From Dreyfus to Macron: The Grand French Tradition of Politically Correct Antisemitism
Macron did not even have the decency to make his recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state contingent on Hamas releasing the hostages.
Joining Macron in this narcissistic display were other small, soft leaders with large, hard Islamist constituencies -- Britain's PM Keir Starmer, Australia's PM Anthony Albanese, and Canada's PM Mark Carney -- who followed Macron's lead in granting international legitimacy to a cause dedicated to terrorism.
The Palestinian Authority continues to operate as an unelected dictatorship, funneling millions into its infamous pay-for-slay "jobs" program -- sometimes listed as "welfare" -- which grants salaries to terrorists and their families based on how many Jews they succeed in murdering. The more Jews they murder, the higher the monthly stipend. Palestinian schoolbooks still erase Israel from maps, depict Jews as usurpers, and teach children that the ultimate aspiration is martyrdom.
Macron's recognition, applauded by large sections of Europe and beyond, was not the action of a statesman seeking peace. It was a pitiful lunge to hold onto power by a weakened leader, desperate to posture as a "moral arbiter" abroad while avoiding accountability at home. Macron is willing to betray the Israelis, who are fighting not only for the West but for his own people, the French.
After France's defeat at the hands of Germany in 1940 came collaboration. France's Vichy regime did not merely submit to German edicts; it embraced its own homegrown antisemitism. Vichy's machinery operated with bureaucratic zeal: statutes defining who was a Jew, the exclusion of Jews from professions, property seizures, internments, and ultimately deportations to Auschwitz. The cultivated myth of a France "shielding" Jews while Germany did the harm has long since been demolished by the historical record. Vichy was a French government, enacting French laws to persecute Jews on French soil, and in too many instances, to deliver them to their deaths.
The moral cost was enormous. By making stability the overriding priority, French authorities tacitly normalized contact with organizations that targeted Jews and Israelis. These back-channel accommodations blurred the line between counterterrorism and collusion — and served as an early modern example of a recurring French pattern: When domestic tranquility and influence in the Arab world collide with the safety and security of Jews, the balance is often struck in favor of tranquility.
President Chirac, during a visit to Israel in October 1996, erupted at what he called a "provocation" by Israeli plainclothes security guards during a walk in the Old City of Jerusalem — an incident that became emblematic of Paris's sensitivity to perceived Israeli slights and a readiness to dramatize grievances that resonated with the Arab and Muslim public. Whether the outburst was theatre or genuine indignation, it fed a narrative: France would hold Israel to scrutiny in a way that sometimes felt public and punitive, while remaining discreet, conciliatory, or accommodating toward Arab regimes.
[H]ow come, if Mohammad al-Durrah was shot, there was no blood at the scene? The controversy led to libel suits, heated media debates in France, and a long war of narratives: for many critics, the al-Durrah case became a test of whether French media could be trusted to report dispassionately on Palestine-Israel — or whether powerful images produced abroad would be turned into instruments of political mobilization at home.
For decades, the front pages of Le Monde, Libération, and Le Monde Diplomatique have provided disproportionate framing that vilifies Israel while sanitizing Palestinian violence. Headlines portraying Israeli counter-terrorism as "aggression," while minimizing rocket fire or suicide bombings, have shaped French public opinion, sometimes more decisively than presidential speeches.
The effect of this editorial slant is cumulative: each cover, each op-ed, each biased image is built into a narrative architecture in which Israel stands as the perennial aggressor and Palestinians as the archetypal victims. This distortion is not merely academic. It affects political choices, emboldens intellectuals who conflate anti-Zionism with moral virtue, and reinforces a climate where politicians know they can score points by signaling distance from Jerusalem. In the long run, media coverage has hardened the double standard and provided cultural cover for diplomatic betrayals.
The 21st century has added a more transactional layer to France's Arab policy: investment in the French economy. Few states have invested more aggressively in French assets and businesses than Qatar. The oil-rich emirate poured billions into Parisian real estate, media holdings, luxury firms, and sports franchises. The purchase of Paris Saint-Germain football team became a symbol of how deeply Qatari capital has embedded itself into French public life. Alongside investment came soft power: television channels, think tanks, and influence campaigns aimed at projecting Doha's narratives into French discourse.
Qatar's record is not benign. For years it has financed Hamas and sheltered its leadership. That France tolerated -- even courted -- Qatar despite these links testifies to a familiar pattern: geopolitical expediency trumping moral clarity.
