How good (and practical) it is to be young. “I was not born”: this is the Swiss Army knife argument invoked by some after the outbreak of the so-called “red hands” controversy, to justify the good faith with which dozens of students brandished their painted hands blood color during a gathering in front of the school on rue Saint-Guillaume, Friday April 26. In response to the outraged tweets of several observers such as the socialist elected official from Strasbourg Pernelle Richardot, the cartoonist Joan Sfar and the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, who denounced a reference to the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000 (one of the attackers had shown his bloody hands to the crowd), several defenders of the initiative thus put forward the factor of ignorance.
“I didn’t have this reference, neither did my comrades”, for example assured CheckNews (Release) Hubert Launois, student at Sciences Po and member of the Palestinian Committee. “I was born in 2004. In 2000, many were not born, or were one or two years old. This is not an image that speaks to our generation,” he continued, saying “sorry ” and specifying that in the future, “we will have to pay attention to this symbol”.
And if it was true ? Between the desire to make an impression and a lack of knowledge of history, an unfortunate reference quickly arrived. On October 20, young climate activist Greta Thunberg published a photo in which she was seen posing with a “Stand with Gaza” sign alongside three activists, and a stuffed toy with the image of a blue octopus . Faced with the outcry – the image of the tentacled animal having been used in Nazi propaganda in the 1930s to represent the dangerousness of the Jewish population – the Swede immediately deleted the publication, pleading ignorance. “I learned that the stuffed animal illustrated in my previous message could be interpreted as a symbol of anti-Semitism, which I was totally unaware of,” she assured, before republishing a similar photo but this time, without the creature.
Ron Hassner, professor of political science at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, has studied this factor of ignorance. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal in December 2023, the professor reported having contacted a survey institute given the success of the slogan “From the river to the sea”, in order to ask 250 students with varied profiles which river and which sea the formula designates according to them. 53% said they were rather in favor of the slogan and 33% “very much in favor”… But only 47% were able to name the river and the sea in question. All it took was a few historical reminders (particularly on the Oslo Accords) and a map showing what, concretely, a Palestine stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan (the disappearance of Israel) would entail, for nearly 70 % of supporters say they no longer support the slogan.
Rain of counter-examples
Often, ignorance is recognized by the mea culpa (or backpedaling) that follows once the error is highlighted. However, since the start of the red hands controversy, some have persisted in defending their position with a lot of counter-examples. On April 29, activist Ariane Anemoyannis argued on the set of C this evening (France 5) that “the action of the red hands is blood on the hands, it is complicity with the genocide and it is even an action which has been seen in Israel in demonstrations (…) It we should not use this to say that the students in France who are fighting against the massacres are for the massacre of the Jews!” Faced with his denials, Denis Charbit, professor of political science at the Open University of Israel, asked “but now that you know (…), are you going to stop with that?” Another guest speaks again. No response from the young woman.
Likewise, an article from the Contre-attack blog (in particular relayed by the writer Mona Chollet) also pointed out the common meaning of the expression “to have blood on your hands: the expression which designates a crime is as old as French language, and has equivalents throughout the world. It is an image regularly used to denounce executioners, dictators, war criminals. Better: the article advances in a jumble of previous uses of the symbolism of red hands. Thus the parade of demonstrators with bloody hands after a man had his hand torn off by a grenade in Notre-Dame-des-Landes in 2018, that of women in support of Aboriginal rights or even the case of Black Live supporters Matters in the United States.
In hollow, we read the following idea: since there would be only one case which would refer to the lynching of Israeli soldiers, and many others whose symbolism would be on the contrary “anti-war”, then – logic of the greatest number obliges – the current controversy is the result of a false trial. So much the worse for the obvious, namely that the symbolism of an image is first assessed in terms of the context in which it is used; here, that of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
Wouldn’t common sense have wanted this image not to be invoked – precisely because of its polysemy and the parallel with the drama of Ramallah which would surely follow? While false trials conflating defense of the Palestinian cause and rejection of Israel multiply, some seem not (or no longer) afraid of fueling them. Even if it means making yourself, for real, the “useful idiots” of better-informed agitators of passions.
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