I don’t usually spend a lot of time thinking about France.
Yes, France, the country.
As in, the birthplace of the croissant and the guillotine and emancipation for European Jews. (Listen, credit where credit is due.)
But France has been in the news a lot lately, and not just because its president is suing Candace Owens. (Side note: WHAT EVEN IS THIS TIMELINE? A random American media personality relentlessly insisting that Macron’s wife is a biological man… was not on my bingo card for geopolitical issues of the year.)
No, I’m talking about the other bombshell France dropped recently.
On July 24, 2025, President Macron announced – via X, naturally – that France is gearing up to recognize Palestinian statehood. As he no doubt expected and planned, the entire world went wild. After all, it’s not every day that one of the most powerful countries in the EU recognizes a brand new state.
And the reactions were entirely predictable.
As you might imagine, Israelis from all over the political spectrum were enraged.
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet called it a “sign of moral collapse” that would be “tossed in the dustbin of history.”
Current Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu took it a step further, claiming Macron’s announcement “rewards Hamas terror, hardens Hamas’s refusal to free the hostages, emboldens those who menace French Jews and encourages the Jew-hatred now stalking your streets.”
But the Israelis weren’t the only ones who were ticked off. The US political leadership wasn’t too pleased, either. Among other salty words, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused Macron of metaphorically slapping the victims of October 7th in the face.
Oof.
To be fair, most of the world seems to be on France’s side. The Palestinian Authority, unsurprisingly, gave the announcement about statehood a big thumbs up. So did Hamas, which usually doesn’t agree with the PA on much, even calling the announcement, quote, “a step in the right direction,” which really makes you wonder what they think the next step should be. Feel me?
Meanwhile, other European countries like Spain, Ireland, Norway, and Slovenia were like, yo, France, what took you so long? We recognized Palestine in 2024. Get with the program.
And regular people – as in, people like you and me, who don’t lead countries – were like… wait. Hold up. Doesn’t most of the world already recognize a State of Palestine?
Because the fact is, the UN has recognized Palestine as a quote-unquote, “non-member observer state” since 2012, which means it can participate in General Assembly debates and join UN agencies and treaties, but has no vote at the UN. (Nerd corner alert! The Vatican is the only other country in the world with that status. And yes, the Vatican is technically a country, which I find so confusing and delightful.)
But where the Vatican doesn’t want full member status, the Palestinians really, really do. And they’ve invested heavily in the accoutrements of statehood.
They have a flag. They have a very intense national anthem titled “Sacrifice.” They have an Olympic team and a Miss Universe contestant, for crying out loud! (Imagine if the Vatican had those. Amazing.) The State of Palestine has passports and diplomats and embassies in a number of countries. And, most importantly, it has the recognition of 140 countries – i.e. three quarters of the world.
Oh, yeah. I didn’t mention that?
Of the 193 countries represented at the UN, over 140 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign state. That’s more recognition than Taiwan, which only 13 countries recognize.
Heck, that’s almost as much as Israel, which is recognized by 164 member states. (I bet you can guess which states don’t recognize Israel!) And then there’s the fact that the Palestinians already declared independence in 1988, in the thick of the First Intifada, via a letter transmitted to the UN by Jordan.
And yet, I feel reasonably confident that no one, including your average Palestinian, would say “yeah, a Palestinian state totally exists.” Because if a Palestinian state already exists, then what the heck are we fighting about? And why was Macron’s announcement such a big deal?
After all, he didn’t say, I’m gonna send the French army in to make Israel recognize Palestine.
He didn’t say, I won’t do business with Israel unless THEY recognize Palestine.
He didn’t even say, I will only recognize the State of Israel as existing within 1967 borders.
All he said was France is gonna join the other 140+ countries who recognize the State of Palestine, which is technically split between two governments in two non-contiguous regions and more or less already controlled by Israel.
In other words, who cares? Seriously. Who cares what France has to say?
Not trying to take shots here, but practically, why does this matter?
Well, the world does care. Israelis care. Palestinians care. I care. But when I asked myself why I care, why this matters, I ran into a whole new bunch of thorny questions.
Like: what even is a state?
Does it have to be fully autonomous, able to make its own decisions without some kind of Big Brother imposing top-down control?
Does it require recognition from the other nations of the world?
Can a state be split between two territories, each ruled by a different government, one of which is considered by much of the world to be a terrorist group?
