After Algeria’s bloody debacle, Lebanon’s chaos, and a long history of colonial meddling, Macron struts into New York to recognize Palestine — proof that Paris has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
The great Charles de Gaulle once paraphrased the 19th-century British politician Lord Palmerston by stating that “states have no friends, only interests.”
His successors in the Élysée have proved him right, again and again, usually with that special Gallic mixture of hypocrisy, condescension, and theatrical timing.
And now comes Emmanuel Macron — peacocking into New York to announce recognition of a Palestinian state, on Rosh Hashana, of all days.
The French? Meddling in the Middle East? The French?! Oh, not again.
This is the same nation that handed Syria to the Ba’athists after gorging on the corpse of the Ottoman Empire.
The same France that dabbled in Lebanon like a bored colonial landlord rearranging the furniture.
The same France that, let’s not forget, was merrily building a reactor for Saddam Hussein until the Israelis demolished it in 1981. Paris as peace-broker? That’s like asking the arsonist to lead the fire brigade.
And we must not forget Algeria — France’s most disastrous colonial possession. For 130 years, the French clung to it as if it were an extension of Provence, until the brutal war of independence (1954–1962) exposed the whole farce. Torture chambers, mass killings, pieds-noirs fleeing in panic: the French state collapsed into moral disgrace and military humiliation.
To this day, the wounds of Algeria still bleed into French politics — witness the unrest in the banlieues, the unresolved guilt, the hypocrisy of a Republic that lectures Israel about peace while it never made its own with the Maghreb.
Algeria is the embarrassment that should silence Paris forever on questions of colonial responsibility.
But of course it doesn’t.
Macron’s letter to Netanyahu, dripping with moral vanity, claims that recognition of Palestine is essential to Israel’s security.
This is the sort of diplomatic alchemy only the French can produce: the assertion that you can secure the world’s only Jewish state by anointing the very phantasm that has promised its destruction since 1948.
It is as if Macron has been reading Jean-Paul Sartre on a bad acid trip: Israel will only be safe when it concedes to those who want it gone.
Meanwhile, Macron invokes the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza — a catastrophe engineered by Hamas, who launched the October 7 massacre and then bunkered down beneath hospitals and schools.
He conveniently forgets that Hamas has never so much as whispered the words “two-state solution.” But to the French imagination, these inconvenient facts are best smothered beneath the perfume of moral outrage.
And then, the pièce de résistance: Macron chose Rosh Hashana for this little circus. The Jewish New Year, the season of reflection and renewal. Only a man marinated in French hubris could decide that the appropriate time to declare a Palestinian state — without borders, without institutions, without even the courtesy of negotiations — is on one of the holiest of Jewish days.
It’s not diplomacy; it’s provocation with a silk scarf tied around its neck.
The Americans, of course, are livid, and rightly so. Charles Kushner, the U.S. ambassador, said it plain: such gestures embolden extremists and put Jews at risk — especially in France, where antisemitic attacks have been climbing like rockets out of Kourou.
Macron, who styles himself a defender of the Republic’s universal values, might ask the Jews of Marseilles or Paris how secure they feel when France treats Hamas like a misunderstood student in need of a bursary.
Let’s be honest: this is not about peace. It’s about Macron’s vanity, his longing to play de Gaulle on the world stage. To strut into New York, to lecture Netanyahu, to upstage Washington — and, naturally, to distract from his own domestic infernos.
The French political class is forever trying to launder its failures through grand gestures abroad. But you don’t fix Gaza by playing Napoléon with a fountain pen.
History is littered with French adventurism in the Levant — every one of them ending in retreat, rubble, or ridicule. Only a lunatic could think France has the credibility, let alone the muscle, to dictate the future of Jerusalem from a Midtown podium.
So yes, the French are at it again. Recognizing shadows, empowering killers, lecturing democracies, and doing it all with exquisite bad timing. And the rest of us — Israelis, Americans, Palestinians who actually want peace — are left to clean up the mess.
