[News] Egged on by Israel, France bans Salah Hammouri from speaking

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/egged-israel-france-bans-salah-hammouri-speaking>
Egged
on by Israel, France bans Salah Hammouri from speaking

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> - 16
March 2023

Prior to his expulsion from his native Jerusalem, France’s government made
a big show of supporting Salah Hammouri
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/salah-hamouri> – at least verbally.

President Emmanuel Macron’s administration publicly admonished
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/do-not-expel-salah-hammouri-france-tells-israel>
Israel that the Palestinian French human rights lawyer “must be allowed to
exercise all of his rights and live a normal life in Jerusalem, the city
where he was born and where he resides.”

Despite such toothless protests from Paris, Israeli occupation authorities
subjected Hammouri to years of imprisonment without charge or trial and finally
expelled him
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/kicking-aside-french-protests-israel-expels-salah-hammouri>
to France in December.

One would think that having lectured Israel in this manner, the government
in France – where Hammouri has never been charged with or convicted of any
crime – would at least want to set an example by treating its citizen with
a modicum of respect for his basic human and political rights.

But instead, egged on by Israel and its lobby, the Macron administration
is, in its turn, subjecting Hammouri to Israeli-style harassment and
persecution which has resulted in his speaking events being canceled or
banned by government decree.

According to Hammouri, on Wednesday night French authorities prohibited an
event <https://twitter.com/LiberezSalah/status/1634835384915083266> in
which he was due to take part in the eastern city of Nancy on Thursday.

Hammouri told The Electronic Intifada that he saw the bans “as an extension
of my expulsion” by Israel and as “an attack on free speech.”

Arnaud Cochet, the French government’s top official in the region where
Nancy is located, explained
<https://www.estrepublicain.fr/politique/2023/03/15/nancy-une-conference-de-l-avocat-franco-palestinien-salah-hamouri-interdite-par-le-prefet-de-meurthe-et-moselle>
he took the decision because the announcement of Hammouri’s appearance had
provoked “strong emotions” in the Jewish community and thus presented a
threat to “public order” – a broad pretext that is now regularly used to
censor Hammouri.

This attack on his rights is only the latest turn in an ongoing campaign by
the French government.
Phone call from intelligence

In February, according to the Paris newspaper
<https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2023/03/02/la-nouvelle-vie-sous-surveillance-de-l-avocat-franco-palestinien-salah-hamouri_6163889_3224.html>
*Le
Monde*, an agent of France’s domestic intelligence service called up an
activist with Association France Palestine Solidarité.

The agent wanted to know whether Hammouri would be speaking at a public
event the Palestinian rights group was planning to hold later that month in
Versailles to discuss Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/>
.

“The officer made no secret of his intentions,” *Le Monde* reported. If
Hammouri “were to be invited to the event, it would be banned.”

It just so happened that Hammouri, the son of a French mother and a
Palestinian father, hadn’t been invited, and the event went ahead without
interference from Macron’s secret police.

Among France’s pro-Israel Jewish communal groups, some lawmakers and within
the government, Hammouri is seen as a “potentially dangerous agitator,”
according to *Le Monde*.

It is more likely that they fear that Hammouri, as a charismatic advocate
for his people’s cause with a harrowing personal story, would prove an
embarrassment to Israel’s propaganda efforts in France.

Certainly, France’s top Jewish communal and Israel lobby group CRIF is
playing an active
<http://www.crif.org/fr/content/actu-salah-hamouri-recu-a-lassemblee-nationale>
part
<http://www.crif.org/fr/content/actu-le-maire-de-lyon-annule-la-conference-sur-la-palestine-et-les-accords-d%E2%80%99oslo>
in the smear campaign against Hammouri – whom it accuses of affiliation
with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a left-wing
political party and resistance group which Israeli occupation authorities
have designated as “terrorist.”
Bogus conviction

*Le Monde* notes that those attacking Hammouri often point out that in 2005
Israeli occupation authorities arrested and in 2008 convicted him
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/lawmakers-france-demand-release-citizen-held-israel>
for taking part in a supposed plot to kill Ovadia Yosef, a prominent
Israeli rabbi who habitually incited
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/idf-must-learn-syrians-how-slaughter-enemy-says-prominent-israeli-rabbi>
genocidal violence to “annihilate
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1270038.stm>” Palestinians.

Yosef died in 2013.

Hammouri, who always maintained his innocence, was held for three years
without charge or trial, before accepting a plea deal from Israel’s
military court in order to obtain a shorter sentence.

The military court has a conviction rate
<http://www.haaretz.com/nearly-100-of-all-military-court-cases-in-west-bank-end-in-conviction-haaretz-learns-1.398369>
for Palestinians of nearly 100 percent.

The illegitimacy of this conviction was always well understood by French
authorities.

In 2011, Alain Juppé, France’s foreign minister at the time, wrote
<https://blog.mondediplo.net/2011-04-25-Salah-Hamouri-fragile-conversion-francaise>
that Israel’s accusations in the case had “never been corroborated by any
element of proof.”

