by Shimon Peres
“Monsieur, I realize I haven’t any idea how one government pays another.” I suggested that I would deposit $1 million in a French Ministry of Defense bank account, and we could settle the balance later. Reynaud agreed.
Over the course of the next several years, I traveled back and forth between Israel and France many times to purchase arms and equipment for the IDF. I met with generals, with political officials, with members of the French cabinet. With the help of an Algerian Jew named Georges Elgosi, an economist in the French prime minister’s office, I convinced the French government to supply us with several types of fighter aircraft, all of which would be crucial to winning the Six-Day War in 1967. Upon meeting me, Elgosi had decided to invite me to his apartment, where his elderly mother would have the chance, quite literally, to inspect me. I remember her sitting mysteriously in the living room, as though it were her court. When I introduced myself, she asked that I give her my hand. She examined the lines and the creases of my palm as though she were reading a map of my soul. When she finished she looked up at her son and said four simple words: “Do whatever he asks.” Elgosi took his mother’s conclusion to heart, it seemed. The next day, he offered me use of his office, a stone’s throw away from that of Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France. Through Elgosi, I was granted entrée into the world of French politics, where I befriended dozens of French leaders, including the prime minister himself.
I arrived without a word of French, with empty pockets, without any understanding of French culture or courtesy, but instead of condescending and rejecting such a wayward soul, the French leadership adopted me like a lost child. They brought me into their most intimate French circles, introducing me to the country’s greatest politicians and generals and authors and artists. In me they saw a version of themselves, from which we formed an indescribable bond. This was not merely personal: the German occupation had not only been a political crisis but an existential one. For a people who had long thought deeply about what it meant to be French, the occupation and legacy of collaboration had forced a crisis of the soul, and in Israel’s struggles Mendès-France and others may have recognized a similar pull to confront the wounds of the past.
The only barrier between our new friendship was language. During my first trips to the country, I needed a translator to join me. But soon I started using those flights as a chance to learn French myself, studying it intensively, practicing conversations with our French ambassador, and sometimes with myself. In time, I would no longer need a translator.
During one of my trips to Paris, I was invited to dinner at the home of the French army’s chief of staff. I was seated next to his wife. Before the meal began, she turned to me, speaking in a whisper.
“Mr. Peres, may I suggest that you will not need to justify your intentions to me,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“I don’t need a word of explanation for why you are here or what you are fighting for.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
She paused for a moment, as though she were searching for the right words. She pushed up the sleeve of her blouse to reveal her forearm, then twisted it ever so slightly to reveal her answer. She had been stamped and numbered like cattle, tattooed by the Nazis at a concentration camp. She was a survivor.
My efforts in France were not happening in a vacuum. At home, the tensions along our borders were worsening, particularly with Egypt. Nasser was supporting units of terrorists in Gaza. Known as the Fedayeen, the assailants had been sneaking across the border and attacking civilians. Each time we were attacked, we retaliated, but with each retaliation, it seemed, came another attack. The escalation of tension made war feel inevitable, all the more so as our intelligence reports revealed that the Egyptians were developing attack plans.
Our concerns turned existential when, in September 1955, we learned that Nasser had just signed a major arms deal with Czechoslovakia, our once and brief partner. The agreement included hundreds of aircraft, tanks, submarines, and destroyers, along with countless crates of heavy artillery and ammunition. It was enough to make Egypt a military powerhouse overnight, enough to give Nasser’s threats to annihilate Israel the gnashing teeth of credibility. A month later, in a provocative act, Nasser closed our most vital shipping route, the Straits of Tiran.
By this point, Ben-Gurion had returned to government and was once again prime minister and defense minister. He considered the closing of the straits an act of war in itself and proposed a plan to use force to reopen it. But the cabinet was skeptical, with a majority voting against it. For the time anyway, the provocation went unanswered.
In the meantime, I worried about the French. Having forged our partnership, I wondered how I would sustain it over time, especially given its mottled set of internal political partnerships and antagonisms. The French government had developed a pattern of falling suddenly and with some regularity, shifting sometimes wildly between ideological extremes. Elections had been called for January 1956, and I wondered if the Radical Party’s government could survive.
I decided to spend the next several months waging my own private campaign in Paris. I ventured to build relationships with the opposition, to protect our interests should they soon take over the reins of government. The most important of those meetings was a private dinner at a small Parisian café with the head of the opposition himself—a fascinating character named Guy Mollet.
Mollet was a socialist, as, he knew, was I. In fact, when I first sat down to the table, he greeted me as “comrade,” and we bonded quite sincerely over the worldview we shared. Eventually, we got down to business.
“What is it that you want?” he asked.
I told him the story or our work with the Radicals and was honest with him about my worries. Though I sympathized with his ideological viewpoint, I expressed fear that Israel would be made vulnerable were he to take over the French government.
Mollet listened intently and engaged me thoughtfully over a meal with many courses and many glasses of wine. By the end of the dinner, he made me a promise. “If I shall be elected,” he said, “I shall answer your call of assistance.”
While appreciative of the sentiment, I remained visibly skeptical.
“Why do you doubt this?” he asked.
“It’s not that I doubt you, personally,” I said. “But I know the socialists. When you’re in the opposition, you promise the world. But when you come to power, you forget your promises.”
“Who did this to you?”
I told him the story of the English politician Ernest Bevin. While in the opposition, Bevin had been a good friend to Israel. But once he became foreign minister, Bevin became a great enemy instead, enforcing the White Paper of 1939, even after the British technically had rescinded it.
“I shall not be Bevin,” Mollet responded. “You can count on me.”
On January 2, 1956, I learned that I would indeed need to count on him. The Radical Party had lost the elections and Mollet was charged with forming a government. I was stunned and, despite our warm conversation, quite worried about his willingness—and ability—to ultimately follow through.
Within a few months, I put his promise to the test. It was well after midnight when I received an urgent call, requesting that I come to Ben-Gurion’s office at once. The clashes with the Egyptian Army in Gaza were getting worse, and we feared Nasser was readying a full-scale attack.
“I need you to go to France right away,” Ben-Gurion told me. “I have a letter for you to give to Mollet. See if you can get him to help us.” The letter described our concerns about Nasser, that he appeared to have access to a practically unlimited supply of Soviet arms, and that his actions represented “a terrifying threat to the State of Israel.” Ben-Gurion asked for France’s emergency assistance—making clear that without Mollet’s support, Israel’s very survival was at stake.
I boarded a plane and was soon sitting across from Guy Mollet once again, this time at the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s official residen
ce. I pleaded my case. “I believe you have nothing to worry about. We can help you,” he said. He saw the relief in my eyes on hearing the news, and whispered one more thing to me. “Didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t be Bevin?” he asked with a grin and a wink.
In June 1956, Moshe Dayan and I returned to Paris for a meeting with senior military leadership. Dayan made a poised and passionate case that Nasser could soon attack Israel, and raised the possibility of a joint operation with the French. “We shall be ready to act together with you against Nasser,” he explained, “to the extent that you will be ready to cooperate with us.” The French officers in attendance agreed—at least in principle.
“If we are to be prepared,” I interjected, “then we must be rearmed. It is the only way.” I handed the officers a wish list of the weaponry and equipment we needed, having inflated the amounts to give myself room for negotiation. To my great shock, the officers didn’t flinch, or make any effort to counter.
We returned home feeling a greater sense of confidence, and soon began receiving the new weapons from France. We continued to monitor Nasser’s troop movements, while staving off more border incursions. Then, in July 1956, Nasser announced a fateful decision: he intended to nationalize the Suez Canal.
The canal had been operated by the Suez Canal Company, a joint enterprise of the British and French, both of whom used the trade route to transport oil and other essential goods. Having Egypt take control of the canal thus represented a grave economic danger to both Western powers. The French had already been ready to go to war with Nasser. Now the British were similarly inclined.
I was in Paris when Nasser made his announcement, and I spent the next day in meetings with the French defense minister, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury. I returned to Israel the following afternoon and was picked up by Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan at the airport. On our drive to Jerusalem, I briefed them both on the conversations. I told them that the French and the British were both interested in joining forces with Israel to remove the Egyptian threat. The British were willing, so long as Israel committed not to attack Jordan, with whom the British had a treaty. Beyond the details of the campaign itself, which had yet to be determined, there remained a question of timing. The French favored immediate action, while the British preferred two more months to seek a political resolution. Ben-Gurion generally favored the contours of the conversation, though he remained skeptical about the British joining the fight. As to the timing, he preferred the French call for immediacy given the likelihood of an Egyptian attack.
I returned to France shortly after to continue our discussions—to move beyond the general question of whether we would go to war together and into the details of how we would execute the campaign. I was accompanied by Golda Meir, who had recently been named foreign minister. Golda viewed me as one of her greatest annoyances. She was frustrated that I had managed to earn the trust of Ben-Gurion—a man whom she worshipped as the singular figure he was. She was frustrated that he listened to my ideas, even the ones she thought were reckless or fantastical. She was frustrated that I built our relationship with the French outside of the Foreign Ministry, where such a thing would normally take place. I suppose I empathized with her, even while she treated me with such suspicion. She had been at Ben-Gurion’s side for years and I had only just arrived. Were I in her position, I imagined I, too, would have been upset.
Our first meeting in France didn’t improve the situation between us. To our surprise, Guy Mollet didn’t attend, which frustrated Golda, heightening both her suspicions about the chance of military cooperation and her general disdain for me. But it was upon hearing the recommended battle plan that Golda’s impatience turned to fury. The proposed scenario would become known as the “Israeli pretext”: the French and British wanted Israel to attack Egypt first, giving the French and British a justification to intervene in the conflict. “The Israelis will start a war with the Egyptians,” one of the French attendees explained, “and then we will come to separate them. When the Israelis withdraw and the Egyptians do not, we have the pretext we need to expel them [from the Suez Canal].”
