Censuré! The crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices in France

On 21 March 2024, a roundtable titled ‘The war on Gaza seen from the West Bank’ was due to be held at Aix-Marseille University, France. But just a few hours before it was set to take place, the university’s administration revoked the permission previously granted to the higher education unions and collectives organizing it.

The organizers tried to reschedule the event under the institutional umbrella of a research unit of the university, with a new, polished and depoliticized program. But despite what an organizer described as a ‘painful exercise of self-censorship’, the university again cancelled the event at the last minute.

Under usual circumstances, the double cancellation of an academic event would attract plenty of attention. But amidst the wave of repression and censorship around the topic of Palestine that flooded French public space after the Hamas attacks on 7 October, it went almost unnoticed. I probably wouldn’t have known about the cancellation myself had I not been invited to speak.

The wave of repression

Immediately after 7 October, demonstrations in support of Palestine were banned by the French authorities and violently repressed, with peaceful demonstrators arrested. On 14 October, the 72-year old Palestinian feminist and intellectual Mariam Abu Daqqa, who had been invited to France to speak at a series 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 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is defined as a terrorist organization by the European Union.

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Offending colonial sensibilities

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While repression swept the streets, a more subtle form of control and discipline took over the media. The main newspapers, television programmes and radio stations rushed to align themselves with the Israeli narrative, condemning the 7 October attacks but at the same time omitting at least 76 years of Zionist dispossession and colonialism in Palestine. Researchers and experts were not given space to bring their nuanced and critical analyses, while others were simply censored. The terms of the discourse prohibited many from participating in public debate for fear of being attacked or misrepresented.

Academia was not spared from the flood of repression. University professors were cautioned, suspended and had disciplinary cases opened against them for expressing support for the Palestinian liberation struggle, even if only on their personal social media accounts. On 9 July 2024, for example, François Burgat, director emeritus of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and an expert on political Islam, was detained on charges of ‘apology for terrorism’.

Simultaneously, a wider administrative repression resulted in the cancellation of academic events about Palestine, justified on the grounds of security or because the events were deemed overtly political. Scholars were silenced outside the university too. The most prominent case was that of American philosopher Judith Butler, whose talk on antisemitism and Palestine, due to have been held on 6 December, was cancelled by the Mayor of Paris.

But as the toll of Palestinian victims in Gaza rose, so the solidarity movement inside the universities grew. Like in the USA and around Europe, universities in France became the main sites not only for the mobilisation for Palestine, but also for protests in support of academic freedom.

The government increasingly began to intervene in university affairs. On 13 March 2024, the French prime minister Gabriel Attal presented himself at Sciences Po in Paris, urging the university to take disciplinary action against students who had organised a Palestine solidarity event on campus. This intervention followed accusations of antisemitism by members of the Union of Jewish Students of France. For fear of being labelled antisemitic, many universities stepped up censorship on all matters related to Palestine.

Sciences Po University became the epicentre of student encampments in France, which then extended to other universities, including the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. The occupations, which peacefully demanded the end of academic collaborations with military and colonial institutions, faced repression from university administrators. On various occasions, universities called the police to evict their students, sometimes leading to arrests. Police repression didn’t spare demonstrations in high schools either, with many students detained. The normalisation of systematic police intervention inside schools and universities became a major concern.

The attacks on pro-Palestinian student movements are an expression of the rising authoritarianism of the French authorities, aligned on pro-Israeli positions. During the recent French legislative elections, characterised by a historically high score for the far right, accusations of antisemitism were often instrumentalised to discredit antiracist personalities and movements who condemned the Israeli aggression on Gaza. The far-left political party La France Insoumise and its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon bore the brunt of these attacks.

An old French story

The repression of the Palestinian solidarity movement in France is not new. Pro-Palestine movements, including BDS, have faced repeated attempts at criminalization over the years. The general attitude of French institutions towards Palestine has deep and complex reasons related to French geopolitics, France’s colonial past, and its racist authoritarian present.

Upon the creation of the state of Israel, France was the main supporter of its military and nuclear armament. The Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert, for example, was constructed with French assistance outside the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection regime. From the 1960s onwards, France altered its position, recognizing the national rights of the Palestinians. The aim was to ensure France’s independence from the United States and to bolster its position in the Arab world following the decolonial movements. At the same time, France kept up diplomatic and economic ties with Israel and never seriously question its colonial order.

Over the last twenty years, successive French governments’ lurch to the right and alignment with American neoconservative doctrine has resulted in stronger political, economic and ideological ties with Israel. Powerful Zionist interest groups played a role in shaping government attitudes towards Israel and Palestine, using accusations of antisemitism to apply pressure. In 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron announced to attendees of the annual dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions that France would adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, declaring that ‘antizionism is a modern form of antisemitism’. This conflation of antizionism and antisemitism aims to silence criticism of Israel while leveraging historical guilt about France’s long and unresolved history of antisemitism.

This refusal to criticize Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise, despite all the evidence of its violence and injustice, also has an intellectual history. Although many leftwing French intellectuals from the 1950s onwards were vocal on other social, political and even anti-colonial causes, most were silent or even sympathetic with respect to Zionism, with a few exceptions such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean Genet. Recalling the time Jean-Paul Sartre invited him to Paris, the Palestinian–American scholar Edward Said was struck by how coldly he was treated by many French intellectuals, including Michel Foucault. Said, who was always very outspoken about Palestine, was marginalised in France; even now his works remain incompletely translated into French.

Compared to other countries, French academia is generally resistant towards postcolonial studies, and especially decolonial studies, which offer a more global and radical critique of western hegemony. Yet despite their marginality, decolonial studies in France have been targeted by conservative intellectuals and media, who accuse them of being anti-scientific and promoting identity politics. This tendency, often attributed to antipathy towards American academic hegemony, conceals a deeper issue: France’s problematic attitude towards its unresolved colonial past and neocolonial present.

