I write this from Paris, a city wrapped in blue and yellow. All around me, Ukrainian flags hang like moral badges pinned on French facades.
I arrived in this city just a few weeks ago as a survivor of the genocide in Gaza, leaving my country burning behind me. I had the privilege of being evacuated by the French government as a student admitted to a French university.
What first struck me in Paris, this so-called city of Liberty is its organized sorrow, its sanctioned empathy and its decorated silence.
France cries Ukraine aloud. Gaza, on the other hand, must be whispered. The Palestinian flag cannot be seen here. He is hidden, feared, criminalized. If you are lucky, you find it painted in graffiti, a timid declaration of solidarity has hastily sprayed as a secret.
Should I be surprised?
After all, France is a colonial empire that has never dismantled, but has not been renamed. From Algeria to Vietnam via Syria, the hands of France are stained with the blood of those who dared to resist it.
When France supported the Zionist movement in the 20th century, when it formed Israeli officers, when it helped to militarize a colonial state of the colonists on stolen lands, it was not out of ignorance. It was in solidarity, white solidarity, with another colonial project.
France condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in a few hours. He opened his borders. He cried on television. He canceled the concerts and imposed sanctions. For what? Because Ukraine is white.
But when Israel applauded entire districts of Gaza, when he bombes hospitals, hugs of children, cuts water, tastes of prohibited weapons and puts families in bone dust, France hesitates. He is equivalent. He blamed Hamas. He insists on the “context”. This tends to Israel even more weapons.
What is happening in Gaza is not a “conflict”. It is not “complicated”. It is a genocide.
According to official statistics, more than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023; According to scientific estimates, the real number of deaths is in hundreds of thousands. More than 70% are women and children.
More than 80% of the population survives, barely, on one meal a day, often canned food or grass or cooked leaves. Every day we lose dozens of civilians trying to get help. Some 340 children and adults died in famine in just a few months.
Each northern hospital has been destroyed. Children are amputated without anesthesia. People with chronic diseases die on a mass scale due to the lack of drugs and treatment.
Help trucks are blocked. The water desalination plants are bombed. More than two million people are moved. And yet there is silence.
Experts from the United Nations, all major international human rights organizations, thousands of legal researchers and others, and even former Israeli officials said that this war had crossed all the red lines of international law.
And yet, here in France, we are told to lower our voices. We are told that screaming the “free Palestine” could be anti -Semitic. People who are waving the Ukrainian flags with pride tell us that our sorrow must be “balanced”. They rage against Russian imperialism but justify colonialism of Israeli colonists. It is not a neutrality. It is white supremacy.
Gaza has become their moral exception. Their blindness. Their other consumable. The news each editorial room twists to avoid.
But here is the truth: Palestine has no army, no jets, no ships, no nuclear weapons. What we have is resistance. Hamas is not a state soldier. It is the result of decades of siege, occupation, apartheid and abandonment. And while European leaders rush to condemn Hamas on each occasion they obtain, they refuse to condemn the occupation which gave birth to it. They erase our right to resist, while glorifying the Ukrainian resistance, holding them on weapons and praise.
In Ukraine, Molotov cocktails are “heroism”. In Gaza, the stones are “terrorism”. It is hypocrisy. It is the algorithm of white empathy.
What is happening in Gaza is not a war between two armies. It is the destruction of the scale of a people occupied by one of the most advanced armies in the world. It is a genocide helped by Western arms, protected by Western silence and embellished by humanitarian lies.
France wants to claim that its complicity is historic, that it ended with the end of formal colonialism. But how do you explain the weapons? Diplomatic immunity? The refusal to respect the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? The ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris? Monitoring Muslim students?
I left Gaza in an evacuation of the United Nations, organized by the French consulate in Jerusalem, my name selected from thousands. I was not allowed to wear anything. No laptop. No books. No memories. Just the clothes on the back and my phone.
I crossed Israeli control points where the soldiers looked at me as if I was not human. Four hours through the desert felt four decades. And now, I am there, walking on the boulevards of a city that claims to love freedom, while my people die for daring to want it.
Do not tell me that it is only politics. It’s racism. It is hypocrisy. The genocide of my people is watched from balconies draped with Ukrainian flags.
I don’t want pity. I want a responsibility. I want justice. I want to see Palestinian flags suspended next to those of Ukraine, not as competition, but as a truth. Because if solidarity depends on the color of the skin, borders or geopolitical interest, it is not solidarity. It is supremacy.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
