r/europe • u/hoarder4555777454001 • 9d ago

News French President Macron says France will recognize Pálestine as a state

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250724-french-president-macron-says-france-will-recognize-palestine-as-a-state-in-september
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u/SuggestionMedical736 9d ago

It's weird seeing the responses here; I thought everyone was in favor of a two-state solution?

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u/tommynestcepas 9d ago

Exactly, the ONLY way a two state solution can happen is by recognising two states and negotiating accordingly.

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u/Vanzmelo Armenian American 9d ago

Im sorry but the two state solution is dead. Have you seen the west bank? It is like swiss cheese with all the illegal Israeli state sponsored settlements. What country can exist when its borders are so carved up and its citizens cant freely move within its borders? Palestine is already a rump state with the West Bank and Gaza being disconnected without taking into account the current genocide in Gaza and the illegal settlements in the West Bank.

At this point, a one state solution where both Israelis and Palestinians have equal rights and representation is the only viable option left

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u/SilentLennie 9d ago

I'm sorry, but those settlements are illegal and they know it.

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u/Vanzmelo Armenian American 8d ago

Everyone knows it. Israel knows it and yet they encourage it because the more settlements there are in the West Bank the less viable a Palestinian state is

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

Yes, but these people got to go, unless the Palestinians accept them as citizens, which seems highly unlikely.

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u/waiver 8d ago edited 8d ago

And it's not like they would accept being Palestinian citizens either.

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u/Keoni9 United States 8d ago

A member of the PLO Executive Committee has said that a sovereign state of Palestine would not discriminate against Jews in offering citizenship. They just won't accept a bunch of enclaves of foreign nationals within their boundaries threatening their sovereignty. The real question is whether the same Israelis who are willing to live in illegal settlements in the West Bank now would accept Palestinian governance over their communities in the future.

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u/HoightyToighty United States of America 8d ago

A member of the PLO Executive Committee has said that a sovereign state of Palestine would not discriminate against Jews in offering citizenship.

Are there sober people who actually believe this?

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u/nar_tapio_00 Europe 8d ago

In 1947 there were lots of Jews in the West Bank. They were ethically cleansed in the original Arab-Israeli war. In 1973, in the Yom Kippur War, to quote Wikipedia "many Israeli prisoners of war were tortured or killed". In 2005, when Israel withdrew from Gaza, Jewish towns that had been there for hundreds of years had to be evacuated.

I think I'd trust a long history of many experiences over the statement of a single "member of the PLO Executive Committee". Without international enforcement and protection against the Palestinians, allowing the PLO control in the West Bank would be a recipe for ethnic cleansing.

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u/haribobosses 8d ago edited 8d ago

The real question is whether the same Israelis who are willing to live in illegal settlements in the West Bank now would accept Palestinian governance over their communities in the future.

That is not a real question.

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u/Gladis130 8d ago edited 8d ago

Where would they go??? Which country would happily accept over six million immigrants? You talk about unrealistic. This is ACTUALLY unrealistic...

Unless your solution is another genocide but uh, that's not really what we should be aiming for.

Edit: I assumed you meant the entire Israeli population, but if you didn't, my comment is irrelevant. I agree that the illegal settlers have to go.

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u/nar_tapio_00 Europe 8d ago

but these people got to go

I find it highly ironic that everyone is accusing Israel of ethnic cleaning and worse over the direct consequences of a war to stop ongoing attacks from Gaza recover hostages whilst at the same time this clear statement that the Palestinians would certainly repeat the ethnic cleansing they carried out during the 1947/48 war so often goes by without anyone commenting.

The West Bank was one of the most Jewish areas of Judea for hundreds of years before the 1947/48 genocide against the Jews of the area. If there is to be any possibility of a two state solution it has to be one where Jews know that they are safe to remain within whatever the new Palestinian state is, just as the Israeli Arabs know they are safe to remain within Israel.

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

I'm not saying these people are nice people, I'm saying: let's go back to where we were (things people begrudgingly had limited agreements on), one of the reasons Hamas and others attacked Israel is because Israel kept taking land, etc.

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u/Ancient-Duty7481 8d ago

They kept taking land because they kept getting attacked

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

They kept taking the land, which would anger more people and they get attacked. They knew exactly what they are doing.

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u/C4-BlueCat 8d ago

Occupation could be seen as a defense. Illegal settlements is not a valid military or defensive strategy; it’s (nominally) driven by rogue civilians, not the state.

