The Recognition Game

How to Invent a State, Pretend It’s Peace, and Get a Standing Ovation

Disclaimer, up front: I am perfectly aware that everyone with a keyboard and a pulse has already commented on Emmanuel Macron’s declaration. I resisted. Then I read his letter. Resistance collapsed.

France’s president has decided to recognize a Palestinian state. Which one, exactly, he leaves open. Where it begins and where it ends, he doesn’t say. Who governs it—Abbas, whose democratic mandate expired when the first iPhone was still a rumour, or Hamas, whose mandate was carved into Israeli civilians on October 7th—he also leaves conveniently blurred. In short: Paris has chosen to baptize an abstraction and to call that act “peace.”

Macron’s letter to Mahmoud Abbas (July 24, 2025) reads like a triumph of mood over method. It speaks of “the only viable solution”, of “demilitarization”, of “reform”, of “elections” and “legitimacy”—all noble nouns with no visible verbs. Peace, apparently, can be legislated into being via eloquent phrasing and a UN podium slot in September. The speech will be solemn; the consequences, for Israelis and Palestinians alike, will be anything but.

THE STATE WITH NO COORDINATES

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.

WHICH GOVERNMENT? THE CADAVER OR THE CALIPHATE?

Recognition means recognizing something sovereign. In this case, sovereignty would need to be exercised by either:

1. The Palestinian Authority: A sclerotic bureaucracy funded by Western donors, dedicated to the moral pedagogy of “pay-for-slay,” where murderers’ families are salaried for their grief; or

2. Hamas: A jihadist organisation whose founding charter reads like a fever dream of medieval Jew-hatred fleshed out by Iranian steel, Qatari cash, and Western indulgence.

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.

THE GAZA EXPERIMENT: A CONTROLLED STUDY IN DELUSION

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.

Unilateral gestures reward unilateral violence. Recognition without prior disarmament and constitutional guarantees converts terror into diplomacy. Europe calls it “statehood”; the region experiences it as war.

THE ASYMMETRY MACRON PRETENDS DOESN’T EXIST

Israel’s Arab citizens vote, litigate, serve in parliament, attend universities, and criticize their own government with a freedom that would get them arrested—or worse—in Gaza, Tehran, or Ramallah. Ask, then, in clear language: would Jews enjoy equal rights in the Palestine Macron imagines? Will Jews be able to live there, pray there, own property there? Will a future Palestinian state host synagogues, Hebrew schools, or Jewish candidates? Or will it be yet another judenrein territory whose leaders simultaneously demand the “right of return” to Israel proper—thereby guaranteeing that the only Jewish state becomes the only binational experiment in a region where every other state defines itself ethno-religiously?

Macron’s letter hints at demilitarization and acknowledgement of Israel. Fine words. Where is the Palestinian leader—name, office, party—who has publicly committed to that, repealed the “right of return” dogma, reformed the textbooks, and said in Arabic (not in English at Davos) that Jews have an indigenous right to live in their ancestral homeland? Israel has crossed its Rubicons many times. The Palestinian leadership has built bridges to none of them.

“147 COUNTRIES HAVE RECOGNIZED PALESTINE.” AND THEN?

One hears the refrain: 147 countries have recognized Palestine. The implied argument runs: majority equals morality equals inevitability. This is a Foreign Ministry version of argumentum ad populum. The supposed avalanche of recognitions has produced neither peace nor governance, neither civic pluralism nor demilitarization. The guns didn’t fall silent; they multiplied. Hezbollah didn’t retreat; it rearmed. Hamas didn’t moderate; it industrialized cruelty.

Recognition divorced from reform hardens the worst actors and punishes the best arguments. It tells the Palestinian street: why vote out the militants when Europe will hand you a state regardless? It tells the Israeli public: your self-restraint is evidence of guilt, your survival is evidence of aggression.

“ISRAELI–PALESTINIAN CONFLICT”? THE LABEL CONCEALS THE WAR

Macron insists on the old catechism: “Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” The phrase has aged into propaganda. Israel isn’t fighting a small national movement at the negotiating table; it is fighting a transnational Islamist movement, funded and armed by Iran, laundered through Qatar, masquerading as a liberation theology for the benefit of Western audiences that never read charters or watch funeral parades. To describe this as merely “Israeli–Palestinian” is to describe a metastasis as a sprain.

