On May 24, socialists and activists from across France and other countries, including Germany, the Spanish State, Russia, the United States, Algeria, and more, rallied at the Charenton Space in Paris to attend an internationalist rally against imperialist militarism, the international Far Right, and the genocide in Gaza. In addition to the 2,000 people who attended in person, there were another 2,000 individual connections virtually from around the world.

Organized by Révolution Permanente — the sister organization of Left Voice and our international organization, the Trotskyist Fraction — the event was a collective shout of defiance against rearmament and austerity in an epoch of imperialist crisis. But it was also a call to organize internationally from below — for students, workers, and leftists to unite against the capitalist class in our own independent organizations and to join our struggles against genocide, the attacks of the bosses, xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and all forms of exploitation and oppression.

The event featured speeches by comrades in the Trotskyist Fraction who are part of the worker and student movements all over the world, who struggle side by side with a strategy and program to use the power of the working class from below to fight to tear capitalism up from its roots and build a socialist society organized according to social need, not profit. Speakers came from France, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Germany, and the Spanish State. The TF-FI is formed of groups in 14 countries across the world; it organizes the international network of socialist publications that publishes in seven different languages.

Below we republish the intervention of our comrade Elsa Marcel. Elsa is a French labor lawyer, socialist militant, and national spokesperson for Révolution Permanente. As an attorney registered with the Paris Bar, she is known for her unwavering defense of workers, youth, and oppressed communities facing state repression and capitalist exploitation. Marcel is a founding member of the Collectif d’action judiciaire, a network of left-wing legal professionals that emerged during the Yellow Vests movement to support protesters and challenge the criminalization of social movements. She has been a prominent voice in the fight for the right to strike, notably defending refinery workers during the 2023 pension reform protests and opposing government-imposed requisitions. A frequent media commentator, Marcel has appeared on national outlets like BFM TV, where she has denounced the Macron regime. In 2024, Marcel ran as a revolutionary socialist candidate in the French legislative elections, representing Révolution Permanente in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. Her campaign emphasized the need for an independent, working-class alternative to both the neoliberal center and the Far Right, advocating for internationalism, anti-racism, and socialist feminism.

Read More Here: “Over 2,000 Socialists From France and Other Countries Rallied in Paris Against Militarism, War, and Genocide”

***

I’d like to start my speech with a tribute, because for the past year and a half, not a day has gone by without the faces of Palestinians murdered by Israel flashing across our screens. It’s probably the first genocide in which the victims broadcast their own massacres live. Tens of thousands have died under the bombs, from hunger, and from a lack of access to basic health care.

Behind these numbers, Palestinians have names and stories. So tonight, during this speech, I’d like us to think of them: of Ahmed Mansour, the Palestinian journalist who was consumed by flames in early April; of Hassan Alaa Ayyad, the 14-year-old known for his magnificent voice, who was killed in a bombing raid; of Adnan Al Bursh, a doctor at Al-Shifa Hospital, who died in the terrible prison of Auvers in the West Bank; and Fatima Hassouna, a 25-year-old photojournalist who said, “If I die, I want a resounding death.” This meeting is also a way to highlight their names, their deaths, but above all their struggle — the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

Today, the Gaza Strip is a field of ruins. The scale of destruction is unprecedented in the 21st century. Israel’s colonial offensive has killed the highest number of journalists, healthcare workers, and humanitarian aid workers in such a short span of time. As I speak, a new phase of the massacre has been underway for almost 80 days, with Israel blocking all humanitarian aid. The longest blockade in Gaza’s history has already pushed the population into a state of absolute distress, stricken by famine and deprived of electricity, water, and medicine.

If, on Monday, Netanyahu conceded and started allowing a small amount of aid into a territory so devastated that it cannot even reach the population, it’s so he can better advance his plan to conquer Gaza. As Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich explained to his supremacist friends, who are shocked by the very idea of sending aid to Gaza, “When our good friends ask us to stop and provide a minimum of help, we accept so that we can continue.”

Continue what? Current operations. Their aim is simply to empty each section of the strip of its population, town by town, to move the Palestinians far to the south in Rafah, where they will be exterminated or deported. Smotrich, once again, is explicit: “We occupy Gaza to stay. It’s a war for victory. It’s time to stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation.’”

