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France’s Macron Faces Dilemma With Intention to Recognize Palestinian State
Turbulent relations between France and Israel are nothing new, but even by those historical standards the crisis caused by President Emmanuel Macron’s apparently imminent readiness to recognize a Palestinian state is acute.
The postponement, as a result of fighting between Israel and Iran, of a United Nations conference this week convened to explore the creation of a Palestinian state has deferred any announcement but appears to have redoubled Mr. Macron’s resolve. “Whatever the circumstances, I have stated my determination to recognize a Palestinian state,” Mr. Macron said on Friday. “That determination is whole.”
“We must reorganize it as soon as we can,” he said of the conference, which he was to chair with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia. French officials close to Mr. Macron say he has told the crown prince of his firm intention to recognize a Palestinian state.
Vilified by Israel as leading “a crusade against the Jewish state,” and spurned in his peacemaking efforts by the United States, which is implacably opposed to the conference and has urged countries to shun it, Mr. Macron is confronted by a diplomatic predicament that will test his renowned adaptability, viewed by some as wobbliness.
Mr. Macron — outraged, like much of the world, by the almost 56,000 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since the start of the war, and by its near or total blockade of the strip in recent months — has spoken of “a moral duty and political requirement” to recognize a Palestinian state.
In the absence of Israeli plans for Gaza, and in the face of Israel’s bombardment of Iran aimed at destroying its nuclear program, Mr. Macron believes that only a strong political commitment to Palestinian statehood can open the way to a two-state peace, persuade Hamas to lay down its arms and eventually advance regional stability.
The Israeli view is the opposite: that French recognition would reward Hamas terrorism. A senior French envoy, speaking on condition of anonymity, said she was dressed down for several hours this month in Jerusalem by Ron Dermer, the Israeli minister of strategic affairs, and Tzachi Hanegbi, the national security adviser, who told her that Mr. Macron serves the ends of Hamas and “supports a terrorist state.”
“I suspect there is some relief at the postponement,” said Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and long a senior U.N. diplomat, referring to the conference’s French and Saudi co-chairs. “What are they going to do without U.S. support? This will change nothing on the ground.”
The history of ties between Israel and France, which hesitated before recognizing the newborn state in 1949, only to provide critical military and technological support, has known many highs and lows. “This is a moment of particularly extreme tension,” said Miriam Rosman, an Israeli historian who wrote a book on the relationship. “Macron is neither consequential nor coherent and may be on the verge of a grave error.”
That is not the view of several officials in Mr. Macron’s entourage, including his diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, and his Middle East adviser, Anne-Claire Legendre. They share the conviction of a growing number of European states, many previously supportive of Israel, that the most right-wing government in Israel’s history is leading the country down a blind alley at devastating cost in Palestinian lives.
For Israel, France is a point of particular sensitivity. Spanish, Irish and Norwegian recognition of a Palestinian state last year was one thing; French recognition would be of a different order, given the intensity of an emotional historical bond.
France is the only nuclear power and only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council in the European Union. Some 150,000 French citizens live in Israel, according to the foreign ministry; 48 of them were among the 1,200 people killed in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
“There is fundamental French attachment and commitment to Israel that stems in part from the history of the Vichy regime,” said Gilles Kepel, a leading French expert on the Middle East. The regime, which led a rump France under Nazi occupation, deported 76,000 Jews to their deaths.
France made a critical contribution in the 1950s to Israel’s development of its unacknowledged nuclear bomb. It provided Mirage fighter jets that played an important role in Israel’s defense.
In 1967, however, President Charles de Gaulle called the Jews an “elite people, sure of itself and domineering.” Israel was outraged. Seeking to heal the wounds of the Algerian war, he set out to befriend the Arab world and imposed an arms embargo on Israel.
Support for Israel has since been tempered by an unbending French commitment to a Palestinian state, initially laid out before the Knesset in 1982 by President François Mitterrand, the first French head of state to visit Israel. Unlike the United States, France has been consistent in its rejection of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which has turned Palestinian statehood into an ever more distant chimera.
