It is the evening of October 17, an explosion occurs at Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. There would be hundreds of deaths, 200, 500, all the numbers are circulating. In the age of social networks, the important thing is to react immediately, and check later, and only if the opportunity presents itself. Jean-Luc Mélenchon draws: “Shame of a French government which invents internal controversies instead of going to the aid of the victims of war crimes in Gaza. President, stop unconditional support for an Israeli government which commits war crimes also abominable. France is not that.”
Mathilde Panot was at a good school, she chairs the LFI group in the Assembly: “500 innocent civilians killed. The Israeli army bombed a hospital.” Thomas Portes is an LFI deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis: “Israel made the conscious choice to massacre families. […] There are already 500 dead.” Hadrien Clouet is an LFI MP for Haute-Garonne: “The Israeli army is now bombing hospitals.” Younous Omarjee is an LFI European MP and, if we dare say, the most generous of all: “More 800 deaths in a hospital. This is where Israel’s right to defend itself leads without setting the limits defined by international law. This is where the permanent excuse for all of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians leads. Shame on all those who remain silent.”
Shame ? Or thank you to everyone who is silent. Less than forty-eight hours later, if the versions remain contradictory, not one definitively accuses Israel. It would seem, to say the least, that there is no certainty about who was responsible for the explosion – we are not specialists and the definitive identification of the person responsible promises to be particularly delicate and long. The Guardian publishes an investigation which concludes that the crater in the hospital parking lot does not correspond to an air attack but rather to a rocket attack which failed. Furthermore, an official of a European intelligence service cited by AFP speaks of “a few dozen deaths” and not hundreds – it is not less serious, but it is not the same.
Reality, the search for truth, these are not the objectives of LFI elected officials. To withdraw? Moderate the peremptory convictions of the first hours? You do not belive it. Here, we don’t come up against reality. None of the elected officials cited above provided the slightest nuance to these definitive remarks – none have the competence to know, but that is of no importance. Manuel Bompard persists and signs this Thursday at 1 p.m.: “This is the third hospital to be hit by the Israelis, there have been evacuation orders, the credibility of the IDF has already been compromised. At this stage , the most likely hypothesis is that it is Israel’s responsibility.” He adds: “But I no longer say the same thing as the day before yesterday.” If he clarifies it during a casual conversation, he does not rush to write it publicly. We don’t recognize our mistakes, we don’t apologize, it’s a course of action.
This close friend of Jean-Luc Mélenchon remembers a recent episode: when the deputy Aurélien Saintoul, in the middle of a debate on pensions, described the Minister of Labor Olivier Dussopt as an “assassin”, he quickly conceded that the words had gone beyond his thought and presented “a public apology”. The next day on the radio, Bompard is a guest on a radio station, he is asked if the apologies of his LFI colleague are enough. Today, he is learning his lesson: “The media didn’t want an apology, they wanted him to make amends.”
At least the first secretary of the PS Olivier Faure had the decency, failing to apologize, to delete his first tweet, in which he described the bombing of the hospital in Gaza as a “war crime of IDF.” Not very glorious, of course, but it allows him to avoid persisting in error.
At the conference organized for the 70th anniversary of L’Express on Wednesday, Bruno Le Maire recounted this recent anecdote: an opposition deputy (whose political color he does not specify) accuses him of an unfair tax decision, the minister of Economy calls him to tell him that it is a lie. And would have been told: “I know that, but the problem isn’t whether it’s true or false, it’s that people believe it.”