When French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Thursday that France will recognize the State of Palestine in September at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, it was greeted by a chorus of negative reactions in Israel.  Of course from Prime Minister Netanyahu who has done nothing to promote a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He was joined by many of his colleagues in the Likud, but also unfortunately by Yair Lapid, the official head of the opposition, and also Benny Gantz, whose National Unity Party is rapidly declining in the polls.  Their essential claim is that the French recognition of Palestine is “a gift to Hamas”. That’s a rather strange claim, because Hamas is opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel which is the essence of what Macron is calling for. Lapid even went so far as to claim that “the Palestinians should not receive a prize for October 7th and for supporting Hamas”. Well  according to polls carried out by the highly respected Ramallah-based Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research led by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, today the majority of the Palestinians, in both Gaza and the West Bank blame Hamas for provoking the deadly Israeli response to the October 7th attack, leading to such massive death and destruction in Gaza.

Recognition of a Palestinian state is actually a prize for both the Israeli and the Palestinian people against the wishes of Hamas, which claims that all of the area of Israel-Palestine is waqf, holy Islamic land, and there is no room for an Israeli state on it. It would mean a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for the sake of both peoples, and an end not only to the Gaza war but to the 100 year “forever conflict” between them.

In rejecting President Macron’s declaration, Netanyahu even said “the Palestinians do not seek a state alongside Israel: they seek a state instead of Israel”. On what in the world does he make this claim, which totally goes against the official positions of the PLO, the Palestinian Authority and their leaders in support of a two-state solution?

After October 7th, Israelis are understandably worried about their need for security.  Well, the proposal for a two-state solution which has been accepted by the leadership of the PLO is that a future Palestinian state would be demilitarized.  And in the context of the French initiative, President Mahmoud Abbas sent a letter to President Macron on May 11th in which he condemned the Hamas attack on October 7th, and declared that in any future arrangement Hamas would no longer govern Gaza, and would hand over it’s weapons. Unfortunately that letter did not receive much publicity in the Israeli media.

All of this should be very good news for Israelis who are understandably worried about their security after October 7th.  We continue to have the strongest army in the Middle East, but in the final analysis we cannot continue to live by sword, drones, planes, missiles and nuclear weapons (according to foreign sources) alone.  The peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan demonstrate that it is possible to end armed conflict with our neighbors. If our future will be characterized by a series of endless “forever wars” with the Palestinians, the best and the brightest of our younger generation will opt out for greener, calmer pastures to raise their families in. That would be a tremendous blow to the prospects for the future of the State of Israel.

On June 13th and 14th I was one of over 300 Israeli and Palestinian civil society activists who were invited to participate in a conference hosted by the Paris Peace Forum. We were brought together by ALLMEP  (Alliance for Middle East Peace) to provide input to the French-Saudi conference at the UN devoted to “Recognition of a Palestinian State, Ending the War and a Two-State Solution”, a conference which will be held later this week. All of us were invited to the Elysee to meet with President Macron. After giving a press conference, he came to speak to us in the garden. Macron gave a very impressive presentation describing his commitment to help end the war and advance a resolution of the conflict based upon a two-state solution.  “You can count on me” he said to us, and I must say very convincingly. And now in announcing France’s intention to recognize a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel in September, he said that “it is up to us, the French, together with the Israelis, the Palestinians and our European and international partners, to demonstrate that it is possible.”

An essential component of the French initiative is their partnership with Saudi Arabia in promoting a “Global Alliance for a Two-State Solution”.  The Saudi’s are the ones who initiated the Arab Peace Initiative at the Arab League summit conference in Beirut in 2002. The API expresses the readiness of the entire Arab world to recognize and have normal relations with the State of Israel based on an end to the occupation, the establishment of a Palestine state alongside the State of Israel and an agreed upon solution to the refugee problem with the government of Israel. This was later amended during the Kerry negotiations to include the concept of a one-to-one land swap, which if carried out with 4-5% of the land adjacent to the Green Line recognized international border, would contain 80% of the settlers, neutralizing that problem.

And peace with Saudi Arabia is something that almost all Israelis, left and right, want. The Saudis are saying that the clear condition for that is the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.  Peace with the Saudis and other Arab states would be great for business, great for security, and simply great for all the peoples of the Middle East.  The fact is that all 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation support the API.  President Macron has said that one of the achievement already of the French-Saudi initiative is the readiness of Indonesia, the largest Muslim-majority state in the world, to recognize Israel the moment a Palestinian state will be established.

President Macron’s announcement follows the welcome joint recognition of a Palestinian state declared by Ireland, Norway and Spain on May 28th 2024.  The fact that France is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and is one the world’s nine nuclear powers, gives added importance to the step.

Although I regret that both Gantz and Lapid joined Netanyahu in opposing the French initiative, I am encouraged by the fact that their parties have joined together with Yair Golan’s Democrat Party to create a Caucus for the Advancement of a Regional Security Arrangement in the Knesset.  This partnership was expressed in a joint article published in Haaretz by Gilad Kariv (Democrats), Ram Ben-Barak (Yesh Atid) and Alon Schuster (National Unity) titled “No Riyadh deal without Ramallah”.  Now they should all take a step forward and understand that the French-Saudi initiative is showing the way to such a regional security arrangement.

So thank you President Macron, for caring about the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians, and trying to do something about it.