The outbreak of violence in recent days in Israel and the Gaza Strip has awakened political differences in France on this highly sensitive subject. Thursday, May 13 in the evening, the prefect of police Didier Lallement banned a demonstration scheduled for Saturday in Paris and organized by the Association of Palestinians in Ile-de-France for “Denounce the latest Israeli attacks against the Palestinian people”.
To justify its decision, the police headquarters referred to a “Serious risk” of “Serious disturbances to public order” and D’“Abuses against synagogues and Israeli interests”. Earlier today Thursday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin asked for the event to be banned, recalling the “Serious disturbances to public order observed in 2014” when demonstrations against an operation by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip had provoked serious violence in Paris and the Paris region. “We cannot have a manifestation of hatred, an anti-Semitic manifestation”Mr. Darmanin said on Friday, recalling the cries of “Death to the Jews” summer 2014. The lawyers of the Association of Palestinians in Ile-de-France filed, Friday, an appeal for interim relief with the administrative court to challenge the prefectural decree “Unfair and abusive”.
“A precedent of seven years cannot justify violating the freedom to demonstrate”, replied on Twitter the first secretary of the Socialist Party (PS), Olivier Faure. Conversely, the mayor (PS) of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, considered that this ban was a “Wise decision”. “I fear violence since in 2014, we all remembered an extremely difficult demonstration where terrible words like ‘Death to the Jews’ were uttered”said Mme Hidalgo, for whom “Paris and France cannot be the ground of confrontations which would import this conflict on our territory”.
Fractures in the left
To invoke the demonstrations of 2014 to ban that of Saturday is on the contrary a motive “Absolutely lunar”, estimated Elsa Faucillon, MP (Hauts-de-Seine) of the French Communist Party. The same goes for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France insoumise (LFI) in the National Assembly, who considers that the gathering is “Obviously” prohibited in the “Sole purpose of causing incidents and (of) to be able to stigmatize [la] cause [palestinienne] “.
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