According to this newsreel, some 15,000 students demonstrated outside the Tel Aviv French embassy in 1969, protesting Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle’s decision to stop France’s supply of arms to Israel.
Though France had been a chief weapons supplier during the 1950s, de Gaulle’s administration imposed an embargo after the 1967 Six Day War.
“Mr. Eshkol, the prime minister, said that any weakening of Israel’s forces would threaten peace in the Middle East,” the British narrator reports.
In the crowd, students wave banners, read Scripture, and chant slogans as guards struggle to hold back the throng of angry youths.
(The Associated Press and Movietone News recently released their vast video archives on YouTube, allowing the public to freely access a million minutes worth of historical news clips dating back to 1895 — including many iconic scenes from Israel’s history featured in this Times of Israel series.)
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