On 21 March 2024, a roundtable titled ‘The war on Gaza seen from the West Bank’ was resulting from be held at Aix-Marseille College, France. However just some hours earlier than it was set to happen, the college’s administration revoked the permission beforehand granted to the upper training unions and collectives organizing it.
The organizers tried to reschedule the occasion below the institutional umbrella of a analysis unit of the college, with a brand new, polished and depoliticized program. However regardless of what an organizer described as a ‘painful exercise of self-censorship’, the college once more cancelled the occasion on the final minute.
Below traditional circumstances, the double cancellation of a tutorial occasion would appeal to loads of consideration. However amidst the wave of repression and censorship across the subject of Palestine that flooded French public house after the Hamas assaults on 7 October, it went virtually unnoticed. I in all probability wouldn’t have identified concerning the cancellation myself had I not been invited to talk.
The French–Palestinian human rights lawyer and activist Rima Hassan at an indication in Marseille in April 2024. Picture: AN2303 / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
The wave of repression
Instantly after 7 October, demonstrations in assist of Palestine had been banned by the French authorities and violently repressed, with peaceable demonstrators arrested. On 14 October, the 72-year outdated Palestinian feminist and mental Mariam Abu Daqqa, who had been invited to France to talk at a sequence of conferences, was brutally detained by the police and deported to Egypt after a month in custody. Abu Daqqa’s detention was linked to her affiliation with the Widespread Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is outlined as a terrorist group by the European Union.
Whereas repression swept the streets, a extra refined type of management and self-discipline took over the media. The primary newspapers, tv programmes and radio stations rushed to align themselves with the Israeli narrative, rightly condemning the 7 October assault however on the identical time omitting at the very least 76 years of Zionist dispossession and colonialism in Palestine. Researchers and consultants weren’t given house to carry their nuanced and important analyses, whereas others had been merely censored. The phrases of the discourse prohibited many from collaborating in public debate for worry of being attacked or misrepresented.
Academia was not spared from the flood of repression. College professors had been cautioned, suspended and had disciplinary circumstances opened in opposition to them for expressing assist for the Palestinian liberation wrestle, even when solely on their private social media accounts. On 9 July 2024, for instance, François Burgat, director emeritus of analysis on the Nationwide Centre for Scientific Analysis (CNRS) and an skilled on political Islam, was detained on prices of ‘apology for terrorism’.
Concurrently, a wider administrative repression resulted within the cancellation of educational occasions about Palestine, justified on the grounds of safety or as a result of the occasions had been deemed overtly political. Students had been silenced exterior the college too. Essentially the most distinguished case was that of American thinker Judith Butler, whose speak on antisemitism and Palestine, resulting from have been held on 6 December, was cancelled by the Mayor of Paris.
However because the toll of Palestinian victims in Gaza rose, so the solidarity motion inside the colleges grew. Like within the USA and round Europe, universities in France turned the principle websites not just for the mobilisation for Palestine, but additionally for protests in assist of educational freedom.
The federal government more and more started to intervene in college affairs. On 13 March 2024, the French prime minister Gabriel Attal introduced himself at Sciences Po in Paris, urging the college to take disciplinary motion in opposition to college students who had organised a Palestine solidarity occasion on campus. This intervention adopted accusations of antisemitism by members of the Union of Jewish College students of France. For worry of being labelled antisemitic, many universities stepped up censorship on all issues associated to Palestine.
Sciences Po College turned the epicentre of scholar encampments in France, which then prolonged to different universities, together with the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. The occupations, which peacefully demanded the tip of educational collaborations with navy and colonial establishments, confronted repression from college directors. On numerous events, universities referred to as the police to evict their college students, typically resulting in arrests. Police repression didn’t spare demonstrations in excessive colleges both, with many college students detained. The normalisation of systematic police intervention inside colleges and universities turned a serious concern.
The assaults on pro-Palestinian scholar actions are an expression of the rising authoritarianism of the French authorities, aligned on pro-Israeli positions. Through the latest French legislative elections, characterised by a traditionally excessive rating for the far proper, accusations of antisemitism had been usually instrumentalised to discredit antiracist personalities and actions who condemned the Israeli aggression on Gaza. The far-left political social gathering La France Insoumise and its chief Jean-Luc Mélenchon bore the brunt of those assaults.
An outdated French story
The repression of the Palestinian solidarity motion in France just isn’t new. Professional-Palestine actions, together with BDS, have confronted repeated makes an attempt at criminalization over time. The overall perspective of French establishments in direction of Palestine has deep and complicated causes associated to French geopolitics, France’s colonial previous, and its racist authoritarian current.
Upon the creation of the state of Israel, France was the principle supporter of its navy and nuclear armament. The Dimona nuclear reactor within the Negev Desert, for instance, was constructed with French help exterior the Worldwide Atomic Power Company inspection regime. From the Sixties onwards, France altered its place, recognizing the nationwide rights of the Palestinians. The goal was to make sure France’s independence from america and to bolster its place within the Arab world following the decolonial actions. On the identical time, France saved up diplomatic and financial ties with Israel and by no means critically query its colonial order.
Over the past twenty years, successive French governments’ lurch to the fitting and alignment with American neoconservative doctrine has resulted in stronger political, financial and ideological ties with Israel. Highly effective Zionist curiosity teams performed a task in shaping authorities attitudes in direction of Israel and Palestine, utilizing accusations of antisemitism to use stress. In 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron introduced to attendees of the annual dinner of the Consultant Council of French Jewish Establishments that France would undertake the IHRA definition of antisemitism, declaring that ‘antizionism is a modern form of antisemitism’. This conflation of antizionism and antisemitism goals to silence criticism of Israel whereas leveraging historic guilt about France’s lengthy and unresolved historical past of antisemitism.
This refusal to criticize Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise, regardless of all of the proof of its violence and injustice, additionally has an mental historical past. Though many leftwing French intellectuals from the Nineteen Fifties onwards had been vocal on different social, political and even anti-colonial causes, most had been silent and even sympathetic with respect to Zionism, with a number of exceptions comparable to Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean Genet. Recalling the time Jean-Paul Sartre invited him to Paris, the Palestinian–American scholar Edward Stated was struck by how coldly he was handled by many French intellectuals, together with Michel Foucault. Stated, who was all the time very outspoken about Palestine, was marginalised in France; even now his works stay incompletely translated into French.
In comparison with different international locations, French academia is usually resistant in direction of postcolonial research, and particularly decolonial research, which provide a extra international and radical critique of western hegemony. But regardless of their marginality, decolonial research in France have been focused by conservative intellectuals and media, who accuse them of being anti-scientific and selling identification politics. This tendency, usually attributed to antipathy in direction of American tutorial hegemony, conceals a deeper concern: France’s problematic perspective in direction of its unresolved colonial previous and neocolonial current.
Take the debate over the historiography of the Algerian conflict and, significantly, revisionist makes an attempt to re-habilitate French colonialism. In 2005, France’s ‘memory law’ (2005-158) sparked controversy above all for its article 4 requiring highschool lecturers to emphasize France’s ‘positive role’ in its former colonies. Though article 4 was later amended, the regulation continues to acknowledge the nation’s ‘gratitude to the women and men who participated in the work accomplished by France in the former French departments of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Indochina as well as in the territories previously placed under French sovereignty’.
With regards to Palestine, analysing the issue in colonial phrases turns into virtually outrageous. A private anecdote: as an Italian–Palestinian doctoral scholar engaged on Palestine, I used to be requested to substitute the phrase ‘colonialism’, thought-about (and I cite) ‘too partial’ and to be ‘avoided’, in favour of ‘conflict’. This linguistic management is a part of a extra common regime of reality, on that doesn’t criticize Israel and represents the historic scenario as a battle between two equal sides. Removed from being goal, this discourse obscures particular political pursuits.
Regardless of this epistemic violence, a youthful technology of researchers, amongst them francophone Palestinians, are slowly altering the paradigm, bringing the settler-colonial framework into the centre of their evaluation on Palestine.
The continuity of Eurocentrism and the taboo on criticising Israeli colonialism inside academia stem from a dominant worldview characterised by enduring racism. As economist and thinker Frédéric Lordon has argued, some sectors of European society, significantly the bourgeoisie, instinctively aspect with Israel, not solely due to sociological affinities (neoliberal existence, and many others.), but additionally and particularly shared sympathy for domination and racial supremacy.
The racist hierarchization of lives is obvious within the double commonplace of French establishments when coping with worldwide conflicts and humanitarian crises. The behaviour of the CNRS was emblematic, suspending all scientific collaborations with Russia in response to the aggression on Ukraine, however by no means making a pronouncement concerning the Israeli aggression on Gaza.
