France–Israel relations
bilateral relations between Israel and France
France–Israel relations are the bilateral ties between the French Republic and the State of Israel. In the early 1950s, the two countries maintained close political and military ties. France was Israel's main weapons supplier until the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962. Three days before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, the government of Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on the region, mostly affecting Israel.
Under François Mitterrand in the early 1980s, bilateral relations improved greatly. Mitterrand was the first French president to visit Israel while in office. After Jacques Chirac was elected as president in 1995, France's relationship with Israel declined due to his support for Yasser Arafat during the first stages of the Second Intifada. After being elected as president in May 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would refuse to greet any world leader who does not recognize Israel's right to exist. Relations continued to warm since 2017, under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron. However, Macron said that he stopped the flow of French military aid to Israel during the Gaza war and encouraged others to do so in a conference on 5 October 2024.
“France–Israel relations” enters the record as bilateral relations between Israel and France. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what France, Israel and relations can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2585678. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1967, 1995 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “France–Israel relations” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.