Turbulent relations between France and Israel are nothing new, but even by those historical standards the crisis caused by President Emmanuel Macron’s apparently imminent readiness to recognize a Palestinian state is acute.
The postponement, as a result of fighting between Israel and Iran, of a United Nations conference this week convened to explore the creation of a Palestinian state has deferred any announcement but appears to have redoubled Mr. Macron’s resolve. “Whatever the circumstances, I have stated my determination to recognize a Palestinian state,” Mr. Macron said on Friday. “That determination is whole.”
“We must reorganize it as soon as we can,” he said of the conference, which he was to chair with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. French officials close to Mr. Macron say he has told the crown prince of his firm intention to recognize a Palestinian state.
Vilified by Israel as leading “a crusade against the Jewish state,” and spurned in his peacemaking efforts by the United States, which is implacably opposed to the conference and has urged countries to shun it, Mr. Macron is confronted by a diplomatic predicament that will test his renowned adaptability, viewed by some as wobbliness.
Mr. Macron — outraged, like much of the world, by the almost 56,000 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since the start of the war, and by its near or total blockade of the strip in recent months — has spoken of “a moral duty and political requirement” to recognize a Palestinian state.
In the absence of Israeli plans for Gaza, and in the face of Israel’s bombardment of Iran aimed at destroying its nuclear program, Mr. Macron believes that only a strong political commitment to Palestinian statehood can open the way to a two-state peace, persuade Hamas to lay down its arms and eventually advance regional stability.
The Israeli view is the opposite: that French recognition would reward Hamas terrorism. A senior French envoy, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she was dressed down for several hours this month in Jerusalem by Ron Dermer, the Israeli minister of strategic affairs, and Tzachi Hanegbi, the national security adviser, who told her that Mr. Macron serves the ends of Hamas and “supports a terrorist state.”
“I suspect there is some relief at the postponement,” said Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and long a senior U.N. diplomat, referring to the conference’s French and Saudi co-chairs. “What are they going to do without U.S. support? This will change nothing on the ground.”
The history of ties between Israel and France, which hesitated before recognizing the newborn state in 1949, only to provide critical military and technological support, has known many highs and lows. “This is a moment of particularly extreme tension,” said Miriam Rosman, an Israeli historian who wrote a book on the relationship. “Macron is neither consequential nor coherent and may be on the verge of a grave error.”
That is not the view of several officials in Mr. Macron’s entourage, including his diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, and his Middle East adviser, Anne-Claire Legendre. They share the conviction of a growing number of European states, many previously supportive of Israel, that the most right-wing government in Israel’s history is leading the country down a blind alley at devastating cost in Palestinian lives.
For Israel, France is a point of particular sensitivity. Spanish, Irish and Norwegian recognition of a Palestinian state last year was one thing; French recognition would be of a different order, given the intensity of an emotional historical bond.
France is the only nuclear power and only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council in the European Union. Some 150,000 French citizens live in Israel, according to the foreign ministry; 48 of them were among the 1,200 people killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
“There is fundamental French attachment and commitment to Israel that stems in part from the history of the Vichy regime,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East. The regime, which led a rump France under Nazi occupation, deported 76,000 Jews to their deaths.
France made a critical contribution in the 1950s to Israel’s development of its unacknowledged nuclear bomb. It provided Mirage fighter jets that played an important role in Israel’s defense.
In 1967, however, President Charles de Gaulle called the Jews an “elite people, sure of itself and domineering.” Israel was outraged. Seeking to heal the wounds of the Algerian war, he set out to befriend the Arab world and imposed an arms embargo on Israel.
Support for Israel has since been tempered by an unbending French commitment to a Palestinian state, initially laid out before the Knesset in 1982 by President François Mitterrand, the first French head of state to visit Israel. Unlike the United States, France has been consistent in its rejection of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which has turned Palestinian statehood into an ever more distant chimera.
“Recognition and full admission of the Palestinian state to the United Nations are a precursor to a political solution,” said a French statement that reflected Mr. Macron’s thinking and was intended to set the framework for the conference in New York.
This amounts to the antithesis of the Israeli and American positions that any Palestinian state demands prior negotiation on security, borders, governance and other matters. But that approach has yielded nothing for a long time. Just this month, Israel announced it would build 22 new settlements in the West Bank, the largest expansion in two decades.
“The United States opposes any steps that would unilaterally recognize a conjectural Palestinian state,” the Trump administration said in a cable last week first reported by Reuters.
On Thursday, Mr. Macron posted a statement on X lauding Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, saying that a letter “of hope, courage and clarity” received from him last Tuesday “traced the path toward a horizon of peace.”
In the letter, Mr. Abbas called for Hamas to “hand over its weapons,” immediately free all hostages and leave Gaza. He also committed to reform the notoriously corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority.
The letter met several of the conditions set by Mr. Macron for French recognition of a Palestinian state. But other voices close to the president are pushing him in another direction.
“The very idea of Palestinian state can only be envisaged after Hamas has laid down its arms, its commanders in Gaza have gone into exile, and the people of the West Bank and Gaza have renounced their murderous dream of a Palestine stretching from the sea to the Jordan border,” said Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French author and intellectual who has the ear of Mr. Macron.
He suggested that Mr. Macron was still torn, buffeted from both sides, but leaning in the direction of delaying French recognition, which the president has said should not come in isolation. Germany, a close ally of both France and Israel, said this month that recognition would send “the wrong signal.”
As for Prince Mohamed of Saudi Arabia, he finds himself obliged to juggle his close relationship with President Trump and his determination to advance Palestinian statehood. While the prince has described Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide,” Mr. Macron has gone through contortions to appear balanced since Oct. 7, 2023.
The French president governs the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Western Europe. He is confronted by a far left that has made “Free Palestine” its slogan and by the inescapability of France’s historical debt to Jews.
“This is no gift” and comes “far, far too late,” Rima Hassan, a far-left French member of the European Parliament, who is of Palestinian descent, said in April of Mr. Macron’s stated intention to recognize a Palestinian state. She was recently detained by Israel when aboard a charity vessel trying to take aid to Gaza and was later released.
Now Mr. Macron, the “at-the-same-time” president, so-called for his endless equivocations, must make up his mind. Of the 193 U.N. members, 147 have already recognized a Palestinian state.
But, as Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington put it, “French recognition would bring greater diplomatic pressure on Israel and further erosion of our legitimacy, but not the creation of a Palestinian state any time soon, if ever.”
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
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