“Recognition and full admission of the Palestinian state to the United Nations are a precursor to a political solution,” said a French statement that reflected Mr. Macron’s thinking and was intended to set the framework for the conference in New York.
This amounts to the antithesis of the Israeli and American positions that any Palestinian state demands prior negotiation on security, borders, governance and other matters. But that approach has yielded nothing for a long time. Just this month, Israel announced it would build 22 new settlements in the West Bank, the largest expansion in two decades.
“The United States opposes any steps that would unilaterally recognize a conjectural Palestinian state,” the Trump administration said in a cable last week first reported by Reuters.
On Thursday, Mr. Macron posted a statement on X lauding Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, saying that a letter “of hope, courage and clarity” received from him last Tuesday “traced the path toward a horizon of peace.”
In the letter, Mr. Abbas called for Hamas to “hand over its weapons,” immediately free all hostages and leave Gaza. He also committed to reform the notoriously corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority.
The letter met several of the conditions set by Mr. Macron for French recognition of a Palestinian state. But other voices close to the president are pushing him in another direction.
“The very idea of Palestinian state can only be envisaged after Hamas has laid down its arms, its commanders in Gaza have gone into exile, and the people of the West Bank and Gaza have renounced their murderous dream of a Palestine stretching from the sea to the Jordan border,” said Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French author and intellectual who has the ear of Mr. Macron.
He suggested that Mr. Macron was still torn, buffeted from both sides, but leaning in the direction of delaying French recognition, which the president has said should not come in isolation. Germany, a close ally of both France and Israel, said this month that recognition would send “the wrong signal.”
As for Prince Mohamed of Saudi Arabia, he finds himself obliged to juggle his close relationship with President Trump and his determination to advance Palestinian statehood. While the prince has described Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocide,” Mr. Macron has gone through contortions to appear balanced since Oct. 7, 2023.
The French president governs the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Western Europe. He is confronted by a far left that has made “Free Palestine” its slogan and by the inescapability of France’s historical debt to Jews.
“This is no gift” and comes “far, far too late,” Rima Hassan, a far-left French member of the European Parliament, who is of Palestinian descent, said in April of Mr. Macron’s stated intention to recognize a Palestinian state. She was recently detained by Israel when aboard a charity vessel trying to take aid to Gaza and was later released.
Now Mr. Macron, the “at-the-same-time” president, so-called for his endless equivocations, must make up his mind. Of the 193 U.N. members, 147 have already recognized a Palestinian state.
But, as Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, put it, “French recognition would bring greater diplomatic pressure on Israel and further erosion of our legitimacy, but not the creation of a Palestinian state any time soon, if ever.”
The Enhanced Games left Wall Street largely disappointed after its inaugural event over Memorial Day weekend. Shares of its parent company, Enhanced Group Inc., fell nearly 45% to close at $2.96 on Tuesday.
Enhanced Group began trading on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month under the ticker ENHA after merging with a special purpose acquisition company. The transaction valued the business at $1.2 billion, and in the immediate aftermath, shares saw a 21% spike. Now, its market cap is less than $400 million.
A spokesperson for Enhanced Group declined to comment on the company’s share price.
The Olympics-style competition—which allows the use of FDA-approved, performance-enhancing drugs—debuted on Sunday at Resorts World Las Vegas. Both enhanced and clean athletes competed in swimming, weightlifting and track and field for prizes ranging from $20,000 for coming in seventh to $250,000 for topping a podium. A $1 million bonus was dangled to those who broke world records.
When Australian businessman Aron D’Souza unveiled his plans for the Enhanced Games in 2023, he said athletes would “obliterate all the world records” by “unlocking human potential.”
But contrary to the company’s bold claims, numerous world records didn’t fall on Sunday. In fact, only one did after Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev completed the 50-meter freestyle in 20.81 seconds, besting the 20.88-second mark Cameron McEvoy set in March. And that was even subject to dispute after viewers called into question the veracity of the time. The Enhanced Games dismissed the claim, calling it “completely unfounded internet drivel,” according to The Guardian. Either way, the record doesn’t actually count because of Gkolomeev’s PED use and his high-tech suit that is outlawed in the sport.
