When French President Emmanuel Macron announced that in September, at the UN General Assembly, he will call for the recognition of the “state of Palestine,” he started a juggernaut that has been joined, so far, by Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the U.K. and Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada.
Macron has apparently been working the phones, trying to persuade other world leaders to join him in this abandonment of the embattled Jewish state, and the embrace of a “state of Palestine” that still has no borders and no government — it’s an imaginary state, which is apparently meant to include all of Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem, but how this is to be achieved, and what say the Israelis will have about the 700,000 Israeli Jews who now live in this area, neither Macron nor any other Western leader has explained. More on Macron and the antisemitism that helps explain his attitude can be found here: “Macron’s choice: Stand with democracy, or allow Frech [sic] Jews to become political sacrifices – opinion,” by David Ben-Basat, Jerusalem Post, August
This past June, as rockets rained down on Israeli cities from the North and South and Hamas proudly released execution videos of soldiers and women, French President Emmanuel Macron issued a public statement warning Israel against committing crimes in Gaza.
While condemning the October 7 massacre of civilians, Macron simultaneously emphasized Israel’s “obligation to act proportionately.” This was no passing remark from a pressured leader; it reflects a longstanding political and cultural approach in France, deeply rooted in antisemitism.
Israel was under no obligation to “act proportionately.” It’s not even clear what that would mean. Should 6,000 members of the IDF rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Gazans? Is that “acting proportionately”? After the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, the IDF had one duty: to make sure that such attacks could never again be launched by Hamas, by destroying it completely as a military force. If the Americans in World War II had been told they must “act proportionately” they would never have dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it was those bombs that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that would have been lost in the other possibility, an American invasion of Japan’s home islands.
Antisemitism in France is not the result of a specific crisis. It stems from deep historical, moral, and religious foundations. The alliance between the intellectual Left and anti-Zionist forces dates back to the Dreyfus Affair, continued through France’s silence during the Holocaust, and was given dramatic political expression under president Charles de Gaulle.
In the modern era, this approach persists under the guise of “liberty and equality– providing a platform for radical Islam, Jew-hatred, and the systematic delegitimization of the State of Israel.
In 1967, immediately after the Six Day War, de Gaulle – once an enthusiastic supporter of Israel – announced a one-sided arms embargo against the Jewish state and described Jews as a “domineering and self-assured people,” a phrase that would not have seemed out of place in 19th-century antisemitic rhetoric.
Since then, French policy has shifted from supporting a nation risen from the ashes of the Holocaust to embracing the Arab world and the Palestinian cause, even at the cost of moral distortion, denial of terrorism, and indirect collaboration with enemies of the West.
The United States did not begin to supply arms to Israel until 1967, just after the Six-Day War. Until then, France had been the major supplier of arms to the Jewish state; French scientists helped the Israelis to develop their nuclear arsenal. The leaders of France in those days had lived through World II, and Israel’s successful effort to survive despite the efforts of five Arab armies to snuff out its young life.
These men were deeply sympathetic to the Jewish state. A sea change occurred after the Six-Day War, when Israel, because the IDF had won a spectacular victory against three Arab states, now appeared to some in the new generation of French leaders as less deserving of sympathy than before. De Gaulle’s famous remark, after the Six-Day War, that Jews were “a people sure of themselves and dominating,” was a startling volte-face, one that incorporated antisemitic tropes about Jewish power.
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