MACRON’S MOTIVES: GESTURE, GEOPOLITICS, OR GULF MONEY?

Charitably, Macron believes he is forcing history’s hand: declare the destination, and the road will appear. Less charitably, he is positioning himself as Europe’s priest-king of peace, virtues on his sleeve, consequences on Israel’s doorstep. Cynically, one can’t ignore the role of Qatari influence—soft power, media leverage, Parisian sports investments, and all the lubricants of European moral flexibility.

He speaks to Abbas about “trust, clarity, commitment.” Trust must be earned. Clarity requires maps, laws, and leaders who survive without stipends from terrorists. Commitment begins with a single test: renounce the destruction of Israel in Arabic, in writing, in schools, and in mosques. No backchannels, no “resistance,” no flirtation with martyrdom culture. Then we can talk borders. Until then, we are not in the realm of diplomacy, but in the showroom of European performative statesmanship.

THE MORAL HAZARD: REWARDING MAXIMALISM

Every incentive structure matters. Recognize a state before it renounces terror, and you incentivize terror. Recognize a leadership that refuses elections, and you incentivize autocracy. Recognize a right of return that implies Israel’s dissolution, and you incentivize eliminationism under the cover of “international law.”

Natasha Hausdorff has argued—precisely and repeatedly—that pre-emptive recognition corrupts international law. Law without criteria becomes theatre. Theatre without memory becomes propaganda. Propaganda pretending to be peace is how democracies talk themselves into complicity.

MEMORY, FOOTNOTED AWAY

Here the connection to the broader sickness comes in. We inhabit a media culture that prizes the performance of wisdom over the discipline of knowledge. The fourth estate, which should hold a mirror, holds a ring light and a teleprompter. Gaza 2005: footnoted. Abbas’ democratic vacuum: footnoted. Hamas’ charter: footnoted, then excused as “old language.” Iranian sponsorship: footnoted as “complex regional dynamics.” Western hostages: footnoted under “both sides.” The result is a public trained to forget—in real time. You cannot defend a civilization if you cannot retain a memory longer than a news cycle.

THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE—IT JUST REQUIRES ADULT TERMS

The alternative to Macron’s gesture politics exists, and it has three pillars:

1. Prior Disarmament and Constitutional Guarantees: Any Palestinian state must be a state that ends “pay-for-slay,” purges genocidal education, and constitutionally recognizes Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

2. Regional Accountability: Iran and Qatar finance, arm, and launder this conflict. No Palestinian “state” stabilizes while the patrons of jihad remain unpenalized. Recognition that bypasses this reality is fraud.

3. Moral Reciprocity: Israel’s Arab minority has rights. Jews in a Palestinian state must have rights. If the future Palestinian state rejects pluralism in principle, it forfeits recognition in practice.

THE LAST ACT OF WESTERN SELF-FLATTERY

Macron’s September speech at the UN will be tailored to draw applause from diplomats who never shelter from rockets and activists who never read the charters of the causes they champion. It will be righteous. It will be eloquent. It will be welcomed in editorial boards and protested in Israeli bomb shelters. Europe will feel taller. Israelis will feel surrounded. Palestinians will remain trapped between kleptocrats and clerical fascists. And theocrats from Tehran to Doha will file the result under “proof of concept.”

Peace remains possible—under hard conditions, with real criteria, and with an uncompromising insistence on truth. Gesture is easy; law is hard. Recognition is free; responsibility is priced in blood. Macron chose the cheaper currency and sent Israel the bill.

THE FIFTH REPUBLIC AND THE FIFTH COLUMN

France, the self-appointed cradle of laïcité and liberté, has somehow become the liturgy hall of Islamic revisionism and diplomatic fantasy. Macron, who once thundered against Islamism as “a crisis of our civilisation”, now genuflects before its geopolitical emissaries in tailored suits and with forged mandates. The same president who refused to name radical Islam in the streets of Paris now calls Mahmoud Abbas “a partner for peace,” despite the man’s lifelong career in Holocaust denial, paramilitary support, and electoral avoidance.