Yet now the Macron administration is treating Hammouri as if he – not the
military occupation regime that subjected him to years of imprisonment,
persecution and finally expulsion from the land of his birth – is the
criminal.
Israeli interference

In February, Hammouri was scheduled to speak
<https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/actualite/lyon-pourquoi-une-conference-sur-la-palestine-organisee-par-la-ville-suscite-t-elle-l-indignation>
at an event sponsored by the city of Lyon, marking the anniversary of the
1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo accords.

In a blatant intervention
<https://twitter.com/bendorim5/status/1617975769619378176> by a foreign
government, the Israeli embassy in Paris wrote to the mayor of Lyon, citing
the Yosef case and cynically invoking the memory of the Holocaust, to
demand that the city pull out of the event.
France’s hardline interior minister Gérald Darmanin also intervened
<https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/politique/salah-hamouri-a-lyon-il-est-heureux-que-le-maire-ait-renonce-a-son-projet-mortifere-juge-darmanin>
with local officials to pressure Lyon to cancel the event – which the city
did.

Darmanin later bragged in parliament that had Lyon’s mayor not canceled the
event, he would have issued a decree banning it anyway on the pretext that
it would have disturbed “public order.”

The minister has issued several such banning orders against Palestine
solidarity groups and Muslim leaders over their criticism of Israel in
recent years, which have later been overturned
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/court-overturns-french-ban-palestine-solidarity-groups>
by the courts
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/frances-high-court-rules-emmanuel-macrons-mosque-ban-illegal>.

Amnesty International France, which was due to participate in the Lyon
event, stated <https://twitter.com/amnestyfrance/status/1620120074194669570>
that “hate speech against Salah Hammouri on social media, sometimes
coordinated, aims to prevent him exercising his freedom of expression.”

The human rights group noted that across France in recent months,
Palestine-related events have been canceled following various forms of
pressure amounting to censorship.
Nonetheless, the “public order” pretext was invoked again this week to try
to prevent the French public from hearing about Hammouri’s experiences of
Israeli military occupation and persecution.

On 13 March, the French government applied threats and pressure on a venue
in Poitiers, in western France, to cancel a booking for that same day
<https://twitter.com/LiberezSalah/status/1634834584729706496> by a local
Palestine solidarity group for an event featuring Hammouri.
Citing Hammouri’s military court conviction in the Ovadia Yosef case, the
Macron administration’s local representative Jean-Marie Girier wrote,
“Already banned from gatherings in Lyon and Paris, the visit of Mr. Salah
Hammouri elicits a strong reaction from the Jewish community.”

“I demand … that you take your responsibility and cancel this conference,”
Girier wrote to the director of the Centre d’Animation de Beaulieu, a
publicly funded events space.

Girier’s handwritten postscript reinforced the message, implying that if
the event was not canceled the government might step in.

In fact <https://twitter.com/ElsaLefort/status/1635566268408315904> –
contrary to Girier’s claims – no meeting involving Hammouri had been banned
in Paris. And the event in Lyon was canceled by the city itself – albeit
under government threats and pressure.

Notably, the administrative court in Lyon even rejected a petition
<https://www.dalloz.fr/documentation/Document?id=TA_LYON_2023-01-27_2300623#texte-integral>
in late January from an Israel lobby group demanding that the event be
prohibited.

But this time, the government’s threats failed and the event in Poitiers
went ahead as planned.
Israeli genocide inciter to arrive in France

Meanwhile, as Elsa Lefort, a human rights defender and Salah Hammouri’s
wife has pointed out, France is allowing a planned visit by Bezalel Smotrich
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/bezalel-smotrich>, the ultra-far-right
Israeli minister who recently issued a genocidal call
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-calls-genocide-met-shrugs-washington-and-brussels>
for the Palestinian town of Huwwara to be “wiped out.”
With a note of irony, Lefort called on people to send to Darmanin examples
of Smotrich’s many racist and violent statements so that the interior
minister “can get to know this great humanist.”

Although France is allowing this inciter of violent racial and ethnic
hatred into the country, French officials reportedly do not plan to meet
with him
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-13/ty-article/.premium/smotrich-heads-to-paris-after-chilly-u-s-trip-but-not-at-frances-invitation/00000186-da57-d9b0-a3af-db7f4bf60000>
themselves.

Amid Paris’ ongoing crackdown on supporters of Palestinian rights, 19
French labor unions, human rights groups and social organizations wrote
<https://www.france-palestine.org/Le-droit-de-s-exprimer-et-de-se-reunir-sur-la-question-palestinienne-en-France>
to Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne this week calling on the government to
halt its efforts to muzzle criticism of Israel which are often done under
the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism.

The groups urged Borne “to act urgently to halt the threats, the climate of
intimidation and witch hunts in the service of a third country which
violates human rights and international law daily.”

They also called on the prime minister to act to “stop the threats and
defamation against our compatriot Salah Hammouri.”
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