Macron's post on X insisted on conditionality (Hamas must relinquish control and the Palestinian Authority must reform), yet those conditions remain unenforceable in practice. A state without concrete guarantees risks rewarding the very actors — such as Hamas and its patrons — who use terrorism as a policy. Macron's declaration looks less like statesmanship and more like firing blanks: a symbolic attempt at appeasement to placate vocal constituencies at home and reclaim the moral high ground abroad by offering up a state that someone else -- a sovereign nation, far away -- is supposed to implement, while offering Israel and the United States nothing at all.
Domestically, Macron's maneuver landed poorly. Multiple polls indicate that a large majority of the French public — roughly three-quarters — opposed immediate, unconditional recognition of a "Palestine" while Israeli hostages remained in Gaza or while Hamas remained in power. The disconnect between Macron and his electorate is striking. While he sought applause abroad, he was being widely perceived at home as indulging in moral posturing that had little chance of delivering peace and a lot of chance of making matters worse.
On the eve of the Jewish New Year, when families across the world were preparing to celebrate renewal and resilience, French President Emmanuel Macron chose a different symbol.
He formally recognized, at the United Nations on September 23, a so-called Palestinian state -- an act that emboldened Hamas, even as the 20 Israeli hostages still believed to be alive remained starved, tortured, and trapped in its tunnels in Gaza. Macron did not even have the decency to make his recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state contingent on Hamas releasing the hostages.
Joining Macron in this narcissistic display were other small, soft leaders with large, hard Islamist constituencies -- Britain's PM Keir Starmer, Australia's PM Anthony Albanese, and Canada's PM Mark Carney -- who followed Macron's lead in granting international legitimacy to a cause dedicated to terrorism.
The timing could hardly have been more cynical. It trampled on the dignity of the hostages and their families, and rewarded forces that glorify conquest and bloodshed, also in the West.
The Palestinian Authority continues to operate as an unelected dictatorship, funneling millions into its infamous pay-for-slay "jobs" program -- sometimes listed as "welfare" -- which grants salaries to terrorists and their families based on how many Jews they succeed in murdering. The more Jews they murder, the higher the monthly stipend. Palestinian schoolbooks still erase Israel from maps, depict Jews as usurpers, and teach children that the ultimate aspiration is martyrdom.
Macron's recognition, applauded by large sections of Europe and beyond, was not the action of a statesman seeking peace. It was a pitiful lunge to hold onto power by a weakened leader, desperate to posture as a "moral arbiter" abroad while avoiding accountability at home. Macron is willing to betray the Israelis, who are fighting not only for the West but for his own people, the French.
The great French leader Charles Martel, who repelled the Muslims trying to conquer France at Tours in the year 732, would probably die again from disgust.
Macron's calculation is transparent: appease an increasingly assertive Muslim electorate, cater to progressive elites, and hope that an international gesture will distract the French public from his collapsing domestic authority.
This is not the first time, in moments of moral testing, that France has betrayed its own ideals. Not long ago, France surrendered to Hitler and lived under the Third Reich's collaborationist government in France, Vichy.
The very nation that proclaims itself the cradle of the Rights of Man has a long and extremely questionable record when it comes to Jews and, later, the Jewish state. From the anti-Semitic hysteria of the Dreyfus Affair to the anti-Israel rhetoric of Charles de Gaulle, from France's protection of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini after World War II, to its welcoming of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on the eve of Iran's Islamic Revolution, Paris has repeatedly oscillated between lofty universalist proclamations and sordid accommodations.
France's stance today under Macron is not an aberration. It is the latest chapter in a long history of ambiguous — and often duplicitous — policies toward the Jewish people and the State of Israel. To understand this trajectory, one must begin at the very moment when modern political Zionism was born: the Dreyfus Affair, in the heart of Paris.
I. Dreyfus as the Matrix: The Birth of Modern Political Zionism
In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was falsely accused of treason. The ensuing scandal tore French society apart, dividing the country into two camps: the anti-Dreyfusards, steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and the defenders of Dreyfus, who rallied behind principles of evidence, justice, and equality before the law.
The hysteria was not confined to the courtroom. French newspapers spread venomous caricatures portraying Jews as traitors, parasites, and alien intruders within the French body politic. Crowds chanted "Death to the Jews" in the streets of Paris.
