On Tuesday December 19, 2023, the “Alyah Fair” was held in Lyon, organized by the Jewish Agency for Israel [1]. The aim of this event, which takes place out of sight and without publicizing its address, as if it had something to reproach itself for or to fear from the light, is to guide candidates for the colonization of Palestine in their efforts to settle where other people already live, with the assumed prospect of replacing them there. Aliyah is in fact a response to the messianic promise made to the Jewish diaspora to be able one day to “return” to settle in Palestine without worrying about those who have lived there for centuries. To support these would-be settlers, the Olim, the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah provides a host of gifts, benefits and financial aid, the amounts of which are listed on their website. The “integration basket” alone represents over 19,000 shekels (€5,000) for a single person, and up to 37,000 shekels (€9,000) for a couple [2].
The Jewish Agency for Israel explains that “All Jews, regardless of their place of birth, are Israeli citizens by right”. According to the statistics, between 8 and 14 million people around the world could claim the right to occupy Palestine, in addition to the 6.7 million Jewish citizens already present in Israel (out of a total population of 9.6 million). Over 22,000 km², this would mean that the area of territory available per citizen of Israel would fall from the current 2.30 m² to less than 1.5 m², if we include the current total population, which is not made up solely of people of Jewish faith or origin. We can therefore understand the absolute need of colonization advocates to expand their “Lebensraum” (living space) by moving or ethnically cleansing the territory they covet in addition to the one they already occupy. The genocidal logic behind this project will be obvious to any rational person.
At a time when almost 20,000 Palestinians, half of them children, are being massively exterminated in the relentless bombardment of the Gaza ghetto, the holding of such an event demonstrates the insensitivity and boundless immorality of its organizers, who are relentlessly pursuing their colonization project. Every participant in this fair bears undeniable responsibility for the mass crime perpetuated between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, confirming just how much evil can lurk behind the apparent banality of a simple “move to Israel”. On December 19, a handful of people sensitive to the plight of Palestinians taken hostage and condemned to death by Zionist expansionism rightfully decided to gather near the Aliyah fair to denounce the atrocity involved in these population transfers.
The show was held on the premises shared by the Representative Council for Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) and the Unified Jewish Social Fund (FSJU), at 68 Mongolfier street in Lyon’s 6th arrondissement. Near the building, around twenty men dressed in black and with their faces concealed were in charge of securing the event, with no distinctive sign to identify whether they were a private security company or an ultra-nationalist militia of Zionist obedience. A study of the articles published the day after the event suggests that it was the extreme-right Zionist group Jewish Defense Ligue (LDJ) [3].
Worried by the dissuasive and virile presence of these concealed-face security guards, the small group of a dozen or so supporters of the Palestinian cause – at least one of whom was wearing a Union Juive Française pour la Paix badge – opted not to demonstrate noisily, but to hold signs and Palestinian flags on the sidewalk in front of the event, in the parking lot at Zoé Roche square. The messages on the placards were chosen to avoid any confusion as to the political clarity of the protest picket’s motivations: “Stop genocide”, “Freedom for Palestine”, “Stop colonization”, and so on. Some of the placards featured portraits of civilian victims of the Gaza massacre.
Even as the group tried to stand on the sidewalk facing the event, the show’s militiamen quickly crossed the intersection and immediately assaulted their detractors, tearing down their signs and flags and attempting kicks and punches in their direction, while verbally insulting them as “sons of bitches” and other depoliticized, masculinist slurs.
The protesters were violently pushed back onto the sidewalk from Boileau street to Duquesne street. Their reaction was not to come into contact with the aggressors, and videos would show (the aggressors filmed their own attack, as do IDF soldiers for their crimes in Gaza) that on several occasions they tried to temporize, first by questioning the fact that private security for an event was crossing the road to intimidate non-violent protesters on the opposite sidewalk, then by shouting at them to “keep their distance”. In the face of the aggression, the pro-Palestinian group legitimately shouted at their attackers, but no discriminatory insults were uttered. What was denounced was their ultra-nationalism and their status as settlers, which one of the attackers even jokingly admitted, betraying the fact that “settler” did not constitute an insult for him.
At the Duquesne street intersection, a member of the Zionist militia sprayed one of the demonstrators in the face, blinding one of his colleagues in the process, who fell to the ground in the process. The rest of the demonstrators then ran off to get rid of their attackers, who seemed determined to continue pushing them back with violence. Having finally distanced themselves, the Palestinian activists had just enough time to count themselves and, for some of them, to leave the scene, before some thirty law enforcement officers (BST, CDI…) arrested six of them at the Créqui street intersection, three blocks and over 350 meters from the Alyah fair.
During the checkpoint, half a dozen members of the Zionist militia took up position on the opposite sidewalk to film, insult and threaten the six people being checked, without the police getting them to leave or checking them. On the contrary, they subsequently received outrageously false complaints from two of the assailants, which fed into the legal proceedings opened against the people stopped, despite the fact that no evidence in the latter’s possession made it possible to characterize the acts of violence falsely attributed to them.
