At the protest in France: “We are young, it hurts us to feel powerless against Gaza”

There are few in Paris, although they are aware. Some, new to manifesting. All, hopeful that, like the students in New York or California, their voice will eventually be heard.

They are the students who in recent days have occupied French universities, who have already been evicted on several occasions. A handful have gone on hunger strike. And now he thinks what to do: how to prevent the movement, which is quite limited at the moment, from becoming extinct before it has really caught on. Paris is not Columbia, nor is France the United States. For now.

“We are young, we see the images [de Gaza] and it hurts to be powerless,” Warda, 22, summarizes this Friday. “Young people are not listened to. Since we are students…” adds this History student at the Sorbonne. Maeva, 18 years old and also a student of the same subject at the same university, intervenes: “Yes, we are young, we are told that we don’t know life because we haven’t lived yet, that we don’t know anything and that we shouldn’t give our opinion, and When we give it they tell us: ‘You’ll see when you’re older…’.

Like all the young people who demonstrate in France, Maeva observes with attention, and surely a point of envy, the mobilizations in the United States. “It is important,” says Maeva, “that the students of the world show that we are a generation that does not want to have blood on our hands.” And in France? “It would be nice if there were more of us,” she says, “but some of us won’t be able to convince them of what is happening. As the month of May progresses, we will be able to add more people.”

Warda, Maeva and Jade, another classmate at the Sorbonne, attended a rally in Paris this Friday under the motto: “For the Palestinian people. “No to repression and the closure of faculties.”

There were about 300 people in front of a few dozen journalists at the entrance to the Pantheon, the secular temple of French national glories, less than 500 meters from the Sorbonne. A few hours earlier, the riot police had evicted, without any confrontations or notable scenes of violence, a group of students at Sciences Po, the Institute of Political Studies, where many of the rulers of the future study. Sciences Po is not much further from the Pantheon than the Sorbonne: two kilometers. Everything is in one neighborhood, the same one that 56 years ago was the scene of the ’68 revolt.

Hicham, a 22-year-old master’s student, said, after the eviction of Sciences Po, that the police had dragged some students along the ground and torn down flags. He is one of the students on hunger strike. And he promises: “I will continue.”

“On our small scale, what we can do is demonstrate to make noise and this involves organizing blockades and things like that,” says Dante, an English Language and Literature student at another Sorbonne campus. “We students can’t do anything other than shout and say that we don’t agree. We must continue”.

In reality, the students do not have it all with them, although they have achieved a considerable echo with successive partial blockades at the Sorbonne, at Sciences Po and in centers of other French cities such as Grenoble and Lille this Thursday and Friday. There is a common complaint: the interruption of cooperation with Israeli universities. Also a word that returns again and again in all conversations and slogans: genocide.

“We can’t just close our eyes,” says Morgane, 22, an Art History student at the Sorbonne. Olivia, 21 years old and a student at the same university, adds: “We ask that those who support Palestine stop being persecuted and criminalized, that they stop assimilating it to anti-Semitism.”

Half a kilometer from the Pantheon demonstration, in front of the Sorbonne, the Union of Jewish Students of France has set up a “dialogue table.” The idea, according to Jérémy, a 21-year-old philosophy student and member of this student union, is to promote understanding, to break the dialogue of the deaf. They approach pro-Palestinians and have had tense conversations with Jewish students, but also friendly and reasoned ones.

“We see on both sides a willingness to say: I am with each other, like in a football match,” says Jérémy. “But you can be both a Zionist and a pro-Palestinian, consider that there is a possible peace with two states and that we can recognize both the suffering of October 7 and the fact that a massacre is taking pla
ce in Gaza and there is a humanitarian crisis.”

Regarding the neighboring pro-Palestinian rally, Jérémy declares: “It doesn’t pose any problem to me as long as there are no anti-Semitic phrases.” He says that these days, during the mobilizations, it has bothered him to see students with their hands painted red, “because it is the symbol of a massacre.”

“We are not for Hamas! “We condemn the terrorist actions of Hamas!” says the student Warda, of Algerian origin, at the Pantheon rally. And her partner Jade concludes: “I also feel sorry for the dead in Israel.”

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