On Tuesday October 15, 2024, diplomatic tensions between France and Israel took on a new dimension when French President Emmanuel Macron recalled the role of the UN in the creation of the State of Israel. An outing which hardly pleased the Israeli Prime Minister.
According to Emmanuel Macron, Israel “must not forget that its country was created by a UN decision”referring to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947, which proposed the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disputed this version of the story.
Israel created by the UN: Emmanuel Macron recalls History
Macron’s remarks were made against a backdrop of high tensions in the Middle East, particularly with the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. The French president, during a Council of Ministers, stressed that the time was bad for Israel to free itself from UN decisions, while the Israeli ground offensive continues in the south of Lebanon, where also deployed UN peacekeepers. The Israeli army is accused of injuring several peacekeepers from UNIFIL, the force deployed in Lebanon, causing an international outcry.
Benjamin Netanyahu strongly criticized this historical interpretation, saying that “ it was not the UN resolution that established the State of Israel, but rather the victory achieved in the War of Independence with the blood of heroic fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, including of the Vichy regime in France ».
The role of the UN in the creation of Israel
The UN actually played a key role in the creation of the State of Israel through Resolution 181, adopted in 1947, which provided for the partition of Palestine into two states: a Jewish state and an Arab state.
The first saw the light of day in May 1948, but the birth of the Palestinian State, planned in the same plan, never materialized, largely due to the rejection of this division by the Arab countries and the Palestinians, thus triggering the first Arab-Israeli war. This war of 1948-1949, often referred to as the Israeli War of Independence, which Netanyahu highlights to contest the role of the UN in the creation of Israel.
Growing tensions between France and Israel
This exchange of arms takes place in a context of tense diplomatic relations between the two countries, exacerbated by Emmanuel Macron’s criticism of the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.
The French president had notably called for an end to deliveries of weapons used by Israel in these conflicts, declaring that “we do not fight against terrorists by sacrificing a population”. These comments were firmly rejected by Benjamin Netanyahu, who then described these statements as a “disgrace”, while insisting on the need to maintain military operations against hostile forces like Hezbollah.
The differences between the two leaders are numerous. They also touch on current questions of international law, Emmanuel Macron having criticized what he considers to be deliberate violations by the Israeli army of the positions of the peacekeepers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). This accusation was formally rejected by Israel, which claims that Hezbollah uses UNIFIL facilities to carry out its attacks against the Jewish state as it had accused Hamas of using UN infrastructure in Gaza.
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