When I first heard that Emmanuel Macron was planning to recognise a state of Palestine, I wondered whether it might be worth asking him to do us all a favour and recognise Britain as having resolved its problem with small boats?
He could recognise his own country as being in the same position, come to that, with a stable government that isn’t likely to be toppled by an insurgent party, an economy that hasn’t been labelled as the EU’s “number one budgetary basket case”, and no hint of a problem with Jews.
Between 2000 and 2017, one in ten French Jewish people emigrated to Israel. Those numbers have only risen since; such is the state of anti-Semitism in the Republic that in Tel Aviv you can now buy a very decent baguette.
France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim community, at ten per cent of the population. Almost half of that demographic, according to a survey by France’s leading pollster Ifop, wrongly saw October 7 as “an act of resistance against colonisation”, while nearly one in five expressed support for the savagery.
Recent years have seen a spate of gruesome anti-Semitic murders in the country, including that of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired teacher, who was hurled out of a window to her death by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar”. And 89-year-old René Hadjaj, who was likewise defenestrated from the seventeenth floor by his neighbour in Lyon.
Similarly, his recognition will take place with the support of the United Nations. As it happens, that august body is flirting with war crimes in Gaza as I write; this week, journalists in Israel saw 1,000 truckloads of aid piling up in the Strip because the UN had refused to deliver it, apparently to put pressure on Israel. So what if the Gazans starve?
But no. War crimes are what the Jews do, amirite?
All of which is to suggest that this is not about reality. It’s about self-fashioning. That, of course, and an animus towards the West.
As evidence, consider the simple fact that Hamas has warmly welcomed Macron’s announcement. “We call on all countries around the world that have not yet recognised the State of Palestine to follow France’s example,” a statement from the terrorists said.
To put this in perspective, I suggest that Mr Macron watches some of the footage of October 7. Perhaps the scene in which Ahmed Fozi Wadia, a Hamas paraglider, strolled into the home of the Taasa family in a village called Netiv Ha’asara – inside internationally-recognised Israel, by the way – and shot 17-year-old Or six times in the head.
He then threw a grenade into the saferoom where the rest of the family was hiding. Or’s father, Gil, a fireman, threw himself onto the grenade to protect his other children and was killed instantly.
Two of his sons were injured in the blast, with eight-year-old Shay’s eye blown out of its socket. As they wailed in confusion, agony and distress, trying vainly to comfort each other, Wadia strolled past the boys and drank a Coca-Cola from the family fridge.
Well done, Mr Macron. These are the people who are slapping you on the back. My fear is that under Sir Keir Starmer’s “leadership”, Britain will follow France in this disgrace to end all disgraces.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that unilaterally recognising Palestine stands out as the most myopic, destructive and treacherous foreign policy to have been dreamed up by our sybaritic elites in recent memory.
Granting statehood to one of the most corrupt, brutal, inept and intransigent regimes on Earth – which has something of a taste for terrorism, given that it hand out financial rewards to those convicted of it – in order to pressure a democratic ally out of winning against the jihadis, makes no sense either for stability in the Middle East or our own national security. Does Macron really think they wouldn’t kill him too?
The Palestinian leadership does not even want a state, as it has shown time and time again. Consider, for instance, 2008.
In a flush of naïveté, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas his own country on 94 per cent of the West Bank (plus six per cent of Israeli land to make up the difference), with its capital in East Jerusalem, the Old City under international control, a tunnel connecting Ramallah with Gaza and many other sweeteners.
This was precisely what the Palestinians had asked for. But the offer fell on deaf ears. Why? Because – whisper it – Palestinian officials are speaking the language of the West while pursuing a long-term project of elimination. As Bill Clinton lamented last year: “I tell [young people] what Arafat walked away from, and they can’t believe it… You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open and all the possibilities weren’t still there.”
Only with the likes of Macron on your side, you very much can. Will Starmer follow suit? It seems likely. Five vignettes reveal the way things are going. The first is from January this year, when data from the Jewish Agency revealed that the number of British Jews emigrating to Israel doubled the year before, amid soaring levels of anti-Semitism.
Before October 7, those making the move were largely retirees. The latest surge, however, was mainly young families and professionals.
The second is the fact that despite the war, Israel’s economy is booming. This week, the shekel was at recent highs against the dollar and the euro.
Its stock market has broken record after record this year and is outperforming the world’s major stock indexes. In March, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, bought the Israeli cybersecurity startup Wiz for a record-breaking $32 billion. In the first quarter of the year, Israel’s economy grew by 3.4 per cent. What would Britain give for data like that?
The third is Israel’s birthrate, which stands at 2.89 per woman, the highest in the OECD. Israel is the only Western country that is producing enough babies to be above “replacement”; in 2024, the number of live births in the European Union fell below four million for the first time in modern history, producing one of the lowest fertility rates on Earth.
In Britain and many countries across Europe, the solution to our falling birthrate (and productivity) has been to import cheap labour from overseas. How’s that one working out for us? It has brought us to the brink.
The fourth is a post on X by Marco Rubio, the American secretary of state, in response to Macron’s vacuous announcement: “This reckless decision only serves Hamas propaganda and sets back peace. It is a slap in the face to the victims of October 7th.” America is on Israel’s side. We’re not.
Last but not least, the fifth vignette. On the last day of August 2024, less than a year after October 7, Ahmed Fozi Wadia, butcher of the beautiful Taasa family, was eliminated in an Israeli airstrike on a terrorist position very close to the Al Ahli hospital. You may recall that this was the place at the heart of the worst misreporting of the war, when a Palestinian Jihad rocket blast was blamed on Israel.
OK. Put these things together and what do you get? A vision of the future. Or, to put it another way, a clear indication of the right side and wrong side of history. How depressing that Macron has chosen the latter; how disturbing that Starmer seems poised to follow him into the abyss.
When I first heard that Emmanuel Macron was planning to recognise a state of Palestine, I wondered whether it might be worth asking him to do us all a favour and recognise Britain as having resolved its problem with small boats?
He could recognise his own country as being in the same position, come to that, with a stable government that isn’t likely to be toppled by an insurgent party, an economy that hasn’t been labelled as the EU’s “number one budgetary basket case”, and no hint of a problem with Jews.
Between 2000 and 2017, one in ten French Jewish people emigrated to Israel. Those numbers have only risen since; such is the state of anti-Semitism in the Republic that in Tel Aviv you can now buy a very decent baguette.
France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim community, at ten per cent of the population. Almost half of that demographic, according to a survey by France’s leading pollster Ifop, wrongly saw October 7 as “an act of resistance against colonisation”, while nearly one in five expressed support for the savagery.
Recent years have seen a spate of gruesome anti-Semitic murders in the country, including that of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired teacher, who was hurled out of a window to her death by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar”. And 89-year-old René Hadjaj, who was likewise defenestrated from the seventeenth floor by his neighbour in Lyon.
Similarly, his recognition will take place with the support of the United Nations. As it happens, that august body is flirting with war crimes in Gaza as I write; this week, journalists in Israel saw 1,000 truckloads of aid piling up in the Strip because the UN had refused to deliver it, apparently to put pressure on Israel. So what if the Gazans starve?
But no. War crimes are what the Jews do, amirite?
All of which is to suggest that this is not about reality. It’s about self-fashioning. That, of course, and an animus towards the West.
As evidence, consider the simple fact that Hamas has warmly welcomed Macron’s announcement. “We call on all countries around the world that have not yet recognised the State of Palestine to follow France’s example,” a statement from the terrorists said.
To put this in perspective, I suggest that Mr Macron watches some of the footage of October 7. Perhaps the scene in which Ahmed Fozi Wadia, a Hamas paraglider, strolled into the home of the Taasa family in a village called Netiv Ha’asara – inside internationally-recognised Israel, by the way – and shot 17-year-old Or six times in the head.
