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French President Emmanuel Macron has announced to the world that in September, at the opening of the UN General Assembly, he intends to announce that France will recognize “the state of Palestine.” This promise was greeted with approval both from the Palestinian Authority, that hopes to rule that future state, and by Hamas, that knows it will rule that future state, and will use that state as a launching pad for future attacks on Israel. Meanwhile, Israelis of every persuasion denounced Macron’s announcement, calling it a “betrayal” and an “abandonment of Israel” and accusing Macron of behaving like the Vichy regime, in making an alliance with the “new Nazis” of Hamas. And Donald Trump dismissed it, saying that “what he [Macron] said doesn’t matter.” Others think that it will matter, and not in a good way.
British journalist Brendan O’Neill lets loose at Macron here: “President Macron is playing with fire by recognising Palestine,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, July 25, 2025:
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….
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.
Macron’s craven attempt to win favor with the Muslims of France — now some 10% of the population — will not succeed. The Muslims in France, as elsewhere in Europe, refuse to be integrated into a society built by Infidels, who are “the most vile of created beings.” They know that they must not take Christians or Jews as friends, “for they are friends only with each other.” They are biding their time, knowing that demography is destiny, and that Muslim women in France have fertility rates close to twice that of the indigenous French. They will pocket the win that Macron has just given them, but give him nothing in return. Meanwhile, Macron has pleased the men of Hamas, the same men who on October 7, 2023 raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered 1,200 Israelis. He has said he will “recognize a state of Palestine,” but has said nothing about just how he intends to persuade Israel to give up territory to which, by history, by the Mandate for Palestine, and by UN Security Resolution 242, the Israelis are entitled to retain. He has said nothing about how he would make sure that this “state of Palestine” is to be “demilitarized.” He has not explained what he thinks will happen to the half-million Israeli Jews who now live in Judea and Samaria, territory that he no doubt thinks will be included in this new “state of Palestine.”
As Brendan O’Neill says, Macron has presided over a state from which Jews are fleeing because of the virus of antisemitism that Muslims in France have spread, and he has at the same time made less safe the nation — Israel — to which they have fled. In the war between Islamic jihadis and the Jewish state, Macron has chosen to side with the former and abandon the latter. His appeasement must not be forgotten.