Israel’s ambassador to France

As early as September 1975, in the days of the Geneva signing, the press called him “ambassador-designate to France”. On 23 December 1975 he was appointed ambassador, and until 1979 he represented Israel in Paris.

These were hard years in the relationship: the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in Uganda, which ended in the rescue operation; the crisis over the release of Abu Daoud, one of the planners of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; and the struggle over the reactor France was building for Iraq, which Israel finally bombed in 1981.

After the Abu Daoud affair Gazit was recalled to Jerusalem in protest, and within a month he was sitting opposite the President of France at the Élysée Palace. Largely thanks to his work, relations returned to normal relatively quickly.

During the Entebbe hijacking he conducted the contacts with the French government; in those same days his younger brother, Shlomo Gazit, headed IDF Military Intelligence. He tried to prevent French help for the Iraqi reactor, and told Foreign Minister de Guiringaud: “Whoever supplies the Iraqis with proven fuel is like one who supplies meat to lions”.

In early 1979, thirty days after the death of Shlomo Friedrich, Gazit spoke in his memory. Friedrich, a man of Herut, Menachem Begin’s opposition party, and an old friend of Begin, had headed the “France–Israel Alliance Committee” for more than twenty years, building ties with French politicians across the spectrum.

“We all knew he was a party man,” Gazit said, “and yet no one thought of him as a party man”; the secret of his influence, he added, was “his integrity, his goodness and his generosity” (translated from the French, as quoted in Yoel Haddad’s article).

A photograph of him with the singers Rika Zaraï and Enrico Macias is kept in the Getty archive, taken, according to the archive caption, at an evening event in Paris on 29 May 1976.

And in its farewell item of 5 July 1979, Le Monde described the impression he left: he learned French with surprising speed, and his courtesy and good grace won him sympathy and esteem, even when there were political disagreements. (The sources differ on when he actually took up the post, late 1975 or 1976.)

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