With many of Europe’s village idiots now clamoring to adopt France’s October 5, 2024 arms embargo of Israel, it bears remembering the last French embargo. It occurred 72 hours before the Six Day War.
Whether they are surrendering to German panzer units or shirking responsibilities to their wartime allies, the French lead the world in moral and physical cowardice.
Yet this time around Israelis are shrugging at France’s embargo. Israel is not the vulnerable nation it was in 1967. Today, Israel is in fact a major competitor to France in the global armaments industry.
Let’s start with a trip down memory lane.
It was June 3, 1967. Over 130,000 Egyptian soldiers and 900 tanks were massed on Israel’s southern frontier. Jordan mobilized 56,000 soldiers and 270 tanks to Israel’s east. Syria was poised to attack from the north with a force of 50,000 men.
“Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel,” said Egyptian President Gamel Nasser. The war aim, according to other Arab leaders, included targeting and murdering Jewish civilians. The Arabs mobilized more combatants than in any other Middle Eastern battle in history.
Earlier, US President Lyndon Johnson’s Operation Red Sea Regatta, designed to bust open Egypt’s naval blockade of the Straits of Tiran failed to send a single ship. Israel’s last major ally and arms supplier at the time was France.
For 15 years, the Franco-Israeli relationship was strong and bilateral. Israel helped France and the UK briefly retake the Suez Canal in 1956. Israeli experts served in support roles in the French military. Israeli submarine crews trained with French counterparts. The French would play a role in helping Israel become a nuclear power. The strategic alliance started in 1953.
Yet as Arabs armies encircled Israel, France quit. As quickly as his WWII-era countrymen could throw up their hands before advancing WWII German Panzer divisions, French President Charles De Gaulle announced an arms embargo over its own ally – even before the war began.
The embargo would commence immediately with France’s refusal to deliver 50 Mirage 5J fighter-bombers. Israel had already paid $200 million for the jets six month earlier. Israeli aeronautical engineers had helped France improve the design and performance of the Mirage over the years. This was a betrayal of the highest order.
There is nothing new under the sun.
On October 5, 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron said that he had ended the flow of French weapons to Israel. He has been encouraging other leaders to join his arms embargo. With last week’s announcement by the ICC of a phony war crimes arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the embargo is gaining steam.
Luckily, this time things are different. Israelis shrugged at France’s latest act of fecklessness.
Although France is the world’s second largest exporter of arms after the US, with 11% of the global arms market, Israel learned its lesson in 1967. While the 1967 French arms embargo was a serious threat to Israel’s security, the 2024 Arms embargo is not. Israel has pursued a strategy of near independence. It is even a global exporter of arms.
Israel today has 2.4% of the global arms market. It shipped arms worth $1.15 billion in 2023. The Jewish State is a world leader in guided munitions, cyber warfare, missiles, missile defense, advanced radar, avionics, and much more. It has begun manufacturing the arms it depended on receiving from the US.
After the 1967 betrayal by France, Israel sought and obtained better allies and suppliers. It forged durable relationships with the US and Germany, arguably the best two arms partners on the planet. While Germany may be susceptible to ICC and left-wing pressure, the US is not. Trump's election should remove the slowdown initiated by Biden.
These relationships, like the one in days past with France, are bilateral. Despite Israel’s tiny size, it is a significant arms exporter back to its friends and allies. According to the SIPRI arms transfer database, Israel provided the US with 10% of all its arms imports from 2021 until 2023 ($331 million). It accounted for 4.4% of Germany's arms imports during the same period.
Also significant is the fact that Israel’s biggest arms customers are almost all democracies. They include India, the Philippines, the US, and Germany and many others.
By contrast, France sells arms to nearly any country that comes calling, without regard for whether they are democratic, free, or have relatively free economies. The French even sell their weapons without much regard for human rights records, national stability, or even the existence of civil wars and strife. France has even sold weapons to countries that have a history of using them against their own civilian populations.
Specific examples are elucidating. France sold armored vehicles to violent dictator Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 1999. They sold missiles to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela in 2002. They shipped mortars to Rwanda in 1991 and helicopters in 1992. Communist thug Evo Morales, who murdered and imprisoned his elected opposition, received French helicopters in 2009 and 2017.
The French claim that they will not sell Israel arms due to pending fighting, civil strife, and unrest in Gaza and Lebanon. Are those really France’s limiting principles?
Consider that France was glad to furnish missiles to Lebanon in 2019, a failed state partially controlled by Islamic terrorists (and during a period of civilian protests and crackdowns). In 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, France sold the Chinese Communist Party helicopters, missiles, and naval guns. They sold the military Junta of Myanmar ship engines in 2015. They sold Vladimir Putin helicopters in 2013 as he armed brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Even regionally, in the Middle East, the French also profit from arms sales to nearly any Arab, Muslim, or Middle Eastern country that comes calling, regardless of whether they are democratic, stable, or involved in regional conflicts. They supply Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, UAE, Jordan, Somalia, Turkey, Iraq, Morocco, Pakistan, Oman, Kuwait, Brunei, Bahrain, and Algeria.
These decisions by the French show an utter lack of foresight, at best. At worst, France does not seem to care who they sell weapons to, unless the recipients are Jewish.
Israel will endure with or without French arms and support. The support or lack therefore by France, which has not won a meaningful military victory since 1918 (and even then, it was the USA that won the war), is dubious. The real question is how long will a morally bankrupt France endure? It is a France that is flooded with anti-western values, indifferent to the plight of Jewish hostages, yet which feigns outrage while arming violent dictators.
Rami Chris Robbins is a columnist who focuses on Middle East issues and foreign policy.