Israel’s former Ambassador to France recalled in a radio interview here last night how President Charles de Gaulle once pledged to him that France would always support Israel because it was traditional French policy to back small states in the Middle East, and that France’s relations with the Arab world would never be conducted at Israel’s expense.
Ambassador Yaacov Tsur, now chairman of the Jewish National Fund, said that, in an interview with the French leader in 1956, General de Gaulle urged Israel to take a militant stand against the Arabs and fight if necessary to assert its right of free navigation through international waterways. (At his press conference in Paris, Monday, de Gaulle had claimed that Israel used Nasser’s blockade of the Guif of Akaba as an excuse to launch the Six-Day War.)
Ambassador Tsur disclosed that, on November 16,1956, right after the Sinai campaign, Gen. de Gaulle expressed approval of the Suez war and told him that he thought Britain and France were mistaken to have suspended their action before the Suez Canal was taken. This was during the Fourth Republic and before de Gaulle’s election to the presidency of France, Mr. Tsur recalls that de Gaulle said to him at the time; “Tell Ben-Gurion, that, even if Israel is forced to withdraw her troops, she will never lose the immense gains that she made in international prestige or her strengthened position in the Middle East that resulted from the war.”
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