For many, the case was not about one officer's guilt or innocence—it was about the place of Jews in France itself.
One man observing this tragedy with particular intensity was Theodor Herzl, a Jewish Viennese journalist covering the trial. Herzl had once believed in the promise of European liberalism, convinced that Jews could assimilate fully within modern nation-states. Yet in Paris he witnessed the fragility of that dream. If antisemitism could erupt with such virulence in the land of Voltaire (who, sadly, was himself a venomous antisemite) and the Enlightenment, then emancipation was a lie. Jews, Herzl concluded, would never be secure unless they had a state of their own.
From this epiphany came Herzl's 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), then, one year later, the first Zionist Congress in Basel. His vision did not emerge in a vacuum; it was born of the venom he had witnessed in France. The Dreyfus Affair became the crucible in which modern political Zionism was forged.
French intellectual currents not only gave rise to Zionism — they also nourished antisemitism in forms that would metastasize worldwide. As France vacillated between defenders of justice and merchants of hatred, the battle lines drawn in the 1890s would echo throughout the twentieth century.
II. French Letters and the Poisoned Well (1890s–1930s)
It is hard to understand the modern spread of European antisemitism without factoring in its French literary engine. In 1886, Édouard Drumont published La France juive, a runaway bestseller that packaged bigotry as a total explanation of French decline. Drumont did not merely "describe" Jews; he indicted them as an alien cabal, thereby giving a popular movement both its slogans and its pseudo-intellectual veneer. His newspaper, La Libre Parole, normalized the discourse, turning antisemitism into a daily habit for thousands of readers. The template of conspiracy, financial demonology and cultural contempt would stretch across Europe and into the twentieth century.
By the years between the world wars, the climate had worsened. Jacques Doriot, once a rising Communist, mutated into a fascist, founding the Parti Populaire Français (PPF). His trajectory, from far-left tribune to Nazi collaborator, embodied a grim convergence: Jew-hatred as the bridge between extremes. Under the German occupation during WWII, the PPF enforced antisemitic policies and aped Nazi methods, showing how French politics could serve as a transmission belt for imported totalitarianism.
The literary canon itself was not spared. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of France's most stylistically gifted novelists, published two notorious pamphlets — Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937) and L'École des cadavres (1938) — that dripped with genocidal antisemitic bile. He never atoned. Even decades later, debates about republishing his pamphlets acknowledged their openly antisemitic, fascistic core. What mattered for the wider world was the export value: when hatred is written with elegance, it travels farther.
III. The Communist Blind Spot: From Molotov-Ribbentrop to Defeatism (1939–1941)
When Stalin signed his non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939, the shock swept through Europe. The French Communist Party struggled for a few days, but then aligned with Moscow.
The result was a propaganda campaign that promoted defeatism and make-believe "peace" with Hitler, precisely when what France really needed was immediate mobilization. Contemporary and subsequent analyses record how communists disseminated the view that the war was "imperialist," consequently undercutting national resolve at a decisive hour.
Scholarly work details the tactical shifts and the impact inside factories and unions during 1939–1940. The narrative is complex, but the through-line is not: between 1939, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union), the French Communist Party's stance mirrored Soviet policies, not France's interests. This posture, however rationalized, proved catastrophically out of step with the threat France actually faced.
While the far right had given antisemitism a pulpit, part of the far left gave Hitler a window — briefly but fatefully — through which to divide and demoralize a democracy. Different motives, same effect: France entered the storm of war after being weakened from within.
IV. Vichy: State Complicity and Deportations
After France's defeat at the hands of Germany in 1940 came collaboration. France's Vichy regime did not merely submit to German edicts; it embraced its own homegrown antisemitism. Vichy's machinery operated with bureaucratic zeal: statutes defining who was a Jew, the exclusion of Jews from professions, property seizures, internments, and ultimately deportations to Auschwitz. The cultivated myth of a France "shielding" Jews while Germany did the harm has long since been demolished by the historical record. Vichy was a French government, enacting French laws to persecute Jews on French soil, and in too many instances, to deliver them to their deaths.
The shock is enduring because the betrayal was intimate. The nation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen transformed its own legal code into a weapon against a tiny minority that had fought for France in WWI and WWII and believed in its promise. This was not only an occupation story; it was a national story.
