It is early on a Sunday morning, and you are awoken by armed police officers banging on your door. They hand you a letter: the state will freeze your assets for a further six months, denying you access to your own bank accounts because they disagree with the anti-genocide stance you have publicly expressed.
The letter cites a tweet you posted several months ago, in which you criticised the Israeli and US bombardment of Iran. It cites the fact that you have shared an interview with a pro-Palestine activist and an article written by an academic historian on social media. These actions are proof, the letter explains, that you have failed to renounce your "pro-jihadist" convictions.
It sounds like something out of the pages of a dystopian sci-fi novel, but for Elias d'Imzalene, a French anti-genocide activist and founding member of the pro-Palestinian organisation Urgence Palestine, it has become real life.
The crime of which d'Imzalene is accused - and for which his freedoms have been restricted and his assets frozen for more than a year - is not so much a thoughtcrime, to use George Orwell's term, as a wordcrime.
In September 2024, at an anti-genocide demonstration in Paris, he used the Arabic word intifada to refer to the global non-violent uprising against Israel's occupation of Palestine that is still taking place regularly in cities all around the world.
Zionism has warped the lexicon, so words are now convenient weapons
Dozens of Israeli settlers attacked the Palestinian village of Qusra in the northern occupied West Bank...
Ahmed Zeidat was tending his olive trees in the occupied West Bank when a group of...
Israel's Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli has explained his own strategy more candidly than any critic...
Zvi Sukkot, a member of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, was filmed smashing the...
