Emmanuel Macron’s West Bank Whopper

There was a race to the bottom on opening day of the annual debate at the United Nations General Assembly: Which speaker can make the most outrageous statement on Israel. Competition was stiff and there’s still a week-worth ahead of contestants who will try to outdo King Abdullah II of Jordan, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Emir Tamim Al Thani of Qatar, and UN chief Antonio Guterres. Then again, what’s French for chutzpah? “We need to respect the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, their legitimate right to exist,” President Emmanuel Macron said in his UN address. “This is a prerequisite for security today and tomorrow, for the people of Israel, their security, their very existence, to which we’re very committed.” What caught our ear, though, was Monsieur Macron’s line that preceded that paean to Mideast tropes: “Hamas has never been active in the West Bank.”On Yom Kippur eve, as residents of the Samarian town of Neve Tzuf were praying, a 37-year-old Arab from the nearby Ramallah area came in and fired indiscriminately. Town resident Netanel Shukrun, a French citizen and a father of six, was killed. The terrorist was identified as Qadri Samara, a “Hamas operative.” Hamas, it turns out, is active at Judea and Samaria. Prime Minister Netanyahu calls Mr. Macron’s statement a “grotesque absurdity.” As our Benny Avni reports, Hamas and other terrorists stand to gain politically if elections are held in the territories that the Parisian would-be peacemaker calls the “West Bank.” Ignoring Hamas’s presence there, even in a UN speech, is a bad blueprint for guaranteeing Israel’s “security” or “existence.” Ask the bereaving Shukrun family. As unhelpful was Monsieur Macron’s last year UN stunt, when he led a mass recognition of a Palestinian “sState.”The idea of the two-state-solution has dominated Tuesday’s UN addresses. The Palestinian Arabs are yet to create a viable state anywhere outside of Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, where they are always presented as victims. Meanwhile anti-Israel invectives — “apartheid,” “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” — filled speeches. Nobody raised an eyebrow when Mr. Erdogan accused the Jewish state of “genocidal mentality with an insatiable appetite for killing.”King Abdullah, whose country depends on Israel for water, electricity, and security, dedicated his entire speech to accusing his neighbor of horrors such as denying Christian and Muslims their right to worship. Emir al-Thani hosts Hamas leaders. In 2023 they gathered to praise Allah for the October 7 horrors, which they hatched from Doha. That Emir also used much of his speech to vilify the Jewish state and its Gaza tactics. Then there’s the outgoing UN chief, whose anti-Israel rhetoric has marked his ten-year tenure. In Tuesday’s speech Mr. Guterres said he saw in Gaza “a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.” He barely mentioned the much larger Sudan death toll. A word or two about Ukraine, but none about the devastation in Syria or Burma — or the murder of tens of thousands Iranians by the Tehran regime. President Trump, in contrast, dedicated much of his speech to the “world number one sponsor of terror,” Iran. The president noted that three years ago in Israel “terrorists funded by Iran tortured, mutilated, and killed 1,200 innocent civilians, including dozens of Americans.” The October 7 attack that launched a Mideast-wide war was omitted from most speeches. Genocidal Iran, Hamas, and other terrorists do exist — not at the UN, but in the real world.

Emmanuel Macron’s West Bank Whopper

Emmanuel Macron’s West Bank Whopper

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