Macron’s Masquerade: The Theatre of Capitulation

By now we ought to have grown wearily familiar with President Emmanuel Macron’s fondness for grandstanding masquerading as statesmanship — that gallant little pirouette he performs each time he wishes to assert France’s moral relevance on the world stage. But his latest venture — the premature “recognition” of a Palestinian state by 2025 and a sanctimonious call for an arms embargo against Israel — is not merely vacuous diplomacy. It is perfumed cowardice dressed up as virtue, and a betrayal of the most basic principles of both justice and rationality.

Let us examine the grotesque theatre at hand. France, a nation which could not govern its own banlieues without a weekly bonfire of civil order, now proposes to lecture Israel — a democratic state under siege by jihadist proxies — on the ethics of warfare and peace. Macron’s proposal to recognize a Palestinian state by fiat, in lockstep with that bastion of liberal enlightenment known as Saudi Arabia, is not the bold leap toward peace he imagines, but a cynical reward for intransigence, ideological fanaticism, and terror.

To recognize “Palestine” in the current context — with no functioning unity government, no clear borders, and half of its political organs actively glorifying the massacre of Jews — is not diplomacy. It is appeasement. And not even the decent kind, motivated by a desperate hope for peace. It is instead appeasement born of political expedience and cowardice, of a man eager to be applauded in the salons of Brussels while washing his hands of the grubby business of truth.

And as for the arms embargo — that most enlightened gesture. One wonders whether Macron might also propose disarming Ukraine to encourage negotiations with the Kremlin. Or perhaps cutting off Kurdish arms to placate Erdoğan. No? Only Israel, then, must be denied the means to defend itself while Hamas tunnels under its children’s playgrounds and stores rockets in UN schools.

This is not neutrality. It is not even misguided idealism. It is complicity by inertia — a slow strangulation of Israel’s right to exist under the weight of international approval for those who seek its erasure.

And what’s this nonsense about ensuring “Israel’s security” while throttling its ability to defend itself? Macron is either deluded or thinks the rest of us are. It is a fiction so transparent it barely merits rebuttal, save to say that the Jewish people are not obliged to entrust their survival to the benevolence of Europe’s failed promises — we have heard such promises before, always delivered with the finest silver cutlery and the most civilized of accents.

Make no mistake: this entire farce is about optics, not peace. It is an act of diplomatic theatre staged for applause from the usual chorus of anti-Zionist moral relativists who delight in the language of peace but cannot bring themselves to condemn terrorism without caveats or context.

If Macron truly wished to contribute to peace, he might begin by insisting that Palestinian leaders renounce jihadism, reform their educational systems, stop rewarding murderers with stipends, and sit at a table with Israel without preconditions or threats. But such demands require courage — the courage to stand up to popular sentiment, to endure the sneers of the anti-Israel left, and to speak the inconvenient truth that the Palestinian leadership bears the lion’s share of responsibility for its people’s continued statelessness.

Instead, Macron has chosen the easier path — that of the preening diplomat who mistakes applause for wisdom and gestures for substance. He is not forging peace. He is burning bridges and lighting a cigar with the charred remnants of moral clarity.

In rewarding the forces that glorify death, he dishonors the values he purports to defend. And in punishing the region’s lone democracy for defending itself, he reveals his hand — not as a statesman, but as a coward cloaked in rhetoric, fiddling on the Quai d’Orsay while the fires of fanaticism burn.