As repeated by dozens of researchers, lawyers, and legal experts who have been monitoring the situation for the past year and a half, all this has a name: genocide — organized, meticulously prepared, and implemented. A genocide publicly acknowledged long before May 6 and even as early as October 9, 2023, when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Or when singer Eyal Golan called for Gaza to be wiped out and nonchalantly showed images of the massacre in a Paris concert hall. It wasn’t a year ago; it wasn’t six months ago. That wasn’t even a week ago.

At the end of March, Gaza’s Minister of Health published a document of over 1,500 pages. It lists the names of Palestinians who have been killed; 474 of these pages are filled solely with the names of children, the first 27 containing the names of children killed when they were between zero and one year old. Israel bombed hospitals, as well as buildings, bakeries, and cemeteries.

We need to listen to the reports of the humanitarians who go to Gaza, including nurses like Imane Maarifi, whom we have the honor of counting among us and whom I ask you to applaud very loudly. As early as February 2024, she told Parliament what she had seen: children with crushed skulls or sniper bullets that gouged out their eyes; carts full of corpses pulled by donkeys; mothers arriving with their babies — cold babies — refusing to believe they are dead. But this genocide did not begin in October 2023. It is the continuation and acceleration of an ethnic cleansing that has been underway for 77 years.

On May 15, we commemorated the Nakba, the date chosen to remember those months during which, from 1947 to 1949, more than 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly exiled, dispossessed of their land, and driven into exile. Even back then, the Israeli army was sending leaflets to the Arab inhabitants of Tirat, Haifa, who were resisting the occupation. They said, “If you want to escape the Nakba, to avoid a disaster, an inevitable extermination, turn yourselves in. The vise tightens around your neck.” Last week, on the occasion of this anniversary, Malak Radwan from Gaza explained, “Nakba Day is no longer a memory. Today, this has become a daily reality.”

In 1948 and today, this genocide has accomplices all over the world. During Biden’s tenure, the United States supplied $17 billion worth of weapons to the Israeli state. Trump has followed suit, explaining that Gaza must be turned into a resort for billionaires.

France is Israel’s second-largest import partner. The colonial state buys military equipment and high-tech missile guidance systems produced by Thales. It is thanks to these powers that Israel has been able to starve the population for two months.

It’s thanks to this that many are afraid to speak out against genocide, because, for a year and a half — and still today — talking about it has been a subversive act, risking accusations, criminal prosecution, or arbitrary police custody. Just listen to Stéphane Séjourné, minister of foreign affairs, who on June 17, 2024, said, “Accusing the Jewish state of genocide is crossing a moral line.”

But it was they who crossed the moral line. We must say it all the more loudly now that some people are trying to sneak onto the right side of history, discreetly moving from the camp of the genocide’s supporters to the camp of the just. After a year and a half of massacre, a year and a half of laissez-faire genocide, and a year and a half of openly supporting war criminals, Macron and his army are explaining that they “will not stand idly by.” For its part, after reiterating its unconditional support for Israel, the European Union has discovered that it can “reexamine its association agreement” with Israel.

But how can we believe for a second those who allow Netanyahu to travel freely in violation of an arrest warrant while they persecute opponents of genocide for a tweet? How can it be that all those who have been broadcasting Israeli war propaganda to justify ethnic cleansing have suddenly changed their minds?

The reality is that this about-face shows the absolute cynicism of European imperialism and the cowardice of all those who have remained silent until now. This procrastination is not only indecent and hypocritical; it is impotent. For our part, we are among those who will never forget that they were complicit in this massacre and that history will judge them.

But Western imperialists are not the only powers with a share of responsibility in this genocide. What did the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, or the United Arab Emirates do while Gaza was under bombardment? They either collaborated, stayed silent, or negotiated.

Before the genocide, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, legitimizing apartheid and Israel’s project, which has never ceased to pursue its objectives of eliminating the Palestinian people. Saudi Arabia does business with Trump while feigning concern. Egypt keeps the Rafah crossing closed, making itself complicit in the blockade. Qatar and Turkey present themselves as allies of Palestine but negotiate behind closed doors with Tel Aviv and Washington.

All these countries may express solidarity with Palestine in principle, but in reality, they fear this cause and will do nothing because their priority is not the liberation of Palestine but the stability of their own regimes. Rather than Israel’s crimes, what they fear is that the example of the Palestinian people’s struggle will awaken their own populations or their own working class. That’s why they ban demonstrations, impose curfews, and imprison pro-Palestinian activists. Once again, the genocide has shown that the Arab bourgeoisie is not an ally of the Palestinian people.

