Interview
Rima Hassan: ‘Am I afraid? I refuse to be. Israel’s goal is to paralyze us.’
We interviewed the Palestinian European parliamentarian Rima Hassan of La France Insoumise ahead of her voyage with activists including Greta Thunberg to challenge the blockade of Gaza.
Rima Hassan is about to embark. On Sunday, June 1, together with other political activists – including Greta Thunberg – she will board the Madleen in Catania, a vessel bound for Gaza: the Freedom Flotilla’s new, defiant mission after an Israeli air raid disabled one of the coalition’s vessels off Malta a few weeks ago.
Elected to the European Parliament with La France Insoumise, the first Palestinian to achieve that feat, Hassan has a long record of political activism behind her. We interviewed her in Naples.
Why are you going on board?
It’s a matter of consistency. The struggle for the Palestinian people must be waged on several fronts – in the streets, through initiatives like the Flotilla or the Global March to Rafah, and at the political level, in parliaments. As citizens we are called to step up. We will have a small boat, which won’t carry aid. This is a political and symbolic action. Am I afraid? I refuse to be. Israel’s goal is to paralyze us, to make us too terrified to speak out.
What obstacles are you facing in the European Parliament? How much of its paralysis is due to splits among the groups and divisions within the progressive camp?
The EU–Israel Association Agreement could have been suspended immediately. The human rights violations, as provided in Article 2, had already been documented: apartheid, occupation, arbitrary detentions, killings, village demolitions. Only now, after 20 months and massive street protests, Kaja Kallas managed to scrape together a majority just to review the agreement, not suspend it. In the Human Rights Committee, where I sit, I tried every avenue to get a text passed on Palestinian rights, on children, on destroyed civilian infrastructure – yet progressive groups blocked every single one.
Why are some European leaders striking a new tone today?
The shift in rhetoric is due solely to the mobilizations, not to any newfound conviction. They speak out because they are forced to; they know they have forfeited credibility on human rights. Sanctions on Russia took two weeks; we are 20 months into a genocide and they are still deliberating what to do.
How much of an effect are Trump’s far-right policies having on this new stance?
Trump has been clear. He wants to turn Gaza into a Riviera, he talks about deportation. Such cynicism forces Europeans to condemn all this and to reaffirm their professed defense of human rights and international law. The only “advantage” of Trump’s line is that, by proposing such an extreme “solution,” he has isolated Israel to the point that even hypocritical Europe felt obliged to dissent. We should recall: historically, the Palestinian question is a European issue. Zionism, antisemitism, Nazism – they are all European issues. Israel was founded in response to European antisemitism; Zionism arose, as Theodor Herzl wrote, amid the persecutions of the Jews in Europe; and the colonial project follows Europe’s own colonial model. The problem is European, and the solution must be European.
One of the worst consequences of Europe’s stance has been the repression of dissent. You have come under fierce attack.
I am a daughter of the Nakba, and my discourse particularly bothers Israel and its allies because it goes back to the roots, to 1948. Our very existence as refugees born in camps proves Palestine’s dispossession. They call me “Syrian” to erase my Palestinian identity, because their greatest fear is the right of return for six million people.
In France, to what extent has the repression of protests operated along racist, ethnic, religious or class lines?
Many have gone through similar stories: events cancelled, prosecutions for “apology of terrorism”, demonization in the media. Yet activists have won the vast majority of cases that reached court in France, showing that the instrument of repression is political, not with any legal basis. There is also a class dimension to the repression, targeting racialized communities of migrant background. Media and politicians claim support for Palestine comes from Muslims, but these communities back Palestine because they share a colonial history. Arabs and Black people feel they have ties to the Palestinians – not through Islam, but through their own experience of colonization. To vilify the Palestinian cause amid rampant Islamophobia, they brand it Islamist and pro-Hamas, instead of calling it international, revolutionary and anti-colonialist.
You call yourself a child of the Nakba. Like all Palestinians, you grew up hearing your grandparents’ stories of expulsion. What do you feel when you see the same images today?
In those tents I saw the images of the Nakba all over again. In this temporal and spatial context – time frozen since 1948, living in the diaspora – which is central for anyone raised in a refugee camp, what is happening in Gaza is like a second death. If Palestinians in Gaza are deported, the next stop will be the West Bank. We are at a historic turning point, but I am convinced the Palestinians will win.
Europe talks a great deal about a Palestinian state, often confusing the goal with the vehicle of liberation. What political solution do you envisage?
The international community is narrowing the political horizon of the Palestinian cause by boxing it into the form of a state. The people are demanding something else: self-determination. Let us turn Israel’s colonial policy on itself: you want the whole land, freedom of movement, the right to live anywhere? So do Palestinians. And we already live from the river to the sea: 20 percent of Israelis are Palestinian; Palestinians are in Gaza, Jerusalem, the West Bank. The only way to dismantle this colonial system is a single, two-nation state. When Palestinians have equal rights, they will not respond with violence. The prerequisite is equality and freedom of movement and residence. That is true reparation for the Nakba. In 2018, the Great March of Return did not call for ending the blockade on Gaza but for freedom to return to our villages. Liberation doesn’t mean Palestine written on a map; it means return. We do not want another Nakba to undo the first: Israeli Jews must be able to stay. Their presence is as legitimate as mine.
(Filippo Ortona contributed to this interview)
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/rima-hassan-la-questione-palestinese-e-un-problema-europeo on 2025-05-30