U.S. Olympic bronze medalist sprinter Fred Kerley, who said he was competing without PEDs, crowed that Usain Bolt’s record time of 9.58 seconds in the 100-meter dash would get “destroyed,” while predicting he would match the 9.81 seconds he ran to land on the podium in Paris two years ago. Kerley did win the sprint, albeit with a time of 9.97 seconds; the race had to be restarted four times because of false starts and untied shoes.
A spokesperson for Enhanced Group said the company was “delighted with the performance of the inaugural Games” and called it “a first step toward success.” They pointed to the 22 personal bests set by 14 athletes, including Megan Romano beating her 50-meter freestyle time from 13 years ago. In total, athletes earned $6.6 million at the competition.
Official viewership data has not yet been released for the Enhanced Games, though the spokesperson said that could come this week. The broadcast, which featured former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho and Braintree founder and controversial anti-aging evangelist Bryan Johnson, was available on the Roku sports channel in North America, and it was streamed across YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Rumble, Twitch and Kick. As of Tuesday, it had picked up slightly more than 900,000 views on YouTube.
The Enhanced Games plans to stage competitions annually, and it’s eyeing a similar time in 2027 to hold its next event; the company has a three-year deal with Resorts World.
Declining share price or not, a person familiar with the matter said the company continues to be optimistic about its future and ability to fundraise.
Enhanced Group isn’t solely in the business of staging athletic competitions. It also sells a collection of longevity and wellness products through its website and telehealth platform, including testosterone injections and peptides. The company’s largest shareholder is German biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer, who founded psychedelic drug startup Atai Life Sciences.
In the aftermath of its debut event, the Enhanced Group did boast about its success in sponsorships. On Tuesday, the company released a statement saying that it secured more than $32 million in “aggregate sponsorship deal value” ahead of the first meet, citing deals with Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU), Betr and Rumble (NASDAQ: RUM). It also noted that with seven months left in the year, it already had exceeded its sports revenue guidance of $31 million.
“We reset what this category is capable of,” Maximilian Martin, CEO of Enhanced Group, said in the release. “The $32 million we secured with our first event is not a ceiling. It is a starting point.”
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Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, would have to approve any final deal with the U.S. through secret courier networks while remaining in hiding as a “designated target,” counterterrorism experts said Tuesday.
The unprecedented arrangement, they claimed, means Washington is negotiating a high-stakes accord with an entirely invisible counterparty, with a potential memorandum signed by a regime leader and a “designated target” who can never publicly show his face.
“Khamenei is a designated target, and every confirmed sighting is a coordinate,” Dr. Omar Mohammed told Fox News Digital.
“The courier system used for messaging is not transitional. It is the operating system of his rule.
IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER RUNS ‘STATE WITHIN A STATE’ THROUGH SECRET 4,000-PERSON NETWORK, REPORT SAYS
In this picture obtained from Iran’s ISNA news agency, Mojtaba Khamenei (C), son of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, walks along a street in Tehran on May 31, 2019. (Hamid FOROUTAN / ISNA / AFP via Getty Images)
“Any deal the United States signs will have to be designed for a permanently invisible counterparty whose enforcement depends on his continued survival. That is not arms control as it has been conventionally understood. It is a memorandum signed under American military pressure, with a regime whose leader cannot show his face.”
Mohammed’s remarks came after Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained to reporters in India why the deal was suffering delays.
“It’s just the response,” Rubio said. “I mean, when you get down on some of these things, you’ve got to hear back, and it takes the Iranians — takes them a little while longer to get back,” he explained.
“That is Secretary Rubio confirming the courier latency on the record,” said Dr. Omar Mohammed, director of the Antisemitism Research Initiative Program on Extremism at George Washington University. “Rubio is describing a structural feature of negotiating with a supreme leader no one can locate.
