JEFF PACHOUD / AFP
Illustrative photo taken at Sciences Po Lyon, May 2, 2024.
POLITICS – For the second time in less than ten days, the police intervened this Friday, May 3 in the grounds of Sciences Po Paris to dislodge a few dozen pro-Palestinian students who were occupying the premises. This, while the movement affects some other university sites, such as La Sorbonne, the ENS campus in Paris and even journalism schools.
Compared to the American scale where the campuses of around forty universities are experiencing a wave of mobilization, with muscular interventions by the police, the situation in France remains measured outside the Sciences Po campuses in Paris and in the region.
The executive, however, displays its “firmness”. “There will never be a right to blockade and never any tolerance with the action of an active, dangerous minority, which seeks to impose its rules, an ideology from across the Atlantic, on our students and teachers,” launched the Prime Minister while traveling in Pirou (Manche) on April 27. Gabriel Attal is closely following the case and has “requested the intervention (of the police, Editor’s note) as soon as the provisional administrator was requisitioned” from Sciences Po Paris, Matignon clarified on May 3, to put an end to the new blocking sequence.
Before Gaza, Vietnam (and not just in the United States)
In fact, seeing students mobilize in the context of an international conflict is nothing new. Nearby HuffPost Robi Morder, president of GERME (Study and Research Group on Student Movements), and associated researcher at Laboratoire Printemps, discusses the mobilizations against fascism in the interwar period but especially those against the Vietnam War ( 1955-1975).
In March 1968, students occupied the Nanterre faculty and launched the “ March 22 Movement “, A “detonator” of May 1968, for the historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel. The demands of the time are diverse but “the first was the release of an activist from the Vietnam Committee (CVN) who had been arrested a few days before”explained the historian to World in 2018.
It is also impossible not to mention the Algerian war and the large-scale demonstration launched by Unef on October 27, 1960. However, with a significant difference: France was then directly concerned, which is not the case in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In addition, the removal of the military reprieve (the order of August 11, 1959) which concerned students, likely to be sent to the battlefield, provided an additional reason for gathering in the 1960s.
“Student mobilization on international conflicts is nothing new. But we must each time ask ourselves why it is done on certain conflicts and not on others. summarizes Robi Morder.
The fight against colonialism, a mobilizing element
If the student mobilization for the Algerian war is not entirely comparable with that for the Palestinian cause, there is however a common point: the fight against colonialism, French for Algeria in the 1950s, Israeli for current conflict in the Middle East. At the end of 2023, the Israeli NGO PeaceNow identified around 146 official Israeli settlements in the West Bank, plus at least as many settlements not recognized by the Israeli administration. This is in total violation of dozens of resolutions passed at the UN since the end of the Six Day War.
Messages “once a settler, always a settler” were thus tagged on certain establishments while this Friday, the USL high school union called for “mobilization in establishments for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, recognition of the Palestinian state and an end to colonization” .
The fight against colonialism acts as a “identification phenomenon”deciphers Robi Morder. “It is obvious that any anti-colonialist fight that appears as such is likely to interest many students who are, for reasons of origin or opinion, attached to this question.” And to cite, as a counter-example, the case of the war in Ukraine where this aspect did not impose itself, due to the territorial proximity on the one hand but also the representation in the collective imagination of the colonization: against peoples “of different color or religion”which is not the case in Ukraine.
A “movement of the heart” for “the crushed”
“The student population has always shown an outpouring of heart and always for those who are crushed, rarely for the authoritarians,” criminal lawyer Henri Leclerc abounds on France Inter. “What is happening in Gaza is something that is shocking. No one disputes that October 7 is an absolute horror, that it is a barbaric act (…) but the response given is appalling”affirmed the honorary president of the Human Rights League on France Inter, evoking a “movement of the heart”.
Beyond the sole fight against the colonization policy, Robi Morder also highlights a “specificity” from Sciences Po where, due to its status as an institute of political studies, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its repercussions are among the themes studied. “Students are therefore particularly sensitive to it”observes the specialist and the communication or awareness-raising operations carried out by students from co-belligerent countries have more resonance.
However, unlike in the United States where the demands directly challenge Joe Biden’s policy towards Israel, in France they do not remain limited to the higher education sector. Thus at Sciences Po Paris, the blockade of the institute was revoked on the evening of Thursday May 2 and around ten students began a hunger strike after management refused to launch an internal investigation to review the partnerships between the Parisian school and Israeli establishments.
Also see on The HuffPost:
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