Harrison Stetler

On April 30, French interior minister Bruno Retailleau announced that he would order the administrative dissolution of Urgence Palestine. Why?

Salah Hamouri

Urgence Palestine is the voice of the Palestinian resistance in France. We started organizing in October 2023, just after the onset of the current war, and rapidly developed into a movement that was getting a lot of attention and making a lot of noise. The threat of dissolution has been there from the beginning.

As we see it, this order is a direct result of the French state’s complicity in what’s happening in Gaza. This is not just about France and French society. We’re the voice of Palestinians and this power move is about suppressing the voice of Palestinians who want to stop genocide and defend themselves as a people. This decision stems from a situation in which the government of this country and the president of the French Republic are complicit in what’s happening in Gaza.

We’re also not the only targets. The government hopes to disband the Jeune Garde [an anti-fascist group]. It’s revealing that these orders came the same day. Retailleau wants to snuff out an anti-colonial movement and an anti-fascist group. The two are connected. Our aim is not just to be a pro-Palestine voice. Anti-colonialism and anti-fascism are linked.

Harrison Stetler

The interior minister has accused your movement of being [made up of] “Islamists” and antisemites, and of engaging in “apologism” for terrorism based on alleged pro-Hamas sympathies. Retailleau even had the gall to say that his order to ban your group was about not letting activists like you “distort” the Palestinian cause. What’s your response to his accusations?

Salah Hamouri

These are the classic false pretexts. The interior minister is lying when he calls our movement Islamists, “apologists” for terrorism, antisemites, or “Islamo-leftists.” We’ve heard this all before. It’s textbook nationalist propaganda in France and has long been part of the repressive arsenal used against left-wing social movements. The Jeune Garde is not an Islamist movement, and neither is Urgence Palestine. Our charter lays out very clearly what we’re about: we’re anti-colonial, anti-fascist, and anti-Zionist.

Harrison Stetler

This is a blatant attack on freedom of expression. How have French governments since 2023 tried to limit what can be said about the Israel-Palestine conflict?

Salah Hamouri

This is about more than just “freedom of expression.” The International Court of Justice has said that there’s a plausible risk of a genocide in Gaza. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against several Israeli leaders, including Benjamin Netanyahu. When a genocide is happening right in front of your eyes, you can’t say that a minister of the perpetrating state has the right to freedom of expression here in France [last November, Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich was scheduled to speak at a pro-Israel gala in Paris, before canceling his trip].

Two years ago, when Smotrich was last in France, he said that the Palestinian people are an “invention” and do not exist. Is that “freedom of expression”?  Giving Smotrich a platform in France, inviting the Israeli national soccer team to play at the Stade de France, or allowing talks by genocide apologists in France — that’s direct participation. It’s complicity in an ongoing genocide.

Harrison Stetler

Compared to the history of pro-Palestine organizing in France, you’ve managed to achieve a new degree of unity and political centrality. What has made for Urgence Palestine’s success?

Salah Hamouri

It used to be that the pro-Palestinian movement was relatively weak in France compared to other countries in Europe. The 1960s and 1970s were the years of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Marxist-Leninist left, for example, with many Spanish and Italian activists in support of the cause. During the First Intifada — the “Intifada of the Stones” — we saw a certain level of support in Western countries, but less in France and Germany.

The majority of pro-Palestinian groups in France were born after the Oslo Accords [of the mid-1990s], which imposed a certain framing to the debate around things like the two-state solution, the economic agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and the association treaty between the European Union and Israel. This context imposed certain red lines, namely the two-state solution. Without wanting to generalize, it’s safe to say that these were the broad terms of the debate for the majority of actors in the Palestine solidarity movement.

Harrison Stetler

Urgence Palestine was founded and has been in large part lead by members of the Palestinian diaspora within France. How has this affected your strategy?

Salah Hamouri

We came with a different political language and wanted to go back to our roots. We organized around the principle of Palestinian centrality. It’s up to the Palestinians to organize. It’s up to the Palestinians to claim their own voice and to say what they want and what they don’t want. This involved breaking a certain number of taboos in France, even within the old solidarity movement.

For example, we say loud and clear that the Palestinians have the legal right to all means of resistance, including armed struggle. The French state is not going to teach us any lessons about that. We all know the stories about resistance fighters here in France. In South Africa, it was the same thing — as in Vietnam and Algeria.

Our strategy doesn’t shy away from affirming the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance and bringing to the forefront the idea that the two-state solution is not necessarily the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. What’s also been important is that we make the link between the struggle in Palestine and repression here in France. We developed close ties with anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements, with the working-class suburbs, with African struggles, and the fight against poverty.

Harrison Stetler

It seems that this broader role is also in part why you’ve been deemed such a threat.

Salah Hamouri

As a rule, aggressors, occupiers, and imperialists see danger in popular unity. For them, it’s necessary to fragment the lower classes, workers, trade unions — to try to cut everything into smaller parts so as to be able to control and manage each piece, each segment, and each sector of society.

