The French government has instructed public prosecution services, prefects and the police, that to display solidarity with Palestine is a potential offence.
Whereas no concern is shown towards the excessive utterances of extremist supporters of the Israeli cause – for which conservative parliamentarian Meyer Habib has made himself the noisy spokesman –, the least suspicion of ambiguity regarding the actions of Hamas or the legitimacy of Israel serve as a pretext to silence, intimidate or stigmatise militant voices in support of the Palestinian cause, and which are accused of terrorism or anti-Semitism.
Let’s take a few examples. An official with the CGT trades union, Jean-Paul Delescaut, was this month handed a suspended sentence of one year in jail over the publication, following the massacres of October 7th 2023, of a text on the website of his local branch of the union. In wording that was out of place, which he himself recognised in court, his intention was to denounce the fatal spiral by which colonialist violence leads to terrorist violence.
Before his trial, a number of representatives of unions and associations expressed their concerns over moves “to assimilate any political or social protest with terrorism”, while CGT general secretary Sophie Binet spoke of a “context of repression […] never before seen” in France since the end of WWII. All of which was in vain; the court magistrates in Lille followed the public prosecutor’s recommendations to the letter.
For having similarly, in a post on social media, placed the Hamas attack in the context of the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, several activists, including the anti-racist militant Sihame Assbague, were summoned for questioning by police on suspicion of “vindication of terrorism”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Among them is the French jurist of Palestinian origin, Rima Hassan, who is running in the upcoming European elections as a candidate for the radical-left party, La France insoumise (LFI). She was handed the summons the day after the banning, by the chancellor of Lille university, and the prefect of the surrounding region, of a conference on Palestine on the campus which she was to address alongside LFI founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Her lawyer, Vincent Brengarth, posted a statement on X (formerly Twitter) on April 19th, denouncing “a general climate tending to silence voices raised to call for the protection of the rights of Palestinians and to condemn the abuses committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip”. He wrote of his alarm at the misuse of the accusation of the crime of “vindication of terrorism” which he said was “for the profit of an obvious criminalisation of thought”.
A climate of suspicion and the impunity of some media
The same day, a Paris administrative tribunal, in summary proceedings, overturned a ban issued by the Paris police prefect on a march “against racism, Islamophobia and for the protection of all children”, which was planned for April 21st. The tribunal ruled the ban to be “a serious and manifestly illegal infringement of the freedom to demonstrate”. The Paris police prefect justified the ban on the grounds of a likelihood that marchers would utter “anti-Semitic slogans”. But the magistrates underlined that the organisers had planned “to control the microphone speakers in order to prevent any anti-Semitic speech”.
These are but the most visible manifestations of a general suspicion that is amplified in the mass media, radio stations and television channels, which are in the hands of far-right propagandists, thanks to the impunity, in the audiovisual sphere, that is granted by the French presidential camp to the media group owned by tycoon Vincent Bolloré. But that suspicion is even relayed by some socialist figures, some of who have no hesitation in appearing on these same channels which are given to fuelling hatred of Muslims, of Arabs and of immigrants.
Palestine serves here as the umpteenth pretext to make these discriminating themes commonplace, suggesting an importation in France of a conflict of civilisations, in which Israel is supposed to be a Western fortress against the Islamist peril. Far from the media noise, one should imagine the silent consequences for those concerned, who are not necessarily activists, and, even less so, radical, and who are hurt in their deepest being by these words and acts.
That is true to the point of them now feeling excluded from their own country, so great is their solitude in the absence of massive indignation or the solidarity of the state in face of the stigmatization that they live with. A vast sociological investigation into the diaspora of French Muslims, entitled La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes (France, you love it but you leave it) and due to be published later this month by Seuil, shows that thousands of French citizens have already left their country since 2015, the terrible year of successive terrorist attacks in the country (see this recent report on the subject in French daily Le Monde).
With the recurrent controversies, to cite only those of recent months, over the clothes worn by Muslim school pupils, the administrative sanctions issued against private Muslim schools, and the intolerance shown towards Muslim football players who wish to observe fasting during the Ramadan, it is an understatement to say that this persecution has become simply ordinary, and accepted by most political currents. The demonizing of support for the Palestinian cause is added to this, throwing more fuel onto the flames (as if there was not already enough, for the flames have spread since so long already, to sinister indifference).
The bans issued today against expressions of solidarity with Palestine are part of a continuity seen over the past decade. Already, in 2014, the socialist government of then president François Hollande and his prime minister Manuel Valls seized on the previous Israeli war in Gaza to attack fundamental freedoms by issuing bans on planned demonstrations. But it was also the occasion to make out that a rebirth of anti-Semitism was behind any criticism of Zionism as a national Jewish movement, one that had denied the rights of a national Palestinian movement (my op-ed article published at the time can be found here).
