France will recognize a state of Palestine: what does that mean?

• France will recognize the state of Palestine in September at the UN, President Emmanuel Macron announced on Thursday.
• Paris thus seeks to create a collective dynamic in this sense.
• But what does that mean exactly? I jt de TF1 takes stock.

It is an announcement that strongly reacted. Thursday, July 24, Emmanuel Macron announced that France was going to recognize the state of Palestine in September at the UN. With a hope: to create a collective dynamic in this sense while the American emissary Steve Witkoff has acted, on the same day, the failure of the talks carried out in Doha for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

An announcement greeted in Ramallah in the West Bank. “We hope that this recognition will end the killings in the Gaza Strip and that this recognition of Palestine will be followed by several countries in Europe and in the world”, launches a resident in the report at the top of this article. Another “Thanks the French Republic for this decision” and hope “that it will result in concrete actions”.

On Thursday, the French Consul General in Jerusalem brought Emmanuel Macron’s letter to the president of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The French president undertakes to recognize a Palestinian state. A gesture above all political and symbolic. Because the borders claimed by the Palestinians include the Gaza Strip and all the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as the capital. However, this territory is fragmented, fragmented due to the Israeli colonies and subject to military control.

Last June, France demanded, before this recognition, a demilitarization of Hamas in Gaza and the return of Israeli hostages. Today, there is no longer any question of imposing conditions on the Palestinians.

Give weight

It is on another level that this recognition could make the lines move. “Concretely, on the ground, it will not change anything. On the other hand, at the political level, it is very important because it says that in relation to what is going on in Gaza at the moment, the solution is political. It is not military. We can see it. The war continues. There are thousands of deaths. The hostages have not all been released. So the military solution does not work”, Analysis Grégory Philipps, editor -in -chief of the LCI International Service.

After successive failures to apply a ceasefire, French diplomacy says it wants to give weight to the Palestinian, rival and enemy of Hamas. The Islamist group, at the origin of the terrorist attacks of October 7, still published a press release in which he welcomed the decision of Emmanuel Macron. “We consider this as a positive step in the right direction to do justice to our people”, he wrote in the document.

Israel, for its part, denounces a black spot in French history. And the head of American diplomacy, too, castigates an reckless decision. In total, 148 countries around the world, mostly in Latin America, Africa and Asia, already recognize the existence of a political state.