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.

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