A Century after Sykes-Picot, France Still Hasn't Learned

Robert P. Barnidge

Politics, Middle East

They're ignoring local realities in the Levant—again.

It is more than a bit ironique that France has proposed to host a major conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace on May 30, exactly one hundred years to the month after it agreed to the Sykes-Picot Agreement with the United Kingdom.

Sykes-Picot, an act of secret diplomacy and geopolitical calculation, saw Paris and London agree to protectorates over a future Arab state or states in the event of an Ottoman defeat in the First World War.

If France wishes to avoid the imperial legacy of Sykes-Picot, it should commit to treating the key players in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute (Israel, as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the self-determination movement of the Palestinian people) as juridical equals. It should make clear that Israel and the PLO alone are responsible for their destinies—and that France does not view them as pawns to be disposed of from afar, even if it has decided not to invite either of them to Paris.

There are three concrete steps that France can take in this direction in the lead-up to its proposed conference.

First, it should reaffirm the mutual understandings that have undergirded Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations since 1993. These include Israeli recognition of the PLO as the “representative of the Palestinian people” and PLO recognition of the “right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.” In today’s context, these understandings imply recognition of both Jewish and Palestinian self-determination.

If one proceeds on the basis that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is, at least in part, a conflict of self-determination movements, evenhandedness would also require France to call upon Arab states to amend the 2004 Arab Charter on Human Rights. This treaty, which the Palestinians have signed on to, expressly calls for the elimination of Zionism. It makes little sense for France to expend considerable diplomatic capital hosting a peace conference for states that are committed to the destruction of Jewish self-determination.