Support Olivia Zemor on trial in France for promoting boycott of Israeli products

Dear Members and Supporters,

 French BDS activist, Olivia Zemor, has requested AFOPA’s help during her trial in Lyon on charges of promoting a boycott against Israel. Promoting boycotts of Israeli products is illegal in France. The Executive of AFOPA have long admired and supported Olivia’s work in educating people across Europe about the boycott so were happy to organise a small protest outside the French consulate on the first day of Oliva’s trial (16 March) . We wanted to hand to the Consul a letter (see below) signed by our Chairperson, Edie Bransbury and our Historian, Dr David Faber.  Despite our visit being in business hours no-one was available to speak with us or accept the letter. We were placed in a position where we had to push the letter under the door. Most disappointing.

 If Olivia is found guilty she could be fined up to 45,000 Euros and/or face 3 years in gaol plus possibly be forced to attend compulsory re-education lessons on the Holocaust during World War 2. We also know that this is a test case and jurisdictions around the world will be watching carefully to see if they can impose anti-BDS laws in their countries.

Olivia’s trial has now finished and the judgement will be handed down on 18 May.

 We ask that you show your support for a fellow activist for Palestinian human rights by sending an email to Adelaide’s French consul, Mrs Susan Crafter, voicing your opposition to this trial.           consuladelaide@ambafrance.com.au

AFOPA’s letter to the Adelaide representative of the Consulate General of France

Mrs Susan Crafter

Honorary Consul

Consulate General of France

429 Gilles St

ADELAIDE SA 5000

Dear Mrs Crafter,

The Australian Friends of Palestine respectfully remonstrate with the Government of the august Republic of France regarding the lawfare persecution of the Human Rights activist and critic of Israeli abuses of the Palestinian people, Olivia Zemor. Zemor is summoned to appear today 16/3/2021 before the Tribunal judiciaire de Lyon, charged with having published in 2016 on the Europalestine website a call for the Israeli pharmaceutical company TEVA to be boycotted in terms of the peaceful international BDS campaign requested by Palestinian civil society in 2005 to oblige Israel to seriously engage in peacemaking with the Palestinian people. The world would be a better place for the imposition of this educative boycott, just as a similar Jewish American boycott of Germany in 1933 would have been.

This lawfare prosecution would appear to owe much to the speciously extensive perversion of the term `Antisemitism’ under the tendentious terms of the IHRA `International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism’, drafted to incriminate anti-Zionist free speech criticism of the abhorrent conduct of the State of Israel. As an historian of Fascism, I completely denounce this devious definition as `hasbarah’ propaganda.

Furthermore, this lawfare prosecution appears to be inspired by the Circular of the French Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, calling for condemnation of BDS declarations by French tribunals as `provocation à la discrimination à l'égard d’une nation’. This is a craven favouring of the Zionist lobby. A macabre sign of the bias of the circular is the recommendation that convicted BDS activists be subjected to re-education in the unforgettable and unforgotten horrors of the Shoah of European Jewry 1933-45. This bizarre proposition clearly violates the 11/6/2020 determination of the Cour européenne des droits de l’homme [CEDH], which fined France Euros 100.000 damages for its campaign against the free speech rights of the Mulhouse BDS activists. The incumbent Government of France appears most signally to be deliberately undermining republican values in this matter, given the great libertarian traditions of the Republic which have made ‘La Marsaillaise’ a battle hymn of liberty around the world until today.

We therefore respectfully call on the Government of France to cease and desist from lawfare persecution of BDS activists exercising their judicially attested right of free speech in humanitarian advocacy of Palestinian national rights, as this is deleterious to the Rights of Man & the Citizen of sacred memory and not in the best interests and the good name of the French nation and Republic.

 Yours sincerely,

 Dr David Faber

Historian

for Australian Friends of Palestine Association (SA)

 and

 Ms E Bransbury

Chairperson, Australian Friends of Palestine Association (SA)

16 March 2021

AFOPA 16 March 2021