Birtherism

It’s worth looking at the statement by Hassan that kicked off the latest round of attacks. “Hamas is a legitimate actor from the point of view of international law,” Hassan told Sud Radio host Jean-Jacques Bourdin. “International law needs to be our guide. . . . The legitimacy of armed struggle in a context of colonization is extremely clear.”

Evidently many would consider Hassan’s statements politically wrong or unwise — but the MEP did little more than recall the fundamental terms of international law. In a situation of a colonial conflict and occupation — which is how the United Nations qualifies the Israel-Palestine conflict — acts of armed resistance are legitimate, although they must adhere to the laws of war. Moreover, the MEP would go on to tell Bourdin that she condemned the kidnapping and killing of civilians. That claim was not included in the sound bite that circulated on social media, unsurprisingly. “You do not have the right to take civilians hostage,” Hassan continued, “or to commit many of the acts of violence” seen in Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

“What’s behind these latest threats is the attempt to criminalize the political beliefs of Rima Hassan, whose slightest public statements trigger the most outrageous reactions,” Vincent Brengarth, Hassan’s attorney, wrote to Jacobin. “These reactions serve to mask the taboos surrounding the fundamental issues inherent in the Gaza question. They result from a choice to abusively repress, rather than admit the possibility of debate.”

If they mark a new phase in the attacks against his client, Brengarth nonetheless maintains that the threats to strip her of French citizenship are legally baseless. Loss of French nationality is a sanction authorized under French law, but only under strict circumstances — none of which apply to Hassan. The accused has to be shown to have attacked the “fundamental interests” of France, and have done so in their capacity as a citizen of another state. Likewise, the stripping of nationality can be a sentence in a case involving conviction for acts of terrorism.

“Not only does this the loss of nationality not apply, but it has been totally misused by extravagantly equating Rima Hassan with a person convicted of terrorism,” said Brengarth, referring to the wanton accusations of “terrorist apologism” that have been leveled against his client.

But French law also states that nobody can be made stateless by their loss of nationality. Hassan was born in Palestinian refugee camp in Syria in 1992, and therefore without an official nationality. She moved to France at a young age and ultimately acquired French citizenship in 2010, when she was eighteen. Revealingly, one conspiracy theory about her origins that has become popular on the Right holds that she in fact has Syrian citizenship. “In all the propaganda that surrounds her, it’s very difficult to know for sure whether she has dual citizenship,” Tanguy, the Rassemblement National MP, told the far-right news network CNews in late February.

“Lady Gaza”

Given the likelihood that Donald Trump’s clampdown in the United States will serve to turbocharge the repression of pro-Palestinian voices across the West, it’s perhaps optimistic to say that the battle over Hassan is not really about her nationality — or the prospect of her losing French citizenship.

Ultimately, the outrage surrounding Hassan has always been about delineating what can and cannot be said in France about the Israel-Palestine conflict. In discrediting the thirty-two-year-old MEP, the French right and center — and even segments of the center left — hope to turn the clock backward, unwinding the political space opened by the massive opposition to Israel’s October 2023 invasion and occupation of Gaza Strip.

Hassan’s party, France Insoumise, is the most vocal of the left-wing forces in its calls for a cease-fire in Palestine and a political solution to the Middle East conflict. This has at times swelled into a sticking point with the other left-wing parties and exposed it to accusations of antisemitism from the media and right-wingers. Those accusations were reignited in recent weeks with the March 11 publication by France Insoumise of a poster depicting far-right media personality Cyril Hanouna, which many viewed as drawing on antisemitic tropes.

For her party’s unflinching stance on the conflict, Hassan is chronically portrayed as something of a guru: a hysterical figure whose sole role is to further France Insoumise’s attempts to tap into the supposedly irrational resentment of the country’s Arab electorate. One comedian with a column on public radio France Inter referred to her as “Lady Gaza,” to tune with the general representation of Hassan as single-mindedly driven by a single “obsession.” In conservative weekly Le Point, one editorialist equated Hassan to a new Jean-Marie Le Pen, referring to the longtime far-right leader and notorious Holocaust denier who died in early January.

The media cycle jumps at any possible opportunity to isolate the MEP. Why did Hassan refuse to vote a nonbinding European Parliament motion calling for the release from Algerian prison of the novelist Boualem Sansal? Her critics cry Third World “campism.” That the vote was called by far-right MEP Marion Maréchal (née Le Pen) gets fewer accusations of hypocrisy.

Much of the political center and establishment media has largely abandoned Hassan to the Right’s attacks. In a stilted profile of the young MEP in the March 15 edition of Le Monde — a story that at times verges on being a hit piece — veteran journalists Christophe Ayad and Abel Mestre reduce Hassan to four words: “spontaneous, impulsive, domineering and radical.” And “in anger,” too, recycling her own reply to their question: “What year were you born?” (Hassan’s actual identity is the object of birtherist speculation on the Right — as are allegations that she did not in fact complete her master’s thesis in law.)

Then there’s her clothing: when Hassan speaks in public, she often wears a keffiyeh. That she “even” tried to wear the traditional symbol of the Palestinian liberation movement in the European Parliament — she has been ordered to remove it within the European Union assembly chamber — leads the Le Monde journalists to claim that Hassan “more often acts as an activist than as a politician.”

Double loyalties, an agent of foreign fifth column, not entirely “one of us.” There are not only a few of the country’s oldest antisemitic tropes in the French public’s obsession with Hassan. Ayad and Mestre write that she even “sometimes seems to forget” that she’s a “French elected official.” It’s not hard to hear a troubling extra emphasis on the word “French.”