French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

Two days before Emmanuel Macron told the UN General Assembly that Hamas had “never been active” in Judea & Samaria (aka, the “West Bank”), a Hamas terrorist named Qadri Samara murdered Netanel Shukron, a French citizen and father of six, in his car in Judea and Samaria, on the eve of Yom Kippur. Shukron’s last words to his son were an order to run. Macron must have known about this attack. He recited the line anyway.

He didn’t invent it. In October 2023, Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef, to malign Israeli security operations in Judea & Samaria and to support the claim that Hamas is just an excuse for supposed Israeli aggression, told Piers Morgan that “Hamas has no control over the West Bank,” asking viewers to imagine “a world without Hamas” and “name this world the West Bank.” Three years later, the President of France repeated the substance of that claim from the UN floor. A talking point from a comedian/activist graduated to head-of-state doctrine, three years later, without a single fact intervening to stop it.

The facts were never hard to find. Hamas’s leader in Judea & Samaria, Hassan Yousef, has run operations there openly for decades. Between 1994 and 2005, Palestinian suicide bombings killed nearly 1,000 Israelis and wounded over 10,000, a large share of them Hamas operations: the 2002 Park Hotel bombing in Netanya, 30 murdered, traced to a Hamas cell in Tulkarm; the Patt Junction bus bombing in Jerusalem that same year, 19 murdered; the Matza restaurant bombing in Haifa, 15 murdered.

Between October 2000 and mid-2003, 35 suicide attacks originated from Jenin and Nablus alone, murdering over 160 Israelis. Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli security services have logged over 1,200 attacks originating from the northern West Bank in a single year, with 24 Israelis killed, and Hamas has publicly claimed West Bank operations, including the June 2023 shooting at Eli that killed four civilians and a failed Tel Aviv suicide bombing in August 2024 that Hamas took credit for the day after. This is not intelligence buried in an obscure classified file. Hamas announces it.

None of this was unknown to the French government. It was simply inconvenient to the speech Macron wanted to give.

But treating “Hamas was never active in the West Bank” as an isolated fantastical falsehood misses what it really is: one brick in a wall built to hold up a single, much larger lie. Every fantasy in the modern anti-Israel catalogue exists to prop up the same conclusion, and that conclusion is the only one that has ever mattered to the Palestinian Arab leadership since Haj Amin al-Husseini put on a Nazi uniform in the early 1940’s and told his people not to compromise: Israel is temporary, its destruction is coming, and there is therefore no reason to accept partition, negotiate borders, or make peace on any terms that will leave a Jewish state standing.

Everything else is scaffolding for that belief.

For some, history supposedly began either after May 14, 1948, June 11, 1967, or Oct. 7, 2023, erasing over a century of Palestinian Arab antisemitic violence, as well as their leadership regularly choosing war over statehood, from Husseini’s rejection of Peel in 1937, through the PLO’s 1964 charter written to destroy Israel three years before the Six Day War, through Khartoum’s three noes in 1967, through Arafat walking away from Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, and Abbas rejecting Olmert’s offer in 2008. Proportionality becomes a demand for a 0:1 civilian-to-combatant ratio no army in history has ever come close to achieving in urban warfare, including certainly France.

A democracy defending itself against an enemy hiding behind its own civilians becomes “genocide,” a legal term stripped of meaning and repurposed as a buzzword and a bludgeon. Jews are recast as European colonizers with no ancestral claim to the land, despite over 3,000 years of continuous textual, archaeological, and religious record.

There was supposedly no Temple in Jerusalem, a claim that requires discarding the Bible, the Koran, Josephus, the Bar Kokhba coins, and the Western Wall itself. Palestinians are recast as the direct descendants of the Jebusites and Canaanites, a claim with no serious scholarly support, manufactured purely to countermand Jewish indigeneity.

And in perhaps the cruelest inversion of all, the fantasy spreads that Arabs “invited” Jews into the land out of compassion during the Holocaust, only to be repaid with theft, when the actual record is the opposite: Jewish return and land purchase predated the Holocaust by decades, was met with antisemitic Arab pogroms in 1920, 1921, and 1929, and was followed by five Arab armies invading the day after Israel’s 1948 declaration specifically to prevent a Jewish state from existing at all.

None of these fantastical lies is about history. Each is a permission slip. If Jews are foreign, Israel is theft rather than restoration. If there was no Temple, there is no claim to defend. If Hamas doesn’t operate in the “West Bank,” every Israeli soldier there is an occupier with no adversary. If every war death is genocide, self-defense itself becomes the crime. Strip away the footnotes and every one of these claims performs the same function: absolving Palestinian leadership of ever having to say yes, because a world convinced Israel is both illegitimate and doomed has no grounds to ask Palestinians for compromise.

The mechanism is always the same. An activist or activist/comedian manufactures a claim built for a soundbite, not for scrutiny. Sympathetic media repeats it until it hardens into conventional wisdom in the rooms Western politicians occupy. A head of state then recites it on the floor of the UN, lending it the authority of a government rather than a punchline, and by the time anyone checks the underlying facts, the claim has already done its work; reinforcing the master fantasy that has driven every Palestinian Arab rejection since at least 1937.

That fantasy has never once been free, and Palestinians have always paid the largest share of the bill. Seventy-eight years without a state is not a product of Israeli intransigence. It is the direct, repeated, documented consequence of an Arab leadership that keeps choosing the promise of Israel’s disappearance over the certainty of a state they could have had at least six separate times. Every fantasy Macron and people like him keep legitimizing tells that Arab leadership, and the generations raised inside its mythology, that they were right to wait, right to reject, right to bomb, and right to believe someone else will eventually finish the job for them. That belief produced Gaza’s rubble. It produced Netanel Shukron’s children watching their father die at a spring two days before the President of France stood at a podium and called his killers a myth.

Macron did not misspeak. He laundered a fantasy, a lie, and gave it the authority of a Security Council member head of state on the floor of the UN. He added one more plank to a scaffold that has been under construction since Haj Amin al-Husseini, built to hold up a fantasy that has cost Palestinians 78 years of peace and statehood in exchange for a promise that has never once come true, and never will.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.