V. Post-War Realpolitik: Sheltering the Grand Mufti
Few episodes illustrate France's duplicity more vividly than its post-war protection of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Long before World War II, al-Husseini had incited murderous pogroms against Jews in Palestine, most conspicuously in 1929 at Hebron and Safed. Al-Husseini then lent ideological support to the Farhud pogrom in Iraq in 1941, in which more than a hundred of Jews were murdered, and hundreds more wounded. During WWII, Husseini was a willing partner of Nazi Germany: broadcasting anti-Jewish and anti-British propaganda from Berlin, lobbying Adolf Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler to prevent any transfer of Jews to Palestine, and even helping to recruit Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS.
At war's end, the case for accountability was clear. Al-Husseini's name was raised for trial at Nuremberg; Yugoslavia filed an extradition request for war crimes, and Britain initially pressed for his prosecution.
The French government, however, which held him under house arrest from May 1945 until May 1946, had other priorities. Apparently fearing to alienate Arab opinion and desperate to preserve France's influence in North Africa and the Middle East, French Foreign Ministry officials concluded that leniency toward Husseini would be rewarded diplomatically. Prosecuting him, they feared, would risk uprisings and the loss of goodwill in Muslim lands.
Political considerations won out over justice. British resolve softened; Yugoslavia eventually dropped its request. France used this collapse of nerve as cover to avoid a trial. In May 1946, Husseini conveniently "escaped" from France to Egypt. Most historians agree the escape was tolerated — if not facilitated — by the French government, eager to rid itself of a political embarrassment while currying favor with Arab leaders.
This episode set a pattern that would haunt French policy for decades: when forced to choose between upholding justice for Jewish victims or cultivating Arab alliances, Paris chose the latter. In doing so, France sheltered one of the most vicious antisemites of the twentieth century — an active ally of Hitler, a recruiter for the SS, and an instigator of pogroms — because his political utility outweighed the moral imperative of accountability.
Then came a brief period of rational alliance and partnership between France and Israel -- one that eventually led the two countries to become nuclear powers. Unfortunately, this honeymoon did not last.
VI. De Gaulle and the "Arab Policy" (1967 and After)
Charles de Gaulle's reaction to the Six-Day War marked a dramatic rupture in French policy toward Israel. Within days of Israel's stunning military victory in June 1967, Paris moved from being one of Israel's principal arms suppliers to imposing an arms embargo that effectively cut military ties and signaled a strategic pivot toward Arab capitals. This embargo, and the harsh language de Gaulle used to describe Israel and the Jews — calling them at one point "a people sure of themselves and domineering" — left an enduring scar on French-Israeli relations and created the political space for a more openly pro-Arab, realpolitik French diplomacy.
The logic behind the shift was straightforward: France was recalibrating toward what it perceived as long-term national interests — energy supplies in the form of Arab oil, commercial ties, and influence in North Africa after decolonization — even at the price of alienating a democratic ally. De Gaulle evidently believed that maintaining good relations with the Arab world would serve France's global role and help secure its independence from both the US and the Soviet Union. The moral consequence, however, was a clear double standard: universalist rhetoric at home; transactional back-stabbing abroad.
VII. Giscard, Family Reunification and the Demographic Turn (1974–1981)
The post-1968 order in France included policies whose long-term social and political impact has been underestimated by many commentators. One such policy was the legal framework for family reunification for immigrants, consolidated in the mid-1970s under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and his prime ministers. By permitting long-term immigrant workers to bring their families to France, successive governments transformed a temporary labor policy into a more permanent demographic shift — with important consequences for domestic politics and the composition of the electorate that, in later decades, would severely influence France's approach to the Middle East.
It is important to stress causality carefully: legislation on family reunification did not deterministically produce any single foreign policy choice. It did, all the same, help to create the electoral constituencies whose concerns and votes French leaders would increasingly weigh — and with whom political elites sometimes sought conciliatory gestures on foreign policy as a matter of political expediency. In short, immigration policy became a significant factor in France's geopolitical calculations.
VIII. Khomeini's Safe Haven: France's Unwitting Launchpad (1978–1979)
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent his final months in exile in Neauphle-le-Château outside Paris, France inadvertently became a broadcast platform for Iran's Islamic revolutionary movement. With broad press freedoms and a ravenous international media corps gathered around the cleric, Khomeini's sermons and statements were rapidly transmitted back into Iran. What French authorities saw as a short-term humanitarian and logistical solution turned into a strategic blunder: the relative openness of France amplified Khomeini's message and helped him to consolidate a revolutionary narrative that would soon sweep away Iran's Shah and establish an anti-Western, jihadist, theocratic regime.
