Since his arrival in France, in December 2022, after having been expelled from Jerusalem, the thirty -something has been the subject of pressures from the Ministry of the Interior to make a low profile.
by Benjamin Barthe
At the beginning of February, Olivier Pareja, an engineer living in the Parisian suburbs, receives a phone call of a somewhat special kind. At the other end of the line, an agent of the central territorial intelligence service, the successor of the RG, asks him “a question to quit or double”: “Salah Hamouri will he come” in the public meeting organized the February 9, in Versailles, by the France-Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) association, of which Mr. Pareja is one of the officials in the Yvelines? The policeman is not mystery of his intentions: if the Franco-Palestinian lawyer, expelled in December 2022 from Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities, is invited to the event, he will be prohibited.
The organizer responded in the negative. The AFPS meeting, devoted to the presentation of the Amnesty International report qualifying the regime to which the Palestinians are submitted as “apartheid”, took place without hindrance. But this episode speaks volumes about the pressures to which Mr. Hamouri, 37, has been submitted since his arrival in France. This employee of a NGO for the defense of Palestinian prisoners spent almost ten years behind Israeli bars, victim of a politico-administrative harassment denounced by major human rights organizations.
But in part of the Jewish organizations, in the National Assembly and within the executive, the native of Jerusalem is presented as a potentially dangerous agitator. These attacks led to the cancellation of several conferences in which he was to participate, one of which is organized by the town hall of Lyon, in early February, devoted to the Thirty years of the Oslo Peace Accords. “The government tolerates my presence on French soil but it does not want me to talk about my cause,” deplores Salah Hamouri, whose mother is French and the Palestinian father.
“not legitimate to talk about conflict “
The campaign which aims at him is based on two elements: his conviction, in 2008, by an Israeli military court, for participation in an obscure conspiracy aimed at assassinating the Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, leader of the Shass Sepfarade Party; And its affiliation supposed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (FPLP), an organization classified terrorist by the European Union. “A terrorist condemned for terrorist activity is not legitimate to talk about the conflict,” insists Simon Seroussi, the spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in France.
Hamouri’s membership of this party has not, however, been demonstrated by the Israeli authorities. As for the confessions he made at his trial, the only dependent piece in the file, they result from a plead-guilty procedure: seven years in prison if he admitted his participation audit conspiracy, fourteen years He persisted in denying her. In a letter dated 2011, Alain Juppé, then chief of French diplomacy, stressed that “the confessions made at the hearing were not corroborated by any element of evidence”.
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