Emmanuel Macron Has Made His Pusillanimous Choice

Emmanuel Macron had a choice, and he made it: “Macron’s choice: Stand with democracy, or allow Frech [sic] Jews to become political sacrifices – opinion,” by David Ben-Basat, Jerusalem Post, August 1, 2025:

A document seized in Gaza revealed that in October 2020, a secret meeting was held in Qatar between a French intelligence official and senior Hamas figures Mousa Abu Marzouk and Khaled Mashaal. According to the document, the French initiated the meeting and criticized the US approach to the Palestinian issue….

Why was a French official treating the two most corrupt Hamas leaders — both Abu Marzouk and Mashaal have stolen $4 billion from the aid money meant to be spent for the welfare of all Gazans — as legitimate interlocutors, and pandering to them by criticizing American policy toward the Palestinian Arabs? What was it asking in return? Perhaps Macron was hoping to have Hamas promise not to engage in terrorist attacks on French soil. And he was willing to pay for that reduced threat in the coin of Israel’s wellbeing.

While French people in Paris, Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and other towns and cities around the Hexagon are feeling the baneful effects of the Muslims now living in their midst, Macron averts his eyes — he hasn’t a clue as to what must be done if France is to remain France — and concentrates his efforts on pleasing the world’s Muslims by coming down hard on the side of the “Palestinians.” It’s Macron’s hopeless attempt to convince the Muslims in France to be less aggressive, less determined to spread the Sharia and to conduct da’wa. He is hoping for good behavior from the Muslim invaders in exchange for the Danegeld. But as Kipling reminds us, “We never pay any-one Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!”

Macron still has a choice. He can stand with the democracies or be remembered as yet another betrayer in the lineage of de Gaulle, turning French Jewry into a political sacrifice.

I beg to differ. Macron has made his pusillanimous choice. He’s alarmed by the ever larger Muslim population, but dares not discuss, as Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Eric Zemmour are prepared to do, the need to put a stop to further Muslim immigration and to deport as many Muslims as possible, beginning with those who have committed crimes, back to their countries of origin. Demography is destiny, and for France to remain France, severe measures will have to be taken. He hopes by never mentioning the Muslim threat, by pretending that Muslims are indeed integrating successfully into French society, that somehow the problem will go away. It won’t. Instead, he seeks ways to placate Muslims, in the hope that they will not be too violent in their anti-French behavior, and the best way he knows how to do this is to abandon the Jewish state, and to embrace the factitious “state of Palestine” that has no borders and no government. Macron will soon discover to his chagrin that, as President Trump said, his opinion “doesn’t matter.” He has no weight on the world stage. The Israelis will reject his attempts to insert himself into the Arab-Israeli conflict, on the side of the Arabs. Those Israelis are fighting for their lives, and they don’t have time to listen to the unsympathetic and mildly antisemitic boytoy of the Elysée.

Macron can announce his intention to recognize a state of Palestine. He can get a few other states to follow his example. But so what? They cannot force Israel to commit suicide by pulling out of Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem. The Israelis, 80% of whom now oppose the chimera of that falsely-named “two state solution,” are not going to engage in any further surrender of territory, not to Hamas, and not to the Palestinian Authority. Even those who disagree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on domestic matters such as judicial reform agree with his lapidary formula about what the “Palestinian” Arabs should reasonably expect. “I think the Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers to threaten us.” That means the Palestinian Arabs would have domestic control, but no military and no “right of return” — both of which would threaten the state of Israel.

Macron is a hopeless case. His attempt to buy off the Muslims in France won’t work. They will pocket his betrayal of Israel, but won’t stop making the lives of the indigenous French more unpleasant, more expensive, and more physically insecure than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence in their country.

And Macron? He will be ignored by both the United States and Israel. And he will learn, to his own secret sorrow, what Kipling noted long ago about attempts to buy off an implacable enemy: “We never pay anyone Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!”