French President Emmanuel Macron hosted a lunch last month for Secretary of State Marco Rubio and developer Steve Witkoff.
While the formal agenda focused on Russia and Ukraine, it is hard to ignore the undercurrent of unease regarding France's positions on the Middle East, which have often stood in direct opposition to American and Israeli policy.
What is particularly startling is France's recent alignment with Slovenia, the Arab League, among other countries in preparing to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state.
This move places France not only against the United States and Israel, but also at odds with every other major founding member of the European Union. Such a step, in the eyes of both the U.S. and Israel, is premature, destabilizing, and counterproductive to the long-term goal of peace.
For the United States, the principle remains clear: Palestinian statehood must emerge from direct negotiations, not from unilateral declarations. Early recognition — especially during ongoing hostilities and in the absence of credible Palestinian leadership — risks emboldening extremists, undermining diplomacy, and permanently derailing the peace process.
For Israel, the position is more urgent and existential. After the horrors of the October 7 Hamas attacks, any movement toward statehood without comprehensive reforms and ironclad security guarantees is viewed as a legitimation of terrorism, a reward for violence, the establishment of a platform for more violence and rocket launching by Iranian proxies, and a potential threat to Israel's survival.
In essence, neither Washington nor Jerusalem reject the idea of a Palestinian state outright. Rather, they reject the timing, context, and unilateral nature of France's initiative, and the country's lack of solid support for U.S. efforts to bring an end to Iran's nuclear capacity.
In disregard for United States leadership France continues to move forward, echoing a decade-long pattern of divergence from both allies. In the past 10 years, France has voted in opposition to the U.S. and Israel 5–7 times on major United Nations resolutions, particularly on:
- Ceasefire initiatives in Gaza
- Recognition of Palestinian statehood
- Condemnations of Israeli settlements
- The status of Jerusalem
As recently as February 20, 2024, France voted in favor of an Algerian-drafted U.N. resolution calling for an immediate, unconditional ceasefire in Gaza. The United States vetoed the resolution, citing its failure to condition a ceasefire on the release of hostages held by Hamas.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield emphasized that such an omission would reduce pressure on Hamas and prolong the conflict.
This brings us to the deeper, more uncomfortable contradiction. France often leads commemorative ceremonies honoring Jewish victims of the Holocaust and decries the rise of antisemitism. Yet its foreign policy routinely undermines Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, and often does so in tandem with regimes and factions that are openly antisemitic — backed by Iran and executed by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
This contradiction is not merely symbolic. In the French press, in political discourse, and even in some Jewish organizational circles, there appears to be a willful blindness to the disconnect between honoring Jewish memory and opposing Israel and Jewish self-determination.
The tolerance — if not amplification — of false accusations such as “Israeli genocide” especially from the extreme leftist LFI party but also oftentimes by mainstream politics stands in stark contrast to the silence when young Jewish soldiers are risking their lives, not only to defend their country but to defend Western civilization against barbarism.
Efforts to combat antisemitism cannot succeed while political anti-Zionism is given legitimacy or overlooked. The modern face of antisemitism often hides behind slogans of justice and activism, but at its core, it denies the Jewish right to national existence.
When Israel is uniquely demonized, when Jews are held collectively responsible for the actions of a democratic state, and when anti-Zionist rhetoric incites global hatred, the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism disappears.
To truly confront antisemitism, nations like France must also confront the ideological double standard that permits — and sometimes promotes — anti-Zionist hostility in international forums.
It is shaming that a country that took more than 40 years after the war to recognize its own responsibility in sending Jews to their deaths at concentration camps, has now taken no position to condemn firmly and through official channels, the accusations by members of the United Nations that Israel is a country committing genocide.
Without differentiating the suffering from Israel's war and the tragedy of the millions of deaths in World War II the fight against antisemitism remains selective, inconsistent, and ultimately, hollow.
Mark L. Cohen has his own legal practice and was counsel at White & Case starting in 2001, after serving as international lawyer and senior legal consultant for the French aluminum producer Pechiney. Cohen was a senior consultant at a Ford Foundation Commission, an adviser to the PBS television program "The Advocates," and Assistant Attorney General in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He teaches U.S. history at the business school in Lille l'EDHEC. Read Mark L. Cohen's Reports — More Here.
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