IRAN’S KHAMENEI STAYS AWAY FROM TALKS AS JD VANCE SAYS DYNAMIC MAKES DIPLOMACY ‘MUCH MORE COMPLICATED’
President Donald Trump monitors U.S. military operations in Iran following an Israeli strike in Tehran on Feb. 28, 2026. (White House)
“Mojtaba is in hiding, messages are moving by courier, and responses are arriving days late.
“Rubio just confirmed the symptom, and the administration is being honest about the problem. The question is whether the framework can be designed to survive it,” Mohammed claimed.
Khamenei has spent nearly three months in hiding as tensions with the U.S. escalate.
He went underground as soon as a strike on Feb. 28 killed his father, amid reports that he was gravely injured.
He was struck in Operation Epic Fury — “wounded and likely disfigured,” according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His wife and son were killed in the same strike.
“Officials at the highest levels of the Iranian government do not know where he is,” Mohammed said, meaning every piece of information he receives is “dated, and his responses come with significant latency.”
The remarks come as Iran and the United States continue talks aimed at reaching a deal to end the war that began Feb. 28.
IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER MOJTABA KHAMENEI ‘MISFUNCTIONING,’ NOT CONTROLLING REGIME: SOURCES
Secretary of State Marco Rubio faced tough questions Sunday at a New Delhi, India, news conference about the Trump administration’s pressing India on trade, tariffs, visa and immigration reform. (Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AFP)
“If there’s going to be a deal, we’re going to have to work through that. But this is, you know, it’s either going to be a good deal or there isn’t going to be one,” Rubio said Tuesday.
A senior administration official said the U.S. is prepared to ease sanctions if Iran makes major concessions on uranium enrichment. Frozen Iranian assets have also emerged as a key hurdle.
Iran said Monday that no agreement with the United States was imminent, despite progress toward a framework in talks.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said the focus of talks remained ending the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and that a possible memorandum of understanding did not include specific details on managing the Strait of Hormuz.
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“The real question for Washington is not how fast the framework can be signed,” Mohammed added.
“It is also what enforcement looks like when the counterparty’s signature comes through a courier.”
Moscow’s envoy accuses Washington of failing to honour commitments under the 1947 UN Headquarters Agreement.
Published On 26 May 2026
Russia has slammed the United States for failing to grant a visa to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Alimov to attend a United Nations Security Council meeting in New York, calling the decision a breach of Washington’s obligations.
Vassily Nebenzia told the Security Council on Tuesday that the country should have been represented by Alimov – “who oversees matters related to the United Nations” – at the meeting.
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“However, despite all of our attempts to persuade the US side to issue a visa to him, that visa was ultimately not granted,” Nebenzia said.
The 1947 agreement that established the international body’s headquarters in New York requires the US to issue visas to foreign diplomats looking to attend UN functions “without charge and as promptly as possible”.
Nebenzia said not granting a visa to Alimov is a violation of that treaty and also a slight to Beijing, which is chairing the Security Council in May.
“We view this not just as a breach by Washington of its obligations under United Nations Headquarters Agreement, according to which access to United Nations needs to be provided for all officials and member states, barring none, but we also view this as an egregious instance of disrespect for the Chinese presidency of the Security Council,” he said.
The US Department of State did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.
The visa controversy comes at a time of receding tensions between Washington and Moscow as US President Donald Trump pushes to end the war in Ukraine.
Trump has been regularly speaking with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. But Washington has continued to enforce sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion.
Both Putin and Trump have separately visited China and met with its president, Xi Jinping, in recent weeks.
Earlier this week, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Abbas Araghchi, the country’s top diplomat, cancelled his participation in Tuesday’s Security Council meeting due to visa issues.
During last year’s UN General Assembly, in September 2025, the US imposed strict limits on the movement of the Iranian delegation in New York.
In 2019, the US also delayed then-Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visa for the General Assembly but eventually granted him entry.
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