Gerard Araud

A screen grab of Ambassador Nicolas de Rivière of France participating in a videoconference of the UN Security Council on Syria, April 29, 2020. As president of the Council in June, he intends to speak only in French in public sessions, as multilingualism in the Council, he said, has suffered collateral damage during the pandemic. 

WASHINGTON — In an interview with the Atlantic last Friday, outgoing French Ambassador to the United States Gerard Araud made headlines after emphatically stating that Israel is already “an apartheid state” and that the Trump administration’s so-called “Deal of the Century” aimed at resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is “99 percent doomed.”