PARIS—As France, the home of Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities, tears itself apart over the war between Israel and Hamas, French President Emmanuel Macron is leveling the harshest criticism seen from any G-7 leader toward Israel since the beginning of the conflict, talking openly about the need to work toward a long-term cease-fire.
Besides humanitarian concerns, let alone a desire to play a grander role on the global stage, Macron has good reason to wish for a speedy conclusion to the war. Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both on the rise in the country: France has seen more than 1,500 antisemitic acts or remarks since the conflict broke out, three times as many as those that occurred in the whole of last year. Six hundred people have been arrested over the incidents. Muslim leaders say enmity is brewing against their communities as well.
“This is the only solution we have, this cease-fire, because it’s impossible to explain we want to fight against terrorism by killing innocent people,” Macron said in a BBC interview last week. “These babies, ladies, and old people are [being] bombed and killed. There is no reason for that, and no legitimacy, so we do urge Israel to stop,” he added.
Well over 10,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, are believed to have been killed so far by the Israeli campaign in Gaza, following the slaughter of around 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in early October. Other allies of Israel, including the U.S. and Britain, are also trying to rein it in and get it to agree to humanitarian pauses. But Macron’s strongly worded calls for a cease-fire, a term that implies an indefinite cessation of hostilities, have largely made him an outlier among Western leaders and haven’t gone unnoticed, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu snapping that Macron had “made a serious mistake factually and morally.”
The war is simmering on Macron’s homefront. More than 100,000 people took to the streets of Paris in solidarity with France’s Jews over the weekend, but antisemitic episodes continue, with several Jewish graves damaged in a cemetery in the Oise region north of Paris on Wednesday. While the country has no equivalent record of Islamophobic acts, prominent French Muslim figures say that following the massacre perpetrated by Hamas, as well as two Islamist attacks that hit France and Belgium last month, racism against their communities is growing, too. On Saturday, far-right militants raided an event organized by a pro-Palestinian association in the eastern French city of Lyon, leaving three people injured.
“If things continue to be this troubling in the Middle East, the internal situation in France will continue to be as awful as it is today,” said Michel Wieviorka, director of research at the School of Advanced Social Science Studies in Paris. Macron “is seeking to stay on top of all these elements, and it’s not easy,” he said.
The war is also presenting Macron with fresh political challenges. Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally and the centrist president’s most fearsome rival, was quick to express unequivocal support for Israel’s military campaign, a move that many saw as a successful step to further sever ties with her party’s antisemitic past and boost her credentials as presidential material. She is currently leading in the polls.
But it’s not just about domestic woes. Macron breaking ranks with other Western powers and openly lambasting Israel over its military operation also has to do with France’s long-standing aspiration to punch above its weight on the world stage, refusing to simply toe the line dictated by the United States, experts say. France’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian question is traditionally more nuanced than America’s unequivocal support for Israel, and “strategic autonomy” from Washington has long been one of Macron’s pet projects.
“Whenever a crisis breaks out, France seeks to find a role for itself,” said Christian Lequesne, a professor of international relations at Sciences Po university. Ever since French President Charles de Gaulle in the 1950s and 1960s, “even if we have fewer resources than the superpowers, we try to act as if we were still one of them,” he said. “For the French, it would be a tragedy to admit that they don’t matter anymore.”
After the war between Israel and Hamas broke out, Macron embarked on a tour of the region, meeting the leaders of Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt; announced the deployment of two helicopter carriers to the eastern Mediterranean; and hosted a conference on humanitarian aid for Palestinians, where he pledged to bring French donations from 20 million euros to 100 million euros this year.
To many, this may feel like déjà vu. Early last year, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine loomed, the French leader also went into diplomatic overdrive, with a much-hyped trip to Moscow in a bid to prevent the onslaught. Then, just months into the war, he drew the ire of his allies by suggesting that Russia “should not be humiliated,” and appeared to be pushing for a negotiated solution much too soon for Ukraine’s taste.
Despite these efforts to carve out a role for itself, however, France is confronted time and again with the limited influence it has on the events it tries to shape.
France’s stance may pique Israeli leaders, but it hardly carries the same weight as the almost $4 billion in defense funding provided to Israel every year by the United States, with negotiations currently underway in Congress for an additional package to the tune of $14 billion.
“The key external actors here are the U.S. and Iran, with Paris having a much weaker hand,” said Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The question is whether Macron’s outspoken criticism of Israel’s conduct will accelerate the closing of the window of legitimacy that the military campaign has enjoyed internationally, amid shock at the brutality of Hamas’s attack.
Macron is hardly the only Western leader facing a difficult situation at home over the conflict. Like France, the United States, Britain, and Germany are all dealing with skyrocketing antisemitic incidents. U.S. President Joe Biden’s material and diplomatic backing of Israel is getting him into trouble with his own base, with 44 percent of Democrats thinking that he has been too supportive of the military operation in Gaza and his ratings plummeting among Muslim Americans, which may hurt him badly in crucial swing states in next year’s presidential election. Rep. Ilhan Omar sponsored a resolution this week in the House of Representatives to ban the sale of certain U.S.-made precision weapons that Israel is using against Hamas in Gaza.
In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is confronted with huge pro-Palestinian protests every week, and he just fired his home secretary, Suella Braverman, after she inflamed tensions by labeling the demonstrations as “hate marches” and alleging the police were being too lenient on them.
The winds may be shifting already. The Biden administration has avoided pushing for a long-term cease-fire so far, but it is growing more vocal in its calls for pauses in the fighting to get aid to civilians and facilitate the release of the hundreds of hostages still in Hamas’s hands. After the Israelis started targeting Gaza’s main hospital, under which they said Hamas had placed one of its command centers, Biden urged them to take “less intrusive action” there. Israel resisted the pressure, storming the hospital earlier this week, eventually finding weapons and an operational command center, according to Israel’s military.
On Wednesday, the U.N. Security Council passed for the first time since the beginning of the war a resolution calling for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses,” thanks to the abstention, among others, of the United States.
For now, however, Israel’s most powerful ally remains loath to adopt language as direct as Macron’s. “What’s important for France is being proactive,” Lequesne said. “Whether results can be achieved, though, is a different question.”
