Libérez Georges Abdallah

For all the attention that Abdallah attracted in the mid-1980s, when he arguably became the foremost symbol of the “Arab terrorist” in the eyes of the French public, mainstream opinion there has largely forgotten his case. (The same goes for the United States, despite the important role American officials have played over the years in Abdallah’s incarceration.) During a state visit to Tunis in 2018, French president Emmanuel Macron was heckled by onlookers shouting, “Free Georges Abdallah!” Macron appeared genuinely confused, turning to his entourage to ask whom the protestors were referring to.

In activist circles, however, Abdallah has become a symbol of France’s suppression of the movement for Palestinian liberation and the anti-colonial cause more broadly. Tom Martin is an activist in Toulouse with the Palestine Vaincra collective, which works for the liberation of Palestinian political prisoners. He has met Abdallah in prison and described him to Jacobin as a “communist intellectual who’s very open to the world and very curious about the French activist scene.”

At the Lannemezan penitentiary, Abdallah is said to have acquired a status of an elder to guards and detainees alike —in a prison largely reserved for individuals under long-term sentences, including New Caledonia independentists, Basque separatists, and Action Directe militants. That cause célèbre status is mirrored in the Arab world, most notably in Abdallah’s native Lebanon, which has long lobbied France for his liberation and extradition.

Abdallah reached the milestone of forty years in custody just weeks before a court decision on his latest release request — the eleventh such filing in a now-decades-long legal and political battle. The hearing was held this October 7, the one-year anniversary of the onset of the current Israel-Gaza war, in the very moment that Israel was escalating its offensive in Lebanon.

This coincidence is something that sympathizers fear will not play in Abdallah’s favor in the current proceedings, centered as they are around a figure who has not given up any of his political convictions. Indeed, a host of forces — from international pressure on French authorities to the erosion of France’s own justice system in the decades-long war on “terrorism” — seem to have consigned Abdallah to live out his days behind bars.

The “Yankis”

At around 9 a.m. on January 18, 1982, lieutenant colonel Charles R. Ray, a military attaché at the American embassy, was shot outside of his home in Paris’s Sixteenth arrondissement as he left for work. Weeks later, on April 3, Yacov Barsimantov — an advisor at the Israeli embassy and presumed intelligence officer in the French capital — was likewise shot dead outside his residence. The assailants in both killings were not found. Initial reports of Ray’s assassin suggested the suspect was “Middle Eastern” and “short, poorly dressed and with long hair.” As the New York Times then reported, witnesses identified Barsimantov’s assassin as a young woman who rapidly escaped to the metro, wearing a beret to cover her hair.

The killings would remain a cold case for some time, joining the long list of politically motivated assassinations at the height of a restive period of armed struggle, though the LARF rapidly claimed responsibility for both attacks. Founded in 1979 following Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon, the LARF was closely affiliated to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a revolutionary Marxist party embedded in the broader Palestinian independence movement.

A connection between Abdallah and the 1982 attack was made only years later. Born into a Christian family, Abdallah was politicized at a young age and wounded in combat during Israel’s 1978 invasion of southern Lebanon, which sought to dislodge the forces of the Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in that country. Part of a strategy of extending the fight beyond the Middle East, Abdallah relocated to Western Europe, leading LARF operations from Paris and Lyon. The group likewise claimed responsibility in the failed assassination of Robert Homme, US consul general in Strasbourg, in March 1984. Citing “the Israeli occupation and the massacres orchestrated by the Yankis [sic],” a LARF statement on the attempted killing of Homme claimed, “we are completely within our rights to attack the enemy of the people wherever they are.”

Abdallah was arrested in Lyon on October 24, 1984, following a tip from Italian authorities who had taken a man into custody near the Yugoslav border in the possession of explosives. That man’s contact in Yugoslavia was a woman by the name of Ferial Daher, who was renting an apartment in Lyon occupied at the time by Abdallah, whom French police began to surveil.