He then threw a grenade into the saferoom where the rest of the family was hiding. Or’s father, Gil, a fireman, threw himself onto the grenade to protect his other children and was killed instantly.
Two of his sons were injured in the blast, with eight-year-old Shay’s eye blown out of its socket. As they wailed in confusion, agony and distress, trying vainly to comfort each other, Wadia strolled past the boys and drank a Coca-Cola from the family fridge.
Well done, Mr Macron. These are the people who are slapping you on the back. My fear is that under Sir Keir Starmer’s “leadership”, Britain will follow France in this disgrace to end all disgraces.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that unilaterally recognising Palestine stands out as the most myopic, destructive and treacherous foreign policy to have been dreamed up by our sybaritic elites in recent memory.
Granting statehood to one of the most corrupt, brutal, inept and intransigent regimes on Earth – which has something of a taste for terrorism, given that it hand out financial rewards to those convicted of it – in order to pressure a democratic ally out of winning against the jihadis, makes no sense either for stability in the Middle East or our own national security. Does Macron really think they wouldn’t kill him too?
The Palestinian leadership does not even want a state, as it has shown time and time again. Consider, for instance, 2008.
In a flush of naïveté, then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert offered Mahmoud Abbas his own country on 94 per cent of the West Bank (plus six per cent of Israeli land to make up the difference), with its capital in East Jerusalem, the Old City under international control, a tunnel connecting Ramallah with Gaza and many other sweeteners.
This was precisely what the Palestinians had asked for. But the offer fell on deaf ears. Why? Because – whisper it – Palestinian officials are speaking the language of the West while pursuing a long-term project of elimination. As Bill Clinton lamented last year: “I tell [young people] what Arafat walked away from, and they can’t believe it… You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open and all the possibilities weren’t still there.”
Only with the likes of Macron on your side, you very much can. Will Starmer follow suit? It seems likely. Five vignettes reveal the way things are going. The first is from January this year, when data from the Jewish Agency revealed that the number of British Jews emigrating to Israel doubled the year before, amid soaring levels of anti-Semitism.
Before October 7, those making the move were largely retirees. The latest surge, however, was mainly young families and professionals.
The second is the fact that despite the war, Israel’s economy is booming. This week, the shekel was at recent highs against the dollar and the euro.
Its stock market has broken record after record this year and is outperforming the world’s major stock indexes. In March, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, bought the Israeli cybersecurity startup Wiz for a record-breaking $32 billion. In the first quarter of the year, Israel’s economy grew by 3.4 per cent. What would Britain give for data like that?
The third is Israel’s birthrate, which stands at 2.89 per woman, the highest in the OECD. Israel is the only Western country that is producing enough babies to be above “replacement”; in 2024, the number of live births in the European Union fell below four million for the first time in modern history, producing one of the lowest fertility rates on Earth.
In Britain and many countries across Europe, the solution to our falling birthrate (and productivity) has been to import cheap labour from overseas. How’s that one working out for us? It has brought us to the brink.
The fourth is a post on X by Marco Rubio, the American secretary of state, in response to Macron’s vacuous announcement: “This reckless decision only serves Hamas propaganda and sets back peace. It is a slap in the face to the victims of October 7th.” America is on Israel’s side. We’re not.
Last but not least, the fifth vignette. On the last day of August 2024, less than a year after October 7, Ahmed Fozi Wadia, butcher of the beautiful Taasa family, was eliminated in an Israeli airstrike on a terrorist position very close to the Al Ahli hospital. You may recall that this was the place at the heart of the worst misreporting of the war, when a Palestinian Jihad rocket blast was blamed on Israel.
OK. Put these things together and what do you get? A vision of the future. Or, to put it another way, a clear indication of the right side and wrong side of history. How depressing that Macron has chosen the latter; how disturbing that Starmer seems poised to follow him into the abyss.