Leila Shahid, Palestine’s Brightest Voice

Mahmoud Darwish once joked with his friends Elias Sanbar and Farouk Mardam-Bey that he envied Leila Shahid and tried not to walk beside her in the streets of Paris, because people would constantly stop them to greet her or ask for a photo. He would be left waiting until she had acknowledged her admirers, or else she would have to point out, smiling, that the person with her was the celebrated poet, “none other than him,” the one who truly deserved the greeting…

Leila Shahid, Palestine’s representative in France, then in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and to the European Union between 1993 and 2015, was, beyond any doubt, the most visible Palestinian figure in Europe’s media and political arenas for two decades. Born in Beirut in 1949 to a father from Acre and a mother from Jerusalem, she came from a family for whom political struggle had been a destiny ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Great Revolt of 1936, and then the Partition Plan and the Nakba of 1947–1948. In her youth, she joined Fatah. She rose through political engagement and cultural activism, especially during her studies in Paris, where the Mossad assassinated, in 1973, Palestine’s envoy Mahmoud al-Hamshari, one of the first to build a Palestinian “diplomatic” narrative abroad. There, Leila became part of a circle of Palestinians and Arabs who gathered around al-Hamshari’s successor in the role of “ambassador,” Ezzedine al-Qalaq (among them Sanbar and Mardam-Bey) and with them she forged close ties with French left-wing intellectuals and writers throughout the 1970s. That continued until the Abu Nidal group assassinated al-Qalaq in the summer of 1978, an operation whose dark day Leila would recall, in striking detail, for years, given her attachment to him and the imprint he left on her generation’s political culture.

Francesca Albanese et la bassesse des puissants

La rapporteuse des Nations unies sur les droits de l’homme dans les territoires palestiniens occupés, Francesca Albanese, se trouve une fois encore exposée à une campagne politique qui la prend pour cible, à la fois comme personne, comme incarnation d’une éthique juridique, et comme position indépendante, refusant toute transaction au rabais avec le droit international et les exigences qu’il impose s’agissant des Palestiniens et des crimes israéliens perpétrés à leur encontre.

Article publié dans le Club de Mediapart

Comprendre le Proche-Orient

 

The Iranian Regime at the Crossroads of Internal Revolt and External Threats

For the past two weeks, Iran has been witnessing its broadest popular uprising since the revolt of 2022, which itself had been the largest and most radical since the demonstrations of the Green Movement in 2009.

The current uprising, however, differs markedly from its predecessors—whether in its slogans, its social base, its geographical scope and national implications, or in the manner in which a regime subjected to intense external pressure has responded to it.

Unlike the 2009 uprising, which emerged from the rejection by a largely urban and university-educated generation of electoral fraud in a presidential election they believed could open the door to political change, and unlike the 2022 revolt, which articulated feminist slogans and combined demands for individual freedoms persistently curtailed by the authorities with broader rights-based claims—particularly in regions with Kurdish, Azeri, and Baluchi majorities—the present uprising began with calls by the bazaar (the class of traders rooted in Iran’s historic marketplaces) for a general strike. These calls protested economic deterioration, the collapse of purchasing power, and the devaluation of the national currency. They were subsequently followed by major political mobilizations initiated first by student groups and then by rural popular sectors across most of the country, with the notable exception of areas that had experienced the most extensive protests three years earlier, where demonstrations have so far remained limited, for reasons to be discussed later.