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.

[2] 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.

[4] Relations continued to warm since 2017, under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron,[citation needed] until he stopped the flow of French weaponry to Israel and encouraged others to do so in a conference on 5 October 2024.

[5][6][7] Napoleon, the first and second Emperor of the First French Empire, declared emancipation by his decree allowing Jews to be free to worship their religion and prohibit any kind of persecution on Jewish people, and he obtained the title as a liberator.

The ousting of a Jewish French officer in a modern European state motivated Theodor Herzl in organizing the First Zionist Congress and pledging for a home for the Jews in 1897.

[11] The 1922 census of Palestine lists 716 French speakers in Mandatory Palestine (3 in the Southern District, 497 in Jerusalem-Jaffa, 3 in Samaria, and 213 in the Northern District), including 715 in municipal areas (261 in Jerusalem, 70 in Jaffa, 123 in Haifa, 2 in Gaza, 1 in Hebron, 120 in Nablus, 72 in Nazareth, 2 in Ramleh, 6 in Tiberias, 46 in Bethlehem, 3 in Acre, 4 in Ramallah, 2 in Beit Jala, and 3 in Shafa 'Amr).

After France's liberation by Allied forces, David Ben-Gurion was confident that Charles de Gaulle would assist him in the founding of a Jewish state.

France then shared with Israel a strategic interest against radical Arab nationalism, as it had to cope with nationalist sentiment in its Algerian territories.

In Michael Karpin's 2001 documentary A Bomb in the Basement, Abel Thomas, chief of political staff for France's defense minister at the time said Francis Perrin, head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, advised then-Prime Minister Guy Mollet that Israel should be provided with a nuclear bomb.

The aims were to regain Western control of the Suez Canal and to remove Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser from power,[19] as well as reopening the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and stop Egyptian-sponsored fedayeen raids into Israel.

The USA started to assume its current role as an ally of Israel with the Six-Day War in 1967, while France decided to take sides with the Arab world to improve its relations after the independence of Algeria.

Just before the Six-Day War in June 1967, Charles de Gaulle's government imposed an arms embargo on the region, mostly affecting Israel.

France's main export items are motor vehicles, plastics, organic chemicals, aeronautical and space engineering products, perfumes and cosmetics.

You need to remove him from this position.”[25] In January 2016 French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced that France would convene an international conference with the objective of enabling new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

[29] Israel and France, along with Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, have also recently worked against Turkey on various fronts from its treatment of Kurds to the conflicts in Libya and the Syrian civil war.

[36] On 15 June 2024, France banned Israeli defence companies from exhibiting at the Eurosatory arms fair over the latter's ongoing war in Gaza.

[39] In a conference on 5 October 2024, Macron said that he had stopped the flow of French weaponry to Israel and encouraged other leaders to join his arms embargo.