The decision to allow Khomeini into French territory was complicated. He had been expelled from Najaf, Iraq and was seeking a place from which he could freely communicate his messages to Iran. French officials and local hosts were, according to contemporary reporting and later histories, guided more by considerations of asylum and the technicalities of visas than by any intent to aid an Islamic revolution. Yet the strategic effect was that his stay in France gave Khomeini a massive international megaphone. The French media — and the protections of French civil rights — transformed a reclusive cleric into a global icon.
IX. Mitterrand, Beirut and the Paradox of Protection (1982)
The 1982 Lebanon War demonstrated once again how France could position itself rhetorically as a mediator while pursuing policies that many in Israel and the US found opaque — even hostile. As Israeli forces closed in on West Beirut and the PLO leadership faced annihilation, Paris — under President François Mitterrand and through foreign policy channels — advocated a multinational force to oversee the evacuation of the PLO from Lebanon. France pressed for, and contributed troops to, the multinational contingent that was supposed to supervise the PLO withdrawal. France's diplomatic posture was presented as saving the PLO from complete destruction. PLO leader Yasser Arafat himself publicly expressed gratitude to France for its role in arranging and guaranteeing the evacuation.
The same intervention, all the same, fed narratives of French partiality. Critics argued that Paris's willingness to play shepherd to Arafat reflected not a neutral humanitarian instinct but a consistent policy tendency to court Arab opinion and preserve French influence in the Levant. The multinational force succeeded in evacuating thousands of PLO terrorists and the organization's leaders, but the region's bloody aftermath revealed the limits of diplomatic theater when not paired with decisive measures to protect civilians and confront militias. France's role in Beirut in 1982 is therefore ambiguous: a protector of evacuation on paper; in practice, a state whose broader policy choices had repeatedly favored accommodating terrorists over accountability.
X. The "Secret Deal": PFLP and French Intelligence
One of the darkest and most revealing episodes of late-20th-century French diplomacy was the quiet coordination between elements of France's intelligence services and Palestinian terrorist groups. In the years after a wave of terror attacks on French soil in the 1970s and 1980s, former French intelligence officials later admitted that the country's security services had entered informal understandings with Palestinian terrorist factions — not out of sympathy for their cause, but from a blunt, transactional desire to keep terror off French streets. Yves Bonnet, who headed the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST) in the early 1980s, publicly described how the DST cultivated channels to Palestinian terrorist organizations as a "pragmatic" way to prevent attacks and preserve domestic order.
This was not high-minded diplomacy. It was a deal underwritten by cynicism: toleration and limited engagement in exchange for the simple promise that murderers would not strike France again.
The moral cost was enormous. By making stability the overriding priority, French authorities tacitly normalized contact with organizations that targeted Jews and Israelis. These back-channel accommodations blurred the line between counterterrorism and collusion — and served as an early modern example of a recurring French pattern: When domestic tranquility and influence in the Arab world collide with the safety and security of Jews, the balance is often struck in favor of tranquility.
XI. Chirac's Arabist Reflex
Jacques Chirac's career embodied the ambivalence of France's post-colonial diplomacy: a leader who publicly confronted France's past crimes against the Jews (his 1995 speech acknowledging responsibility for the Vichy deportations is historic), yet repeatedly cultivated personal and political ties with authoritarian Arab leaders. Chirac's long-standing, almost intimate ties with Iraq and with Saddam Hussein in particular were well known in diplomatic circles; those ties illustrate how French foreign policy often privileged personal relationships and strategic commerce over moral clarity.
The texture of that reflex is visible in smaller, symbolic episodes, as well. President Chirac, during a visit to Israel in October 1996, erupted at what he called a "provocation" by Israeli plainclothes security guards during a walk in the Old City of Jerusalem — an incident that became emblematic of Paris's sensitivity to perceived Israeli slights and a readiness to dramatize grievances that resonated with the Arab and Muslim public. Whether the outburst was theatre or genuine indignation, it fed a narrative: France would hold Israel to scrutiny in a way that sometimes felt public and punitive, while remaining discreet, conciliatory, or accommodating toward Arab regimes.