You know, the types of questions that make me a hit at parties. I just stride right up to the coolest-looking person at the snack table and casually ask, yo, have you ever thought about the definition of statehood? As a strategy for making friends, it leaves a lot to be desired. As a topic for a conversation on an Israeli history podcast, though, turns out it’s a hit.
Because today, I’ve got some pretty pretty pretty cool guests clustered around the metaphorical snack table.
Yes, I’ve been burying the lede a little on this one.
I’m not going to think through all of these questions by myself. Where’s the fun in that? We’ve assembled a team of incredible, brilliant leaders, thinkers, and activists from all over the political map. And all of them gave me some serious food for thought on these and other questions. Viewpoint diversity is my jam!
Throughout this episode, you’ll hear snippets of my conversations with my four guests – the juiciest excerpts from talks that stretched for over an hour. Obviously, if I included every single insight from all of these brilliant humans, this episode would be roughly one million hours long – that’s my most scientific estimate. Instead, we’re going to release each of those conversations as its own episode, so you can listen in full. The little snippets you’ll hear today are basically previews, giving you a tantalizing taste of what’s to come.
And just to hype you up some more, I’m gonna share the names of my four incredible guests – though I’m gonna bet you already know who they are.
From East Jerusalem, we have Samer Sinijlawi, former international secretary of the Fatah youth movement, founding chairman of the Jerusalem Development Fund, and perhaps the most prominent Palestinian voice calling for reform and a two-state solution.
From DC, we have Michael Koplow, the Chief Policy Officer of the Israel Policy Forum, which works towards “a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on two states.”
Also in DC by way of Gaza, we have Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, probably the best known Palestinian-American humanitarian activist and political analyst out there.
And finally, from Jerusalem, we have Einat Wilf, former Member of Israel’s 18th Knesset, foreign policy advisor to Shimon Peres, author, and host of the podcast “We Should All Be Zionists.”
In other words, I brought in the big guns. And for the next 45 minutes, I’m gonna break all of this down, with help along the way from my four guests.
Palestinian statehood – and deeper questions about what even makes a state – is a big, sprawling topic, and we could easily get lost in the weeds. So to make this all a little easier to digest, to try to impose some structure on the chaos, this episode will contain five brief chapters. And yes, when I say brief, I actually mean it. We’ve got a bunch of in-depth episodes on a lot of this content already, so if anything you hear whets your appetite for more, well, you know where to find it.
In Chapter 1, we’ll talk about the 30 years between the end of WWI and the establishment of the state of Israel, exploring why Israel became a state and Palestine didn’t.
In Chapter 2, we’ll talk about what happened – or didn’t happen –between 1948 and 1967, when Gaza and the West Bank were under Egyptian and Jordanian control, respectively.
In Chapter 3, we’ll talk about the upheaval of 1967, and Israel’s responsibility to the Palestinian people.
In Chapter 4, we’ll talk about the first Israeli-Palestinian peace process at Oslo and the creation of the Palestinian Authority, which was the Palestinian people’s first official government.
Chapter 5 will take us from the Oslo Accords of 1993 all the way up to October 6th, 2023.
The final chapter, chapter 6, is the one we’ve all been living through since 6:29am Israel time on 10/7/2023. And to be fully transparent, I don’t know how that chapter ends. None of us do.
But because I’ve got both chutzpah and ambition, we’ll also include an epilogue to this entire story. A moment for our brilliant guests to reflect on what they think might happen next. We don’t make predictions on this show. But we do sketch out ideas. We do dare to imagine what the future might look like. We do nurture hope.
So let’s explore some big questions together about how we got here and what it all means.
Chapter One: The Before Times
For most of human history, the idea of a “country” or a “nation-state” as we understand it today simply didn’t exist. People belonged to empires, kingdoms, tribes, or city-states. Their loyalty was to a ruler, not to a flag.
Then came 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia. Europe, exhausted from centuries of religious wars, decided sovereignty had to be tied to territory. Rulers governed land and people within it. It was the first step toward nation-states, though borders still shifted and identities stayed fluid.
The 18th century revolutions sped things up. No more kings, no more dynasties. The people were sovereign. Nationalism surged, empires cracked, and by the early 20th century, the Habsburgs and Ottomans were gone. The nation-state had arrived.
