France’s presidential elections are coming – and Israel will foot the bill

The United Nations adopted last December 10, 2024, the Resolution 79/81. This resolution calls for a “High-Level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution”, to be held during the General Assembly session in New York this June. It will be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

The reasons why France is so interested in leading this effort are clear: The presidential elections in France are coming in 2027, and President Macron’s party is on the ropes, crushed between Marine Le Pen’s Right party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left party. He desperately needs Saudi’s investments to furbish the credentials of his party. Macron just finished visiting Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, with a population of 240 million. And he needs the Muslim vote: approximately 13% (9 million) of France’s population are Muslims.

It is all deja-vu again: International policy in France is dictated by internal policy needs, how to win the elections at home.

We saw this in 2011, when France sent its military to Libya, to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi, partly to cover the tracks leading to Gaddafi’s multi-million financing of then France’s presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy won indeed the elections in 2012, but after a long trial he was found guilty of corruption, for spending beyond legal campaign funding limits.

That this military adventure of France left Libya in ruins and created the largest migratory crisis in Europe (just in four years, between 2014 and 2017, 600,000 migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Italy) was just a minor incidental for France, that fought to avoid receiving any migrants from Libya, leaving the burden to Italy.

This time, president Macron is sending the bill to Israel. And it is a very onerous bill. Resolution 79/81 – under which this coming Conference will convene, requires – between other things:

1) A Juden-free Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

2) The right of return of Palestinian refugees to the pre-June 1967 Israel, under the mantra of “A just resolution of the problem of Palestine refugees in conformity with the United Nations General Assembly resolution 194, from December 1948”

3) The obligation of Israel – based on the conclusions of the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion of July 2024 – “to provide full reparation for the damage caused by its international wrongful acts to all natural or legal persons concerned.”

Just to avoid any “J’ Accuse …!” directed at France’s behavior, the French approved last week a bill to promote Captain Alfred Dreyfus to Brigadier-General. As someone pointedly said: “People like dead Jews. Living Jews – not so much.”

“The Forgotten Refugees” (Still photo from the documental movie by the same name, produced and directed by Michael Grynszpan.)

“The Forgotten Refugees”: About 3,500,000 Jews living today in Israel are Jewish refugees from the Arab countries or descendants of these refugees, who fled the centuries-old persecutions as “dhimmis” in Muslim countries.

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For details, check my book “The root of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the path to peace” (May 2025 edition). The book can be downloaded for free at:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364057784_The_root_of_the_Arab-Israeli_conflict_and_the_path_to_peace