Chirac also played a backchannel role in moments of regional crisis. During the fraught period following the failure of Camp David II and the violence that surrounded the second Intifada in 2000, Paris's posture favored diplomatic hedging and protection of Palestinian leadership in ways that, critics argued, sometimes shielded figures whose methods and rhetoric hardened the conflict rather than resolving it. This posture — part humanitarian, part geopolitical calculation — confirmed a French habit: act as mediator and moral broker while maintaining policies that preserve Paris's influence in the Arab world, as in its support for Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.
XII. Al-Durrah: The Icon That Divided a Nation
Few images from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had the raw emotional impact of the footage broadcast by France 2 on September 30, 2000: a father crouched over his son, bullets flying — and the boy apparently dying on camera. The scene of Muhammad al-Durrah became an emblem of Palestinian suffering and a rallying image across the Muslim world. The initial France 2 report, narrated by Charles Enderlin and filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, was widely accepted as real and re-broadcast; it shaped international opinion during the opening months of the Second Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising against Israelis.
This narrative, however, did not long survive forensic and legal scrutiny. Subsequent inquiries, re-examination of the footage, and several technical reconstructions raised serious doubts about whether Israeli fire had caused the boy's death or whether he was even shot. Some investigators argued that the image had been edited or narrated in a way that produced a politically explosive impression not fully supported by the raw material -- for instance, how come, if Mohammad al-Durrah was shot, there was no blood at the scene? The controversy led to libel suits, heated media debates in France, and a long war of narratives: for many critics, the al-Durrah case became a test of whether French media could be trusted to report dispassionately on Palestine-Israel — or whether powerful images produced abroad would be turned into instruments of political mobilization at home.
The scandal's political consequences were immediate. The image accelerated anti-Israel sentiment in French public opinion, fed protests and hardened the belligerent framing of the conflict in French media and politics. Whether one believes the original France 2 account in full or accepts the skeptical reconstructions, the al-Durrah affair demonstrated how a single televised sequence can change the political chemistry of a country and create a lasting credibility problem for its media.
XIII. The French Anti-Zionist Intelligentsia
Beyond presidents and spy chiefs, France's intellectual and media class has been a decisive engine shaping public attitudes. From certain influential columnists to the editorial positions of major publications, anti-Zionist framings have often bled into the discourse, sometimes tipping into rhetorical excesses that risk conflating policy critique with cultural or religious denigration.
Outlets and figures across the French media ecosystem — from leading op-eds in Mediapart to controversies inside Le Monde and Libération — have been accused by critics of asymmetrical coverage that places Israel's worst actions at the center while "contextualizing" or downplaying incitement, violence and terrorism from Palestinians and other extremist actors.
Edwy Plenel himself, before founding Mediapart and after serving as editor-in-chief of Le Monde, has a history that exemplifies this problem. In 1972, while writing for Rouge, the weekly of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League, he reacted to the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics not with condemnation but with praise. He argued that "no revolutionary could disown Black September" after they murdered the Israeli athletes, thereby effectively offering what contemporaries described as "unconditional support" to the terrorists.
While Plenel has since distanced himself from this youthful radicalism, acknowledging that it was indefensible, the episode remains a solid reminder of how parts of the French intelligentsia once crossed the line from political critique to glorification of terror.
This environment creates two linked problems. First, it makes France's public conversation unusually capricious: a large portion of France's opinion-forming institutions interpret events through frames that often emphasize French universalism and human rights language, yet apply those frames unevenly when Jews and Israel are involved. Second, it gives political actors license to pursue policies that mirror the elite discourse — policies that, for reasons of domestic politics or international positioning, can be strikingly less sympathetic to Israel than to rival states. The result is predictable: when moral outrage is selective, credibility erodes — and the Jewish community, and Israel, frequently pay the price.
XIV. The Media Coverage That Misled a Nation
No survey of France's ambiguous stance toward Israel would be complete without scrutinizing its media ecosystem. For decades, the front pages of Le Monde, Libération, and Le Monde Diplomatique have provided disproportionate framing that vilifies Israel while sanitizing Palestinian violence. Headlines portraying Israeli counter-terrorism as "aggression," while minimizing rocket fire or suicide bombings, have shaped French public opinion, sometimes more decisively than presidential speeches.
The effect of this editorial slant is cumulative: each cover, each op-ed, each biased image is built into a narrative architecture in which Israel stands as the perennial aggressor and Palestinians as the archetypal victims. This distortion is not merely academic. It affects political choices, emboldens intellectuals who conflate anti-Zionism with moral virtue, and reinforces a climate where politicians know they can score points by signaling distance from Jerusalem. In the long run, media coverage has hardened the double standard and provided cultural cover for diplomatic betrayals.
