His emergence, a year ago, into the small world of speakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict favored by the media caused quite a stir. His two appearances on “C ce soir”, the France 5 debate show, on January 30 and February 28, 2023, had disrupted an exercise that is usually very codified. “Why couldn’t I come back to my grandparents’ village? “, exclaimed Franco-Palestinian jurist Rima Hassan, 31, granddaughter of Palestinians driven from their land when Israel was created in 1948.
Faced with recognized academics, sometimes twice her age, the young woman brandished words rarely heard on television sets, notably that of“apartheid”, the term used by human rights NGOs to describe the regime of oppression to which Palestinians are subjected. “We must stop lying to ourselves, there will be no Palestinian state,” she insisted, pleading, instead, for the creation of a binational state.
With her long jet-black hair and her quiet strength, Rima Hassan gave a face to the anger of the Palestinians, to their growing distrust of the two-state solution, to their rejection of the semantics of Oslo, this failed peace process, which served, in their eyes, as a screen for the perpetuation of the Israeli occupation. In two media appearances, the president of the Refugee Camp Observatory, an NGO of which she is the founder, was elevated in pro-Palestinian circles to the rank of “new Leila Shahid”, the former general delegate of Palestine in France, a shock speaker, long popular with the Parisian media.
So when the bombs started to rain on Gaza again, in the wake of the massacre committed by Hamas commandos on October 7, we expected Rima Hassan to step up to the plate. But after two interventions in Mediapart And blast, which earned him a cascade of death threats by SMS and voice messages (“we’re going to catch you bitch, look closely behind you when you walk”, “we will rape you and burn you alive”), the international law graduate took a tangent.
Desire to preserve freedom of speech
She did not renew her contract with the National Court of Asylum, where she had worked for six years. She gave up the position that Amnesty International offered her, as an advocacy officer on migration issues, for fear that this position would restrict her freedom of speech on the Palestinian issue. And she bought a plane ticket. Direction Syria, more precisely the Palestinian refugee camp of Nayrab, near Aleppo, where she was born and lived her first ten years.
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