In Cutting Off Israel, Macron Says Nothing About the Christians of Lebanon

On October 5, as Jihad Watch reported here, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that his country was ending arms sales to Israel.

Does Macron have reason to believe that the IDF’s campaign in Gaza has violated international law? Hasn’t Israel been doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza? Already by March, the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million text messages, and made sixteen million robocalls, all in order to warn civilians away from areas, and buildings, that were about to be targeted. It is Hamas that, by embedding its operatives and weapons in those civilian areas and buildings, has deliberately been trying to increase civilian casualties. Macron knows this, but chooses to ignore it. Such a French embargo on weapons to Israel will have little material effect, as France sells only $33 million worth to Israel, but it sends a terrible and false message to the world, that Israel is guilty of acts — the wanton killing of civilians — that have warranted such an embargo. And other European suppliers of weapons to Israel may now be more likely to follow France’s lead.

More on his call for an embargo on weapons for Israel can be found here: “Macron urges countries to ‘stop delivering weapons’ to Israel for war in Gaza,” by Niha Masih, Bryan Pietsch, and Ellen Francis, MSN, October 6, 2024:

French President Emmanuel Macron urged countries to stop providing weapons to Israel for its war in the Gaza Strip and expressed concern that the civilians of Lebanon could face a fate similar to that of Palestinians.

“The priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to carry out fighting in Gaza,” Macron said in an interview with France Inter, a public radio station, that aired Saturday. France itself, Macron said, was not delivering any weapons….

Macron said Lebanon should not be allowed to “become a new Gaza,” referring to Israel’s ground and air offensive in the country. “The Lebanese people cannot, in turn, be sacrificed,” he added.

France has historically been the defender of the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, who have remained in their Lebanese redoubt, always under demographic and political pressure from circumambient Muslims. Lebanon was 70% Christian in 1932, when the last census was taken, but it has steadily decreased. One estimate of the Christian share of Lebanon’s population, as of 2012, was 40.5%. More recently, in 2018, the CIA World Factbook estimated that Christians constituted 33.7% of Lebanon’s population. But on the other hand, as of 2022, the Pew Research Institute says the Christian population is 43%. It may be that Christian Arabs have fled Iraq for Lebanon now that their quondam protector, Saddam Hussein, is long gone; other Christians may have decided to escape the civil war in Syria for the relative safety of Lebanon. Or just possibly the CIA’s estimate in 2018 was wrong, and the Pew’s 2022 figure is more accurate.

Macron says nothing about the Christians of Lebanon. Does he dare to recognize that the great enemy of the Lebanese Christians whom France once protected is Hezbollah, the very group that the IDF is now battling with a ferocious assault on its stronghold of Dahiyeh, in southern Beirut? Is he unaware that Lebanese Christians are quietly delighted that the IDF is weakening their Hezbollah tormentors?

According to that Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, while France did not export any major arms to Israel in recent years, it has supplied components for arms.

The French embargo will not make much of a dent in the IDF’s operations, but such a public abandonment by France, which was the Jewish state’s main supplier of weaponry until 1967, when the United States replaced it, will nonetheless be demoralizing to the people of Israel.

At a summit for French-speaking leaders in Paris on Saturday, Macron appeared to take a jab at the United States, by far Israel’s largest supplier of weapons: “If we call for a cease-fire, consistency is to not provide weapons of war,” he said. “And I think that those who provide them cannot every day call for a cease-fire alongside us and continue to supply them.”…

A ceasefire in Gaza now would leave enough Hamas combatants in the Strip who could regroup, and still remain as a threat to the Jewish state. More than 20,000 Israeli civilians would not be able to return to their homes in the south, for fear of Hamas rockets. A ceasefire now would allow Hamas to boast that it was still standing despite everything that the “Zionist entity” had thrown at it. Israel’s goal — to end once and for all Hamas’ attacks on civilians living in southern Israel — would remain unattained. The Israelis will not agree to such an outcome.