The question we must ask ourselves is how to achieve the true liberation of Palestine. In recent months, a whole generation in the West and the Arab world has recognized that neither international law nor state diplomacy is enough to put a stop to genocide, apartheid, and colonization. Of course, recent decisions by the International Court of Justice and the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court have helped weaken Israel and reveal its true face to the world. But they also highlight their powerlessness.

Since the Nakba, the UN Security Council has passed hundreds of resolutions against Israel. Not one has ended the oppression of the Palestinians. Historically, international law was constructed to provide a democratic framework for imperialist domination of the world. It effectively safeguards imperialist interests, particularly when the Security Council is used to justify the invasion of Bosnia or Kosovo, or the bombing of Libya, supposedly in the interests of the people. But when the interests of the great powers are at stake, these mechanisms are disregarded. The ICC has never condemned American crimes in Afghanistan, and no international court has held French generals accountable for torture in Algeria.

In the same way, at a time when imperialist leaders have an interest in resurrecting the fable of the two-state solution, it’s worth repeating the important conclusions drawn by a whole generation of Palestinians in the wake of the Oslo Accords. No Palestinian state can thrive alongside a colonial state armed to the teeth, determined to expand, and driven by the belief that its survival requires eliminating a neighboring people.

For all these reasons, the liberation of the Palestinian people will not depend on a legal decision or the rulings of international bodies from which they are excluded. It can be achieved only through the struggle of all the peoples of the region and the masses of the world.

In May 2011, it was the Egyptian mass movement that, after toppling Mubarak, forced the new government to allow Gazans freedom of movement for the first time since 2007. Since October 2023, the people of Jordan have been mobilizing against normalization with Israel, notably in front of their embassy, denouncing the cowardice of Arab governments, the banning of the Palestinian flag, and police repression. This is where the energy and strength to end the colonial situation in Palestine lie.

There’s an old slogan in the Palestinian national movement that says the road to Palestinian liberation passes through Cairo, Amman, and Damascus. It’s a slogan we embrace as revolutionaries. Not because we think that the reactionary regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, or even Lebanon and Iran could be allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, but because we believe that the end of colonization will come through a revolution led by the Palestinian people in alliance with the workers and popular classes of the region.

This struggle will be waged against imperialism and its stranglehold on the region, and against governments complicit with Israel. But it will also have to reach out to Israeli workers and youth who are willing to break with Zionism, like the young refuseniks, however small a minority they may be today. That’s why we don’t share Hamas’s methods, program, or strategy, and why we don’t share the illusions of those who believe that the salvation of Palestine can be achieved through an alliance with the Iranian state today, or with Bashar al-Assad yesterday, to the point of sometimes legitimizing his regime’s repression of workers’ and people’s struggles.

The struggle of the Palestinian people is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism and imperialism, and it can even be a fundamental driving force behind it. Like Jabra Nicola and the Palestinian revolutionaries of the Fourth International before us, we firmly believe in a free, secular, and socialist Palestine throughout the historic territory of Palestine — a Palestine where Jews, Muslims, Christians, and atheists can live side by side with equal rights in a society governed by the working and popular classes. It’s possible. It’s the only prospect for true emancipation after decades of oppression and massacres.

Today, while the State of Israel is radicalized and unparalleled in its cruelty, it is also weakened on the international stage. Despite the enormous strike force of the imperialist powers, millions of people — including younger generations of Jews and Jewish people organizing by the thousands in the United States and around the world — now recognize that Israel is a barbaric colonial power, and there will be no turning back. Everywhere, the solidarity movement has grown, despite imperialist efforts to crush it. Millions of people around the world have taken to the streets of Western capitals and will continue to do so.

And above all, Israel faces the heroism of a people who refuse to die. From the general strike of 1936 under the British Mandate to the youth revolt in the Sheikh Jarrah district in 2021 to the women’s organizations and relief committees of the First Intifada, Palestinians are fighting with exceptional courage against colonialism and imperialism the world over.

The extreme situation of today shows the impasse of Zionism, a project through which some Jews hoped to escape European antisemitism and the trauma of the Holocaust. In the 1930s, Trotsky, along with Jewish socialists, described this illusion as a bloody trap. A century later, the crisis in Israel, the moral decay of its elites, and the growing fear of civil war remind us of Marx’s maxim that a people that oppresses another can never be free.

The courage of the Palestinian people compels us here and in France, not only out of solidarity with an oppressed people but also because Palestine is today the catalyst for trends that extend beyond it — the decay of capitalism and the authoritarian acceleration that accompanies it.

