A year ago, her entry into the small world of media-savvy speakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caused quite a stir. Her two appearances on France 5's debate program C ce soir, on January 30 and February 28 2023, shook up an otherwise highly structured exercise. "Why shouldn't I be able to return to my grandparents' village?" said French-Palestinian law expert Rima Hassan, 31, granddaughter of Palestinians driven from their land when Israel was created in 1948.

Confronted by renowned academics, some twice her age, the young woman brandished words rarely heard on television, notably "apartheid," the term used by human rights NGOs to describe the oppressive regime to which the Palestinians are subjected. "There will be no Palestinian state," she said, arguing instead for the creation of a binational state.

With her long, jet-black hair and quiet strength, Hassan has given a face to the anger of the Palestinians, to their growing distrust of the two-state solution, to their rejection of the semantics of the Oslo Accords, the failed peace process that served, in their eyes, as a screen for the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation. In just two media appearances, the president of the Observatory of Refugee Camps, an NGO of which she is the founder, has been elevated in pro-Palestinian circles to the rank of "the new Leila Shahid," the former delegate general of Palestine in France, a powerful speaker long prized by the Parisian media.

So when the bombs started raining down again on Gaza, in the wake of the massacre committed by Hamas commandos on October 7, Hassan was expected to step up to the plate. But after two articles by the webistes Mediapart and Blast, which earned her a cascade of death threats by SMS and voicemail ("we're going to get you bitch, look behind you when you walk," "we're going to rape you and burn you alive"), the international law graduate left.

Freedom of speech

She did not renew her contract with the National Asylum Court, where she had worked for six years. She gave up the position as advocacy officer on migration issues offered to her by Amnesty International, for fear that it would restrict her freedom of speech on the Palestinian question. She bought a plane ticket and headed for Syria, more specifically the Palestinian refugee camp of Nayrab, near Aleppo, where she was born and spent the first 10 years of her life.

"In this horrible time, I felt the need to be close to my people. What's happening in Gaza is like a second Nakba," she said, referring to the forced exodus of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, when Israel was created. Her departure was also an act of protest against the atmosphere then prevailing in French political-media circles, marked by declarations of "unconditional support" for Israel and the suspicions of pro-Hamas sympathy, or even anti-Semitism, to which those criticizing this line were then exposed, such as former prime minister Dominique de Villepin.

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