From ‘Brave Little Israel’ to ‘an Elite and Domineering People’: The Image of Israel in France, 1944-1974 by Robert B. Isaacson B.A. in Jewish Studies, May 2011, The Pennsylvania State University M.A. in History, May 2015, The George Washington University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 21, 2017 Daniel B. Schwartz Associate Professor of History The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Robert Brant Isaacson has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 2, 2017. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. From ‘Brave Little Israel’ to ‘an Elite and Domineering People’: The Image of Israel in France, 1944-1974 Robert B. Isaacson Dissertation Research Committee: Daniel B. Schwartz, Associate Professor of History, Dissertation Director Katrin Schultheiss, Associate Professor of History, Committee Member Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor, The University of Maryland, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2017 by Robert B. Isaacson All rights reserved iii Dedication This work is dedicated to my family, whose unflagging love, patience, and support made this dissertation possible in a myriad ways. iv Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge the many individuals and organizations that have helped to make this dissertation possible. I wish to extend my gratitude to the American Academy for Jewish Research for providing an AAJR Graduate Student Travel Grant (2015), and to the Society for French Historical Studies for its Marjorie M. and Lancelot L. Farrar Memorial Award (2014), which enabled me to conduct archival research for this project. I am also grateful to the George Washington University for its GW Summer Dissertation Fellowship, which facilitated the drafting of this study, and to the Association for Jewish Studies for providing a Knapp Family Foundation Graduate Student Travel Grant that allowed me to present preliminary elements of this research. I am especially indebted to Daniel Schwartz for his diligent service as my dissertation supervisor, and to Katrin Schultheiss, Jeffrey Herf, Guy Ziv, and Arie Dubnov for their generous support, attentive reading, and service on my dissertation committee. I am similarly indebted to the History Department of The George Washington University, which has served as my intellectual and institutional home for the last six years, and which has provided much of the research and conference funding needed to complete this project. I also owe a particular debt to Shimon Peres, who kindly granted his time and attention by agreeing to be interviewed for this study. I am thankful to Arline Cohen and Michael Bar-Zohar for facilitating that interview, and I wish to extend my particular gratitude to Bill Newman, whose immense generosity helped support the write-up of this dissertation, and enabled the aforementioned interview. Special thanks are finally due to Roy and Eric Freundlich for their logistical wizardry. v Many individuals were also generous with their time and attention in reading early versions of this work. I would like to thank Maud Mandel, Marion Kaplan, and Deborah Dash Moore for the guidance they provided at dissertation workshops at the Center for Jewish History (2015) and the University of Michigan (2014). Thanks are also due to my peers and colleagues Katharine White, Qingfei Yin, Julian Waller, and Sonia Gollance, for reading and commenting on many early drafts. I am also grateful to Cindy and Steve Finden for their thoughtful attention in proof-reading this manuscript. I also wish to extend my appreciation to Jack Garrat, Sarah Gavison, and Josiane Sberro for their warm friendship and advice, and to Frédéric Encel and Itamar Rabinovich for sharing their insights on the French-Israeli relationship. My deepest gratitude, however, is due to my family. The unfaltering generosity and support of my parents, grandparents, and extended family, which I am privileged to enjoy, contributed significantly to the completion of this study. Most of all, I am grateful to my son James for his boundless patience and affection, and to my wife Jen, without whose support and partnership this dissertation could never have been written. To each of you, my sincere and heartfelt thanks. vi Abstract of Dissertation From ‘Brave Little Israel’ to ‘an Elite and Domineering People’: The Image of Israel in France, 1944-1974 This dissertation examines the rise and decline of French-Israeli relations at both the popular and official level between 1944 and 1974 in light of Israel’s imagined Jewishness. From 1954-1968, France was Israel’s most important international partner, providing it with extensive diplomatic support and billions of francs worth of military and nuclear hardware. Using recently declassified French defense and diplomatic records, and understudied sources in the French media and Jewish organizational world, this study demonstrates that the rise of this region-defining friendship was contingent on powerful perceptions of Israeli Jewishness rooted in the French experience of the Second World War. Previous scholarship has attributed the French-Israeli alliance to pragmatic factors arising out of the 1954-62 French-Algerian War. Yet this narrow framework insufficiently accounts for the political breadth, personal depth, or longevity of the French-Israeli alliance, which both pre- and post-dated the Algerian conflict. By examining the impact of sentiment, ideology, and institutional structure alongside the pragmatic, I challenge the presumed primacy of political realism in the French-Israeli relationship. Thinking about Israel also stimulated and reflected heated internal debates about the nature and ethos of French society after the Vichy period, and proved central to the politicization of France’s Jewish and Arab communities in the late 1960s. Historians of French Jewry have recently explored the role of Jewishness as an ideational foil for defining the self and the state. This dissertation demonstrates that Israel functioned in a vii similarly elucidatory fashion by examining Israel’s variable figuration as a vulnerable enclave of Holocaust survivors, a second front in the struggle for French Algeria, and a test case for the principles of the Left. In a revision to that scholarship which presumes a postwar French silence surrounding the Holocaust, I also demonstrate that popular and political discourse about Israel and the Holocaust was extensive, and mutually informing. Finally, by providing the first study of French popular discourse on Israel throughout the entirety of this period, I challenge the notion that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War had an immediate and transformative effect on Israel’s international image, and question long- held assumptions about Israel’s declining popularity in Europe. viii Table of Contents Dedication ..................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................... v Abstract of Dissertation ............................................................................................... vii List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................... x Introduction: Une Affaire “Personnelle” ...................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Between Two Camps: France, Jewishness, and the Question of Israel, 1944-1953 ......................................................................................................... 37 Chapter 2: Between Munich and Nasser: Context and Contingency in the French-Israeli Alliance, 1954-1958 ............................................................................. 92 Chapter 3: Mirage: The Decline of French-Israeli Official Relations, 1959-1967 .................................................................................................................. 167 Chapter 4: Catalyst and Continuity: French Discursive Responses to the 1967 Six-Day War ..................................................................................................... 227 Chapter 5: Debating Israel and the Self: Political Tumult and the Politics of Sympathy, 1968-1970 ................................................................................................ 275 Chapter 6: The “James Bond” of Cherbourg: Imagining Israel in Pompidou’s France ......................................................................................................................... 328 Chapter 7: Echoes: The French-Israeli Differend, 1971-1974 ................................... 365 Conclusion: The French-Israeli Friendship: Mirage or Something More? ................ 429 Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 442 ix List of Abbreviations AFP ............................Association France-Presse AIU ............................Alliance Israélite Universelle AJY ............................American Jewish Year Book ASFA .........................Association de Solidarité Franco-Arabe AUJF ..........................Appel Unifié Juif de France CCOJF........................Comité de Coordination des Organisations Juives de France CDIM .........................Centre