Palestine and Europe: the weight of the past and contemporary dynamics

Carte ancienne de la Palestine à l'époque romaine, avec les villes et régions marquées. — Map of Palestine under the British Mandate (detail), coll. Amjad Ghannam - the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive

Conference co-organized by the Contemporary History of the Arab World Chair at Collège de France and the Centre arabe de recherches et d'études politiques de Paris (CAREP Paris).

Scientific committee : Henry Laurens and François Ceccaldi (Collège de France) / Salam Kawakibi and Leila Seurat (CAREP Paris).

Languages : English / French / Arabic
Date : November 14 & 15 2025
Venue : Collège de France, Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, 11 place Marcelin Berthelot, 75005 Paris
Free admission : Subject to availability, direct transmission on social networks.

Documents and media

Presentation

With the opening of the " question d'Orient " in the last third of the 18th century , Palestine, with its special status as the Holy Land, became the nerve center of European international relations.

In the decades leading up to the Great War, struggles for influence between the European powers multiplied, each presenting itself as the protector of a particular religious community. While France and Russia extended their influence over Catholics and Orthodox respectively, the English presented themselves as the protectors of the Jews in Palestine. It was in this context that the Zionist movement was born.

While France gained primacy of influence following the Balkan Wars, the British took advantage of the alliance forged with the Zionist movement during the First World War to claim a mandate over Palestine.

The period of the British Mandate is essential for the establishment of the contemporary actors that are the Palestinian national movement and the Zionist movement. Caught in a double bind between one and the other, the British were unable to find a political solution satisfactory to both parties, be it a unitary Palestinian state, a division into cantons or a territorial division. They were faced with a Palestinian revolt, and then a Jewish revolt. Not without ulterior motives, they delegated the matter to the UN, which, with the vote on the partition plan in November 1947, provoked a war between Arabs and Zionists, then, after May 15, 1948, an Arab-Israeli war.

In this long-lasting conflict, Europeans largely identified with the State of Israel. In the 1950s and 1960s, France and Germany supplied Israel with the armaments it required, but the Hebrew state's priority was to obtain American military aid, which only became substantial after the June 1967 war.

After the war, the " four-way talks " saw a rapprochement between the positions of Great Britain and France on the need for withdrawal from the occupied territories in return for recognition of the State of Israel, but the question of how to take the Palestinian factor into account remained open. A Euro-Arab dialogue thus began. This led to the Strasbourg resolution of 1975, calling on Israel to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territories and recognize the national rights of the Palestinian people, followed by a new declaration in 1977 calling for the creation of a homeland for the Palestinian people, and marking for the first time European opposition to the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. The most important milestone was the Venice Declaration of June 13, 1980, which spoke of a just solution and advocated the integration of the PLO into the peace talks.

Two levels of action need to be considered. The first is that of each State's own policy, the second is that of the collective action of the Community, now the European Union, all caught up in the complex interplay of transatlantic relations. Indeed, the Union has a strong presence in the economic sphere, both through the EU-Israel Association Treaty, which makes the Hebrew state the Union's leading trading partner, and through the funding of Palestinian institutions since the Oslo process. Nevertheless, Europe is no more than a mere observer of the Oslo process negotiations, and although the " quartet " of the 2000s acknowledges a role for Europe, it does so within a framework that is powerless to secure acceptance of a satisfactory political solution.

Europe is thus caught between the weight of its colonial and imperial heritage, its cultural identification with Israel, the burden represented by its guilt in the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War, the importance of its economic, technological and scientific relations with the Hebrew state, and the rising indignation of part of its public opinion, marked by the accusation of apartheid and now genocide in the Gaza war.

The question is whether the vast majority of European states will recognize the Palestinian state and exert pressure on the Hebrew state, particularly in the economic sphere, or whether this is more a question of pretense designed to disguise an impotence, or even adherence, linked to their historical heritages and geopolitical commitments.

The fact remains that Europe, as a whole, is one of the major theaters of confrontation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly in public opinion. In a sense, much of Europe's identity is at stake, both in the interpretation of its past and in the definition of its future identity.