But what counted as a state? In 1933, the Montevideo Convention laid out four criteria:
- Defined territory – This is a specific geographic area with some kind of boundary – though it’s OK if said boundary is not perfectly settled
- A regular population – People who live in this specific geographic area on an ongoing basis
- A government – An organized political authority that exercises control and provides services
- Capacity to enter relations with other states – The ability to engage in diplomacy and international agreements independently
By that point – 1933 – the Jews of Palestine fulfilled, mmm, let’s say two and a half out of four of these requirements.
They had number 2, a regular population.
They had number 3, a proto-government, which I’ll explain in a second.
They had halfish of number 1, defined territory. Sure, they wanted a defined territory. But let’s just say they were flexible. As long as they were in the general area, where their ancestors had been, where their mighty temple had once stood, they were happy. Or happy enough, anyway. Ish.
They didn’t have number 4, independence, or the ability to negotiate with other states. Most of their negotiations were with Great Britain, which held all the cards. Some of those quote-unquote “negotiations” eventually devolved into shooting British officers in the street, so, you know, not everything was hunky-dory.
But number four was the goal.
Independence.
Sovereignty.
The ability to say F you, other countries. You don’t want your Jews? We’ll take them, thank you very much.
And the Palestinians? What did they have before 1948?
They had land and population, but not the other two. And they didn’t have a unified vision of what their state should even look like. They just knew they didn’t want too many Jews in it.
Einat
It’s a conversation between the Arab mayor of Jerusalem in the early 20th century and a leading Zionist activist. The Arab leader says, look, Jews are great, Jews contribute to society, you know, it’s great to have Jews. They’re like salt in bread. But if you have too much, better to have nothing at all. The Zionist activist says, but we are done being the salt, we want to be the bread. Essentially from that moment you can argue that the conflict is essentially inevitable.
Noam
That was Einat Wilf, giving us the most helpful framing I can imagine. The metaphor of bread and salt – brilliant. Because what is Zionism – what is ANY form of nationalism, really – if not a people’s yearning to be the bread, rather than the salt?
Too many, many Jews, and other people, around the world, Zionism was – and is – about dignity. About liberation. About exercising the power to make your own decisions.
The problem, of course, was that the Palestinians wanted to be the bread, too. But they didn’t have the leadership to make it happen. And so instead of baking their own bread, much of their leadership focused on limiting the salt.
Okay, I think this metaphor has outlived its usefulness, but you get what I’m saying, right?
Look, for 400 years, the people of the region weren’t really making their own decisions. They were under the authority of the Ottoman Empire, which was huge and diverse and sometimes tolerant of its subjects, sometimes less so.
That “less so” REALLY came to the forefront in the 19th century, because the Ottomans didn’t particularly appreciate the rising tide of nationalism. And they did their best to stomp out any expression of it that they could – whether it came from Arabs or from Zionists.
But after WWI, the Ottoman Empire was gone. Collapsed. Kaput. Donezo.
And in its place was the British Mandate. The Brits were supposed to prepare locals for self-rule. Instead, they mostly made a mess and fled in 1948.
But of all three of those groups – Jews, Arabs, and Brits – it was the Jews who came out on top. That’s not because they were inherently better than anyone. And, and I can’t stress this enough, not because they were always 100% unified. They really, really weren’t. But they agreed on one essential thing. One thing that ended up being everything. The Jews need a home. And it needs to be in Palestine. Everything else could be negotiated.
So they set about building that home, hoping it would pay off eventually. So they built one. They arrived on rickety ships or donkeys, they drained swamps, they built kibbutzim, and they died of malaria until they found solutions.
And they built cities. Some, like Jerusalem, had existed for millennia, and were now bursting at the seams, until new neighborhoods began cropping up beyond the ancient walls. Others, like Tel Aviv, the first Jewish city in more than a thousand years, were built on sand.
They built other things, too.
The Histadrut is often erroneously described as a labor union, but it was way more. It ran companies. It ran healthcare. It even ran a defense org, the Haganah, which would become the core of the IDF.
The Jewish community of pre-state Palestine, aka the Yishuv, had created all the infrastructure they needed to actually run a country. Industry. Schools. Banks. A healthcare system. A system of taxation and finance. A proto-government, in the Jewish Agency. An elected National Council to deal with civil matters.
Yes, like any other people, there was internal strife, and sharp disagreement. But the Yishuv came together when it counted. When the Jewish Agency spoke to the Brits, or to the rest of the world, it was with one voice. A voice that was willing to compromise.