The shift is not accidental. It is a function of a deeper pathology: the post-colonial guilt reflex fused with the post-modern allergy to moral clarity. It is the Crescent and the Guillotine once again—France slicing its tongue rather than offend its imported gods, while imagining it has defended enlightenment values in the process.

So instead of addressing the nature of Hamas’ genocidal ambitions or the Palestinian Authority’s systematic glorification of martyrdom, Macron opts for the theater of recognition. One might call it recognition by projection: grant statehood to a fiction and hope it retroactively becomes a fact. But in doing so, he recognizes not Palestine but a mirror of Europe’s own diplomatic illusions—sovereignty without statecraft, democracy without elections, and peace without peacekeepers.

THIS ISN’T DIPLOMACY. IT’S CARTOGRAPHY FOR THE DELUDED.

Diplomacy, at its best, is the art of realising peace between competing interests through negotiated understanding, power-balancing, and verifiable obligations. Macron’s version resembles more a toddler’s crayon map, drawn to soothe parental nerves than to guide a real-world journey. In it, Hamas becomes a “partner to be disarmed,” Abbas a “reformer,” and Israel a permanent footnote to be guilt-managed into silence.

The borders? Still missing. The capital? Whispered to be East Jerusalem, which would remove Israel’s sovereignty over its eternal capital. The refugees? Still framed as victims entitled to resettlement in Israel, which would nullify its Jewish character. This is not peacemaking—it is a cartographic suicide note, written in French cursive and signed with Palestinian Authority ink.

And yet, we are told, “there is no alternative.”

That sentence—puffed from Davos panels to Quai d’Orsay salons—is not a solution. It is a sedative. There is always an alternative, but it begins with recognizing terror as terror and peace as peace, not with rearranging the furniture while the house burns down.

THE CONSEQUENCES WILL NOT STOP AT THE GREEN LINE

Those who think this is just about Israel are already asleep. What Macron is normalizing is the West’s capitulation to grievance without responsibility, to victimhood without introspection, and to diplomacy without memory. Today it’s Palestine. Tomorrow, it will be Lebanon’s reinvention under Hezbollah’s rebranded PR team. Then it will be the Syrian regime getting a cosmetic makeover from its Russian backers. All in the name of “regional stability,” which—if recent history is any guide—is diplomatic code for “we can’t afford to care anymore.”

And let us not kid ourselves: this will echo through the democracies of the West. Macron’s recognition gives license to every armchair revolutionary and anti-Zionist campus demagogue to declare victory. It emboldens those who set fire to synagogues in Europe while chanting “intifada.” It tells the “Free Palestine” mobs: you no longer have to argue—Paris has already agreed.

It delegitimizes Israel’s defensive war by presuming symmetry where there is none. It casts the aggressor as a co-equal interlocutor, rather than a regime that kidnaps children, slaughters civilians, and builds tunnels under schools. It gaslights the Israeli dead into mere “complications,” and elevates the architects of their murder into state-builders.

THE ONLY WAY FORWARD—CLARITY BEFORE RECOGNITION

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.

FINAL NOTES FROM A VANISHING MIRROR

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.

POSTSCRIPTUM

I don’t write this from a place of cynicism, but of conclusion. At this point, I consider the two-state solution—and the rush to recognition—not merely premature, but illusory. That said, I’m open to being proven wrong. Not swayed by sentiment, applause lines, or diplomatic euphemisms—but by reasoned, evidence-based arguments.

If you believe recognition without disarmament, elections, and institutional reform can lead to lasting peace, show your work. If you see a model—historical or theoretical—where similar recognition produced stability, sovereignty, and pluralism, bring it forward. But let’s keep it clear-eyed: no utopian metaphors, no retroactive justifications, no recycled slogans.

This isn’t a debate between optimists and pessimists. It’s a reckoning between those who still believe in responsibility before reward—and those who’ve redefined peace as performance.

Comments open. Let’s test our convictions—mine included.