Nicolas Sarkozy’s electoral victory is good news for Israel. It shouldn’t, however, create exaggerated expectations.

Mr. Sarkozy is not about to become a second President Bush in his support for Israel. This isn’t necessarily because he wouldn’t like to be one, but because French reality won’t let him be one. Nor does Israel need him to be one. It would be quite enough for him to be more even-handed in his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts than France has been in the past.

Except for a short period in the 1950s, French foreign policy has been consistently shaped by a pro-Arab bias. As a British political commentator, David Pryce-Jones, has shown convincingly in his recently published book, “Betrayal: France, The Arabs and The Jews,” this bias goes back a long way. It has its roots in the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign office, already in the mid-and-late 19th century, when a combination of traditional Catholic anti-Semitism and French imperial ambitions and commercial interests in the Middle East produced a French diplomatic corps and political establishment that were — unlike those of Great Britain — strongly anti-Zionist in their outlook.

This anti-Zionism persisted after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and World War I, which ended with France in colonial possession of Lebanon and Syria. Indeed, even in 1947-1948, although the French voted at the last minute in the Security Council for the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there, they delayed their recognition of Israel until January 1949, over half a year after it was declared. President Truman, by contrast, recognized Israel on the day of its declaration.

The brief French romance with Israel in the middle 1950s was not, therefore, inspired — certainly not initially — by pro-Israel sentiment. It was the coldly calculated result of the anti-French revolt in Algeria and of backing for it in the Arab world, especially on the part of Gamel Abdul Nasser’s Egypt, which was then the spearhead of pan-Arab nationalism and was engaged in nationalizing the Suez Canal — and it reached its high point in the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. By 1958, when Charles De Gaulle came to power and began the French disengagement from Algeria, it was over. De Gaulle returned French foreign policy to its pro-Arab course and even revived its traditional Quai d’Orsay anti-Semitism in his notorious post-anti-1967 remarks about the “domineering” Jewish people.

History, of course, abounds in ironies. There was a direct connection between De Gaulle’s cynical dropping of Israel and America’s gradually warming relations with the Jewish state, two processes that started at about the same time.

Like the Quai d’Orsay, the U.S. State Department was also traditionally anti-Zionist and cool to Israel — and not for dissimilar reasons. Indeed, American’s commercial, political, and military interests in the Arab World were, by the time of the Cold War, far greater than France’s had ever been, and from a purely practical point of view there was much to be said for the State Department’s position that America’s life in the region would have been far easier had Israel never been created. But once Israel was created, it was not politically possible for a country with six million Jewish citizens of its own (or for that matter, with a global struggle on its hands against a viciously anti-Israel Soviet Union) simply to consent to Israel’s abandonment — and when France did abandon Israel, both as an arms supplier and as a political supporter, America, starting with the Kennedy years, was obliged to step into the breach.

Nicolas Sarkozy does not have six million Jewish citizens. Instead, he had roughly six million Muslim ones. Nor does he have an evangelical Christian community strongly supportive of Israel like America’s. He also has to contend with a Quai d’Orsay at least some of whose diplomats’ views on French interests in the Middle East and on Zionism have not changed appreciably over the course of time. One thinks of French ambassador to England, Daniel Bernard, and his reference a few years ago to Israel as a “shitty little country.” All of this will not allow him to steer an overly pro-Israel course, even if this is the direction in which his natural sympathies lie.

And yet, at the same time, it is precisely France’s troublesome Arab and Muslim community that recreates a possible common bond between France and Israel that, although not as strong as the temporary one of the 1950s, may be more long-lasting. Mr. Sarkozy is the first major French politician to dare speak the truth about this community, both in terms of what France has to do to help it and what it has to do to help itself. He recognizes that until its members see their future as that of Frenchmen living in France, rather than as part of a Muslim internationale, there is no hope of integrating them — indeed, no hope of saving French society from a descent into chaos and conflict.

The battle against jihadist Islam, therefore, is for France, far more than for America, a vital question of domestic rather than just foreign policy — and in this battle, Israel is a potential, if problematic, ally.

If jihadism is not vanquished in the Middle East, it will be far harder to vanquish it in France itself. This gives France and Israel a joint interest that they have not shared for a long time, and Mr. Sarkozy, it is to be hoped, will have the courage to cultivate it.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.