What we told
Pro-Palestinian activists wanted to see her as a new Leila Shahid. With her ease on television sets, her repartee and her sharp arguments, mixing personal experience and international law, Rima Hassan could claim to succeed the former ambassador of Palestine to France, a well-known figure in the French audiovisual landscape. The thirty-year-old, born in Syria, in a Palestinian refugee camp, and arrived in France at the age of 10, gave a face to the post-Oslo generation: this youth who no longer necessarily demand a State, but above all equal rights between Jews and Arabs, who does not denounce so much “occupation and colonization” that the diet“apartheid” established by Israel, according to many human rights defenders, in the occupied territories.
Then came October 7, 2023, the date of the killings perpetrated by Hamas. Although she wrote on Twitter the same day that“it is morally unacceptable to rejoice in the deaths of civilians”, Rima Hassan found herself in the middle of a cyclone: dropped by L’Oréal, which she advised on issues of migrant integration, vilified on social networks, harassed day and night by telephone. Under pressure from figures in the French Jewish community, notably the host Arthur and Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, the magazine Forbes preferred to cancel the ceremony rewarding “the 40 exceptional women of the year 2023” in which this graduate in international law was to participate.
Worn out by this climate, Rima Hassan left to live for several months in the Middle East, between Beirut, Amman and the Nayrab camp, near Aleppo, in Syria, where her father lives. A retirement which was to allow him to reconnect with the Palestinian part of his identity and to work on a book on October 7 and the war in Gaza.
What has happened since
From abroad, Rima Hassan was also preparing her return and her reconversion. At the beginning of March, the lawyer announced her candidacy for the European elections in June, on the list of La France insoumise (LFI). Placed in seventh position, she can hope to win a seat in the European Parliament, the far-left party having elected six of its members in 2019. “The civil society label has its limits, advances the new recruit of LFI to justify his change of foot. The only concrete prospect that presents itself to me, apart from passively relaying messages on social networks, is that of a mandate. I wouldn’t have been able to look at myself in the mirror if I hadn’t gone through with it. »
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