What does it mean to lead a country? It means having a vision, setting a course, sticking to it – and bringing your citizens with you. It means representing a nation on the world stage, deciding its alliances, shaping its role. Leadership is about making choices.
On May 13, 2025, during a primetime interview on France’s leading TV channel, President Emmanuel Macron made one such choice – or rather, refused to. Faced with a simple, direct question, “Mr President, is what’s happening in Gaza a genocide?”, he ducked. “It is not for a political leader to use those terms,” he replied. “That’s for historians to determine, in due course.”
In doing so, he offered a gift – not to the defenders of international law or human rights, but to the Islamists and the far left. And when Macron retreats, it’s not just him: it’s France that retreats with him. This wasn’t neutrality. It was surrender, delivered in the name of the Republic.
What does it say when the president of France hands over the task of describing today’s reality to historians of the future? Since the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, we have learnt the cost of ceding even one inch of semantic ground to those who would twist language into a weapon. When you’re head of state, you don’t outsource the truth.
Words matter. They shape our understanding of the world. Some are precise, others are deliberately distorted. The term “Islamophobia” was coined to silence criticism of extremism. It worked – and people died for drawing cartoons.
Now another word is being weaponised: genocide. Some want to use it for Gaza. Not to seek justice, but to turn the tables – to accuse the Jewish state of the very crime committed against Jews during the Holocaust. To paint Israel as the new Nazis. To portray Jews as the new perpetrators of genocide. This is not justice. It’s an inversion. A lie. An obscenity.
French is a rich language. It gives us the tools to describe every horror with precision. Misusing those tools doesn’t just confuse. It degrades.
There’s a world of difference between the intent to exterminate – like that of Hamas on October 7 – and the grim, tragic reality of a war launched in response.
A child killed is a tragedy – whether in Kibbutz Be’eri, under the rubble in Gaza, or in Auschwitz. But not every death tells the same story. Not every war is a genocide. Not every crime is the same.
If words lose their meaning, what’s to stop us calling France a genocidal state for its airstrikes in Syria? If everything is genocide, then nothing is. And if we confuse language, we lose the truth. And when the truth is lost, propaganda wins. History teaches us: that’s when the tyrants take over.
So no – Macron’s hesitation wasn’t a small misstep. It was a gift to the enemies of freedom. It lends credibility to those who dress up antisemitism as virtue. After all, if the Jews are committing genocide, who could blame the antisemites?
The consequences were immediate.
On May 22, the day after two Israeli embassy staffers were gunned down outside Washington’s Jewish Museum by a man shouting “Free Palestine”, a far-left French MP responded on radio: “My reaction is that the genocide in Gaza must stop – quickly.”
Not a word for the victims. Just a justification. That’s what this kind of language enables.
Today’s antisemitism doesn’t wear jackboots. It wraps itself in slogans such as “anti-Zionism”.
And by a dangerous sleight of hand, anti-Zionism becomes anti-genocide. If we let the enemy dictate the words, they’ll rewrite reality too.
That’s how antisemitism seeps into French universities – where being Jewish is now enough to justify being harassed, marginalised, excluded. And when the president remains silent in the face of such hatred, he adds his voice – or rather his silence – to the growing global wave of antisemitism.
The timing is bitterly ironic. Just days before his evasive remarks on Gaza, Macron welcomed to the Élysée a former Daesh jihadist – now acting “interim president” of Syria – who claims he’s changed, yet still advocates for sharia law.
By refusing to reject the word genocide outright, Macron legitimised the anti-Israel rhetoric of people like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), his party colleague Rima Hassan, and Aymeric Caron – voices he once sought to distance himself from. Now, he seems to echo them.
When leaders hand over the job of choosing words to future historians, they make a choice – to appear in those future books under the chapter titled: abdication.
No one else can make this decision but the president himself. He must choose whether France stands for the uncomfortable truth – or easy lies. History will have its say, in time. But today belongs to us.
And there is no dignity in ducking out through the side door, leaving behind a single note on an empty chair: “Let the historians decide.”
Tristane Banon is an author and journalist for French magazine Franc-Tireur