This racist perspective permeates France’s insurance policies in direction of black and brown ethnic communities in its territory. Traditionally, France has utilized an assimilationist mannequin in direction of the completely different ethno-religious teams below its energy, placing political efforts into disciplining these topics below the ‘universal’ values of the French Republic and the precept of laïcité. Usually, this has meant violently repressing expression of the non secular and cultural specificities of minorities. Racialised topics have been spatially, professionally and socially discriminated in opposition to over time; precise equality of rights and alternatives has by no means been achieved.
Rising repression, rising mobilization
Islamophobic discourses and insurance policies turned significantly virulent in France after the Islamist terrorist assaults in 2015, after which anti-terrorist powers belonging to emergency regulation had been built-in into widespread regulation, resulting in limitations on particular person and collective civil liberties. Within the years since, the French parliament has handed a sequence of legal guidelines focusing on Muslim communities, together with the ‘separatism’ invoice that permits the suppression of Muslim and anti-racist collectives.
The rise of Islamophobia didn’t spare academia, the place many students and intellectuals had been derogatorily labelled islamo-gauchistes (Islamo-leftists). The time period has been promoted not solely by the conservative proper, but additionally by thinktanks and personalities related to the fitting wing of the Socialist Celebration. Former Socialist PM Manuel Valls’s concept of the ‘two irreconcilable lefts’ made the battle in opposition to ‘Islamism‘ (including the refusal of the concept of ‘Islamophobia’) one of many main strains of fracture between an appropriate left (i.e. one which was républicaine and laïque) and the remainder of the spectrum.
In 2021, the Ministry of Increased Training Frédérique Vidal introduced his intention to open an inquiry into ‘islamo-gauchisme’ in universities and to ask the Nationwide Centre for Scientific Analysis (CNRS) to supply ‘a report on all the research taking place in France, in order to distinguish what falls under academic research and what is activism’. The investigation, which finally didn’t happen after the CNRS refused to take part, was imagined to have focused post-colonial, decolonial and intersectionality research, which deal with overlapping dominations and discriminations on the premise of race, gender and sophistication.
Whereas the class of islamo-gauchisme was rejected by the CNRS as ‘non-scientific’, the brand new wave of McCarthyism confronted by pro-Palestinian students and college students continues to pose actual dangers to their careers and might have critical authorized {and professional} penalties. The structural racism and rising authoritarianism of French establishments clarify each the violent response to the Palestinian solidarity actions in addition to the indifference in direction of the massacres confronted by the Palestinian inhabitants in Gaza.
Nevertheless, the dehumanization of racialized lives and the mechanisms to self-discipline and punish dissent couldn’t cease the revolt in opposition to injustice and violence. Social media offered an area for unbiased info and change, connecting solidarity actions worldwide, whereas large demonstrations proceed undeterred.
For many individuals in France, Palestine symbolizes not solely the Palestinian folks’s liberation wrestle but additionally a world battle in opposition to racism, injustice, imperialism and fascism. It’s no coincidence that, at the moment, the Palestinian motion finds echoes and reciprocal solidarity in the independence wrestle of the Kanak folks, the indigenous inhabitants of the Kanaky archipelago (Nouvelle Calédonie) within the Pacific Ocean, colonized by France in 1853.
For the reason that present Israeli aggression on Gaza, new pro-Palestinian native and nationwide teams have emerged in France, whereas pre-existing ones, comparable to BDS collectives, have gained members. The solidarity motion has introduced collectively completely different social and political forces, from the novel leftwing to decolonial and anti-racist actions, together with anti-Zionist Jews. The composition of the motion can also be assorted throughout class strains, with robust participation from racialized and marginalized populations, labour unions and profession-based collectives, comparable to reporters, lecturers, legal professionals, medical doctors and cultural staff.
Within the college, the actions of scholars and better training staff have change into more and more targeted, calling on their universities to demand an finish to the genocide in Palestine, to stop partnerships with colonial and navy establishments, to enter into partnerships with Palestinian universities, and to respect tutorial freedoms. They’ve created new digital areas, together with blogs, mailing lists and platforms to change info and supply unbiased analysis and evaluation on Palestine. By means of the encampment actions, the scholars have freed up bodily areas for important thought and change, accessible not solely to school members but additionally the broader public.
The joint efforts of varied societal forces, in addition to the evident brutality of the of the Israeli regime, are slowly having an impact in France. The grassroots motion is exerting political stress from the underside up, slowly shifting the discourse in direction of bolder positions that condemn Israeli occupation and colonialism.
