“This is France.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon is jubilant on X (ex-Twitter), this Sunday, October 22. He shares a video of the rally “for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine”, in which he has just participated at Place de la République in Paris, at the call of around forty organizations, including La France insoumise. A pacifist meeting, in which we recognize the State of Israel while clearly distinguishing between the “war crimes” of Hamas, according to the call to demonstrate, and the fate of the Palestinian people? Not only that. The Franco-Palestinian activist Omar Alsoumi, leader of the Urgence Palestine collective, spoke from the platform of the organization, evoking the “rockets of the resistance”, about the bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, which the French Military Intelligence Directorate cautiously attributes to a shot by Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas. Alongside a map of Israel entirely covered with the Palestinian flag, the slogan “I can’t breathe since 1948”, the year the Hebrew state was created, and under cries of “resistance”, he also dreamed of the “coming” destruction of the State of Israel: “Inside what they call Israel, in the cities occupied in 1948, everyone is rising. Palestine, this impregnable holy land, is in breaking free.”
No unforeseen slip-up, Omar Alsoumi being a regular at this speech. In July and August 2014, he organized several pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris on behalf of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a collective that the DGSI considers “affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP), we can read in a judgment of the Nantes administrative court of appeal, on November 8, 2019, dedicated to another pro-Palestinian activist. A link invariably denied by PYM members. This is because the PFLP, an ally of Hamas, “is included on the European list of terrorist organizations”, recalled the DGSI in the same case. In the past, this group has claimed responsibility for several attacks, including the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi on October 17, 2001.
On October 10, Omar Alsoumi returned to the Hamas attack in a video on his Facebook account. While claiming to “not like” war and “blood”, he hailed a “noble and sacred cause” as well as a “legitimate, necessary fight against colonialism, which has scored major points”. And added: “We stand alongside the Palestinian resistance whatever the cost.” The day before, he relayed a call for a first pro-Palestinian rally in Paris, accompanied by an even more explicit press release, signed by the Resistance Palestine collective. The editors exalted the “fighters” of the “Palestinian resistance” engaged “in a process of liberation which will culminate in the abolition of the colonial state Israel and the creation of a democratic Palestinian state throughout the land of Palestine”. A message punctuated with the exclamation: “Glory to the martyrs”.
A fragmented pro-Palestinian movement
Since the Hamas attack on October 7 and its 1,400 civilian victims, the pro-Palestinian movement in France has found itself more “fragmented” than ever, says Marc Hecker, researcher at Ifri and author of the book. French intifada? On the import of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, taken from his thesis. The most radical organizations, Palestine Vainra and Palestine Action Committee, dissolved in February 2022 by Gérald Darmanin, before this decision was overturned in summary proceedings by the Council of State, are kept away from large gatherings. The Indigenous Party of the Republic now also, since it tweeted on October 9: “May the Palestinian Resistance, which carries out its action with determination and confidence in heroic conditions, receive in these terrible hours all of our militant fraternity. Palestine will overcome, and his Victory will be ours.
Conversely, the France Palestine Solidarity association (AFPS) forms the most moderate wing of the mobilization. This organization is the heir of the France Palestine Association, founded in 1979 by numerous communist activists but also by some Gaullist executives, such as Louis Terrenoire, former minister and deputy, then named co-president. She campaigns, not for the disappearance of Israel, but for a two-state solution with the return to the borders of 1967, before the Six-Day War. The AFPS did not maintain its call to demonstrate on October 12 after the ban on the gathering, confirmed by the courts. The day before, she denounced in a press release “the appalling acts committed by Hamas commandos”. That’s it. Because on October 7 at 4 p.m., she mentioned in a first press release “a military operation of the weak against the strong” and “warned against the use of the term “terrorist” which has always been used against movements of resistance”.
Far from being kept away by a sanitary cordon, certain groups which support the Hamas attack remain associated with militant actions. On its website, the AFPS invites you to participate in a meeting in support of Palestinian activist Mariam Abou Daqqa in the company of several organizations, including Samidoun Paris Banlieue, an association which described the massacres of October 7 as a “chapter” of ” the heroic Palestinian resistance. Among the members of the national collective for a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis, organizer of the October 19 demonstration, we also find, in addition to La France insoumise, the AFPS, the CGT or the youth branch of the Communist Party, an association like Muslim Participation and Spirituality (PSM), favorable to the destruction of Israel. This organization is affiliated with the Moroccan Islamist movement Justice and Spirituality. On October 9, PSM shared a short text by Moroccan preacher Abdessalam Yassine, its mentor, with anti-Semitic overtones. It was about “Jewish propaganda”, the “so-called Holocaust”, the alleged guilt of the West towards the Jews which would prohibit “any criticism of the Zionist political creed”. “Not only are Arab lands occupied and developed to receive the Jewish communities called to the land of their ancestors, but the very myth which founds the Jewish claim is preserved from any attack,” mocked the imam.
“The Jews, you are the terrorists”
Pascale Léglise, director of public liberties and legal affairs at the Ministry of the Interior, raised this potential porosity between pro-Palestinian activism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism before the Council of State on October 17. Asked to justify Gérald Darmanin’s decision to ask the prefects to ban any pro-Palestinian gathering, the senior official explained that “all the demonstrations declared so far were intended to welcome the methods used for the resistance”. Then she cited a slogan heard at a demonstration in Marseille on October 11: “The Jews, the Jews, you are the terrorists.” This gathering was held at the call of the French Jewish Union for Peace, the local Young Communists, the CGT of Bouches-du-Rhône and Permanent Revolution, a small far-left group that split from the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), assuming its “support for the Palestinian resistance”.
The NPA is the subject of a report to the courts for advocating terrorism after having “recalled its support for the Palestinians and the means of struggle that they have chosen to resist”, in a press release. In 2014, clashes took place on the sidelines of demonstrations against the Israeli military operation Protective Edge. On July 13, 2014, members of the Jewish Defense League (LDJ) and pro-Palestinian activists fought near the La Roquette synagogue in Paris. On July 20, 2014, another gathering turned into a riot. A kosher grocery store was particularly targeted. Finally, on July 19 and 26, 2014, two banned gatherings were marked by violence against the CRS, then an attempted incursion into the Marais, the Parisian Jewish quarter. Each time, the organizer was overwhelmed. It was about the NPA.
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