President Macron is playing with fire by recognising Palestine

A French leader is appeasing fascists again. This time it’s Emmanuel Macron and the beneficiary of his pusillanimity is Hamas. The president has announced that France will unilaterally recognise a State of Palestine in September. That will be on the cusp of the second anniversary of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom when it sent a 6,000-strong army to rape and butcher the Jews of southern Israel. Is that the reward for Jew-murder now, Monsieur Macron – nationhood?

Macron made his imperious statement in a post on X – where else? ‘I have decided that France will recognise the State of Palestine’, he said, with more than a hint of Napoleonic hubris. Other nations have recognised Palestine before – 147 in total, including Ireland, Spain and Norway in a noisy joint virtue-signal last May. But France is hands down the most significant Western player to recognise Palestine. Which means this is a gesture likely to have far-reaching consequences.

Anyone who doubts that Macron’s statement brought joy to the Jew-killers of Hamas need only look at their response. The nutters are thrilled. Macron’s recognition of Palestine is a ‘positive step in the right direction’, they said. And all other nations should ‘follow France’s example’. So even though Macron’s statement made a nod to the need to ‘demilitarise’ Hamas, still Hamas is delighted. It knows, even if Macron does not, that French recognition of Palestine less than two years after that barbarous pogrom adds up to an implicit acceptance that mass murder works; that killing Jews has benefits.

That’s the strange thing about France’s recognition – it is both meaningless and potentially lethal. It’s meaningless because it is not going to magic up a state. It is an imperial delusion to think that just because the President of France says ‘Let there be Palestine’ a functioning Palestinian entity will emerge. Palestinian officialdom is in a state of alarming disorder. The West Bank is ruled by a bent regime led by Mahmoud Abbas, currently in the 20th year of his four-year term as president of Palestine. And we all know what has become of Gaza following its government’s declaration of fascistic war against Israel.

Yet while Macron’s action will do little to assist Palestinians – if they want a state, they will have to build one – it will certainly isolate the Jewish nation. And in its darkest hour, too. Think about the gravity of what Macron has done: as France’s supposed ally of Israel fights a bloody war in a territory overrun by neo-fascists who dream of Israel’s destruction, Macron is bestowing statehood on that territory; on the enemy land where the army of the Jewish State is engaged in a hot and deadly pursuit of the army of anti-Semites that carried out the worst act of mass violence against the Jews since the Holocaust.

That’s what makes this an act of appeasement. That’s what makes it echo things France did in the darker moments of the 20th century. It is a testament to the moral decay of the French Republic under Macron that in a time of existential war between Islamofascism and Israel, France has taken action that pleases the former and distresses the latter. You don’t have to be a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu to see he has a point when he accuses Macron of grotesquely betraying the Jewish nation. Hamas still exists and continues to fight our soldiers, he says, and a Palestinian state in ‘these conditions’ would be little more than a ‘launch pad to annihilate Israel’.

Macron has essentially sacrificed Israel at the altar of his own vanity. His concern is less with improving the lot of Palestinians than with improving his own moral cachet in 21st-century Europe. It seems to me that the aim of his cynical Palestine games is both to ingratiate himself with France’s Muslim population – the largest in Europe – and also to set out his stall as a new kind of statesman in a new kind of EU. He is unilaterally signalling that he is the right kind of ruler for our post-7 October world in which Europe’s influencers and intellectuals have turned en masse against the cause of Jewish nationhood. He is shaking off the pesky Jewish State to the end of boosting his own Jupiterian fortunes – shameful behaviour even by the historical standards of the Élysée Palace.

Macron should focus on getting France’s own house in order rather than fantasising that he can fix the Middle East. France has a savage problem of Jew hatred. There have been some unspeakable acts of anti-Semitic violence in recent years, including the racist slaughter of Jewish children. Things got so bad that between 2000 and 2017, one in 10 French Jews emigrated to Israel. That’s the largest amount of Jew-fleeing experienced by any European country in this century so far. And like other European nations, France experienced a historic spike in anti-Semitic crimes after 7 October 2023 – how many of its Jews have left since then?

So Jews do not feel safe in France, and Israelis now worry that France has emboldened their anti-Semitic enemies on their borders. Is that to be Macron’s legacy – a failure to protect Jews at home and a cavalier attitude to the safety of Jews overseas? Overseeing a nation that many Jews have felt compelled to flee, and then endangering the nation they fled to? For shame. His self-aggrandising recognition of Palestine is a reminder that the road to hell is paved with signalled virtue.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy