FRANCE: Citing the right to freedom of expression and the European Convention on Human Rights, the French Cour de Cassation or Supreme Court yesterday struck down an earlier appeals court judgment which convicted Le Monde newspaper and three prominent intellectuals of "defamation on racial grounds" for a 2002 article criticising Israel.
Sami Naïr, a professor of political science and former member of the European Parliament, said he and co-authors Edgar Morin and Danielle Sallenave would celebrate their definitive legal victory last night.
Mr Naïr, who is of Algerian origin, is a respected expert on racial integration in France. Mr Morin, who is Jewish, was the leader of François Mitterrand's Resistance group in the second World War and subsequently a famous sociologist.
Ms Sallenave, a novelist, was recently awarded the Prix de l'Académie Française and the Prix Marguerite Duras.
All three received insulting letters over the four years since they published "Israel-Palestine: the Cancer" on the opinion page of Le Monde on June 4th, 2002, in response to the Israeli assault on the West Bank town of Jenin.
Ms Sallenave was accused of "sleeping with Arabs" and Mr Morin, who is 85, was physically threatened.
Letters were sent to the home of one of the judges, saying that "criticising Israel is the new anti-Semitism".
France-Israel and Lawyers Without Borders, led by the right-wing, pro-Israeli lawyer Gilles William Goldnadel, filed a lawsuit for "defamation on racial grounds" and "apology for terrorism". The Union of Jewish Students dropped out of the lawsuit.
Mr Naïr described Mr Goldnadel as belonging to the Israeli extreme right. "That such people confiscate Jewish identity to use it as a weapon against everyone who criticises Israel seems scandalous to me," he said. "It's intimidation . . . They hurt the Jewish people more than they help Israel."
The lawsuit against Le Monde and the three intellectuals is part of a pattern. Mr Goldnadel is appealing the last of three failed lawsuits against Daniel Mermet, a popular radio journalist who has reported sympathetically on the fate of the Palestinians.
Award-winning television journalist Charles Enderlin, who is Jewish, has come under intense pressure from pro-Israeli groups since he reported the death of 12-year-old Mohamed Al-Dara in 2000. Pascal Boniface, a leading political scientist, resigned from his position as head of international relations at the French Socialist Party after his criticism of Israel led to an uproar.
Morin, Naïr and Sallenave quoted Victor Hugo: "The oppressed of yesterday are tomorrow's oppressors." Then prime minister Ariel Sharon compromised Israel's chances of survival "by believing he can ensure Israeli security through terror," they wrote. The Holocaust was used to justify colonisation, apartheid and confining Palestinians to ghettos.
The authors condemned the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians as "state terrorism" and pointed out the disproportion in military might and casualties between Israelis and Palestinians.
The Jewish groups based their lawsuit on only two paragraphs in the long article.
"It is difficult to imagine that a nation of fugitives, born of the longest persecuted people in the history of mankind . . . should be capable of transforming itself in two generations into a 'dominating, overconfident people' and, with the exception of an admirable minority, into a contemptuous people who derive satisfaction from humiliating," the authors wrote.
("Dominating, overconfident people" was Gen Charles de Gaulle's description of Israel.)
Five paragraphs later, Morin, Naïr and Sallenave wrote: "The Jews of Israel, descendants of the victims of a form of apartheid known as the ghetto, have 'ghettoised the Palestinians . . ."
Though the text clearly referred to the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, the subsequent reduction of the phrase from "the Jews of Israel" to simply "the Jews" was seized upon as evidence of defamation in the lawsuit.
"Judges must analyse the incriminated text in its context," the Supreme Court verdict said. By isolating two paragraphs from a much longer article expressing the authors' opinions on a highly polemical subject, the Versailles court had violated article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as French law.
"The text in reality targeted the policy of the government of Israel against Palestinians, and not individuals or groups of individuals because of their national or ethnic origin, their race or religion . . ." the Supreme Court concluded.
Meanwhile, the leader of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been ordered to stand trial for comments denying the brutality of the second World War Nazi occupation of France.
In January 2005 he told the extreme right-wing newspaper Rivarol: "In France at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a few blunders, which is inevitable in a country of 220,000 square miles."