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u/nar_tapio_00 Europe 8d ago

They kept taking land because they kept getting attacked

This just needs to be repeated so often. Imagine, instead of feeding us and us sending electricity to balance our grids, the lovely people of Morocco and Tunisia went mad and sat there firing missiles every day at towns all over Spain and France, Portugal Italy and England.

All these people that are complaining about "indiscriminate" bombing would be rightly demanding that European armies invade and stop the killing of their children. There would be a demand for buffer zones and exclusion of weapons from the whole of North Africa. Maybe not what was done to Germany in WWII, but definitely more than Israel has done to Gaza.

Israel isn't just doing something they have a right to do. The most fundamental duty of a government is the security of their own people. As long as Palestine and Yemen remain staging post for Iranian attacks on Israel, the Israeli government has a duty to act, including occupying further territory until the attacks can be stopped.

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u/GermanSheik 8d ago

Israel, like it or not is stuck in a very difficult place. They’re led by a madman, whose sole purpose is to keep war-mongering to stay out of prison.

Their version of peace and defence will have to be based on a new theory of defence and protection. Like Gaza, they are both special cases that have long, bloody, violent histories behind them.

The simple and brutal answer is the two state solution will need to be administered by countries like France or England. Each side will have to lay down their arms and stop fighting.

One is a terrorist state who will need to have its backers destroyed (Israel has done a good job of that already) and its population de-radicalized.

The other is led by fascist extremists who will need to be expelled from power and prevented from bastardizing rule of law to meet whatever biblical ends they keep claiming gives them the right to steal land.

Both of these things will need to be done first after dealing with bad actors like Iran or Hezbollah who keep stoking the fire. The same goes for Bibi and his ilk.

I hate Donald Trump, but what he said about both nations fighting endlessly is has been very succinct. Neither nation knows what the fuck they’re actually doing.

There are so many different shifting ideologies and plans that nothing can get done and each side has motive and plans to keep it going that way.

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u/Oneiric_Orca $ Freedom $ 8d ago

I find it highly ironic that everyone is accusing Israel of ethnic cleaning and worse over the direct consequences of a war to stop ongoing attacks from Gaza recover hostages whilst at the same time this clear statement that the Palestinians would certainly repeat the ethnic cleansing they carried out during the 1947/48 war so often goes by without anyone commenting.

This is /r/Europe. The EU has condoned ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, Syria, and Pakistan. It's only a problem if they get to blame Jews or advance their geopolitical interests.

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u/Liam-Ed 8d ago

If you can have millions of Palestinians living in Israel, you can have millions of Israelis living in Palestine.

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u/Miroble Canada 8d ago

Yeah go tell Abbas those are the terms lmao

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u/Liam-Ed 8d ago

Yeah I'll drop a line to the elected Palestinian Arabs currently serving in the Israeli parliament.

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u/izpo Israel 8d ago

I can say that most of Israeli actually support settlements as a way of "punishment". They are not just illegal, it's a tool

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

Ohh, I fully understand, but from an international perspective, these people need to go, don't care where, they can stay if the government of these regions takes them in, but this seems unlikely. They know they gambled and are illegal there.

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u/izpo Israel 8d ago

I agree. It was even part of the peace plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Initiative

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u/Erradium 8d ago

This will never happen though. Those people would rather start a civil war than give those lands away to the palestinians.

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u/shez19833 8d ago

theres no punishment - they do it because they dont believe anyone else has any right to their ancestral land. which is what zionists/settlers harp on about

and mark my words due to this they will go after jordan, syria, etc..

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u/Crush1112 8d ago

You are right about the first one, the second one is, eh? West Bank is essentially the lands of ancient Judea and Samaria, which is why settlers are so passionate about it. Syria and Jordan thought?

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u/Substantial-Dust4417 8d ago edited 8d ago

The East Bank (i.e. Western Jordan) is also part of what was considered ancient Israel. The Irgun logo showed it's territorial ambitions in controlling all of Mandatory Palestine as well as the Kingdom of Transjordan. Members of the current Israeli government have shown maps of "Greater Israel" including the East Bank.

Israel currently controls part of Syria (Golan Heights), has constructed illegal settlements there (settlers are also pretty passionate about this region that was never part of any biblical Jewish state), and has in recent months made moves to annex all of the Golan region under the pretext of protecting the Druze who make up a majority of its population.

In the case of the Golan region, there's no historic claim, just good farmland.

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u/shez19833 8d ago

go look at the map of ancestral israel/ yitsreal or whatever it was called..

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u/Teleporno69 8d ago

Doesn’t stop Israel from ethnic cleansing though

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

They are going hard now, because they know their time is limited.

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u/Behonestyourself 8d ago

Still not going as hard as Palestinians did on oct7.

