Why Macron’s Palestine Gambit Matters
Why Macron’s Palestine Gambit Matters
The French president’s recognition of a Palestinian state tips the world diplomatic balance away from the U.S. and Israel.
After the French President Emmanuel Macron announced last Thursday that France will recognize the state of Palestine, several U.S. and Israeli leaders dismissed the move as merely symbolic. But this week brought signs that Macron’s announcement is having a real effect on international politics—not least British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s own announcement that his government will also recognize a Palestinian state unless Israel agrees to end the catastrophe in Gaza and forswear annexation in the West Bank.
That might come as a surprise to officials who last week not only dismissed Macron’s move but mocked the French leader in remarkably undiplomatic fashion. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee led the charge. “Macron’s unilateral ‘declaration’ of a ‘Palestinian’ state didn’t say WHERE it would be,” Huckabee wrote Friday on X. “I can now exclusively disclose that France will offer the French Riviera & the new nation will be called ‘Franc-en-Stine.’”
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an extremist settler in the occupied West Bank—which Israelis call “Judea and Samaria”—also reacted with sarcasm. On X, Smotrich wrote:
I thank President Macron for providing yet another compelling reason to finally apply Israeli sovereignty over the historic regions of Judea and Samaria, and to definitively abandon the failed concept of establishing a Palestinian terro[r]ist state in the heart of the Land of Israel.
The comments appeared to indicate that Macron’s gambit would prove at best hopelessly ineffectual, at worst catastrophically counterproductive. President Donald Trump took the former view. “What he says doesn’t matter,” Trump told reporters Friday. “That statement doesn’t carry any weight.”
But if Macron’s announcement “doesn’t matter,” then why have opponents of Palestinian self-determination reacted to it with such venom? In truth, recognition does matter in international affairs, which is why Israel and its Western backers, unlike most nations, have steadfastly refused to acknowledge Palestinian statehood in the first place.
Scholars of international relations have taken a keen interest in recognition, borrowing the concept from social theories of personal identity. According to Justia, an online resource for law students, two theories of recognition prevail in the study of international law. The “constitutive theory” says that a “state does not exist until it receives recognition.” By contrast, the “declaratory theory,” to which most scholars subscribe, holds that recognition “is merely an acknowledgment of an existing situation.” Even so, “an entity likely has a stronger claim to statehood when it has received recognition from many other states.”
For France in particular to join the majority of states in recognizing Palestine is significant. A nuclear-armed power, France is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), an advanced G7 economy, and the mightiest nation in Europe, taking into account the various dimensions of power: economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic. In recognizing Palestine, Macron has used his nation’s geopolitical prominence to create a permission structure for—and ramp up pressure on—other European leaders to follow suit.
Following Macron’s announcement, all eyes were on Starmer and the United Kingdom, where the next day a parliamentary foreign affairs committee called on the government “to recognise the state of Palestine while there is still a state to recognise.” Not wanting to get on America’s bad side, Starmer has been reluctant to take that step, even as he’s drawn attention to the “unspeakable and indefensible” suffering in Gaza and declared that “statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people.”
But on Monday, Trump appeared to acknowledge that Starmer had every right to follow Macron’s lead. “I don’t mind him taking a position” on the issue, Trump said in Starmer’s presence when asked about Palestinian statehood. Starmer seems to have interpreted that remark as a green light, as the next day his government edged closer to the French position. If Britain does indeed join France, the U.S. would be the only permanent UNSC member not to recognize Palestinian statehood, with China, Russia, and the two European powers on the other side.
Evidently, Macron’s announcement really does matter, and it has perceptibly shifted the conversation among world leaders.
It has also done so in the media and among the general public. How many Americans know that some 147 of the UN’s 193 member states (including 11 European Union nations) already recognize the state of Palestine? Thanks to media coverage of Macron’s announcement, many Americans now do.
Here’s another fact that may interest them: Of the top 20 most populous nations in the world, only the United States and two of its vassals—Japan and Germany—do not recognize Palestinian statehood. Citizens of those three nations may start to ask: If Paris can recognize Palestine, then why cannot their own governments, which claim to support a two-state solution?
Macron’s surprise announcement came amid mounting international pressure on Israel. Mainstream newspapers such as the New York Times are not only highlighting the acute famine conditions in Gaza but casting doubt on Israeli claims that the UN and Hamas—and not Israel—are to blame for blocking food aid. The Times has reported on several incidents of Israeli troops killing desperate Palestinians at aid delivery sites. It even published an article by an Israeli professor of the Holocaust who now concludes that “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
British news media has, if anything, been even more critical of Israel. Good Morning Britain last Friday aired an alarming interview with a British doctor who provides medical care in Gaza. He said that Israeli border officials confiscate baby formula from incoming doctors and that Israeli soldiers on occasion seemed to target the genitals of children with gunshots, as though a “game was being played.”
As more and more Westerners begin to see the dark gravity of the Gaza crisis, Macron’s announcement offers a ray of hope, putting the focus on possible long-term solutions. Of course, Israel and its most loyal American supporters have rejected Macron’s solution as impractical and somehow dangerous. But their condemnations only reveal how unserious they are about finding a humane solution to the Israel–Palestine dispute.
“A Palestinian state in these conditions would be a launch pad to annihilate Israel—not to live in peace beside it,” the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. “Let’s be clear: the Palestinians do not seek a state alongside Israel; they seek a state instead of Israel.” The statement amounts to a mixture of projection and mendacity. Members of Netanyahu’s own government, including Smotrich, have been candid about their own annihilationist plans for Gaza: ethnic cleansing and Israeli annexation. Moreover, Macron had said that France’s recognition of statehood was predicated on Palestine’s “fully recognizing Israel.”
Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a DC think tank that promotes Israeli interests, has vilified Macron for “appeasement” of Hamas. “Macron gave a gift to Hamas—and Smotrich—setting back peace by decades,” Dubowitz said Thursday. The accusation doesn’t hold water.
It’s hard to see how Macron gave a “gift” to Hamas. His announcement on social media accompanied a letter to the president of the Palestinian Authority, which partially governs the West Bank. “You condemned the terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023 and called for the immediate release of the hostages held by Hamas, and for the latter to be disarmed and to withdraw from the governance of Gaza,” the letter read. “You underline the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to fulfilling all its governance responsibilities in all Palestinian territories, including Gaza.”
As for Smotrich, Dubowitz was apparently suggesting that the right-wing settler would, in response to Macron, accelerate his push to seize the West Bank. But world leaders cannot allow Israeli extremists to blackmail the international community in this fashion. In any case, Smotrich and his ilk have long pushed to build more settlements in the West Bank, evict Palestinians from the territory, and thus create “facts on the ground” that make a Palestinian state impossible.
Macron’s bold announcement brings Europe closer to the global consensus on Israel–Palestine. Moreover, it positions the French president as the European leader par excellence. It implicitly acknowledges the gulf between the collective West and Israel and reaffirms Christian values of peace, equality, and universal dignity.
France has been a friend of America since before the founding of our republic, providing vital support during our war of independence. In the 21st Century, when Israel was pushing us to attack its Mideast adversaries, France backed us in Afghanistan but told us the truth about Iraq: A war there would prove disastrous and unjust. Today, as France stands against Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, the U.S. should honor its oldest alliance and stand beside its civilizational partner.
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