Golda found the notion preposterous—a complete nonstarter. She felt I had exaggerated France’s willingness to partner with us, that I had taken us embarrassingly far down an uncertain road. And though Ben-Gurion didn’t agree with Golda’s assessment of me personally, he, too, was concerned about the French proposal. He feared that the “Israeli pretext” would risk our standing in the international community—that we would be viewed as the provocateur, even though Egypt had already committed at least one act of war and many more aggressions against us. In this, he was surely justified. But Moshe Dayan made a counterargument that I found quite persuasive.
“England and France don’t need us,” he told Ben-Gurion frankly. “They have all the aircraft they need to annihilate the Egyptian Air Force. The only advantage we have in this matter,” he argued, “which is the only one England and France don’t have, is our ability to give them the needed pretext to enter the campaign.” Though Ben-Gurion remained skeptical, he believed a deal was still possible. It was time, he concluded, for him to go to Paris himself—to meet with the French and British in person. I cabled Paris immediately to set up the conference.
That Sunday, a plane from Paris landed in Tel Aviv to take us to the meeting. A small group of us made our way to the airport, cloaked in secrecy. Ben-Gurion wore a wide-brimmed hat to hide his signature white hair. Dayan took off his easily identifiable eye patch and wore dark sunglasses on the trip instead. (There was some irony in Dayan planning armed collaboration in this instance, since it had been a bullet from a French sniper back in 1941 that had resulted in the loss of his eye.)
When we arrived at the airport, Ben-Gurion was taken directly to the villa in Sèvres where the discussions were to take place. Nestled on the banks of the River Seine, Sèvres was a quiet town with a rich history. Despite the formality of the estate and the seriousness the moment commanded, the meeting itself was quite warm. Ben-Gurion described his objections and his demands to a group of Frenchmen who seemed to hold him in the highest regard. The back-and-forth was cordial and comfortable—a beautiful sight indeed. But when the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, arrived, it was as if an ice storm had suddenly blown in.
From the moment Ben-Gurion and Lloyd shook hands, it was clear that neither liked the other. Lloyd was unpleasant and unfriendly, curt with his words, devoid of imagination, and, at times, openly hostile. He regarded Ben-Gurion more as a former enemy than a future ally, more a partner of necessity than choice. The feeling was mutual.
As the conference continued into its second day, Ben-Gurion had not yet decided whether he would accept any plan that required the “Israeli pretext,” but the discussions of tactics continued on with the assumption that he ultimately would. There were a number of proposals batted around among us, but by the end of the session it was clear that only one was feasible. This scenario involved Israel attacking Egypt on the night of October 29, destroying the Egyptian Air Force as it worked its way to the Sinai. The next morning, France and England would demand that Israel and Egypt cease any military action and retreat from the Suez. When Nasser predictably rejected those conditions, the French and British would launch their own assault against Egypt.
When Moshe and I left Sèvres, Ben-Gurion had yet to make up his mind. The two of us ventured down to a nearby café, where we sipped wine while discussing the choices ahead. We didn’t have a good sense of Ben-Gurion’s thinking, and though we were both strongly in favor of intervention, we did not take his choice lightly. It was a complicated decision with broad implications, based on an imperfect set of facts. And Ben-Gurion was forced to make it knowing that in every war, there are elements of blindness. Obviously a defeat would badly damage France and England, commercially and politically. But for us the stakes were incomprehensibly higher, both for our global standing and our own survival. In his hands Ben-Gurion held what I thought of as a “cruel watch,” the ho
urs running out fast before he had to make the decision that might be the end, not just of a country, but of the Jewish future. None of us envied him.
The next morning, we were summoned back to Sèvres. When we arrived, Ben-Gurion was sitting outside in the grand garden of the villa, under a tree. Noticing our approach, he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket on which he had written several questions for us. As he read them aloud, Moshe and I immediately realized that we had our answer. He was asking us questions about tactics and timing, about military logistics and political considerations. It was clear, by the very act of posing such questions, that Ben-Gurion was no longer ambivalent about our efforts. He had decided that Israel was going to war.
As the conversation continued, Ben-Gurion asked Moshe to draw up a map of the campaign he envisioned. But out in the garden, none of us had any paper, so I pulled from my pocket a pack of cigarettes and handed it to Dayan. He sketched a map of the Sinai Peninsula, and drew on it flight paths and paratrooper drop locations. When the discussion was over, the three of us realized that we had just produced the first map of what would be a historic campaign. We passed it between us and signed the sketch, which I then returned to my pocket.
Five days later, the war began.
When we first sat down to discuss a possible campaign several months earlier, the French defense minister had asked how long I thought it would take to conquer the Sinai.
“Three to four days,” I told him. He was certain it would take at least three to four weeks. In the end, it took only a few hours longer than my initial estimate. The IDF marched through the Sinai with incredible speed and agility, forcing Egypt into retreat, sending massive convoys of Egyptian vehicles fleeing in the opposite direction of the fighting. Injured aircraft were repaired at our own aviation facilities, where more than one thousand people worked day and night on maintenance. It was so swift, in fact, that by the time the French and British launched their own invasions, the fighting was complete. “Total collapse of the Egyptian Army in Sinai,” I cabled to Paris. “Brilliant and complete victory of the IDF on all fronts.”
