I don't know how his father (of Dutch-Irish and Scottish descent) according to Wikipedia met his mother (maybe during the war), but the mother is obviously a "pied-noir". A pied-noir (meaning black foot) is the familiar name for non-Arabic settlers in North-Africa :
Pied-noir (plural: pieds-noirs) is a term for the former population of European descent of North Africa, especially Algeria, which was divided into three French departments until its 1962 independence. It also includes the Algerian Jewish population, some of whose ancestors had fled Spain after the Reconquista. Literally Pied-noir means "black foot" in French. Supposedly, one way the colonists could be distinguished from the indigenous Algerians was by the black boots that the French wore. According to Le Robert French dictionary, it appeared around 1901 to refer to bare-foot indigenous Algerian stokers on boat at a time when coal was the main type of fuel. Given their working conditions, they would get their feet dirty in coal dust. By extension, the term pied-noir was applied to indigenous Algerians. At that time, European Algerians described themselves as Algerian in relation to metropolitan French and Européens or Europeans vis-à-vis the indigenous Arab and Berber population. But in the 1920s and 1930s, the term Algerian came to be monopolised by indigenous Arab/Berber Algerians as Algerian nationalism became a political force to be reckoned with. By 1955, European Algerians started applying the term Pied-noir to themselves. One of the most famous pied-noir was Albert Camus.
The Algerian Jews, however, had a different history. While a Jewish presence had existed since late Roman times, the majority had arrived as refugees from the Reconquista around 1500, when Sephardi Jews and Muslims were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. After centuries of dhimmi status, the local Algerian Jews became associated with the European-Algerian community following the 1871 décret Crémieux, when they largely embraced French citizenship and identity and adopted French culture and language over the course of just one generation. Before 1962 (independence of Algeria), both the European colons and the indigenous Jews of Algeria were listed under the name Européens (Europeans) for statistical or official purposes. They all considered themselves simply French, or Algerian, or African, each of these identities intertwined in their mind. The unofficial anthem of the pied-noir community is the Song of the Africans (Le chant des Africains).
However, many European settlers resented having to share their privileged position with the Jewish part of the native Algerian population. That resentment was expressed, for example, in antisemitic riots during the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s and in strict enforcement in Algeria of the Vichy Regime's anti-Jewish legislation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieds-noirsI did some research about the Tunisian Jews. It's obvious that they accepted the French protectorate and became enthusiastic members of it because it liberated from the Muslim rule. The Germans were in Tunisia 1942-1943 and about 3000 men were sent to labor camps, but not exterminated. The Allies bombings caused probably more deaths than the Nazis. After the war most of them emigrated either to France (35 000) or to Israel (50 000). Only 3 000 live in Tunisia today. In the after war period several anti-Jewish pogroms happened in Tunisia, mostly "motivated"
by the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
So Allen's mother had a typical pied-noir Jewish "French" Italian background and as such was probably "not found" of Arabs. And if the pieds-noirs lived mostly peacefully with them, there are many chances that she saw them with contempt. The Italian background explains the word "macaca", but not the French.
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