There are certain rounds of applause that turn your stomach. So it was yesterday when Emmanuel Macron told the British parliament that an immediate ceasefire in Gaza “without any conditions” was “just” and that recognising a State of Palestine was “the only path to peace”.
These French proposals meant two things. Firstly, an unconditional ceasefire would mean abandoning the hostages in the hands of their jihadi tormentors and leaving Gaza in the control of Hamas, lining up atrocities for the future and condemning the region to an endless spiral of war.
Secondly, recognising a Palestinian state would add British and French endorsement to the ahistorical lie that Israeli intransigence is the obstacle to peace, and enlightened European powers must bring those pesky Jews to heel.
To see Sir Keir Starmer – though notably, not Kemi Badenoch – joining the enthusiastic applause was enough to bring up one’s lunch. As Greta Thunberg may have put it, had her politics been more sensible: how dare he?
The reasons why Macron’s ivory tower moralising was so appalling are so obvious that even a child could see it. We live, however, in a world saturated with Hamas propaganda, where for the majority of the population, lies feel true and the truth is laughable.
Therefore, it is worthwhile considering briefly why when it comes to the Middle East, the leader of France – the same country that so superbly deposed Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, unleashing instability and triggering the European migration crisis – doesn’t, as it were, know his cul from his coude.
First of all, the context. It is a matter of historical record that the Palestinians have rejected the offer of a state that satisfied all their demands on several occasions. The first time, of course, was in 1947, when they chose genocidal war over self-determination.
That strategy worked out about as well for them then as it has every other time they’ve tried it, whether in 1967, 1973 or 2023. You got to hand it to the fanatics. They are indefatigable.
To illustrate their attitude, let’s zoom in on one particularly vivid occasion, the 2008 offer made by Ehud Olmert known as the “realignment plan”. Its terms were the following:
Ninety-four per cent of the West Bank given to the Palestinians, with 6 per cent of Israeli land added to make up the difference;
East Jerusalem placed under Palestinian sovereignty, making it the capital of a Palestinian state;
Israel withdrawing from the Old City of Jerusalem, which would be placed under international administration;
A tunnel connecting the West Bank and Gaza, ensuring Palestinian territorial contiguity;
Israel accepting 1,000 Palestinian refugees annually for five years, with financial compensation provided for the rest.
It is hard to imagine a more generous plan. Yet in a grotesque failure of leadership, Mahmoud Abbas turned it down. Could this be the man who holds a PhD in Holocaust revisionism from a Moscow university and offers cash incentives to those convicted of terror offences?
Another notable occasion was the Camp David negotiations in 2000. Last December, in an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit Bill Clinton described how many young people in America were “shocked” when they hears that Arafat had rejected a deal that would have granted the Palestinians a state with a capital in East Jerusalem and 96 per cent of the West Bank.
“I tell them what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it,” an emotional Clinton said, referring to it as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity.
“You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open, and all the possibilities weren’t still there… All people know that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. But they don’t know the history behind that.”
Writing in the Washington Post in 2009, Olmert said: “It would be worth exploring the reasons that the Palestinians rejected my offer and preferred, instead, to drag their feet, avoiding real decisions.” Well, what were those reasons?
As I describe in detail in my forthcoming book, Never Again? How the West betrayed the Jews and itself, which is out in October and can be pre-ordered here, the continued Arab rejection of a Jewish state can only be explained with an understanding of Islamic history.
The Quran is unique in world religions in viewing military dominance as evidence of divine favour. Mohammad’s success as a warlord confirmed his status as a prophet; the rapid expansion of the Muslim empire after his death supported the status of Islam as the final revelation that superseded both Judaism and Christianity.
For centuries, Muslim armies had subjugated hundreds of millions of people, from China and Indonesia to Europe, only being turned away from France at the Battle of Tours. In the late eighteenth century, however, the Christian West slowly began to reverse the dominance of Islam.