This has been the Israeli strategy, too, since the Oslo Accords. The Israeli state has tried to divide the Palestinian people into pieces with Gaza in its corner, the West Bank on its own, Jerusalem in another, and the refugees over there. In France, the logic is the same: Urgence Palestine needed to be beaten down because we’ve shown that we’re able to bring together a lot of different people, groups, and forces behind our cause.

Harrison Stetler

Why is this happening now, some twenty months after your group was formed?

Salah Hamouri

The escalation here in France is linked to the latest escalation of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. That’s what’s driving this. Just last night, Netanyahu announced that no humanitarian aid would be let into the north and center of the Gaza Strip and that all aid would go to the south. They’re pushing people and trying to centralize them in southern Gaza.

This isn’t for Israel’s “security.” They want to force the expulsion of the Palestinian people from Gaza. They’re going to bomb near the border with Egypt to try to force the border crossings open and push people out.

Harrison Stetler

With Netanyahu doubling down on the invasion, some have wanted to see signs of cracks in Western support. Trump did not visit Israel on his latest trip to the Middle East. A council of European Union foreign ministers voted last week to review the EU-Israel association agreement. France has signaled that it’s preparing to recognize Palestinian statehood. What is your reading of these developments?

Salah Hamouri

[Donald] Trump’s a businessman. He wants to advance his economic interests and those of the United States. He goes to the Gulf and pockets trillion-dollar deals, but signs a check for $12 billion of aid to Israel. The US government has continued to send money and arms to Israel. It’s maybe symbolic that he didn’t stop to see Netanyahu: but at the end of the day, what does it really change?

If French recognition of Palestinian statehood is not accompanied with sanctions, a military, economic and academic embargo, and the closure of the Israeli embassy in France, it’s also just symbolic. It’s not going to fundamentally change things.

Harrison Stetler

It’s important to get across how drastic of a decision a dissolution order really is. How will this impact your organization and your network of activists?

Salah Hamouri

They’ve already started freezing the bank accounts of several leading figures in Urgence Palestine! Quite simply, we will not be able to function as a political force if the cabinet approves this order. The state will be able to place homes, phones, and people under surveillance. They can forbid certain people from speaking to others.

In some cases, they can institute travel bans, or restrictions on certain people going to Paris or moving around certain parts of France. If people are shown to be trying to “reconstitute” a dissolved collective, they can be sentenced to up to three years in prison and fined as much as €45,000.

The government wants a pro-Palestine movement that doesn’t get in the way of things in France, that stays within the lines of what French power has drawn for any solidarity movement. We’ll never accept this. The powers that be in France aren’t going to tell us what we can say and think and what we cannot say and think.

Harrison Stetler

Is the government’s latest move against you also a symptom of your relative weakness? Beyond certain factions on the Left and in progressive civil society, you are isolated. The political center and the Right are largely behind Retailleau on this. Important media outlets relay their caricatures of you. Retailleau feels powerful enough to use an administrative dissolution — a power often deployed against relatively marginal political “groupings” or gangs. Only now, he’s using it against a collective like Urgence Palestine that’s drawn masses of people out to demonstrations.

Salah Hamouri

Retailleau is looking out for his political future and would probably like to see himself as president one day. For that, he needs to appeal to both the traditional right and the far right. He needs the pro-Israel lobby in France and its allies.

But stepping back, this government is also suffering from a legitimacy deficit. It thinks that more repression, more fear, and more isolation in French society will keep the center and the Right in power. There are tens of thousands of us in France that are taking a stand against and making the link between attacks on Muslim women, environmental destruction, and anti-colonial and pro-African struggles.

That’s a big red flag for the Interior Ministry, which has long vied to keep French people of color in their place by clamping down on these communities, harassing mosques and scaring people. The political center and right in power want to fragment our movements in order to better contain them.

Harrison Stetler

The “extension” of repression, from the occupied territories to France, is something that you’ve experienced firsthand. On a personal level, what does this mean to see that Urgence Palestine is facing such an aggressive maneuver by the government here?

Salah Hamouri

I joined the struggle for Palestinian liberation when I was a teenager. I’ve been wounded by gunshot and was first arrested when I was sixteen. From 2001 until today, things haven’t fundamentally changed for me — whether that’s prison, injuries, house arrests, or travel bans. I’ve spent years barred from seeing my children and wife. I was ultimately “deported” to France in 2022. I know that’s a very loaded word in France — touching on the country’s deep guilt for its treatment of Jewish people.

When I arrived here in France, the attacks on me continued. The interior minister at the time, Gérald Darmanin, spoke out against me in parliament. Far-right and pro-Israel members of parliament, or figures in the media, have continued to attack me. This is only the latest chapter in the harassment of the Palestinian community and its allies.

It also shows we’re on the right side of history. Israel is a colonial outpost for Europe and the United States. Everything they’ve done has been to rubber-stamp Israel’s genocide. Just the other week, France opened its airspace to allow Netanyahu to fly over, defying the International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him.

For me, the battle here in France is a battle for French society as well as for the liberation of Palestine. One thing that the last nearly two years have shown is how much the question of Palestine is shaking politics around the world.