Why does France want to recognize a demilitarized Palestine?

On July 24, 2025, Emmanuel Macron announced the recognition of Palestine by France next September. A heavy symbolic decision, which led to an immediate shield of shields of Israeli diplomacy, Benjamin Netanyahu seeing it as “support for terrorism”. But what does this decision of Emmanuel Macron really mean, whose modalities do not lead anything lasting for Palestine?

Regarding Palestine, French diplomacy always seeks a point of balance between the American position and those of the Arab countries. But that does not mean that France seeks “peace” in the Middle East, as Emmanuel Macron claims in his press release, quite the contrary.

Since 1947, the French position on the Palestinian question has ancillated between statements in principle and imperialist realpolitik. If Paris voted for the partition of Palestine to the UN, she never condemned Nakba nor the massive evictions of Palestinians in 1948. Worse: During the Suez crisis in 1956, France joined forces militarily to Israel against Egypt of Nasser, a major figure of the Arab anti -colonial struggles. The Gaullian turning point in 1967, often quoted as proof of rebalancing, remains largely symbolic: France criticizes the Israeli preventive war, but continues to maintain strategic links with Tel Aviv. In the following decades, Paris adopted an ambivalent line: recognition of the PLO, speech in favor of a Palestinian state. While concretely refusing to recognize it and rarely condemn the occupation. During the 1990s, France fully enrolled in the Oslo process, endorsing an asymmetrical peace which confirms the fragmentation of the Palestinian territory. Throughout the intifadas and the wars against Gaza, it invokes the “violence of the two camps”, putting back and colonized and colonized, while abstaining from any concrete measure against the Israeli occupation.

Colonial solidarity

In recent years, France’s alignment has asserted itself clearly: under the guise of the fight against anti-Semitism, it criminalizes the boycott campaigns (BDS), prohibited from pro-Palestinian demonstrations and is increasingly aligning itself with Israeli-American positions. In 2024, she until she refused to support the International Criminal Court when she issued arrest mandates against Israeli leaders. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu flew over France on February 2 and 9 as well as April 6 and 8 as part of travel to Washington.

This attitude reflects a constant: France, a former colonial power whose diplomacy has been built around this matrix, continues to support, by strategic calculation, the Israeli colonial project.

Behind the diplomatic speeches, support for occupation is maintained, to the detriment of international law and peoples, going as far as delivery of arms to the government of Netanyahu in the genocide of the Palestinians. In March 2024, Disclose and Marsactu revealed that France authorized the export of ammunition links intended for Israel, used in particular to assemble cartridges for machine guns, via Eurolinks in Marseille. In 2025, three expeditions were blocked by CGT port strikers from the port of Marseille – Fos. These cargoes included arms components for machine guns Negev 5, manufactured by Eurolinks, intended for Israel via Haifa. The strikers refused to charge them, denouncing French complicity in the violence in Gaza.

The demilitarization trap

Talking about “demilitarization” in a context where the oppressor is an ultra-armed nuclear power and the oppressive an occupied people amounts to neutralizing the only lever of deterrence or resistance that these people can still deploy. This requirement would only apply to Palestine, never to Israel, thus perpetuating colonial asymmetry: one has an army, drones, fighter planes; The other should have neither weapons nor self -defense.

In reality, what France calls a “demilitarized Palestinian State” is a Bantoustan: these pseudo-independent territories created by the South African apartheid regime to confine the black population while refusing citizenship to them. A demilitarized Palestine would imply Israeli supervision, without sovereignty over its borders, its sky or its security. Historically, agreements like Oslo have already tried to impose a disarmed Palestinian police force responsible for containing its own people, while Israel continued colonization. However, the Palestinian resistance, including army, is protected by the UN resolution 37/43 (1982), which recognizes the colonized peoples the right to fight for their release.

Using Hamas as a scarecrow, France seeks to expand to all Palestinian territories the apartheid regime already suffered by the Arab populations living under Israeli domination. This diplomatic blow, although symbolic, would lead to the generalization of an unequal order and the legitimization of colonial incursions. A few days after the Knesset’s vote requesting the annexation of the whole West Bank, the path of disarmament resembles that of renunciation.

Recognition under illegal conditions

By announcing the recognition of the state of Palestine, Emmanuel Macron claims to be part of a French tradition of “just peace”. But his statement above all reveals a neocolonial vision of Palestinian sovereignty. The president conditions this recognition to the demilitarization of Hamas and the full recognition of Israel, while calling for “building” a Palestinian state. However, according to international law, sovereignty is an inalienable right of colonized peoples (resolutions 1514 and 2625 of the UN), and not a privilege granted under conditions.

The constant reference to the security of Israel, without mention of the military occupation, the illegal colonies (resolution 2334) or the right to the return of refugees (resolution 194), empties this recognition of its political substance. By omitting the terms of colonialism, Apartheid (qualified as it is by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch), illegal or even genocide, Macron adopts a rhetoric of “balance” which denies the balance of power. He places oppressor and oppressed on the same plane, erasing the colonial framework of the conflict. Finally, its insistence on the “commitments of the president of the Palestinian Authority” betrays the ambition to see emerge a puppet state, which will undergo the wrath of the Western powers in the event of too virulent of Israeli colonialism.

Macron does not recognize Palestine as a free political subject, but as a subordinate entity, to disarm and normalize. It is not an advance towards justice, it is a diplomatic operation of colonial stabilization, made up in peace. In a context where every day reaches us from the images of Gazaouies whose death oscillates between famine and bombs, and new violent incursions in the West Bank, this recognition can be used at the best of temporary leverage, but it will not lead any concrete change for the Palestinians, who will continue to undergo the horrors of colonialism. Because the current massacres did not start on October 7, 2023: they are a political continuity of over 75 years.

Amine Snoussi – Author and journalist by training – Human rights and democracy – Mena

Illustration photo: The F-35L ADIR, a hunter-bombardier used by Israel for the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Credit: Public domain