Between the Place de la République and the Grands Boulevards in Paris, a thick crowd had gathered, braving the inclement weather on Saturday, March 9, to support the Palestinian cause, in the sixth month of the war triggered by the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023, and the bloody retaliation waged by Benjamin Netanyahu's government. Among the Palestinian flags, several slogans rang out: "Ceasefire," "Stop genocide," and "Boycott Israel, criminal state."
At the head of the procession was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left), who has made the situation in Gaza into the major focus of his European election campaign, and the French-Palestinian lawyer Rima Hassan. The Parti Socialiste (PS, left), meanwhile, could only be seen further down the long parade of demonstrators. Behind the banner adorned with the party's red rose was Emma Rafowicz, the president of the Young Socialists (JS).
Running in 8th place on the list of candidates led by Raphaël Glucksmann for the PS and Place Publique (Glucksmann's own party) in the European elections, the 28-year-old activist has been working tirelessly to convince voters to trust the Socialists. Her presence that day even surprised some in the LFI ranks. In the small world that is the Parisian left wing, everyone knows that the young woman is the niece of Olivier Rafowicz, one of the Israeli army's spokespersons. Since October 7, he has been on a marathon tour of news channels, especially on the French conservative news network CNews, as a mouthpiece of the Israeli government.
So how could the young Socialist be defending Gaza? "People don't understand. It doesn't fit into their essentialist programming," the young woman commented a few weeks later, as she sat in a café in eastern Paris. Since the protest, she has criss-crossed France: From Bourges in the center to Bordeaux on the coast, with stops in Caen and Cherbourg on the Channel. On May 1, she paid tribute to Léon Blum (1872-1950), an iconic figure of France's Popular Front in 1936, and planned to visit the western towns of Guérande and Quimper, as well as the alpine Savoie department over the start of May. If the polls are to be believed, she should be elected as an MEP on June 9.
This achievement would be the crowning glory after a difficult campaign. Her last name and family ties with her uncle in Israel – whom she doesn't know very well – have made her the target of abhorrent anti-Semitic attacks. For months, anonymous trolls have called her a "Zionist whore," a "killer of Palestinian children" and a "youpine" ("kike"). In March, she filed a complaint and went public about the abuse in the French newspaper Libération. Since then, the flood of hatred has subsided somewhat.
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