Mick Hartley

Much talk of recognising Palestine, following Macron's latest move. Paul Friesen has some thoughts (via Jerry Coyne):

Let’s start with the simplest geographical question: where is this Palestine Macron plans to recognize? The 1967 lines? Adjusted borders? A demilitarized Gaza under Mahmoud Abbas’ theoretical authority, which he hasn’t been able to exercise even over Ramallah’s traffic lights without Israeli security coordination?

No answer.

A state without borders is either a fantasy or a threat. Fantasy, because you can’t govern what you can’t locate. Threat, because ambiguity is always the friend of maximalism; it gives every faction the right to fill in the map with its preferred crayons—green flags for some, blood-red slogans for others….

Macron writes to Abbas as if the PA can govern Gaza by decree. He writes about demilitarizing Hamas as if it’s a customs offence. He speaks of elections in 2026 as if the militant factions will queue politely and accept the result. This is not policy; it is therapeutic prose—designed to soothe the conscience of a continent that outsourced its moral courage to metaphors.

Gaza already answered the question Macron refuses to ask. In 2005, Israel uprooted every Jew, dismantled every settlement, and even removed the dead. Gaza became a laboratory. The reagents: international aid, Israeli withdrawal, and Palestinian self-rule. The result: rockets, tunnels, human shields, and ultimately the largest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust. The experiment ran for eighteen years. The conclusion writes itself….

There is a path forward. It is not a utopia, but it is achievable:

• • Palestinian reform must come before international recognition, not as a reward for avoiding it.

  • Hamas must be defeated, not “demilitarized.” You do not negotiate disarmament with a group that views compromise as apostasy.

  • Education must be de-radicalized, not subsidized. Palestinian children deserve books that teach coexistence, not maps that erase Israel.

  • The right of return must be relinquished, not romanticized. No peace will come from imagining that Tel Aviv is negotiable.

  • And finally, Israel must be recognized not merely as a fact, but as a moral necessity—a refuge state for a people nearly extinguished, and the only one of its kind.

Until those terms are met, every recognition letter, every UN podium gesture, every Elysée photo-op is an act of profound irresponsibility—a theatre of virtue where tragedy is the curtain call.

Macron’s letter is already being archived as “historic.” It is no such thing. It is the bureaucratic paraphrase of a failure to learn, a polished signature at the bottom of a diplomatic hallucination. The same moral calamity that allowed Europe to whisper through the rise of Islamism at home now shouts Palestine abroad, hoping it buys a little more credibility in the salons of global virtue.

What it buys, in fact, is a narrative in which Israel becomes the permanent villain for surviving and the Palestinians the permanent victim for refusing to evolve. It preserves grievance, fossilizes failure, and punishes memory. And it dares to call that “peace.”

Let it be remembered, when the next war breaks out—and it will—that the match was struck not in Rafah or Tel Aviv, but in the offices of those who mistook theatrical compassion for strategy, and who never paid the price for their illusions. Others always do.

But very much worth reading in full.

No political group that's arisen in Palestine has ever signaled a willingness to recognise Israel. No political group that's willing to recognise Israel would stand a chance in Palestine – Gaza or the West Bank. And the more they show their hatred of Jews, and their readiness to resort to violence, the more so many in the West, from Macron on down, are willing to appease them.