The Watremez hall in the northern French city of Roubaix was packed to the rafters on Wednesday, April 17. La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) party activists from the working-class city, or from neighboring communities such as Wattrelos or Lille, turned out in droves – 1,200, according to organizers – to applaud party founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Palestinian refugee Rima Hassan, a naturalized French citizen and LFI candidate in the June 9 European elections, and David Guiraud, the local LFI MP.
Gaza was not officially the main theme of this European election rally, but many of those taking part expressed concern over the Palestinian question, "the most important of all" according to Farid, who preferred to remain anonymous. A keffiyeh on her shoulders, Sabrina Bouamama, "a long-standing LFI supporter," had come to "listen" to Hassan. "I know what she stands for," added the 40-something woman, who sees Hassan as a representative of the "second and third generations born of colonization."
It had been a turbulent day for the LFI members. Just a few hours earlier, the debate Mélenchon and Hassan were due to host at the University of Lille the following day was canceled. The institution's president had deemed that "the conditions [were] no longer suitable to guarantee the serenity of the debates," after requests for the event to be banned made by Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern region encompassing Lille and Roubaix (Les Républicains, LR, right), as well as by local MPs Sébastien Chenu (Rassemblement National, RN, far-right) and Violette Spillebout (Renaissance, Macron's centrist party). The event had been organized by the student association Libre Palestine ("Free Palestine") – whose logo, a map showing a single territory indiscriminately encompassing Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, fueled the controversy – and was described by Bertrand as a "conference with anti-Zionist overtones."
On stage, Mélenchon railed against the "wretches" who had "ruined" his day. "They know they're lying, that Rima and I hadn't planned a racist conference, because anti-Semitism is racism and we're not racists," he proclaimed.
Hassan, for her part, refrained from getting involved in the controversy, and avoided bringing up this episode, not even mentioning the situation in the Gaza Strip. In a short speech, the European election candidate stuck to general remarks on "exile," and "uprooting" – which can be both a "tearing away" and a "new beginning." "There is this France of welcoming, [but also] of rejection," which made her hear French anti-Arab racial slurs for the first time, she continued.
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