Take the debate over the historiography of the Algerian war and, particularly, revisionist attempts to re-habilitate French colonialism. In 2005, France’s ‘memory law’ (2005-158) sparked controversy above all for its article 4 requiring high school teachers to emphasise France’s ‘positive role’ in its former colonies. Although article 4 was later amended, the law 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’.

When it comes to Palestine, analysing the problem in colonial terms becomes almost outrageous. A personal anecdote: as an Italian–Palestinian doctoral student working on Palestine, I was asked to substitute the word ‘colonialism’, considered (and I cite) ‘too partial’ and to be ‘avoided’, in favour of ‘conflict’. This linguistic control is part of a more general regime of truth, on that does not criticize Israel and represents the historical situation as a conflict between two equal sides. Far from being objective, this discourse obscures specific political interests.

Despite this epistemic violence, a younger generation of researchers, among them francophone Palestinians, are slowly changing the paradigm, bringing the settler-colonial framework into the centre of their analysis on Palestine.

The continuity of Eurocentrism and the taboo on criticising Israeli colonialism within academia stem from a dominant worldview characterized by enduring racism. As economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon has argued, some sectors of European society, particularly the bourgeoisie, instinctively side with Israel, not only because of sociological affinities (neoliberal lifestyles, etc.), but also and especially shared sympathy for domination and racial supremacy.

The racist hierarchization of lives is evident in the double standard of French institutions when dealing with international conflicts and humanitarian crises. The behaviour of the CNRS was emblematic, suspending all scientific collaborations with Russia in response to the aggression on Ukraine, but never making a pronouncement regarding the Israeli aggression on Gaza.

This racist attitude permeates France’s policies towards black and brown ethnic communities in its territory. Historically, France has applied an assimilationist model towards the different ethno-religious groups under its power, putting political efforts into disciplining these subjects under the ‘universal’ values of the French Republic and the principle of laïcité. Often, this has meant violently repressing expression of the religious and cultural specificities of minorities. Racialised subjects have been spatially, professionally and socially discriminated against over the years; actual equality of rights and opportunities has never been achieved.

Rising repression, growing mobilization

Islamophobic discourses and policies became particularly virulent in France after the Islamist terrorist attacks in 2015, after which anti-terrorist powers belonging to emergency law were integrated into common law, leading to limitations on individual and collective civil liberties. In the years since, the French parliament has passed a series of laws targeting Muslim communities, including the ‘separatism’ bill that enables the suppression of Muslim and anti-racist collectives.

The rise of Islamophobia didn’t spare academia, where many scholars and intellectuals were derogatorily labelled islamo-gauchistes (Islamo-leftists). The term has been promoted not only by the conservative right, but also by thinktanks and personalities associated with the right wing of the Socialist Party. Former Socialist PM Manuel Valls’s theory of the ‘two irreconcilable lefts’ made the battle against ‘Islamism‘ (including the refusal of the concept of ‘Islamophobia’) one of the major lines of fracture between an acceptable  left (i.e. one that was républicaine and laïque) and the rest of the spectrum.

In 2021, the Ministry of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal announced his intention to open an inquiry into ‘islamo-gauchisme’ in universities and to ask the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) to provide ‘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 eventually did not take place after the CNRS refused to participate, was supposed to have targeted post-colonial, decolonial and intersectionality studies, which focus on overlapping dominations and discriminations on the basis of race, gender and class.

While the category of islamo-gauchisme was rejected by the CNRS as ‘non-scientific’, the new wave of McCarthyism faced by pro-Palestinian scholars and students continues to pose real risks to their careers and can have serious legal and professional consequences. The structural racism and rising authoritarianism of French institutions explain both the violent response to the Palestinian solidarity movements as well as the indifference towards the massacres faced by the Palestinian population in Gaza.

However, the dehumanization of racialized lives and the mechanisms to discipline and punish dissent couldn’t stop the revolt against injustice and violence. Social media provided a space for independent information and exchange, connecting solidarity movements worldwide, while massive demonstrations continue undeterred.

For many people in France, Palestine symbolizes not only the Palestinian people’s liberation struggle but also a global fight against racism, injustice, imperialism and fascism. It’s no coincidence that, today, the Palestinian movement finds echoes and reciprocal solidarity in the independence struggle of the Kanak people, the indigenous population of the Kanaky archipelago (Nouvelle Calédonie) in the Pacific Ocean, colonized by France in 1853.

Since the current Israeli aggression on Gaza, new pro-Palestinian local and national groups have emerged in France, while pre-existing ones, such as BDS collectives, have gained members. The solidarity movement has brought together different social and political forces, from the radical leftwing to decolonial and anti-racist movements, including anti-Zionist Jews. The composition of the movement is also varied across class lines, with strong participation from racialized and marginalized populations, labour unions and profession-based collectives, such as reporters, teachers, lawyers, doctors and cultural workers.

In the university, the movements of students and higher education employees have become increasingly focused, calling on their universities to demand an end to the genocide in Palestine, to cease partnerships with colonial and military institutions, to enter into partnerships with Palestinian universities, and to respect academic freedoms. They have created new virtual spaces, including blogs, mailing lists and platforms to exchange information and provide independent research and analysis on Palestine. Through the encampment movements, the students have freed up physical spaces for critical thought and exchange, accessible not only to university members but also the broader public.

The joint efforts of various societal forces, as well as the evident brutality of the of the Israeli regime, are slowly having an effect in France. The grassroots movement is exerting political pressure from the bottom up, slowly shifting the discourse towards bolder positions that condemn Israeli occupation and colonialism.