The great Muslim retreat commenced with the loss of Spain and Portugal, followed by the European menacing of North Africa. Islamic territories gradually fell to Britain, France, Russia and Holland, with Iran coming under economic and political pressure from the West.
While Islamic energies flowed into fighting the Europeans, they were diverted from spiritual and intellectual pursuits, causing them to fall behind in terms of literature, the sciences, innovation and philosophy, areas in which it had previously excelled.
In the heart of the Middle East, the Christian advance was held back by the Ottoman Empire, which retained some strength despite having entered its twilight years.
But the Battle of the Pyramids, when Napoleon’s forces wiped out the mighty Ottoman Mamluk army in a matter of hours in the blistering summer of 1798, became a mortifying psychological blow when just a month later, fourteen ships of the Royal Navy, led by Lord Nelson, in turn routed the French to ensure British access to its imperial assets in India.
Rarely had the Islamic world looked so weak. This was a process of deep and traumatic humiliation for a civilisation that from its earliest days had defined itself by martial power.
Once again, the Jews were viewed as the most potent expression of the enemy. During the centuries they had spent under Islamic rule, they had been viewed as weaklings, living as “dhimmi”, or second-class citizens.
In Muslim eyes, the idea that they could now carve out and defend part of the Middle East, even just the 0.2 per cent of the region to which they have an ancestral claim, compounded the humiliation of history.
As the late historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis observed, for centuries, Jews living in Arab lands had been expected to keep their place, and the rare outbreaks of Muslim violence against them had almost always resulted from a belief that they had resisted doing so. He drily concluded: “They have conspicuously failed to do so in recent years.”
This has informed the development of a Palestinian Arab identity based upon the rejection of the Jewish state as a point of Muslim honour, rather than a desire for state-building on behalf of its own people.
Sometimes, as during the Oslo Accords negotiations in the nineties, Arab leaders reach out for peace and almost take hold of it, but they are always derailed by an appetite for blood and vengeance on behalf of a fallen people. (In the case of the Oslo Accords, that took the form of 140 suicide bombs and the second Intifada.)
Arafat built the ethos of Palestinian “resistance” on the model of Algeria, where Arab guerrillas waged an eight-year campaign against their French overlords that eventually drove them out of the country.
This “death by 1,000 cuts” approach routed the French even though they had possessed the territory for more than a century. The same strategy was brought to bear upon the Jews, and is pursued to this day.
Indeed, when asked about Palestinian deaths on Lebanese television two weeks after October 7, the former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal remarked: “The Algerian people sacrificed six million martyrs over 130 years . . . No nation is liberated without sacrifices.” Unsurprisingly, Hamas does all it can to manipulate Israel into killing civilians, as the French had done to their ultimate cost.
Which brings us neatly back to Macron. In lobbying for London to join Paris in unilaterally recognising a State of Palestine, over the heads of both the Israelis and Palestinians, he exhibits a dangerous ignorance of both the history of the region and the psychology of its peoples.
As was demonstrated by their repeated rejection of the “two-state solution”, the Palestinian leadership has never wanted a country alongside Israel. It has always wanted a country instead of Israel. That is the heart of the problem.
Quite obviously, a peaceful solution would only be achieved if the Palestinians could be persuaded that Israel will never go the way of the French and an Algerian victory will never happen. The Jews are not some colonisers from a distant land. These are the descendants of refugees who had nowhere else to go.
Once the Palestinians accept that Israel is there to stay, and stop fantasising about its destruction, peace will be around the corner. As Golda Meir famously put it, “if the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel”.
Sadly, French and British recognition of Palestine would be interpreted by Ramallah simply as encouragement to keep their weapons in their hands and keep chasing the Algerian dream.
Shame on Emmanuel Macron. Shame on Keir Starmer for applauding him. Their myopic concern for their own virtue blinds them to the reality on the ground and only perpetuates the bloodshed rather than ending it.
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