Gaza: students refuse indifference
It has been almost two weeks since, echoing the student movement developing in the United States, students in France have also decided to mobilize to denounce the monstrous aggression underway for 7 months against the population of the strip. from Gaza.
If the media focus was on Sciences-Po Paris for political reasons that were quickly unmasked, the mobilization quickly developed in other places in Paris, in the Paris region and throughout France. This Monday, May 6, it is high school students who are called to join the movement.
The France Palestine Solidarity Association, just as it had done in previous months, immediately gave its support to this mobilization which puts the ongoing genocide in Gaza back in the media spotlight. She condemned the repression that was immediately meted out to them and her activists are going wherever they can be present. The AFPS is pleased that some of the students refuse indifference.
For 7 months, everywhere in France, every week, initiatives of all kinds have been taken by a very broad solidarity movement without this being of interest to the major media, which are quicker to relay the Israeli narrative. For 7 months the bans have been falling in an attempt to silence the voices denouncing Israel's crimes and demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire, an end to the ongoing genocide.
Not only does power not hear these voices, but it wants to silence them. The period we are experiencing is unprecedented in several ways. Hundreds of activists have been arrested, defamed and summoned for advocating terrorism. Simply contextualizing the October 7 attacks in a factual manner can lead to the anti-terrorist brigade in France!
Also unprecedented is the violence of a very large part of the political and media class against those who are mobilizing and particularly at Science-Po: this prestigious school would have been “ransacked, burned and bloodied” according to the secretary of State to universities; these ministers who claim to refuse the use of the word genocide because the words have a meaning pay very little attention to the meaning of the words when they want to defame the voices of solidarity.
These students are said to be anti-Semitic. If we listen to Eric Ciotti or Élisabeth Badinter, they are “a minority of radicalized people calling for hatred”. Accusations made without a shred of proof and never contradicted by those who spread them.
On France Info, Sunday May 5, Clément Viktorovitch reports disfavored treatment and even disinformation to which pro-Palestinian voices are subjected. How can we not agree with him?
While Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister who calls for the total destruction of the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants, was welcomed in Paris in March 2023 and another minister who calls on the Jews of France to settle in the Israeli colonies in the West Bank was received by the Minister of the Interior, a Palestinian-British doctor, Ghassan Abu-Sitta, who worked at the Al-Shiffa hospital in Gaza, was prevented by the French police from participating in a conference in the Senate and turned away.
All the values are reversed: those who violate international law are officially received, while those who want to testify to their actions to relieve the victims are turned away; those who denounce violations of the law are treated like criminals, while those who deny the crimes or try to minimize them have open microphones all day long.
So, yes, we say it with others, the students mobilized all over the world are an honor for a humanity so mistreated for months by violations of all the rules of law. They continue with dignity the historic student mobilizations carried out in their time against the war in Algeria, Vietnam or against South African apartheid. We will not let them be insulted and denigrated, we will not leave them alone facing the repression of a power that has chosen the side of war criminals. They are an essential part of the solidarity movement. For Palestinians, their movement represents hope that the world will finally stop Netanyahu in his genocidal enterprise.
The AFPS National Office
May 6, 2024