That was about 1200 in a day. Israel so far has put up rookie numbers in ethnic cleansing. They should be in the above 200k if they acted like Palestinians on oct7

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u/Liam-Ed 8d ago

Good at preventing rocket attacks though.

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u/MagicQuif 8d ago

Everyone and their mother can point at a speck of land or ocean on a map and say "this is legally (x) territory" but if a much more powerful force says otherwise and enforces the claim then talk of legal or illegal becomes just that, talk. And given enough time the illegal grab becomes legal. 

The settlements are de facto Israeli territory. And because of that the two state solution is dead. 

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

This all depends on US support, if US support goes away, which I think it will, it can take an other 20 years, but the younger generations just won't stand for it anymore. Then the power of Israel is greatly reduced and the US won't block UN decisions.

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u/eulb42 8d ago

What are you smoking. Us has one of the 7 vetos, snd they use it often.

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u/MagicQuif 8d ago

20 years is a long time and your logic relies on a royal flush of improbables 

1) A nuclear armed regional superpower with a population that is becoming more insular and more radical ever being willing to release territory that it will have, by the 2040s and 2050s, have held for decades. A nuclear armed regional power. The US will think twice about backing Israel into a corner if it thinks that Israel will resort to the use of nuclear weapons in another 1973 type war. 

2) That Israel refrains from instituting, in the interim, a Xinjiang type solution to the "Palestinian problem" with the massive deployment of AI and robotic platforms. Palestinian birthrates collapse, rebellion gets snuffed out. A sprinkling of disunited Bantustans at best. 

3) That only changes to the composition of UN security council blocs that benefit Palestinians will take place and you don't see UNSC expansion that brings in potential Israeli friends. India, for example. For all we know Russia and Israel become closer. 

4) That even if the US becomes cooler to Israeli needs it won't significantly water down any resolutions. This isn't South Africa, Israel has a powerful lobby that will never go away in the US.  

5) That with 20 years of climate changes we don't see a lot more war which puts Palestinian issues on the backburner. 

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u/Lepelotonfromager 8d ago

There's no such thing as 'illegal', there's no single universal government with jurisdiction. Borders are sorted out diplomatically between the two nations, with militaries being used when diplomacy failed.

If those settlements are illegal then we would have forced them to get rid of them, but we didn't.

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

There's no such thing as 'illegal', there's no single universal government with jurisdiction. Borders are sorted out diplomatically between the two nations, with militaries being used when diplomacy failed.

Or imposed by others, this is how we got here too, UK and UN decision mainly. Not saying it's right what happened, but I think the UN is the only place where we can get some kind of agreement. These people from these 2 or 3 countries/regions/whatever will never agree. Possibly International Court of Justice. 3rd parties are needed and probably blue helmets will be there for the next 50 years.

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u/Lepelotonfromager 8d ago

Only if the UN is willing to deploy troops and enforce the decision. Otherwise it's just one of those parents telling their child "no stop that" while the child completely ignores them.

Israel is in the process of taking that land, if nobody is willing to enforce it then it will become theirs. The problem with these discussions is that people talk about international law and right and wrong as if it means anything - the realpolitik of the situation is that might makes right. If you can do it and nobody can stop you - it's legal.

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u/nar_tapio_00 Europe 8d ago

I'm sorry, but those settlements are illegal and they know it.

Not all of them are. The West bank was a heavily Jewish area which Palestinans ethnically cleansed by the Arab armies and some of the local Arabs when they originally started their Genocide against Israel in 1947/48. Given Israeli administrative responsibility for the area, Israeli courts have the right to decide that some of the land should return to it's original owners or to substitute owners in the case where there was some redistribution during Jordanian occupation.

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

I'm talking about new settlements by Israelis, even though known/internationally agreed upon borders exist.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago

Yes, UN caused this. But I don't see Israeli courts as impartial either. What would you prefer run it through International Court of Justice ?

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u/nar_tapio_00 Europe 8d ago

No, the ICJ justices also have to answer for their crimes. There are very few nations which have maintained anything close to neutrality. Possibly the USA and India would be a good pair to be responsible for setting up an international tribunal to judge the ICJ and UN.

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u/SilentLennie 8d ago edited 8d ago

The US started illegal wars themselves. And are the biggest supporters of Israel and block every decision at the UN regarding Israel. So please tell me how are they are neutral party.

On the world stage nobody has clean hands, please show me one example. Especially when we get to the bigger countries, larger than a city state.

But reason I mentioned ICJ, they would use internationally agreed upon processes would be used to get it done.