A voice that said, hey, just let us have some part of this land, please. Whatever you got is fine.
A voice that said Oh, you want to keep Jerusalem international, rather than recognizing it as a Jewish capital? Well, that stinks, but okay.
A voice that said Wow, these borders you’ve drawn up are pretty wonky and weird, but I guess they’re better than nothing.
A voice that said, JEWISH STATE OR BUST.
And in the end, they got that state. They got that state because they were willing to fight for it. Build for it. Compromise for it. Die for it.
And what about the other people of Palestine? Why didn’t they get a state? After all, the Brits proposed splitting the region into oddly-shaped pieces, one for Arabs, one for Jews, as early as 1937. So… what happened there? Or rather… why didn’t it happen?
Well, there are multiple answers to that question.
In early 1919, the first Palestine Arab Congress convened in Jerusalem to discuss their vision for the future of the region. And at first, they were very clear about what they wanted.
Quote: “We consider Palestine …part of Arab Syria and it has never been separated from it at any stage… Our district Southern Syria or Palestine should be not separated from the Independent Arab Syrian Government.”
In other words, we’re not looking to be our own independent state. We’re looking to be part of a larger sovereign Arab state.
But by the end of 1920, the “facts on the ground” had shifted. Syria was now under French control, and the Arabs of Palestine had no interest in being part of that. You know how hard it is to learn how to spell in French? So hard. I don’t blame them. But again, they called for Palestine to become part of a larger Arab state, not its own sovereign nation.
So up until the seventh and final Palestine Arab Congress, most of the resolutions they adopted had to do not with building a state of their own, but with opposing Zionism and British policies. Boycotts. Refusal to pay taxes. Calling for an end to Jewish immigration. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Einat
The Arabs who essentially remained between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, their entire identity from that moment on becomes wrapped up in their absolute rejection of the idea that the Jews can be sovereign in any part of the land. And they have quite a few successes. As a result of the Arab revolt, the British ultimately betray the terms of the mandate.
Noam
By 1931, the Congress was dead and buried. By the 1930s, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – the most powerful non-British person in Mandate Palestine – had effectively silenced all moderate or pragmatic voices. He had been inciting violence since the 1920s and thumbing his nose at the Brits for nearly as long. By 1936, he hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Palestinian state.
He co-opted a grassroots revolt. And he made it much, much uglier. The resulting British crackdown was brutal. By the time the uprising ended in 1939, Palestinian Arab society had been effectively hollowed out. Elites had fled the looming war in droves. Moderates and pragmatists had been silenced by Husseini or deported by the British, who didn’t differentiate between Palestinian Arab factions. The prospect of a Palestinian state was doomed before it even really got off the ground, destroyed by extremists whose refusal to negotiate brought their people misery and chaos.
That might sound harsh. But that’s not merely my opinion. Many Palestinians believe this too. Here’s Samer.
Samer Sinijlawi
We are the champions as Palestinians in committing a series of mistakes towards ourselves and towards the Israelis. The way that we have lost a lot of opportunities to try to materialize Palestinian statehood, while the Israelis were smart and pragmatic and jumped into opportunities and moved on. So there is a lot of weakness, mistakes on our side and we need to admit it. We need to realize it.
Noam:
Palestinian Arab leadership failed. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they were set up to fail by the British, who very, very stupidly imbued the Grand Mufti with his power.
But after 1948, the rest of the Arab world failed, too. Which brings us to chapter two of this story: 1948 to 1967.
Chapter Two: Between Egypt and Jordan
When the 1949 war ended, Israel was still standing. It had lost one percent of its population but survived against five Arab armies, and gained more land than the UN had offered.
For the Arab League, this was humiliation. For Palestinians, catastrophe: some 700,000 became refugees, scattered in camps across the region.
For the purposes of this discussion, we won’t focus too much on the Palestinians who ended up in Lebanon or Syria, though let’s just say that most have not had a great time.
We want to focus on the Palestinians of the West Bank – now under Jordanian control – and Gaza, now under Egypt.
