Palestinian State:
Recognition and a Funeral March

Sep 29, 2025

This article is translated from the September 26, issue #2982 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

French President Emmanuel Macron officially recognized the Palestinian state in a speech at the United Nations on September 22. It was a symbolic gesture because Macron knows he has no influence over the policies of American or Israeli leaders, who oppose it. And he knows that his speech won’t stay the executioner’s hand.

Macron’s gesture provoked anger from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hostility from France’s right wing and far right wing. At the same time it was supported by many people revolted by Israel’s murderous annexation policy.

But this recognition is as late as it is hypocritical. It took at least 65,000 Gazans killed and 163,000 wounded—a genocide—and a famine for Macron to change his tune! He recognized a Palestinian state when Gaza is nothing but a field of ruins, and Netanyahu is preparing the total annexation of the West Bank.

Macron doesn’t care about the fate of Palestinians. By re-orienting his policy back to France’s so-called “Arab policy,” Macron is thinking about strengthening France’s alliance with Saudi Arabia and the Emirates—and the benefits French capitalists could reap in Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East. He is thinking of French military-industrial giant Dassault and freight shipping corporation CMA CGM. He acts every bit the cynical leader of an imperialist power that is reckoning its revenue. He’s like previous French leaders who divided this strategic region floating on oil with the British, and set entire peoples against their neighbors.

Even when he claims to act out of solidarity, Macron dictates his terms. His price for recognizing Palestine? The Palestinian Authority—which administrates the West Bank—must commit to disarming Hamas and excluding Hamas from any future government. In other words, Macron is ready to recognize Palestine, but first, the Palestinian leadership has to upload its resumé and follow orders!

The only role the leaders of imperialism are willing to leave for the leaders of a hypothetical Palestinian state is to be guards in an open-air prison.

The Palestinian Authority was established during the Oslo Accords in 1993 to stem the uprising of Palestinian youth (“intifada” in Arabic) and played this role. This embryonic state apparatus was responsible for administrating territories separated from each other by checkpoints and border walls, subject always to Israeli military authority, and entirely dependent on international aid. Powerless, corrupt, and tasked with maintaining an unjust order, the leaders of the Palestinian Authority were set up to discredit themselves. Their discredit allowed Hamas to seize power in Gaza.

For 15 years, Hamas also controlled its share of the Palestinian population, forcing Gazans to accept every kind of deprivation. Hamas strengthened its military apparatus and hunted down and executed its opponents. Financed by funds from Qatar, with Israel’s consent, Hamas participated in preserving the imperialist order in its own way. By launching the attack of October 7, 2023, Hamas sought to brutally disrupt the normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab states. Hamas never troubled itself with the foreseeable consequences this attack would have for the people of Gaza.

For almost two years now, Israel has been waging a war of extermination against Palestinians, as demanded by the far right-wing parties which are in Netanyahu’s administration. No wonder many people wave Palestinian flags in solidarity with Palestinians and in protest of imperialist barbarism.

But, politically, the strictly nationalist perspective the Palestinian flag symbolizes is a dead end. The goal of a Palestinian national state—even an economically dependent rump state—suits the leaders of Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) which leads the West Bank. They only challenge the imperialist order as much as to carve out a place for themselves and prosper by exploiting workers there, which they already do. This perspective offers the Palestinian masses only poverty and unemployment.

The only true emancipation for Palestinians—and for all the oppressed people of the earth and exploited workers like us—will come by overthrowing the imperialist order and its foundation, capitalism.

This perspective envisions a revolutionary wave of Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, Jordanian, and Egyptian peoples converging to reject the policies of their respective leaders. Then everyone could see there is room for the two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, to live together in an egalitarian and democratic manner.