Thinking he was being followed by Mossad agents, according to Le Monde’s recent chronology of events leading to that arrest, Abdallah reported to the police station but was found in possession of fake Algerian and Maltese passports. He received a first verdict in July 1986, when a court in Lyon sentenced Abdallah to four years in prison under minor fraudulent document, weapons possession, and conspiracy charges. Nearly two years of this spell had already been served following his initial arrest.

The “Professional Terrorist”

The case for Abdallah’s implication in the 1982 assassinations, and for a harsher sentence, was built during this period of detention. In an April 1985 raid on an LARF hideout in Paris — in an apartment leased by a friend and paid via a Swiss bank account under one of Abdallah’s aliases — police discovered the weapon used in the assassinations of Ray and Barsimantov, crediting the idea of Abdallah’s direct connection to the two killings. The presumed leader of the LARF, which had claimed responsibility for both assassinations, Abdallah was logically a suspect.

But Abdallah’s case rapidly took on a far wider scale, the subject of a media storm in the mid-1980s as Paris became the theater of a wave of violent attacks. Israel’s summer 1982 invasion of Lebanon, resulting in the ousting of the PLO from Beirut, and the ongoing Lebanese civil war, which saw France opposing the rise of Hezbollah in its former colonial outpost, stirred fears of blowback attacks in France. Chalanset, Abdallah’s attorney, still finds himself reminding judges that the Ray and Barsimantov killings came before the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war — the “political and historical culture of magistrates is not quite at the level you’d hope,” he says. In 1985–86, fourteen people were killed in a spate of attacks in Paris, which also left over three hundred injured.

Abdallah’s importance in the eyes of French authorities swelled throughout that unrest, in a classic case of guilt by association. What didn’t help was that many of the Paris attacks were claimed by an obscure Committee for Solidarity with Arab and Middle East Political Prisoners, which cited the liberation of Abdallah as one of their demands. Abdallah’s family back in Lebanon were pointed to as accomplices too, as the alleged core of the LARF structure. In March 1985, a French cultural ambassador, Gilles Sydney Peyrolles, was taken hostage in Lebanon by local LARF militants. He was released under the terms of an exchange with French authorities that was never reciprocated with Abdallah’s liberation, since it came just before the discovery of the Paris hideout.

The decks were rapidly being stacked against Abdallah in the courtroom. In his 2022 memoirs, Alain Marsaud, a former anti-terrorist magistrate, wrote that “it’s now clear that Abdallah was in part judged for things that he did not do” — referring to the broader unrest in Paris that occurred while Abdallah was in detention.

In a 1986 report characteristic of the metastasizing fear around Abdallah, veteran journalist Edwy Plenel (future founder of left-wing press outlet Mediapart) wrote in Le Monde that Abdallah was a “professional terrorist.” Plenel and his coauthor Georges Marion describe Abdallah as

no mere technician, a regular of international palaces, a bloody mercenary and reveler. A polyglot (besides Arabic, he speaks French, Italian, English and even Hebrew), Abdallah has firm militant convictions and possesses a deep political culture. These characteristics make him a man whose “price,” for both his friends and sponsors, is high, that of a chief, not a second-rate hired gun.

The return of right-wing government following France’s 1986 parliamentary elections also ended the Mitterrand administration’s initially more lenient approach to political militants. That same year, conservative prime minister Jacques Chirac introduced France’s first modern anti-terrorism law, creating special tribunals presided by professional magistrates without the input of popular jurors. In February 1987, Abdallah was the first person to be convicted under these statutes, the core of France’s modern anti-terrorist justice system.

Symptomatic of those courts’ porousness with the prevailing political climate, the judges adjudicating Abdallah’s case even exceeded the ten-year sentence demanded by prosecutors. They opted for life imprisonment, for complicity in the assassinations. “If the people did not entrust me with the honor of taking part in the anti-imperialist actions you attribute to me,” Abdallah said from the bar, “at least I have the honor of being accused of them by your court and defending their legitimacy.”

