As Palestinians come under devastating attacks from Israeli state forces, in France, efforts to build solidarity with Palestine face a climate of intense hostility. While a demonstration was planned in Paris on Saturday, May 15, interior minister Gérald Darmanin issued a straightforward ban on any protests over Palestine. After a tweet by Darmanin announcing the ban, the Paris police prefecture issued a decree to make any such demonstration illegal, to avoid any “disturbances.” The decree argues that protests over Palestine could bring together “risky elements aimed at provoking violent confrontations with the police.”

Such a restriction against protests in defense of Palestinians is, sadly, nothing new in France. Already in 2014, the state banned a demonstration for Palestine organized by the GUPS Paris (Union Générale des étudiants de Palestine), PYM France (Mouvement des Jeunes Palestiniens), Génération Palestine, Fatah-France, the PIR (Parti des indigènes de la République), the UJFP (Union Juive Française pour la paix), and the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA). Back then, the demonstration went ahead despite the ban (rallying around ten thousand people). But participants were arrested, and Alain Pojolat, a leading member of the NPA, was charged with “organizing a protest in defiance of the ban.”

The question of why demonstrations for Palestine have been banned is pretty easy to answer. Besides the French state’s clear complicity with Israel, demonstrations for Palestine are one of the primary tools of political expression for Arabs in France. The false accusation that a “new antisemitism” is pervasive in the banlieues and among Arabs is the key argument used in order to muzzle this political expression.