Galerie Claude Lemand

GAZA. A Call to con­demn Israel’s policy of destruc­tion.

In a call pub­lished by Mediapart, four women call on France and Europe to "say NO to the policy of destruc­tion" pur­sued by Israel: Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, former Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira, Franco-Tunisian his­to­rian Sophie Bessis, and Lebanese nov­elist Dominique Eddé.
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The State of Israel - ruled by its far right - is exter­mi­nating a people and tearing apart the Middle East. Neither the assas­si­na­tion of more than 200 Palestinian jour­nal­ists, nor the ban­ning of for­eign media out­lets from the crime scenes, nor the sys­tem­atic self-cen­sor­ship of the majority of Western media out­lets have been enough to filter out the horror.

Hour after hour, bombs are falling every­where in Gaza. Entire fam­i­lies are wiped out, hos­pi­tals are almost entirely out of ser­vice, chil­dren are ampu­tated without anes­thesia, mourning tents are burned, people run­ning to the aid of the wounded are killed at point-blank range, sur­vivors are con­demned to not being able to recover the bodies of their loved ones, a ship loaded with aid for Gaza is tar­geted by Israeli drones off the coast of Malta... Any pre­cau­tionary lan­guage now amounts to willful blind­ness.

Meanwhile, the Israeli regime occu­pies the Golan Heights and South Lebanon. Since November 27, 2024, it has vio­lated the cease­fire in Lebanon 1,500 times. Syria, barely freed from half a cen­tury of bloody tyranny, has endured the destruc­tion of its army by the IDF without anyone saying a word. The Israeli air force has attacked Syria nearly a thou­sand times. The new Syrian regime is thus deprived by its Israeli neighbor of the means to estab­lish its authority.
Israel’s hostage-taking of the Syrian Druze pop­u­la­tion adds its sab­o­tage to the chaos. "There are no ’Druze mas­sacres,’ but inter­com­munal clashes that the new gov­ern­ment is trying to con­tain," writes former French ambas­sador Gérard Araud. In doing so, Israel is refining its plan to carve up the region. This is no longer about antic­i­pa­tions or hypotheses. It is about obser­va­tions, find­ings, facts.

If European polit­ical leaders con­tinue to wait - and wait for what? - if they do not rise up with respon­si­bility and dig­nity to apply sanc­tions against Israel and sever their rela­tions with this incen­diary regime, they will be among those accused before his­tory. Worse still, they will inval­i­date the very prin­ciple of Europe, they will co-sign the end of democ­racy, the tri­umph of fas­cism. Let us recall that some thirty coun­tries are tar­geted by European Union sanc­tions, notably for serious human rights vio­la­tions. The legal frame­work for mea­sures pun­ishing Israel’s policy of terror exists. It remains to be imple­mented.

"The objec­tive is clearly to create the con­di­tions for car­rying out the largest ethnic cleansing oper­a­tion since the end of the Second World War," writes Josep Borrell, former High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs. He advo­cates an urgent return to inter­na­tional law, the use of levers of action against Israel, and the rejec­tion of the "fait accompli." When it comes to "fait accompli," if there is one power that is unbeat­able in terms of uni­lat­eral deci­sions imposed by force, it is Israel.

Let France and Europe come to their own aid by saying NO, clearly and finally NO, to this policy of destruc­tion.

Sophie Bessis, Dominique Eddé, Annie Ernaux, and Christiane Taubira