XV. Qatar, Inc.: Money, Influence, and Macron's Blind Eye
The 21st century has added a more transactional layer to France's Arab policy: investment in the French economy. Few states have invested more aggressively in French assets and businesses than Qatar. The oil-rich emirate poured billions into Parisian real estate, media holdings, luxury firms, and sports franchises. The purchase of Paris Saint-Germain football team became a symbol of how deeply Qatari capital has embedded itself into French public life. Alongside investment came soft power: television channels, think tanks, and influence campaigns aimed at projecting Doha's narratives into French discourse.
Qatar's record is not benign. For years it has financed Hamas and sheltered its leadership. That France tolerated -- even courted -- Qatar despite these links testifies to a familiar pattern: geopolitical expediency trumping moral clarity. Macron himself has wavered on Qatar, oscillating between mild criticisms and enthusiastic embrace. The paradox is disingenuous: while Macron preaches republican secularism at home, he welcomes investments from a monarchy accused of fueling Islamist extremism abroad.
Some Qatari investors have pulled back from French markets of late, signaling that Doha's support is conditional and that Macron's balancing act offers uncertain returns. At the same time, Macron is touting new economic partnerships, including a promise of 10 billion euros of Qatari investments in France — a reminder that lofty diplomatic postures are often cushioned by pragmatic financial deals.
XVI. La France Insoumise: The threat within.
In France, a radical left-wing political party has become a destabilizing domestic force. La France Insoumise (LFI, "France Unbowed"), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has adopted methods of political agitation that increasingly recall strategies once used by the Nazis: street intimidation, permanent propaganda, and an obsessive use of scapegoats. LFI has made antisemitism and hostility toward Israel central to its discourse. Members of Parliament such as Thomas Portes, Aymeric Caron and Rima Hassan have turned their anti-Zionist obsession into a quasi-monopolistic political project, using Israel as a lightning rod to mobilize resentment. The aim is clear: to capture as many votes as possible within immigrant communities, where this rhetoric finds fertile ground. For Macron, who is now unpopular with a broad majority of the French population of native or integrated origin, "throwing Israel under the bus" serves a dual purpose: attempting to seduce a segment of this electorate while also appeasing an ultra-violent street movement emboldened by LFI's constant incitement.
XVII. October 7, 2023 and After: Macron's Anti-Israel Tilt
The Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023 was a moral flashpoint. At first, Macron's words were unequivocal: "France stands in solidarity with Israel and the Israelis, committed to their security and their right to defend themselves," he wrote on the day of the attack. Yet, within months, the rhetoric shifted. As harrowing images from Gaza saturated global media and pressure mounted from the European left and Muslim communities inside France, Macron began to emphasize "humanitarian" concerns and call publicly for ceasefires and restraint. On July 25, 2025, he announced on X that "the urgent thing today is that the war in Gaza stops and the civilian population is saved," and declared his intention to formally recognize a Palestinian state at the United Nations -- which he did on September 23, 2025.
This about-face reveals the weakness of Macron's calculation. He presented "recognition" at the United Nations as a humane corrective — a way to "restore political hope" and revive the two-state solution — but the move was both poorly timed and politically naïve, if not duplicitous.
Macron's post on X insisted on conditionality (Hamas must relinquish control and the Palestinian Authority must reform), yet those conditions remain unenforceable in practice. A state without concrete guarantees risks rewarding the very actors — such as Hamas and its patrons — who use terrorism as a policy. Macron's declaration looks less like statesmanship and more like firing blanks: a symbolic attempt at appeasement to placate vocal constituencies at home and reclaim the moral high ground abroad by offering up a state that someone else -- a sovereign nation, far away -- is supposed to implement, while offering Israel and the United States nothing at all.
The international reaction was immediate and revealing. Israeli hard-liners seized the moment to harden their posture. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich publicly thanked Macron — ironically — for providing "yet another reason" to press for Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria, while other ministers openly mulled steps toward annexation that until now had been largely rhetorical. Such responses were predictable: unilateral recognition encourages maximalist countermoves from the threatened party.
