Once close to the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic, for which Hamas attacks are part of “the Palestinian resistance”, the Insoumise Danièle Obono struggles to distance herself from it. Gérald Darmanin took legal action this Tuesday, October 17, for “apology of terrorism” against the member of La France insoumise for having said that the Islamist movement Hamas “resists an occupation”, a new verbal escalation ten days after the attack of the Palestinian organization against Israel.
“You exclude yourself from the republican field” by refusing to qualify Hamas as “terrorist” or by considering it as a “resistance movement”, launched Elisabeth Borne to the Insoumis during the questions to the government session at the National Assembly “Justice is seized. It will decide”, added the Prime Minister.
“Hamas, ‘a resistance movement’? No! it’s a terrorist movement”, the Minister of the Interior wrote in the morning on X (formerly Twitter), two hours after Danièle Obono’s intervention, close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on Sud Radio.
The government regularly accuses LFI of connections with political Islam. And, the day after Hamas’s unprecedented attack against the Jewish state, on October 7, Elisabeth Borne denounced “revolting ambiguities” about the situation in Israel, believing that LFI’s “anti-Zionism” was “sometimes a way of masking a form of anti-Semitism.
“Manipulations”
Pushed several times by the journalist to say whether Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, is “a resistance movement”, Danièle Obono ends up answering: “Yes”. “It’s a resistance movement that defines itself as such.” “It is an Islamist political group which has an armed wing […] which aims to liberate Palestine, which resists occupation.
These statements provoked a shower of indignant reactions from across the political spectrum. The MP posted an explanatory message on the social network. “Enough manipulation! I said that Hamas was an Islamist political group which declares its action to be part of the resistance to the occupation of Palestine. It is a fact. Neither an excuse nor a support nor a guarantee for its despicable war crimes against Israeli civilians,” she wrote.
At LR, Eric Ciotti contacted the office of the National Assembly “to request sanctions and the lifting of parliamentary immunity” of Danièle Obono. “LFI has reached a milestone in ignominy,” said National Rally leader Jordan Bardella on X, judging that “those who, on the left, maintain links with this formation are complicit in the dishonor.”
“Revulsing”
Within Nupes, Danièle Obono’s comments also caused a stir. Because it is precisely because certain rebellious leaders, first and foremost Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have refused for ten days to qualify Hamas as “terrorist” that the left alliance is on the verge of rupture.
The PS deputy Jérôme Guedj, who no longer sits in the intergroup “since this (Tuesday) morning” following this crisis, considered the declarations of the elected LFI representative “revulsive”. “This is proof that they (The rebels) did not understand what motivated our fundamental disagreement,” regretted his colleague Arthur Delaporte in front of journalists at the National Assembly. “Okay, now that’s enough. What happened on Saturday October 7 in Israel had nothing to do with ‘resistance’,” fumed environmentalist leader Marine Tondelier.
In a tweet appearing to take note of an explosion of the Nupes, Jean-Luc Mélenchon summarized the official position of LFI: “ceasefire, release of hostages, humanitarian corridor, end of the blockade of Gaza, condemnation of all war crimes ” and “UN political solution with two viable states with secure borders, non-aligned France”.
Faithful to this line, the group’s president Mathilde Panot accused those who “make believe that we have not condemned the war crimes of Hamas, which is false.” “At least fifteen” LFI parliamentarians are “threatened with death,” she assured.