"The time has come!" he said over and over in his 21-minute speech. “The time has come!” Macron repeated the mantra 12 times in his speech, as if to hypnotize the audience attending the two-state conference into forgetting that France had been missing in action for nearly 80 years.
At the end, the speech was not the long-awaited recognition of Palestinian rights, but a balancing act of a leader walking on eggshells because he was unwilling to come across as someone who was disloyal to Israel.
Macron wanted to be remembered as the man who finally pressed the button on France's recognition of Palestine. Yes, he did it. But look closer: France is one of the last to arrive—perhaps the 150th country to recognise Palestine since the UN partition plan of 1947.
The timing of Macron's move reveals more about his desire to cement France's standing in the world, and placate growing domestic opposition to Paris's handling of Israel with kid gloves, rather than about heeding Palestinian rights. His recognition did not arrive as justice delivered but as a carefully staged diplomatic manoeuvre.
Macron's design for a two-state solution is neat and narrow: A State of Palestine must be demilitarized, must be run by a "reformed" Palestinian Authority, and must be Hamas-free. It also stipulates that all Arab states must normalize with Israel and accept becoming neatly folded into a Western-dominated framework of “security."
A sovereign, but demilitarized, Palestinian state, in Macron’s vision, would constitute a buffer zone for Israel, not a remedy for decades of displacement, confiscation and occupation
The State of Palestine is being recognized here not for its own sake but, rather, to save the State of Israel. It is “the only solution that will allow peace for Israel,” he insisted. The recognition is rendered as “a defeat for Hamas," not a victory for Palestinians.
The bias in Macron's rhetoric is most striking. One only needs to count. He condemned Hamas repeatedly. He called the 7 October operation the “worst terrorist attack in Israel’s history,” a “massacre,” an act of “barbarity."
The French president insisted “nothing can ever justify terrorism” and vowed that the “hideous face” of Hamas must be “defeated militarily” and must be “defeated politically.” He made 11 explicit condemnations of Hamas in 21 minutes in absolute terms, wrapped in emotionally charged language.
His choice of adjectives tells the story. What are the Palestinians to him? They are “exhausted,” “traumatized,” “overwhelmed by hunger.” They are just victims. What about Israel? He describes it adoringly as the “vibrant democracy,” “friendship,” and the “commitment we never wavered.”
Macron even indulges in biblical grandeur, mirroring the Talmudic speeches of Netanyahu and the Israeli far right, lamenting the “destiny of this people, finally, after millennia of wandering and persecution.”
The Israeli bombings of Gaza are acknowledged, yes, in a language imbued with lament and regret rather than condemnation: Israel is “still expanding its military operations,” the war has “destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands,” and “nothing justifies continuing the war any longer.” Was it then justified before? Macron never once calls Israeli crimes “terrorism.”
The asymmetry is blatant. He leans toward Israel over 10 times, Palestine only five times. He frames Israel’s actions in the Gaza war as having a stated goal, the destruction of Hamas, placing them within the accepted, if now excessive, bounds of military logic. Hamas is barbaric; Israel is misguided. Any condemnation is not of Israel's methods, but of the length and proportionality of their application. A critique of strategy, not of fundamental morality.
Even Macron's empathy reveals a hierarchy of victims. Israeli captives are described by name, with clear statistics, personal stories, Evyatar David, Nimrod Cohen. However, Palestinian victims remain anonymous in his speech. ... “women, children whose gaze I will never forget.” Israelis get names; Palestinians remain unspecified even in numbers. no stories, only the impersonal.
History itself is narrated selectively. Palestinian suffering begins, in his narrative, only when Israel started bombing Gaza in October 2023. Everything before October 2023 vanished from the historical record.
What about the 1948 Nakba? Never enters his speech. The brutal 58-year occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, life or quasi-life under the humiliating and inhumane checkpoints, the stealing of Palestinian land and water to build more settlements, the ongoing dispossession and the decades of dispossession? They are absent.
And Palestinian dignity? Macron borrows from the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, "The Palestinians are a people who never give up on anthing," as if he could not say it in his own words.
But when he talks about Israel? He relies on the language of friendship and loyalty: “France has never failed Israel when its security was at stake.” That single sentence exposes the imbalance: unconditional support for Israel’s security, conditional recognition for Palestine.
And yet, Macron robes himself in the cloth of a neutral mediator between two sides, with the mantra of “one life is worth one life.”
He wants to be the impartial mediator between “both-sides”, a prophet of peace, but the scales never lie: he is still Israel’s friend, first, Palestine’s reluctant sponsor, second.
Short link: