Olly Haynes is the latest monthly columnist to join Conter. He works regularly in France, and has reported across Europe, bringing that coverage and expertise to the site. He has written for the Guardian, Vice World News, The i newspaper, Rolling Stone UK, Huck Magazine, Novara Media, Open Democracy and many others.
Support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people has proven an altar upon which Western nations are willing to sacrifice liberalism’s self-declared principles – a basic commitment to universal human rights, antifascism, the right to free speech and the right to free assembly. This liquidation of civil liberties is well documented in Germany and the US and readers in the UK are probably aware of cases like the UCL students who were suspended over Palestinian advocacy and who may have been expelled had it not been for the intervention of the UN, or the draconian use of conspiracy charging by the police with the aid of the right wing press, which allowed for the prevention of actions by Palestine Action.
But a country that has gone relatively unnoticed in its brutal treatment of advocates of the Palestinian cause is France.
When Rima Hassan was elected as an MEP in May 2024 for La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) she became the first person of Palestinian heritage to hold office within the EU apparatus. However, the lawfare and harassment that has dogged her political career began even before she took office. During the campaign she was summoned by the counter-terror police for the crime of “apologia for terrorism” an offence unique to France brought in under Hollande’s government and beefed up under Macron, which purportedly aims to prevent the spread of terrorist propaganda. In reality, the law is used as a cudgel to harass those who disagree with the foreign policy consensus of France’s political establishment, particularly advocates of Palestine.
Hassan was summoned following vexatious complaints by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Organisation Juive Europeen who also managed to provoke a summons of the parliamentary leader of La France Insoumise, Mathilde Panot.
Within two months of Hassan taking office a member of a member of France’s right wing Les Republicains party spearheaded efforts to block her (a scholar of human rights and international law) from the EU’s subcommittee on human rights. Within three months, MPs from the ruling Renaissance party appealed to the public prosecutor to have her parliamentary immunity revoked for attending a pro-Palestine protest, which they characterised as pro-Hamas.
This would prove to be a recurring theme. Hassan gave an interview in which she stated that there is a right to armed struggle under international law, but not to take hostages or kill civilians. She stated her position that Hamas’ actions on October the 7th were a war crime. This did not stop a coalition spanning from the centre-left to the far right from attacking her. Jerome Guedj, a right wing member of the Parti Socialiste used it as an excuse to try and distance the party from La France Insoumise. The hard, arguably far, right interior minister Bruno Retaillau referred Hasan once again to the counter terror police, and François-Noël Buffet and Patrick Mignola, ministers in the Bayrou government said that removing her citizenship “should be under consideration”, in a move that can really only be interpreted as a threat.
This is by no means the extent of the campaign against Hassan, and Palestine advocacy among the elected representatives of the left more broadly, and she is merely the most visible figure that gets attacked this way.
The apologia for terrorism law has been used against one trade unionist who is currently in prison over a communique which stated “the horrors of the illegal occupation have accumulated. Since [October 7] they have received the responses that they themselves provoked”. The judge that sentenced him argued that he diminished the moral gravity of the acts of 7/10 by insufficiently condemning Hamas. Anasse Kazib, a railwayman, trade unionist and spokesperson for the Trotskyist political formation Revolution Permanente is soon facing trial for pro-Palestine tweets under the apologia for terrorism law. Figures of the global left including Robert Brenner and Nancy Fraser have signed an open letter in support of Kazib as he and his comrades aim to politicise his trial and pushback against the judicial harassment of pro-Palestine advocates, however the maximum penalty for his supposed crime – apologia for terrorism published on the internet – is 7 years in prison.
At the level of discourse the battlefield is being constructed against the left and the Muslim population, with the two being amalgamated in the right-wing imagination into a Frankenstein’s monster of “Islamo-Bolshevism.” If Muslims act politically to oppose the genocide, it is Islamism or sometimes “frereism” (a reference to the Brothers of Islam) no matter how universal the terms they use, no matter how secular the arguments they make. If a left-wing politician opposes the genocide and defends minorities from racism and wins votes as they do so, this is communatarism, or Islamo-leftism no matter how radically and steadfastly republican their platform and discourse.
Meanwhile government ministers and supposedly centre-left journalists can attend a rally organised by pro-Israel lobby group Elnet in which a Belgian far right activist calls for “Christian and Jewish communities to unite against Islam […] to arm themselves physically and train physically to use weapons” and face no such accusations of identitarianism or anti-republicanism. France may not have reached such an advanced stage of anti-Palestinian authoritarianism as Germany or the US, but it is well on its way. More than a decade of political discourse demonising Muslims and the beefing up of the state apparatus since the post-Bataclan state of emergency was transposed into law, has helped create the conditions for a severe restriction of civil liberties.
