Before the arrival of the French in 1881, Tunisia’s Jewish and Moslem communities had generally shared peaceful and congenial relations. After the occupation of Tunisia, however, these relations began to witness a serious deterioration as a result of French colonial policies that aimed to nurture intercommunal hostilities. This factor, coupled with later political developments on the national and international scenes, provided fertile ground for an American intervention on behalf of this country’s Jewish minority. Not only did the instabilities that jeopardized communal Jewish life during the German occupation of Tunisia, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and the post-decolonization period, represent strong justifications for Jewish American organizations to undertake a humanitarian intervention on behalf of this community, but also they constituted a perfect opportunity for the American government to secure itself a foothold in one of the world’s most geostrategic areas.