When given the opportunity, France Insoumise (LFI) MEP Rima Hassan often shares the following biographical details: born stateless in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nairab in Syria, she arrived in France at the age of six and obtained French citizenship at 18. Trained as a legal expert, she worked for nearly ten years with international law “as a backbone”, focusing on topics such as asylum, international refugee protection, refugee camps.
On decolonial online media Paroles d’honneur, decolonial activist Sabrina Waz recently described her as an “anomaly,” given how anti-Palestinians try to silence this leading figure in the struggle for Palestinian rights in France and how she keeps resisting: “You should never have survived all of this […] and yet you are here, and that is also why they are so relentless.” What she is reproached for, above all, is precisely that: being present and repeating what undermines the anti-Palestinian propaganda day after day. In a tweet on April 22, she identifies “four taboos to break regarding Palestine: Zionism as a colonial ideology, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the legitimacy of armed struggle, and the debate on political alternatives to Oslo”. So far, she has done more than her share and that‘s why she faces so many attacks.
Born stateless
If Rima Hassan was born stateless in a refugee camp, it is because three of her grandparents lived through the Nakba, and rather than accepting her condition as a refugee, she claims both the right of return and Palestinian nationality. She speaks openly about the Nakba, presenting the facts and the injustice of a “partition plan” that granted Palestinians only 45% of a territory of which they owned 85% and where they represented 70% of the population, about the 15,000 Palestinians killed by Zionist and later Israeli armed groups and the 800,000 Palestinians forced to flee during the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, borrowing the title from historian Ilan Pappé’s book, which she frequently cites.
Rima Hassan constantly reminds audiences that the right of return for Palestinian refugees is enshrined by the United Nations. An exchange with left-wing token commentator Laure Adler during the program “C ce soir” on January 30, 2023 on service public channel France 5, illustrates the violence of the reactions she faces:
“Rima Hassan: The forgotten people in every debate are the Palestinian refugees […], who were dispossessed of their land, of their rights […] The specificity of Palestinian refugees […], is that they want to return home.
Laure Adler: But now you are opening another debate, because, if all Palestinian refugees want to return to Israel, then there will no longer be an Israel.”
If Laure Adler’s response reveals how little Palestinian lives matter to her, it also exposes her inability to conceive of Israel outside the framework of Jewish supremacy. Yet, as Rima Hassan reminded her that evening, such a reconsideration is necessary: “The right of return is enshrined, it is legitimately claimed by Palestinians, and for 74 years, 30% of them […] have lived this refugee life […], which means this issue must also be integrated into the debate.”
The life of the colonized
For Rima Hassan, the issue is actually not the right of the State of Israel or a Jewish national homeland to exist, but rather the underlying ideology: “I do not blame anyone for having conceived the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Mandatory Palestine. But I blame all those who did it and who continue to conceive it at the expense of the Palestinian people,” she summarized at the “Zawa Show” on April 27, 2024.
That’s why she consistently emphasizes that both the initial ethnic cleansing and the subsequent occupation, colonization, apartheid, and genocide (i.e., the ongoing Nakba) are not deviations from Zionism, but rather the implementation of the settler-colonial project conceived by Theodor Herzl. Then, after resorting unsuccessfully to the usual tools of colonial propaganda, Zionists and the French imperial state are left with judicial intimidation in an attempt to silence her — and others who don’t have the chance to be as well-known as she is, she often mentions.
Although many welcomed the temporary withdrawal of the Yadan bill, aimed at preventing criticism of Israel, French legislation already allows for the persecution of political opponents, notably through the offense of “apology for terrorism”. Rima Hassan has never been convicted, but has already been summoned by police 16 times following complaints generally filed by Zionist organizations on these grounds. One complaint concerned a tweet quoting an excerpt from The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon: “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.”
Exclusion or binational state
Rima Hassan then invited her detractors to actually read Frantz Fanon, who actually merely discusses the colonial relationship imposed by the colonizer on the colonized and the rupture of that relationship. When she raises, as further taboos, the alternatives to Oslo and the legitimacy of armed struggle, she is merely identifying the two paths Israel may choose to offer those it colonizes. During “C ce soir” on January 30, 2023, she had explained earlier in the discussion:
“If we are in a situation of colonization of Palestinian territories, then a choice will have to be made: either [Israel] remains a Jewish state and, in that case, the Palestinian people are excluded […] or you are in a democratic system, in which case it becomes a state that integrates identities […], we can move toward a federation of states or a binational state […].”
At this point, the systematic discrediting of the only acceptable solution mentioned — the binational state — begins. The binational state is indeed what Rima Hassan refers to when she speaks about alternatives to the Oslo Accords. As she regularly states, she believes those accords do not allow for a viable solution and that the two-state solution has become impractical given settlement expansion and territorial fragmentation.
Her struggle is therefore focused above all on equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians throughout the territory, and she sees the creation of a binational state as the best way to achieve this. Yet even this simple demand for equality appears suspicious to bourgeoisie lapdogs. On France Inter on March 19, 2024, while she was discussing apartheid and equality of rights, interviewer Sonia Devillers interrupted her: “An equality of rights that erases the State of Israel.” Once again, she had to respond to this rhetorical reversal: “No, never […] this is absolutely not an anti-Israeli logic […] I find it quite incredible to be attacked for a political demand that consists in saying I want total coexistence. […] My ideal is not to have borders between Israelis and Palestinians.”
If even the peaceful way seems unacceptable, it is unsurprising that armed struggle — legitimate in response to the alternative of exclusion (through apartheid or elimination) — is not considered acceptable by the European bourgeoisie. Now, its journalists regularly question the legitimacy of armed struggle by referring exclusively to the October 7, 2023 attack. Yet Rima Hassan does not retreat. During an interview on the right-leaning private radio station Sud Radio on February 27, 2025, she reminded a particularly aggressive interviewer of some basic principles of international law:
“Hamas has a legitimate action if we refer to United Nations resolutions. However, the fact that UN resolutions are extremely clear about the right of colonized peoples to resort to armed struggle does not mean that methods used in armed struggle justify everything […], you do not have the right to take civilians hostage, you do not have the right to commit abuses such as those that were committed, and I’d like to remind you that both my party and I have repeatedly stated that these were war crimes […].“
State scandal
For having described Hamas’s actions as legitimate based on international law — even after taking care during the interview to explain how “the political failure surrounding Palestinian issue” enabled its development and how the Israeli far right in power openly encouraged this development to weaken the Palestinian Authority — right-wing political figures went so far as to demand that Rima Hassan be stripped of her French nationality. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced that he had referred the matter to the courts.
While this latest complaint ultimately had no judicial consequences, the same cannot be said for one of Rima Hassan’s most recent police summons, once again concerning a tweet, this time quoting Kōzō Okamoto: “I dedicated my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as there is oppression, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.” For the first time, the related complaint was not dismissed, and Rima Hassan is therefore set to stand trial — over a tweet. For once, this decision sparked near-unanimous indignation across the French left and beyond. Some nevertheless attempted to justify the prosecution by pointing out that the quoted author was involved in the Lod Airport attack, but we can clearly see how dangerous it is for freedom of speech to allow courts the discretion to decide who may or may not be quoted, especially considering that many public figures who resorted to terrorism in the past are today regarded as legitimate.
This summons, dating from April 2, is nothing less than a political affair resembling an organized attack: a report filed by the Paris Police Prefect, custody imposed in clear violation of parliamentary immunity, leaks of interrogation details organized in real time by the judicial police and the Ministry of Justice’s central administration, false reports of drugs allegedly found among Rima Hassan’s belongings circulated continuously by bourgeois media, the ambiguous role of public prosecutor’s department. Most notably, on April 16, Mediapart revealed that Rima Hassan’s phone line had been monitored since January 1 without justification.
Even before this revelation, Rima Hassan and LFI had launched a counteroffensive with a major press conference on April 3. Rima Hassan and LFI now appear to hold the cards to demonstrate the existence of a genuine state scandal and expose how bourgeois media are able to abandon the little journalistic ethics they have in order to discredit the only party capable of winning the presidential election on a radical platform. Rima Hassan’s lawyer declared during the press conference that if there were indeed a trial, it would become “the trial of the century regarding apology for terrorism”.
The “lightning rod”
Although Rima Hassan regularly speaks about the “cost” of Palestinian identity, she has emphasized that attacks against her intensified after she joined LFI. The bourgeoisie dislikes seeing someone who had long confined herself to the role of a legal expert choose to defend the Palestinian cause within a highly structured political organization — and seeing that organization refuse to buckle under attack and carry its commitment through to the end.
Indeed, LFI broke sharply with the rest of the French left after the October 7, 2023 attack, as it was one of the only political forces that didn’t recognize any Israeli “right to defend itself”, but instead emphasized the broader context of oppression, and called for an immediate ceasefire. More generally, whereas the French Socialist Party has traditionally contributed to calming social anger, LFI seeks instead to provide it with a political outlet.
When one then asks why a figure like Rima Hassan has not emerged in Germany, attention naturally turns to Die Linke. It is certainly even more dangerous in Germany than in France to defend the rights of the Palestinian people, but is this not precisely because those who should have acted as a “lightning rod,” by virtue of their institutional anchoring, have failed to do so? While many groups and elected officials within Die Linke do defend the voice of the Palestinian people — such as comrades Ferat Koçak and Cansin Köktürk — this has unfortunately not yet been sufficient for the party to adopt a clear position on the Palestinian question, one capable of firmly opposing state repression. Die Linke proclaims broad principles, which still too many of its leaders, such as Bodo Ramelow, are quick to trample as soon as there is a cost involved and when it concretely disrupts the interests of the national bourgeoisie and imperialism. Rima Hassan has a name for this left: “the colonial left”.