If before they had some of the conditions of statehood, now they had none. No defined territory, no government, no voice.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
Unfortunately, there is some truth to the fact that statehood was not really a component of the Palestinian national movement early on. It was very much so the retrieval of the land that was taken in 1948. Why wasn’t a provisional Palestinian state, even if you wanted to get rid of the Jewish state, why wasn’t a provisional Palestinian state established between 48 to 67 in the West Bank and in Gaza with East Jerusalem? Why did Jordan annex the West Bank? Why wasn’t it until 1964 that a Palestinian liberation organization was established?
Noam:
That’s my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, asking the right questions. Pointing out the tragedy of 1949 to 1967.
Why didn’t the Jordanians and Egyptians establish a Palestinian state?
Well, there are two answers.
First, over in Jordan, King Abdullah was very wary of Palestinian nationalism. So wary, in fact, that he renamed the West Bank. Where once it had been Central Palestine, now it was… the West Bank, as in the West Bank of Jordan.
But he was practical, too. If he wanted to crack down on Palestinian nationalism, surely a carrot was better than a stick. So he granted citizenship to the Palestinians living in what he considered Jordanian territory, hoping they’d assimilate, become Jordanians, and be eternally loyal to the Hashemite monarchy.
That plan didn’t work out so well. But we’ll get there.
Egypt, however, had no interest in carrots. (Man, we’re all about food on this podcast today, huh? Salt, bread, carrots… I’m hungry. I like salt and bread a lot. Carbs are so good.)
Egypt’s King Farouk barely cared about his own people, leaving them to scrape out a meager living as he partied through life. Why would he extend any concern for the Palestinians now in his territory? What had the Palestinians done for him lately, other than drag him into a war he promptly lost in a spectacular and humiliating fashion? So he imposed martial law on the Gaza Strip.
By 1954, the handsome, charismatic, lushly mustachioed Gamal Abdel Nasser, who spoke charmingly of a pan-Arab identity and a shared Arab destiny, was in charge. But he was in no hurry to extend this beautiful vision to the Palestinians in Gaza. His plan?
Use them as a weapon. A wedge issue, to drive between the Zionist entity and the rest of the world.
But be sure to keep them docile. Be sure to keep them controlled.
I know I’m making Nasser sound like an evil mastermind here. But… I mean… he kinda was. He never saw Gaza as the foundation for a state. He saw it as a weapon he could wield against Israel. And, to be brutally honest, this was the dominant stance across the entire Arab world, for decade.
Rejectionism – as in, this idea that it’s better for the Palestinians to have NOTHING AT ALL than live side by side with any sort of Jewish state. Rejectionism wasn’t just being put forward by groups like Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It applied to much of the Arab world for a long, long time. Especially Egypt – ironically, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. But that’s a couple decades in the future.
And what happened when the Palestinian national movement did emerge?
Ahmed
The early onset of the Palestinian national movement and project was not only hindered, but it was shaped, it was molded by Pan-Arabism, of which Egypt was kind of the flag bearer.
Noam
Pan-Arabism, the idea that Arabs share a common identity and destiny, sounded beautiful, but in reality, not everyone in the Arab League was on the same page.
Ahmed
there was even rivalry within the Arab League within the Arabs. And part of that put Egypt and Jordan in an uncomfortable competition with one another. And one of the battlefields where that played was Gaza and the West Bank. And so to me, that’s the original, like the first root of the Palestinian National Movement after 48.
Noam
By the 1950s and 1960s, younger Palestinians were increasingly frustrated with Arab leaders. They had failed to “liberate” Palestine. They treated their Palestinian population like garbage. (Seriously, don’t get me started on the anti-Palestinian laws in Lebanon.) And that frustration was gonna boil over soon.
So Nasser, with the help of the rest of the Arab League, helped to sponsor the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, aka the PLO. Not out of the kindness of his heart, mind you. He hoped that harnessing the Palestinians’ anger and frustration and grief would help him – and other Arab leaders – better control them. They’d give the Palestinian people a fake voice, make them feel like they were doing something, while keeping the real power firmly in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Amman.
It didn’t work out so well. And there are two reasons for that.
One is that people are people. The more you try to control them, the harder they resist. The second was… the Six Day War.
And that’s where we’re going to pause for now. In today’s episode, we explored why Israel became a state and Palestine didn’t, and how Palestinians lived under Jordan and Egypt from 1948 to 1967. Next time, we’ll pick up with 1967 and the upheavals that transformed everything — the Six Day War, the Intifadas, Oslo, and the devastating choices that brought us to where we are today. That’s all coming up in Part Two.