Macron among the salauds: France has crossed into enemy territory

The United Nations vote this week, co-sponsored by France and Saudi Arabia, declaring support for a Palestinian state was predictable in outcome and devastating in symbolism. 

For Israel, it was another episode in the familiar theater of international hypocrisy. 

But for Jews — both in Israel and in France — the deeper wound comes not from the UN chamber, but from Paris.

In Israel, the reaction is bitter but unsurprised. From Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, the prevailing sense is that the world does not understand Israel’s predicament — or worse, does not care. Israelis see France’s fingerprints on a declaration that ignores October 7th, minimizes Hamas’s genocidal intent, and elevates a phantom “Palestinian partner” that does not exist.

The dominant response is defiance: Israel will continue to defend itself regardless of what diplomats scribble in New York. Yet beneath the bravado lies unease. 

Many Israelis read the resolution as another sign that their margin for maneuver is shrinking — that Europe, once fractured, is now aligning in a way that threatens to isolate Israel even further.

France’s Jews: Unease and Betrayal

For French Jews, the consequences are more intimate and more painful. Already battered by record levels of antisemitic incidents, they now watch their own government co-sponsor a resolution that will embolden street hostility and blur the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Macron claims to defend French Jews against hate at home. Yet abroad, he aligns himself with narratives that fuel that very hatred. He speaks of unity, but his diplomacy tells another story: equidistance, appeasement, and prestige politics — all at the expense of those he promises to protect.

BHL’s Word: Salauds

Then came the thunderclap. In a recent video, philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy — long considered the moral conscience of France — lashed out at Western leaders who sponsored recognition of a Palestinian state. His word was brutal, unambiguous: “salauds.”

The French language has few terms heavier than this one. It means traitor, dishonorable, a man without decency. 

It is the word Sartre used to condemn collaborators. And Macron, as co-sponsor of the UN resolution, is unmistakably included. BHL did not need to name him separately — Macron chose to stand in that circle, and therefore the word brands him too.

When BHL says “salauds”, the echo is not abstract. It lands in the Élysée Palace. It lands in the heart of French Jews who now see their president judged not only by Israelis, but by France’s own intellectual conscience.

Why did Macron do it? The answer is as cynical as it is transparent: prestige. He wants France to appear indispensable in the Middle East, a “bridge” between Riyadh and Brussels, Washington and Ramallah. He dreams of reviving the ghost of De Gaulle, positioning France as a moral counterweight to America.

But in doing so, he mortgages France’s credibility. Sponsoring a resolution alongside Saudi Arabia — a monarchy with no democracy, no tolerance for Jews, and a record of exporting extremism — exposes the bankruptcy of Macron’s “principled” diplomacy. It is not principle; it is opportunism masquerading as moral leadership.

Never Forget: Saudi Arabia and 9/11

Here lies the obscenity. Macron’s chosen partner in this resolution is Saudi Arabia — the very country that supplied fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11, 2001. 

The ideology that drove them, Wahhabi fundamentalism, was exported by Riyadh for decades, funding madrassas and spreading poison from Pakistan to Paris. 

The Twin Towers fell because Saudi extremism was unleashed on the world. Three thousand Americans were murdered. And yet, two decades later, Emmanuel Macron embraces Saudi Arabia as his ally to lecture Israel on morality.

This is not diplomacy. It is amnesia. Worse, it is complicity.

The South Africa Precedent

The implications are clear. What happened to South Africa is the model now being applied to Israel: a slow international strangulation, resolution by resolution, boycott by boycott, until the Jewish state is branded a pariah. 

The Durban Conference of 2001 was the blueprint. BDS campaigns on campuses carried it forward. And this week, France gave it new legitimacy at the UN.

The strategy is no secret: delegitimize Israel in international law, isolate it culturally, cut it economically, demonize it morally, until even allies hesitate to stand beside it. 

The enemies of Israel could not defeat it on the battlefield, so they adopted a war of attrition in the court of global opinion. France has now chosen to arm that war.

A Dangerous Double Standard

For French Jews, the danger is not academic. When the president of their Republic frames Palestinian statehood as an urgent moral imperative while Jewish security in his own country deteriorates, he creates a hierarchy of empathy. Jewish fears count less than diplomatic theater. Jewish safety counts less than Macron’s global stagecraft.

This is why many Jews — in France and abroad — now speak of Macron as a new Pétain. Not because he is a fascist, but because he embodies the same arrogance and blindness: the willingness to gamble with Jewish safety for political gain, to cloak betrayal in the language of “realism” and “balance.” 

Pétain promised stability and delivered shame. Macron promises prestige and delivers insecurity. For Jews, the echo is unmistakable — and unforgivable.

As the English writer Melanie Phillips has warned: “We have to face without flinching what is now undeniable: there is a war across the globe raging against the Jewish people. It’s a war not just to destroy their national homeland but to drive them out of people’s heads, their conscience and their world.”

France, by co-sponsoring this resolution, has declared which side it is on in that war. Macron did not simply make a diplomatic calculation. He aligned the French Republic with a global campaign to erase Israel and weaken the Jewish people.

France Has Become an Enemy

The UN resolution will pass into the archives like so many before it. But Macron’s role will not be forgotten. Israelis will remember that Paris chose prestige over solidarity. French Jews will remember that their president — who promised to be their shield — stood among the salauds.

History has a cruel way of stripping illusions. Macron may believe he secured France a place at the diplomatic table. 

In truth, he secured something else: a place alongside Saudi Arabia — the regime tied to 9/11 — and among those who would turn Israel into the next South Africa.

Bernard-Henri Lévy gave the French verdict: salauds.

Melanie Phillips gave the English one: a global war against the Jews.

And Macron, by his own choice, is now counted among them.

France has crossed the line. It is no longer a friend who disappoints — it is an enemy who betrays.