Washington also did not embrace Macron's gambit. U.S. officials publicly warned that unilateral European recognition undermined leverage in hostage negotiations and could empower extremist factions inside Palestinian politics. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee noted, "If France is really so determined to see a Palestinian state, I have a suggestion for them–carve out a piece of the French Riviera." Macron's symbolic act effectively sabotaged the very US-led channels that were most likely to secure the hostages and constrain Hamas.
Domestically, Macron's maneuver landed poorly. Multiple polls indicate that a large majority of the French public — roughly three-quarters — opposed immediate, unconditional recognition of a "Palestine" while Israeli hostages remained in Gaza or while Hamas remained in power. The disconnect between Macron and his electorate is striking. While he sought applause abroad, he was being widely perceived at home as indulging in moral posturing that had little chance of delivering peace and a lot of chance of making matters worse.
Macron's credibility was further undercut by other domestic crises that exposed governance fatigue and strategic drift. His administration has been battered by repeated street protests — over pension reforms, austerity and other measures — and his government's authority has been weakened by scandals and declining approval. These weaknesses mean that Macron has fewer domestic political resources to absorb an international backlash or to press for a foreign policy that might risk his political future. The timing of his recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state looked less like high moral purpose and more like the miscalculated act of a beleaguered leader trying to reset a collapsing career.
Macron's "recognition" declaration will probably do more harm than good. It has angered Israel, failed to win over the United States, alienated important swathes of his own electorate, and encouraged Israeli hard-liners to entertain permanent annexation. The result is the political opposite of what Macron thought he was promising. It is not a revived diplomacy, but a harder, more dangerous stalemate — with France's reputation as an honest broker badly in a ditch.
This disconnect — between a president desperate for approval abroad but trying to woo a public increasingly skeptical of elite pretenses — is the final irony. The nation of Alfred Dreyfus, Émile Zola, and the Rights of Man, so often invoked as a beacon of a "universalism" that no one appears to want any more, finds itself led by a government more concerned with empty posturing than with genuine justice. Macron's maneuver, like de Gaulle's embargo on Israel, like France's sheltering Amin al-Husseini, will be remembered not as statesmanship but as yet another entry in the ledger of France's double standard toward Jews, Israel and other policies over which it preens itself as an avatar of virtue.
What next?
France's tangled relationship with Jews, Zionism and Israel stretches from the Dreyfus Affair to today's diplomatic theater under Macron. This history is a mosaic of high-minded ideals and ugly sell-outs and compromises that put French interests ahead of moral clarity, as well as a succession of leaders who sometimes courted Arab rulers and "causes" for reasons of strategy, prestige or domestic politics.
What is new — and alarming — is how a contemporary French presidency, ambitious abroad but weak at home, has chosen a symbolic, unilateral, Wonderlandian path — recognizing the statehood of a fictitious "Palestine" -- at a moment of extreme violence, hostage-taking, and diplomatic fragility. Macron's move is being sold as a pragmatic tool to reframe the region and "isolate Hamas," yet it has of necessity only hardened Israel's stance, alienated large swathes of French public opinion, and reopened old wounds that France's post-war politics had never fully settled.
If France's century-long oscillation between principle and self-interest teaches anything, it is that gestures divorced from on-the-ground realities and credible enforcement rarely produce peace. Recognizing a non-existent state — while hostages remain captive and Hamas is still in power — rewards force over reconstruction and rhetoric over results. The only durable path will require credible security guarantees, an enforceable plan for disarming terror groups, and a diplomatic strategy coordinated with Israel and the United States — not a one-off diplomatic flourish that inflames passions at home and abroad.
Finally, a sober France must confront its past honestly: the anti-Jewish strains, the Nazi collaborators who facilitated the deportation of Jews to their deaths, the postwar compromises that protected war criminals, and the repeated flirtations with illiberal movements abroad. Only by facing up to policies that are doing more harm than good to France can it credibly advance "peace and prosperity" either in the Middle East or at home.
Pierre Rehov, who holds a law degree from Paris-Assas, is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of six novels, including "Beyond Red Lines", " The Third Testament" and "Red Eden", translated from French. His latest essay on the aftermath of the October 7 massacre " 7 octobre - La riposte " became a bestseller in France.As a filmmaker, he has produced and directed 17 documentaries, many photographed at high risk in Middle Eastern war zones, and focusing on terrorism, media bias, and the persecution of Christians. His latest documentary, "Pogrom(s)" highlights the context of ancient Jew hatred within Muslim civilization as the main force behind the October 7 massacre.
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