I write this from Paris, a metropolis wrapped in blue and yellow. Throughout me, Ukrainian flags cling like ethical badges pinned to French facades.
I arrived on this metropolis just some weeks in the past as a survivor of the genocide in Gaza, leaving my nation burning behind me. I had the privilege to be evacuated by the French authorities as a scholar admitted to a French college.
What first struck me about Paris, this so-called metropolis of liberty, was its curated grief, sanctioned empathy, and embellished silence.
France mourns Ukraine loudly. Gaza, alternatively, should be whispered. The Palestinian flag can’t be seen right here. It’s hidden, feared, criminalised. For those who’re fortunate, you discover it painted in graffiti, a shy declaration of solidarity rapidly sprayed like a secret.
Ought to I be shocked?
In spite of everything, France is a colonial empire that by no means dismantled itself, however solely rebranded. From Algeria to Vietnam to Syria, France’s palms are stained with the blood of those that dared to withstand it.
When France supported the Zionist motion within the twentieth century, when it educated Israeli officers, when it helped militarise a settler-colonial state on stolen land, it wasn’t out of ignorance. It was out of solidarity, white solidarity, with one other colonial undertaking.
France condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine inside hours. It opened its borders. It cried on TV. It cancelled concert events and imposed sanctions. Why? As a result of Ukraine is white.
However when Israel flattens complete neighbourhoods in Gaza, when it bombs hospitals, starves youngsters, cuts water, drops banned weapons, and grinds households into bone mud, France hesitates. It equivocates. It blames Hamas. It insists on “context”. It palms Israel much more weapons.
What is going on in Gaza just isn’t a “battle”. It’s not “sophisticated”. It’s a genocide.
By official statistics, greater than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023; by scientific estimates, the true loss of life toll is within the a whole lot of hundreds. Over 70 % are girls and youngsters.
Greater than 80 % of the inhabitants is surviving, barely, on one meal a day, typically canned meals or cooked grass or leaves. Every single day, we lose dozens of civilians making an attempt to get support. Some 340 youngsters and adults have died from hunger in just some months.
Each hospital within the north has been destroyed. Youngsters are getting amputated with out anaesthesia. Individuals with continual ailments are dying on a mass scale because of the lack of treatment and remedy.
Help vans are blocked. Water desalination vegetation are bombed. Greater than two million individuals are displaced. And nonetheless, there’s silence.
United Nations consultants, all main worldwide human rights organisations, hundreds of authorized and different students, and even former Israeli officers have mentioned that this warfare has crossed each purple line of worldwide legislation.
And but, right here in France, we’re instructed to decrease our voices. We’re instructed that shouting “Free Palestine” could be anti-Semitic. The individuals who wave Ukrainian flags with satisfaction inform us our grief should be “balanced”. They rage towards Russian imperialism however justify Israeli settler colonialism. This isn’t neutrality. That is white supremacy.
Gaza has turn into their ethical exception. Their blind spot. Their expendable different. The information each newsroom twists itself to keep away from.
However right here is the reality: Palestine has no military, no jets, no ships, no nuclear weapons. What we’ve is resistance. Hamas just isn’t a state army. It’s the consequence of a long time of siege, occupation, apartheid, and abandonment. And whereas European leaders rush to sentence Hamas at each alternative they get, they refuse to sentence the occupation that birthed it. They erase our proper to withstand, whereas glorifying the Ukrainian resistance, heaping on it weapons and reward.
In Ukraine, Molotov cocktails are “heroism”. In Gaza, stones are “terrorism”. That’s hypocrisy. That’s the algorithm of white empathy.
What is going on in Gaza just isn’t a warfare between two armies. It’s the wholescale destruction of an occupied individuals by one of the superior armies on the planet. It’s genocide aided by Western arms, protected by Western silence, and beautified by humanitarian lies.
France desires to faux its complicity is historic, that it ended with the tip of formal colonialism. However how do you clarify the weapons? The diplomatic immunity? The refusal to abide by the arrest warrant issued by the Worldwide Prison Court docket for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? The banning of pro-Palestinian protests in Paris? The surveillance of Muslim college students?
I left Gaza in a United Nations-escorted evacuation, organised by the French consulate in Jerusalem, my identify chosen amongst hundreds. I used to be not allowed to hold something. No laptop computer. No books. No recollections. Simply the garments on my again and my cellphone.
I handed by way of Israeli checkpoints the place troopers checked out me as if I weren’t human. 4 hours throughout the desert felt like 4 a long time. And now I’m right here, strolling the boulevards of a metropolis that claims to like freedom, whereas my individuals die for daring to need it.
Don’t inform me that is simply politics. It’s racism. It’s hypocrisy. The genocide of my individuals is being watched from balconies draped with Ukrainian flags.
I don’t need pity. I need accountability. I need justice. I wish to see Palestinian flags hanging subsequent to these of Ukraine, not as competitors, however as fact. As a result of if solidarity is determined by pores and skin color, borders, or geopolitical curiosity, it isn’t solidarity. It’s supremacy.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.