Sasson was born in Damascus in Ottoman Syria. He studied at an Alliance School in his hometown and the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut.^[1] He became a member of the Arab National Movement,^[2] and edited a Jewish-Arab newspaper named al-Hayat. He immigrated to Palestine in 1927 and worked as an electrician, journalist and lecturer on Middle East affairs.

He began working in the political department of the Jewish Agency for Israel, serving as head of the Arab department between 1933 and 1948. A member of the Jewish delegation to the United Nations between 1947 and 1948 and at the ceasefire negotiations in 1949, he worked as director of the Middle East department of the Foreign Affairs Ministry between 1948 and 1950, before heading an office in Paris for contacts with Arab nations. He is reported by Benny Morris to have been a member in 1948 of one of the government's unofficial Transfer Committees, set up to facilitate the removal of Arabs from their towns and villages.^{[citation needed]} He also served as the Israeli envoy to Turkey (1950–1952), an envoy and ambassador to Italy (1953–1960) and ambassador to Switzerland (1960–1961).

In 1961, he returned to Israel and was appointed Minister of Postal Services by David Ben-Gurion. He was elected to the Knesset in the 1965 elections, and retained his cabinet post until 2 January 1967, when he became Minister of Police. Although he was re-elected in 1969, he lost his ministerial post upon the formation of the new government. He lost his seat in the 1973 elections.

• Eliyahu Sasson on the Knesset website