A country that doesn’t exist is destroying the others. France was among the first to formally recognise a Palestinian state, betting that early mercy would buy quiet. Instead it got the familiar sequence — import the constituency, recognise the cause, watch the host country become unrecognisable. The same streets filled with Palestinian flags — the black, white, green and red of the Abbasid, Umayyad, Fatimid and Hashemite traditions — while the French tricolor disappeared. You may have noticed that during these riots no mosque was reported damaged. CNews carried the claim, via journalist Paul Amar, that rioters arrived with addresses of Jewish shop owners and that on one Marseille street every Jewish-owned business was set alight while neighbouring Muslim-owned ones were left standing. The pattern that is visible is simpler — French symbols, public buildings and Jewish-linked sites absorb the violence, the parallel institutions of the imported communities do not. This is not new. Palestinian leadership and the networks that fly its colours have a documented habit of turning on their hosts once the host is no longer useful — Jordan in Black September, Lebanon in the civil war, and several other Arab states that later expelled or contained the same factions. Europe is now running the same experiment at larger scale. France is learning it in real time. So are Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and the rest. The flags are not metaphors for statehood. They are the colours of successive caliphates and, coincidentally, the four horsemen of the apocalypse.