Macron’s failed Middle East trip exposed his geopolitical immaturity Opinion by Aziz Boucetta

Morocco's Morocco World News published an article by Aziz Boucetta on French President Emmanuel Macron's ill-fated trip to the Middle East. Caliber.Az reprints the opinion piece.

Over the past few years, Emmanuel Macron has brilliantly embarrassed himself in Africa, managing to create a strong sense of disdain among the people of the continent who once supported or trusted his country.

It would appear Macron is skilled at enraging his audience and interlocutors with his lack of a sense of purpose and moral clarity, as well as his outsized arrogance and disdain for the plight of ordinary people. 

And so, Macron, a perfectionist in the art of gaslighting and pooh-poohing, ended up confusing and enraging both camps in the ongoing Hamas-Israel war. He lost his Arab and Muslim audience with his ignorant and offensive suggestion in Jerusalem that the only way to end the alarming humanitarian crisis in Gaza is to eliminate Hamas, the Palestinian militant group.

Meanwhile, he succeeded in infuriating the Jewish, pro-Irrael circles with his supposed, half-hearted criticism of Israel’s criminal policies in Palestine while talking to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. When it comes to keeping face with illusions of grandeur about France’s supposedly noble role in world affairs, as well as gaslighting his interlocutors with ambiguous buzzwords and yes-but-no-type of reasoning, Macron is unmatched and uncategorizable. Remember: His regime is steeped in the art of double standards and equivocation. 

More than two weeks after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli army’s launch of its genocidal operations in the besieged Gaza Strip, Emmanuel Macron followed in the footsteps of his German, American, Italian, and British counterparts by traveling to Israel to express his passionate and enthusiastic support for the Jewish state’s “right to defend itself.”

So high was his sense of undying solidarity with Israel that the clueless and self-absorbed French president went as far as to propose the creation of an international anti-terror coalition to defeat Hamas. 

It should not be surprising that Emmanuel Macron finds it very feasible and even intelligent to have Western armies join forces with Arab armies to go to war against Hamas, which many in the Arab world consider a resistance fighting against Israel’s decades-long oppression and annihilation of the Palestinian people.

Despite converging reports indicating the Arab world’s undying support for the oppressed Palestinians and much of the Global South’s disillusionment with the West’s double standards, the French president, who pays little attention to public opinion on many subjects, thinks that Arab leaders can possibly insult the intelligence and dignity of their own peoples by taking part in a global coalition to defeat the Palestinian militant group.

Bravo, Macron!

As if his Israel trip and insensitive comments on the Israeli army’s Gaza offensive were not off-putting enough for supporters of the Palestinian cause, Macron, ever loyal to his famous “en même temps” (at the same time) philosophy, flew to Ramallah on October 24 to make a strange pledge to support the Palestinians’ struggle. 

To Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the West Bank-based Palestinian National Authority, Macron conveyed his strange enthusiasm to help end Palestinians’ plight. He said he had come to Ramallah to “see and hear” the suffering of the civilian populations of Gaza, arguing that “nothing, nothing could justify” that suffering.  

That would rightly mean that not even Hamas’s October 7 attack could justify Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza, thus contradicting everything Macron had told Netanyahu during his Israel visit. In the face of such insufferable cognitive dissonance, one is tempted to think that either words do not have meaning for Macron, or maybe they have different meanings in different contexts. 

In that sense, not only did the French President not ensure the friendship of Arabs with his rushed trips to Jerusalem and Ramallah, but he also sowed mistrust in Israel.

Applying the “en même temps” rhetoric in all circumstances is to make mistakes and blunders in the concept of “at all times” in general. For seasoned watchers of world affairs, Macron’s failed trip to the Middle East revealed what almost all informed observers already knew: the death of France as a respectable global power with serious, reliable diplomacy. 

The great French diplomacy that marked the great days of French history is no more; it has been replaced by a makeshift of diplomats at the Elysee Palace, characterized by a lack of empathy, complete emotional detachment, irresponsibility, and a tendency to behave impulsively. This is the exact definition of psychopathy as provided by the US National Medical Library.

In the French media, and to a lesser extent in the American and British media, Hamas is called a terrorist group; all TV programs and newspapers heavily emphasize this term. Hamas is considered a terrorist organization by the European Union, Canada, the United States, Israel, and Egypt. But not by the UN, which it seems can at least make a distinction between a terrorist group and a resistance group, even if such a group also commits acts of terror. “Violence” is not always “terrorism,” even if both are reprehensible and both affect innocent people.

As historian Sophie Bessis explains, “The vocabulary of the colonial situations is distressingly monotonous: when violence responds to violence because all other routes have been cut off, the oppressor’s violence is passed over in silence, and the violence of the oppressed becomes the emblem of the evil and cruelty that characterize its essence and culture.”

Or, as Bessis rightly, insightfully wondered, “How does one explain such bias except by a loud return of the repressed colonialism of the powers that be, now increasingly contested?”

The world witnessed the pointlessness of a Peace Summit held in Egypt a few days ago which, rather unsurprisingly, did not even conclude with a joint declaration. Instead, the West left the summit standing sword in hand against Hamas, admittedly guilty of mass murder, and the Arabs left the meeting calling on the world -- especially the Israeli government’s enablers in the West -- to strongly condemn Israel, now resolutely engaged in what looks like genocide in Gaza.

Macron wants to appease and please Israel “at any cost,” and he is followed on this path by his Minister of Foreign Affairs, who in turn wants to please her president. In doing so, both of them are causing considerable harm to the interests and security of their country, as a growing number of voices in France are now proclaiming.

Meanwhile, ethnic cleansing is taking place in Gaza, and war crimes are being committed before the eyes of a world dismayed by Western “double standards.” But Emmanuel Macron does not seem to have the political and geopolitical maturity to understand this.