Israel has more of a right to exist than France
French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that France will recognize a Palestinian state is another chapter in the long, lamentable history of French antisemitism, which includes the Dreyfus affair, Vichy’s complicity in the Holocaust and the current wave of Muslim antisemitism rocking the republic.
On the bright side, as President Trump puts it, “What Macron says is irrelevant. It won’t change anything.”
The French have a saying: The more things change, the more they remain the same. This is most applicable to them.
The French have always had difficulty dealing with reality. They thought the Maginot Line would stop the German advance in 1940. Instead, the Germans were in Paris in a month.
Macron’s move displays a profound ignorance of the Middle East.
Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority has ever recognized Israel’s right to exist within any borders. The Arabs were at war with the idea of a Jewish state long before there was a Jewish state.
Any territory the jihadis acquire will be used as a staging area for future attacks, such as the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre – the greatest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. They will never give up their dream of genocide “from the river to the sea.” Macron’s push for a Palestinian state is in keeping with his country’s execrable treatment of Jews.
In the Dreyfus affair (1892), a Jewish officer in the French army was framed for treason. This had Parisian mobs howling, “Death to the Jews.” The demonstrations, witnessed by Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, convinced the father of modern Zionism that Jews could never assimilate into European society.
How ironic that French antisemitism helped fuel the drive for a Jewish state.
In 1940-1944, the collaborationist Vichy regime, installed in southern France by Germany, aided the Nazis in sending more than 75,000 French Jews to the gas chambers.
Guy Milliere, a researcher for the Gatestone Institute, discloses, “France is the only country in the 21st century where Jews have regularly been murdered simply because they were Jews.”
Milliere notes, “For more than 20 years, it has been impossible to talk about the Holocaust in French schools” because it upsets Muslims.
France has Europe’s largest Muslim population: 6 million, or 10% of the total. That is expected to rise to 17% by 2050. Macron panders furiously to this growing constituency. With elections coming in 2027, his approval rating is at the lowest since he first took office in 2017.
In the 2024 election, to keep the right-wing National Rally party from power, Macron forged an alliance that included the far-left New Popular Front, whose leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon, calls French Jews an “arrogant minority” and Oct. 7, 2023, “an armed offensive of Palestinian forces.”
What once was Christian France is on life support. Each week, another church closes and another mosque opens.
If demography is destiny, France is down for the count.
The overall French fertility rate (the number of children the average woman will have in her lifetime) is 1.79, substantially below the replacement rate of 2.1. The fertility rate for French Muslims is 2.9, well above replacement. France’s Muslim population is augmented by illegal immigration from North Africa.
A Palestinian state would be the beginning of the end of the Jewish state. Israel would have an implacable foe on its border, wholly committed to its destruction. Whatever guarantees are given, arms and fighters would flow in from its regional allies.
Israel has more of a right to exist than France. The Bible wasn’t written in Marseille. The patriarchs and prophets did not walk the streets of Lyon.
The French did not spend 2,000 years praying for a return from exile.
God never said he would bless the nation that blesses France and curse the nation that curses it.
When France was a land of warring barbarian tribes, Israel was a thriving kingdom and the site of Solomon’s Temple and its successor. Christianity did not develop on the Left Bank of Paris.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that Britain will follow Macron’s lead and vote for a Palestinian state at the United Nations in September, unless Israel meets certain suicidal conditions on Gaza.
Macron might as well give the Palestinians their state on the French Riviera. The country will be Muslim by the end of the century if not sooner.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.