On December 11, 2023, again in Lyon, a conference for Palestine was violently attacked by an armed ultra-right group using iron bars, fireworks mortars and glass bottles, injuring seven people, three of whom had to be hospitalized, without the police being as quick to intervene to arrest the proven aggressors. Instead, it was the conference participants who were insulted by the police and handcuffed for 45 minutes while inside the association’s premises. In view of these two events, as well as the ban on conferences organized by anti-fascist collectives under the pretext of threats from the ultra-right, it is clear that the prefecture, the Ministry of the Interior and the public prosecutor’s office systematically support nationalist/fascist groups, investing astonishing energy in persecuting the victims rather than their aggressors.
And now it’s the turn of the press, notably Le Figaro and the first article in the local newspaper Le Progrès [4], to give credence to the shameless lies of the attackers, reported by the France-Israel Trade Chamber website “Israel Valley” and picked up by “i24”, referring to the “attack” on the Aliyah Fair by “around fifty” members of the “ultra-left movement”, who allegedly tried to “break into the event building” before a “scuffle broke out with the police and private security”. The police then “put an end to the fight”, according to i24’s sources [5]. The police investigation reveals that the attackers had the indecency to lodge a complaint and claim to have been attacked with “telescopic batons” and “tear gas”, while having been subjected to the insults “dirty Jews” and “death to the Jews”. It’s staggering to see how the misleading statements of a self-assumed ultra-nationalist group can be used as legal and media truth, despite the fact that several pieces of information are objectified by the facts: there were no more than fifteen people in the group of protesters, there was no attack or attempted intrusion, there were no weapons in the possession of those arrested, no one was injured, no one ever used racist insults against the attackers, and the police were not present at any time during the altercation. Here again, the Zionist aggressor bases the commission of his crimes on misinformation and lies, just as he does in the ruins of Gaza, unable to prove the veracity and legitimacy of the arguments justifying the genocide of an entire people.
“If everyone lies to you all the time, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that no one believes anything anymore. Indeed, lies, by their very nature, must be changed, and a lying government must constantly rewrite its own history. At the end of the day, you don’t just get one lie – a lie you can harp on for the rest of your life – you get a lot of lies, depending on the political wind. And a people who can no longer believe anything can no longer make decisions. They are deprived not only of their ability to act, but also of their ability to think and judge. And with such a people, you can then do whatever you want.” – Hannah Arendt, in an interview with French writer Roger Errera (1974).
In the meantime, six people have been deprived of their liberty, had their fingerprints and DNA taken, and had their phones seized as part of an investigation handed over to “specialized services”, without any trace or proof of the injustice they have suffered being kept in their possession. Released without explanation after 24 hours of custody cut in two (18 hours, then a 6-hour resumption after a night’s interruption), their phones remain in the hands of unidentified investigators. They are also told that the police can summon them again at any time to take them into custody or carry out additional investigations (hearings, confrontations or “police line-up”, searches, etc.).
One of the people arrested was a Syrian national, married to a Frenchman, who has been living since October with the constant pain of seeing her people (in the broadest sense) exterminated by Israel. At the bottom of her backpack, which also contained Tupperware bearing witness to the fact that she had come straight from work for a pacifist rally that was close to her heart, and therefore unprepared for an “armed attack”, the police found a small, brand-new and unused 9 cm pepper spray (OC), as carried by thousands of women constantly harassed and violated in a profoundly sexist and misogynist society. This innocuous element absurdly characterizes the facts, and the object was seized and placed under seal, along with her keffiyeh, which, beyond its pro-Palestinian symbolism, is a traditional accessory of Arab peoples throughout the Middle East. Our friend, still shocked by these measures taken against her, is asking the feminist and intersectional communities to show her support, by asserting loud and clear that a tear-gas spray constitutes a minimal means of protecting oneself as a woman. Contrary to what Israel invokes to justify genocide in Gaza, we are talking here about a right to defend oneself…
The charges against the 6 must be dropped and their phones returned without delay!
The authors of this article are solely responsible for their words and views, which do not imply those of all those present and/or involved in the events reported. To contact us, please write to: interstice.1@tutanota.com
NOTES :
1 – See the Alyah fair webpage : https://www.jewishagency.org/fr/salon-de-lalyah/
2 – See the Jewish Agency for Israel’s and Minister of Alyah’s webpages : https://www.jewishagency.org/fr/aides-a-lintegration/ et https://www.gov.il/fr/departments/general/absorption_basket
3 – See the webpage of the fascist LDJ : https://www.liguedefensejuive.com/lyon-des-racailles-pro-palestiniennes-attaquent-le-salon-de-lalyah-six-interpellations-2023-12-20.html
4 – See the articles of Figaro and Le Progrès : https://www.lefigaro.fr/lyon/a-lyon-des-tags-free-palestine-sur-le-crif-et-un-salon-de-l-alyah-attaque-par-des-manifestants-20231220 et https://www.leprogres.fr/faits-divers-justice/2023/12/20/affrontements-autour-du-salon-de-l-alyah-fin-de-garde-a-vue-pour-les-manifestants-pro-palestine
5 – See the articles of « Israel Valley » and i24 : https://israelvalley.com/2023/12/21/succes-incroyable-du-salon-de-lalyah-organise-par-lagence-juive-qui-se-tenait-a-lyon/ et https://www.i24news.tv/fr/actu/israel-en-guerre/1703153557-lyon-le-salon-de-l-alyah-attaque-par-des-militants-propalestiniens