From 19 to 21 May, thousands of people converged on the Glières plateau in Haute-Savoie France, a historic site of the French resistance to Nazi occupation, for the Resistance Forum organized by the Resistant Citizens of Yesterday and Today association. The 2023 gathering, which marked the 17th such occasion, highlighted solidarity with Palestine at the heart of resistance today. This year’s event included the participation of French-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri and many supporters of Georges Abdallah, the Lebanese communist struggler for Palestine imprisoned in France since 1984, in particular through a stand organized by the Collective for the Liberation of Georges Abdallah 74.
On Sunday, 21 May, on the Glières plateau, during a rally bringing together hundreds of participants, a member of the Collectif Palestine Vaincra read out a message by Georges Abdallah written especially for this occasion, once again emphasizing that Georges Abdallah remains a deeply committed activist in support of current mobilizations for social liberation despite nearly 39 years of detention in French prisons.
Please note: Since this event took place, the event, the Collectif and Georges Abdallah have been under attack by an array of Zionist and right-wing French politicians, who do exactly what Georges describes in his message below: attempting to detach the historical legacy of the Resistance from today’s resistance movements struggling for liberation, in Palestine and beyond.
The message follows below:
Dear comrades, dear friends,
Sharing with you the enthusiasm inherent in your gathering on this Glières plateau is more than invigorating, especially when you have been behind these abominable walls for several decades.
The official representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie of this country ritually come to strut before this or that necropolis of the Resistance. A whole ceremonial with great pomp intended above all else, not to pay homage to the maquisards (rural guerrillas, French and Belgian Resistance fighters), but rather to bury them in a distant past, in order to ward them off, all the values of solidarity, fraternity, justice and freedom that were embodied these guerrillas. These guerrillas, these resistants, who saved the honor of this country in the darkest hours, when the bourgeoisie in its vast majority sank into Pétainism (collaboration with the Nazi occupation) and the crimes which are intimately linked to it, are far from being relics or fantasies of a bygone past.
In the diversity of their commitment, in the diversity of their origins, these women and these men in the various maquis (groups of rural French resistance fighters) of the country and in the various structures of the Resistance in the cities, are of a quite other than secondary importance on the global scale of the world capitalist system. These women and men were able to discover in the practice of the fight against the Nazi occupation forces and their Petainist auxiliaries, that it is together and it is only together that they will win.
The convergence of struggles, in spite of so many obstacles, ended up imposing itself in one way or another. It manifested itself in the most relevant way in the program of the National Council of Resistance, thus expressing globally the values of solidarity, justice and freedom that underpinned the resistant, the maquisard, in his existential militant journey, and in this, it is more topical than ever here and elsewhere in the world where the barbarism of capitalism has never been so widespread since the middle of the last century.
In this time of the multidimensional crisis of mobilization and great struggles, of imperialist and inter-imperialist wars, devastation and other environmental catastrophes in sight, the protagonists of anti-capitalist action in this country are more than ever called upon to strengthen ever more the dynamic of international solidarity in the formation of a historical social bloc as a real political subject with a view to putting an end to the moribund capitalist system in its phase of advanced putrefaction.
Dear comrades, dear friends, when you see that the Zionist military and its hordes of settlers under the orders of the supremacists in power carry out the worst atrocities every day all over Palestine. Every day, young and old are martyred… The expropriation of land and the demolition of houses are continuou and widespread. In fact, this policy never stopped; sometimes it slows down and sometimes it speeds up. It will only stop with the dissolution of this entity, which in reality is an organic extension of Western imperialism, and whose process of fascism has recently accelerated more than ever.
Comrades and friends, from behind the abominable walls, Ahmed Sa’adat and the thousands of comrades imprisoned in Zionist jails send you their revolutionary greetings and draw your attention to what is happening in Palestine with the coming to power of the supremacist fascists.
That said, comrades, the popular Palestinian masses, involved today in this popular intifada of a particular type, can rely and must be able to rely on your mobilization and your solidarity.
You honor your country by demonstrating in the streets your attachment to the application of international law and the condemnation of all forms of colonization.
You do your country honor by standing alongside the masses of the people who are victims of crimes against humanity, apartheid and persecution.
You honor your country by taking part in the fight against all forms of ethnic cleansing and for standing alongside the Palestinian families in East Jerusalem who are threatened these days with being driven from their homes to be replaced by supremacist settlers.
You honor your country for not forgetting the criminal blockade of Gaza which has been going on since 2007.
The conditions of detention in Zionist jails are getting worse day by day. And as you know, comrades, to confront it, international solidarity proves to be an indispensable weapon.
Solidarity, all solidarity with the resistance fighters in Zionist jails and solitary confinement cells in Morocco, Turkey, Greece, the Philippines and elsewhere around the world!
May a thousand solidarity initiatives flourish in favor of our comrade Walid Daqqah!
Solidarity, all solidarity with the proletarians mobilized in this country! Honor to the martyrs and to the popular masses in struggle!
Down with imperialism and its Zionist and Arab reactionary watchdogs!
Capitalism is nothing but barbarism, honor to all those who oppose it in the diversity of their expressions!
Together, comrades, and only together will we win!
To all of you, comrades and friends, my warmest communist greetings.
Your comrade Georges Abdallah
