that Nasser must be toppled; any enemy of Nasser thus became, automatically, a friend of France. Contacts were established immediately, and the attack on Gaza was certainly a good way to remind Paris where the second front could be.
The burgeoning friendship between Paris and Jerusalem, which soon became a full-fledged political and military alliance, followed the by-now traditional pattern of the vicious circle. To the Arabs, France was the most obnoxious of colonial tyrants, massacring a whole people in the vain attempt to hold Algeria. To Israel, France thus became the ideal supplier of fighter planes and tanks which Israel now desperately needed to hold its own against the vast stockpiles of Soviet arms building up in the Sinai Peninsula. Threatening the Arabs and diverting Arab aid from the Algerian liberation fighters, Israel could get any quantity of French arms needed. Yet, aligning itself with the French policy of repression, Israel incurred even greater Arab hatred, and, consequently, the need for bigger, better and more arms.
In vain did some of us in Israel argue that Israel should risk following the opposite policy. The Algerian rebels were eager to receive help from Israel, as they would have been from any other state. Friendship with them could have been established in their hour of need, and when they achieved their freedom, as inevitably they must, we would be for the first time in close contact with at least one important Arab state. For the future security of Israel, this was more important than Mystere fighter planes. These arguments, running against the accumulated experience of two Zionist generations, did not gain much ground in Israel. The Israel Committee for Algerian Liberation, which we created, established good contacts with the F.L.N., but carried no weight whatsoever in Israel. Today's tanks, meeting today's dangers, are always more real than the political outlook of tomorrow.
By the end of 1954, the road which led to the Sinai War