In the United States, Mahmoud Khalil is awaiting deportation while students on American campuses  face registration, denunciation, and persecution. In Germany, pro-Palestinian organizations have been raided, and in England, dozens of young people from Palestine Action who opposed the arms factories are being imprisoned.

In France, Urgence Palestine was dissolved. This was an organization founded by Palestinians in exile and political prisoners who have faced arbitrary detention and torture in Israeli jails, including Salah Hamouri. Demonstrations and meetings are banned, and Rima Hassan, Anasse Kazib, François Burgat, Jean Paul Deslescaut, Olivia Zemor, and many others are being persecuted for their unwavering solidarity with Gaza.

The violence of the repression is compounded by the infamy of the accusations. Regimes will stop at nothing to drag supporters of Palestine through the mud, and they do not hesitate to exploit the essential fight against antisemitism, portraying the political heirs of Nazism, fascism, and collaboration as protectors of the Jewish people.

Today, this repression is at the forefront of the authoritarian radicalization of liberal democracy. In France, we’ve been living under a state of emergency for 10 years now, and not a year goes by without the government passing a major repressive law: anti-terrorist measures, repression of protesters, extension of police powers, and house arrest. Gradually, all sectors of the population are affected and begin to experience the arbitrary nature of power.

This authoritarian acceleration is set to intensify amid a race toward militarization and trends toward war and rearmament. Already, in the United States, Trump is organizing the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to prisons in El Salvador. French Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin is reviving the penal colony by announcing the creation of a high-security prison in the Guiana jungle. Far-right politician Gabriel Attal seeks to incarcerate more and more children.

If the repression of support for Palestine serves as a catalyst, it also reveals what Western democracies truly are: bourgeois regimes ready to abandon all the principles they so proudly claim in order to preserve a system on its last legs. This is why building a massive collective response is essential — for Palestine, but also, more broadly, to avert catastrophe.

I’m a member of the Collectif d’action judiciaire, a group of lawyers and jurists dedicated to defending militants. We challenge protest bans and hundreds of tickets, as well as take cases in which people are held in police custody, and we argue in court. Together with my comrades, we’re part of a generation that has forged itself in the fight against the Labor Law and alongside the Yellow Vests. From repeated 49.3s to the injury of protesters, it soon became clear that simply invoking the great principles of the rule of law was of no use to a regime willing to do anything to defend itself.

For all these reasons, we are convinced that the fight against repression cannot be waged solely in the judicial arena. On June 18, we will have the honor of defending Anasse Kazib and another Révolution Permanente activist who are being prosecuted for their support of the Palestinian people. We’re going to need many people on that day because we want this trial to serve as a school of resistance to the regime. Today, demanding the release of Anasse and all the others who defend the right to fight for Palestine is also about preventing the state from going any further.

It means equipping ourselves to halt its deadly race toward the suppression of our class’s resistance. It means working to secure the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, Europe’s longest-serving political prisoner, held in the jails of the French state for 41 years. It means taking steps to prevent other trade unionists from being prosecuted tomorrow for honoring the best traditions of the labor movement: internationalism and the refusal to fall in line behind one’s own state.

That’s why we’re taking up the legacy of political defense and revolutionary struggle in the courtroom, the tradition of lawyers who understand that confronting the law is part of the class struggle. They recognize that what is at stake is not just individual rights but the future of our entire social class, that of communist militants like Lenin, who, in the face of tsarist repression, sought to “speak to the masses over the head of the judge.” This includes Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, socialists, internationalists, and anti-militarists prosecuted for their anti-war activism, who declared, “I’m not here to defend myself; I’m here to accuse.” All these activists demonstrated that political cowardice doesn’t pay.

I’d like to quote from the manifesto of the lawyers who defended Algerian FLN militants against the French courts that condemned them to death:

Faced with the scale of the protest against its policies, the French government is paradoxically reduced to multiplying the number of trials in which its policies are more and more harshly challenged. Liberal prosecutors and hardline government commissioners wonder: how can they come out on top, even once, in a political trial? And although their auxiliaries spare neither bathwater, nor acetylene flashlights, nor electric current, each time, and more and more, political trials turn to their confusion. These naive Machiavellians forget only one thing: when faced with courageous enemies, a political trial can only be won when one is right. They forget one thing: they are wrong.

And since they are wrong and we are right, let them know that despite their summons, arrests, and trials, they will never succeed in breaking us. They will never succeed in putting an end to our struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people and of humanity as a whole.