The US was the first country to offer de facto recognition to the new Israeli government when the Jewish state declared independence on 14 May 1948. Seventy-five years later, Washington has long been Israel’s strongest military and diplomatic ally.
But it wasn’t always that way. For the first two decades after independence, Israel’s primary foreign ally was France, which supplied almost all of its major weapons including planes, tanks and ships as well as building the nuclear plant from which it developed atomic weapons.