Jacqueline Esber, Barsimantov’s presumed assassin, was tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison as well. She reportedly died in Lebanon in 2016.

A French Spy

What Patrick Baudouin, emeritus president of the Human Rights League, calls the French state’s “relentless” determination in incarcerating Abdallah became even clearer in the aftermath of the 1987 conviction. Just days after the final verdict, Jean-Paul Mazurier, one of Abdallah’s attorneys, confided in a tell-all book by a Libération journalist that he had worked for the French intelligence services during the defense of his client. By July 1987, he was disbarred.

Abdallah’s other attorney was Jacques Vergès, one of the most renowned lawyers in France at the time, known for his work defending individuals accused of politically related crimes. That Vergès did not seek to have the verdict thrown out “remains one of the great mysteries” of Abdallah’s saga, says Chalanset, who took over Abdallah’s case following Vergès’s death in 2013. “Why was there never a retrial?” Baudouin asks. “Many questions remain from the 1987 conviction.” Chalanset speculates that despite Vergès’s stature as an attorney, he was sensitive to the political humors of the day, in a time when public opinion clamored for a clampdown against the threat of Middle East–linked political violence.

The abuse of Abdallah’s rights as a defendant by a politically pliant justice system remains one of the main arguments for his release. On October 26, some two thousand demonstrators joined the annual march for Abdallah’s release held outside the Lannemezan prison. “One can think whatever they might like of Abdallah — it’s not that you have to sympathize with him or the cause that he stands for. What’s important is that his rights are respected,” Baudouin told Jacobin.

Alongside other NGOs, Baudouin’s Human Rights League has come out in favor of Abdallah’s release, writing letters of petition to Macron and his recent heads of government to appeal for a meeting on the subject. So far, it has been to no avail. “We’ve gotten little beyond the cold shoulder from political authorities,” says Baudouin. “It’s completely at odds with all the rules on the respect of an individual’s rights.”

American Interventions

According to French criminal procedure for life sentences, Abdallah has been eligible for a commuted sentence since 1999. Back then, there was reason to believe that he would eventually receive an advanced release from prison, in parallel with the other militants of his generation who began to be released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A court in Pau gave a positive ruling to that effect in 2003, but it was overturned in an appeal initiated by the justice ministry in early 2004.

Abdallah came closest to release in 2012. His liberation was again ordered in a first ruling, which likewise conditioned his release on his extradition from France. That judgment was then held up through appeal, seemingly paving the way for the end of Abdallah’s prison term.

But the court-ordered release that year landed his case in the hands of the center-left government under president François Hollande. Then interior minister Manuel Valls refused to sign off on Abdallah’s expulsion from French territory. “That’s not political authorities’ place,” says Marie-Christine Etelin, a retired attorney who like Chalanset has defended Action Directe militants. “When a judge decides something, it’s up to the political authorities to execute that decision.”

“Prison is not supposed to be a death sentence,” Etelin continued, describing the convict’s limbo status after his near-release in 2012–13. “We’re now essentially in a situation where state authorities have decided to take on the rule of judges and decide that Abdallah has, de facto, been given a death sentence.”

Yet it soon became clear that there were other forces at play. A WikiLeaks release showed the extent of the communications between the United States and French governments on the Abdallah case. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke on the phone with French authorities as Abdallah was awaiting extradition in early 2013 and asked them to block the court-ordered release. “Although the French government has no legal authority to overturn the Court of Appeal’s January 10 decision,” Clinton said, according to the “call sheet” of her exchange with French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, “we hope French officials might find another basis to challenge the decision’s legality.”

That less-than-discreet order was applied to the letter: Valls blocked Abdallah’s freedom by refusing to sign the extradition order, consigning him to further incarceration.