Since then there have been the hackneyed refrains about “Islamo-leftism”, the hunt against wokeism in universities, and the theorisation of an “atmospheric jihadism” . In 2020, the dissolution of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France marked a new stage in the repression of self-organisation by the populations targeted by these campaigns. In 2021, a new level was reached with the adoption of the law against separatism, and which, it was quickly understood with the invention of the phrase “eco-terrorism”, would be used against all forms of dissidence.
No political disagreement over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should allow for putting up with this downhill course which, eventually, does not only ruin democracy by violating fundamental freedoms, but above all damages France by humiliating the diversity of its people. The historical reference that is appropriate here is the McCarthyism of the early 1950s in the US, and which was, furthermore, homophobic and anti-Semite. It created an ignominious “witch-hunt” targeting anything and everyone who could be suspected of sympathising with communism. Yes, everything and anyone: ideas, convictions, creations, works, writing, biographies, professions, relationships, frequentations and so on.
In France, but also in Germany, as illustrated by the scandalous censorship in Berlin against Yanis Varoiufakis, a new McCarthyism is being established, taking hostage the dramatic events that have struck Palestinians and Israelis in order to silence any bothersome questioning about the perilous path of the world, about the universal respect of equal rights, about the violence of colonization, about the demands of international law, about the advent of barbarities at the heart of civilisations, and about the indifferences and blindness that lead to catastrophes.
The politics of fear
McCarthyism was also dubbed the “Second Red Scare”, and it is indeed about a question of fear. The phrase “The politics of fear” emerged in the US to describe the reaction of the country following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. It sums up a political reaction prompted by an existential panic which, far from putting an end to the threat it was supposed to put a halt to, simply increased the disorders that create it. Two decades later, Islamist terrorism has expanded, Iran’s power has been reinforced and anti-Western sentiment has become rooted.
In between, so many principles have been reneged and peoples shattered. From the Patriot Act, a law of exception, to the illegal Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the green light given to torture during interrogations, and, above all, the warring invasion of Iraq on a mediatised lie, this North American blindness has assaulted all the democratic values in the name of which this riposte was carried out. The whole world is now paying the price, gripped by an unbridled brutalisation in international relations as also in internal politics, equally well illustrated by Vladimir Putin and Donlad Trump.
So it was that minority voices – including the French exception that was presented by then foreign minister Dominique de Villepin – which warned against this path to disaster by citing international law and the United Nations charter, were right, however finally powerless in preventing it. Just as today the voices, beginning with the United Nations secretary-general, are right in condemning Israel’s headlong rush of war-waging – one which is potentially genocidal according to the international Court of Justice – in its response to the terrorist massacres of last October 7th.
Viewing the Hamas attack as an existential threat, just as were the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli political-military apparatus is repeating the “politics of fear” by inflicting upon the Palestinian people a terrible collective punishment which, far from guaranteeing the future of the state of Israel, increases its geopolitical fragility and its diplomatic discredit. That only the veto of the US alone last week prevented awarding the state of Palestine full membership of the United Nations epitomizes this fatal spiral in which the use of blind force is an admission of weakness.
For it is obviously the failure to resolve the Palestinian issue that is at the origin of this extremely perilous situation in which world peace is at stake. As long as an end has not been put to this enduring, recurrent injustice meted out to the Palestinian people, and as long as Israeli leaders do not recognise its right to live in a sovereign state after it in part suffered the land expulsions in 1948, followed by the colonization of 1967, neither of the two peoples will be able to live in security, even less in serenity with each other.
History did not stop on October 7th 2023, just as it was not immobilized on September 11th 2001. The “politics of fear” would like to enclose us in an eternal present, frozen on the date of a massacre that would supposedly be of no origin, of no history, of no context. Dismissing explanations and the complexity of issues, the “politics of fear” serve notice against thinking freely and differently, which is what is summarized by “unconditionality”, the renouncement of any criticism.
From that perspective, in its diversity, showing solidarity with Palestine – which cannot be unconditional – is legitimate, if only to save the democratic principle of freedom of thought and the right to criticise. It is not only a question of humanity in face of the incommensurate martyrdom of Gaza, but also a political issue, in face of the authoritarian danger here in France itself. Whatever their differences, every force which lays claim to being part of a lively and pluralist democracy should, with one voice, united and firm, demand that this solidarity be able to freely express itself.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse