On June 10, Salah Hamouri, a Franco-Palestinian lawyer who spent many years in Israeli jails, will be in Marseilles, invited by the Collectif Palestine en Résistances. He will talk in particular about Palestinian political prisoners. More than 850,000 Palestinians have known prison since 1967. It’s as if 10 million French people had been in prison during this period.
It was enough for a pharmacy that dares to speak in the name of the Jews and that the French government authorizes to speak in our name, to pour out its gall and its hatred. This is of course the CRIF.
Who am I to publicly express my anger and disgust? My name is Pierre Stambul. My two grandmothers were survivors of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903. My mother, Dvoira Vainberg, liaison officer for the MOI during the Nazi occupation, was the only survivor of an exterminated family. My father, Yacov Stambul, a member of the Manouchian group in the Boczor-Glasz-Stambul “triangle”, was deported to Buchenwald.
This memory is not only mine, it is that of all of humanity: never again supremacy, racism, negation of the other! All peoples and individuals have the right to freedom, equality and justice.
The CRIF press release accuses Salah Hamouri of being a terrorist. So let’s talk about terrorism. If there is a state that has been ruled by genuine terrorists, it is Israel. How else to describe Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, perpetrators, among others, of the attack on the King David Hotel (1946) and the Deir Yassin massacre (1948)? Shamir was even a collaborator as he murdered British soldiers in 1942-44 when the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis was at its height.
On the use of the term “terrorist”, CRIF seems unaware that Nelson Mandela’s ANC was considered “terrorist” until the fall of apartheid or that the Manouchian group was designated as “the ‘army of crime’. In 1967, General De Gaulle declared about the Israeli occupier: “he organizes, on the territories he has taken, the occupation which cannot go without oppression, repression, expulsions, and he manifests himself there against him a resistance which he in turn qualifies as terrorist”. The Palestinian people have been occupied and repressed for decades. International law is formal: resistance in these cases is not only a right, it is a duty. Salah Hamouri is a great resistance fighter.
The CRIF resumes the accusation against Salah Hamouri that he would have planned to assassinate a “chief rabbi”. He pretends to ignore that Palestinians depend on military “justice”, that this does not need to present evidence to convict and that if a Palestinian does not plead guilty, the penalty incurred is doubled.
But there is a lack of information on this honorable “chief rabbi”. This is Ovadia Yossef (1920-2013). To quote two of his statements: “The six million unfortunate Jews killed by the Nazis were not killed for free. They were the reincarnation of the souls who sinned…”. It’s still an insult to our dead, isn’t it? Or on the New Orleans disaster: “Over there, they are Negroes. Did the Negroes bring the Torah? A hurricane swept over them and drowned them because they have no God”. A Chief Rabbi, really?
The CRIF press release speaks of unbearable violence that allegedly took place in Toulouse against him. It is common for an aggressor to present himself as a victim. On June 9, 2015, I suffered a RAID attack after my telephone line was hacked by an offender from the Jewish Defense League, who has since been convicted by the courts and has taken refuge in Israel. I suffered police custody and violence (the government was obliged to compensate me). In the evening I hosted a big meeting in Toulouse and the same people who attacked Salah Hamouri’s meeting had tried unsuccessfully to attack mine. Then they claimed that there had been “anti-Semitic remarks” at this meeting that only they heard.
The CRIF press release speaks of hatred of Jews, of “the security of our Jewish compatriots”. Palestine has always been the land of the three great monotheistic religions which knew how to live together on this land. The Palestinians fight Zionism, not the Jews. In the numerous public meetings or demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people in France or elsewhere, there has never been the slightest call for hatred of the Jews. What is denounced is the occupation, the colonization, the blockade of Gaza, the mass imprisonment, the civilians executed, apartheid. Not understanding the reality of what is being inflicted on the Palestinian people is denial, not to say negationism. And what endangers the Jews is the summons: the CRIF wants to force them to support, whatever happens, a criminal policy. The OAS had used the same strategy vis-à-vis the French in Algeria.
The CRIF appeals to the prefect of Bouches-du-Rhône. He obviously did not read the many court decisions that go against his attempt to gag the solidarity movement: the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights affirming that the call for a boycott of Israel is legal, that of the Council of State affirming that the dissolution of the Collectif Palestine Vaincra is illegal or that of the administrative court of Nancy authorizing the public meeting of Salah Hamouri.
And of course, in this press release, there is the “classic” instrumentalization of anti-Semitism. Invoking the fight against racism to defend a supremacist regime which has enshrined in the law “Israel State Nation of the Jewish People” (2018) the inequality of men according to their real or supposed identity, it is still cheeky.
On the accusation against BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), remember that a large number of BDS activists are Jewish. This is particularly notable in the United States where 40% of young Jews consider Israel to be an apartheid state. “Self-hating traitors”? No, just Jews true to their values.
Since the CRIF claims to be keen to fight against anti-Semitism, let’s give it some advice.
Why didn’t he file a complaint against Benjamin Netanyahu when he said in 2015: “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews”, suggesting that it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who gave him the idea? ? Isn’t that revisionism?
Why didn’t he react when Victor Orban launched an anti-Semitic campaign against Georges Soros in Hungary and received the support of Netanyahu?
Why has he never condemned the Christian Zionists whose anti-Semitism is proclaimed? Ah yes, because they financed colonization. Pastor John Hagee was present at the inauguration of the US Embassy in Jerusalem. He had declared shortly before “that Hitler was the armed arm of God”.
How could CRIF accept that Jair Bolsonaro, visiting the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, declared without being contradicted: “the Nazis were on the left, weren’t they”?
The CRIF was founded by resistance fighters to defend the interests of Jews. He has become the transmission belt of the Israeli far right. It was led by a veteran of Betar, the militia that carried out armed training in Fascist Italy in the late 1930s.
One of its leaders, Gilles-William Goldnadel, committed to the far right, is the lawyer for Génération Identitaire and declared: “settlement colonies against the advice of the natives, there are some in Seine Saint-Denis . A Jew is less of a foreigner in Judea.” In my Jewish upbringing, racism has always been an absolute evil.
Zionism is an ideology that resulted in the expulsion of the majority of Palestinians from their country in 1948. Zionism is not Judaism and for a very long time the overwhelming majority of anti-Zionists were Jews. Mixing anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is historical nonsense.
I will end by addressing the Jews. 53% of the French in Israel who voted chose Zemmour in the first round of the presidential elections. Zemmour who explained that Pétain had defended the French Jews.
React! Your history, your memory, your identity, is not to follow people whose ideology resembles that of those who committed the genocide.
Judaism, whether secular or religious, produced remarkable individuals who considered that their emancipation as an oppressed minority depended on that of humanity. Your place is with the oppressed, not with the supremacists.
Salah, you are welcome in Marseille.
Pierre Stambul
2023-06-10 18:30:31
#shame #Judaism #UJFP