“American interventions have played an absolutely critical role from the beginning,” says Baudouin. “And that remains present today.” From the initial 1986 Lyon ruling, handing Abdallah a four-year sentence, American authorities were up in arms, criticizing the leniency of the sanction against the LARF militant. Seeking to drum up the fear of Arab terrorism in Europe, US intelligence officials likewise released an ominous report in July 1986, predicting a growing wave of attacks in the region.

After the push for his release in the 2010s failed, Abdallah resigned himself to finishing his life in prison. One ground for another release attempt, according to Chalanset, revolves around a recent ruling by France’s Constitutional Council, specifying equal treatment for French and non-French nationals serving life sentences. For Chalanset, this opens a breach in the authorities’ administrative tactic of blocking Abdallah’s release by withholding his expulsion order.

But the US government has not let go of the Abdallah case either, twelve years after the 2012 release was blocked by pressure from Clinton. In Abdallah’s latest liberation plea, the United States was again represented as a third-party plaintiff. According to Chalanset’s telling of the October 7 hearing, US representatives argued that he would pose an acute risk of destabilizing Lebanon and likely return to armed activity. The US embassy in Paris declined Jacobin’s request for comment.

Repentance

But activists are hesitant about putting all the blame on Washington. “[US pressure] doesn’t absolve France of its responsibility,” says Toulouse-based activist Martin. “French authorities are ultimately the ones that have the keys to the Lannemezan prison, and they’re the ones that are making the decision to keep Abdallah in detention.”

It’s a reading that Abdallah purportedly shares too. Chalanset told Jacobin of his difficulty in convincing his client that the best path to his freedom is in contesting the legal flaws in the justifications for his detention. Abdallah, on the contrary, is more determined to confront its specifically political nature.

If there’s an “Abdallah exception,” that’s in large part because his case straddles two chapters in the history of French anti-terrorism. Here’s a defendant who was judged amid the reaction to the Years of Lead, however much his case already stood apart in the 1980s, connected to the new fear of political violence linked to the Middle East. Yet unlike his peers, Abdallah has been kept in detention as the locus of French anti-terrorism has shifted to the question of Arab terrorism, exposing him to the racist bias of the country’s justice system.

“Beyond international pressure, I think that what’s really at play here is that [Abdallah] is an Arab, even if he’s a Marxist and of Christian origin,” says Chalanset. “Since he’s been eligible to be released, we’ve fallen into a period marked by Islamist attacks, which was not the case before. Judges are terrified at the thought of liberating someone who could be pointed to as an Arab terrorist.”

That is, at any rate, the story about Abdallah told by French and US authorities — including false claims about his converting to Islam in prison. According to Chalanset, the US counsel at this month’s hearing unearthed articles from 2011 that reported that Hezbollah demanded Abdallah’s liberation. “I needed to remind the judges that nearly all of Lebanon’s political parties have called for his release,” the attorney said.

A psychological examination late last year, which this spring delivered a negative opinion on Abdallah’s potential release, also had him answering questions about his views on Hezbollah and Hamas. “They are completely pernicious lines of questioning,” says Baudouin. “If they’re held against him, that would be a flagrant violation of his rights as a defendant.”

For many, the thought that a seventy-three-year-old man will take up arms once more if released is absurd. But what’s really at stake here is the French state’s refusal to release an individual who still defends the legitimacy of armed struggle. “Abdallah is among those who remain faithful to their ideas and principles and don’t shy away from saying it,” Baudouin continued. “He doesn’t repent for his political engagements, which makes him very unsympathetic in the authorities’ eyes.”

“Repentance is not a legal concept,” Chalanset points out. “It’s a moral and a religious one.” For Martin, who cites the conclusions of the psychological examination, “the goal of [Abdallah’s] imprisonment is to break him”:

But in forty years, they haven’t succeeded — a failure that is even more striking when you consider that he’s become a political symbol because of his detention. Thanks to the campaign for his release, many activists have discovered the Palestinian cause and the battle against imperialism.

An initial verdict is expected on November 15, before any potential appeals by Abdallah’s counsel or the French state.