I write this from Paris, a city wrapped in blue and yellow. All around me, Ukrainian flags hang like moral badges pinned to French facades.
I arrived in this city just a few weeks ago as a survivor of the genocide in Gaza, leaving my country burning behind me. I had the privilege to be evacuated by the French government as a student admitted to a French university.
What first struck me about Paris, this so-called city of liberty, was its curated grief, sanctioned empathy, and decorated silence.
France mourns Ukraine loudly. Gaza, on the other hand, must be whispered. The Palestinian flag cannot be seen here. It is hidden, feared, criminalised. If you’re lucky, you find it painted in graffiti, a shy declaration of solidarity hastily sprayed like a secret.
Should I be surprised?
After all, France is a colonial empire that never dismantled itself, but only rebranded. From Algeria to Vietnam to Syria, France’s hands are stained with the blood of those who dared to resist it.
When France supported the Zionist movement in the 20th century, when it trained Israeli officers, when it helped militarise a settler-colonial state on stolen land, it wasn’t out of ignorance. It was out of solidarity, white solidarity, with another colonial project.
France condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine within hours. It opened its borders. It cried on TV. It cancelled concerts and imposed sanctions. Why? Because Ukraine is white.
But when Israel flattens entire neighbourhoods in Gaza, when it bombs hospitals, starves children, cuts water, drops banned weapons, and grinds families into bone dust, France hesitates. It equivocates. It blames Hamas. It insists on “context”. It hands Israel even more weapons.
What is happening in Gaza is not a “conflict”. It is not “complicated”. It is a genocide.
By official statistics, more than 63,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023; by scientific estimates, the true death toll is in the hundreds of thousands. Over 70 percent are women and children.
More than 80 percent of the population is surviving, barely, on one meal a day, often canned food or cooked grass or leaves. Every day, we lose dozens of civilians trying to get aid. Some 340 children and adults have died from starvation in just a few months.
Every hospital in the north has been destroyed. Children are getting amputated without anaesthesia. People with chronic diseases are dying on a mass scale due to the lack of medication and treatment.
Aid trucks are blocked. Water desalination plants are bombed. More than two million people are displaced. And still, there is silence.
United Nations experts, all major international human rights organisations, thousands of legal and other scholars, and even former Israeli officials have said that this war has crossed every red line of international law.
And yet, here in France, we are told to lower our voices. We are told that shouting “Free Palestine” might be anti-Semitic. The people who wave Ukrainian flags with pride tell us our grief must be “balanced”. They rage against Russian imperialism but justify Israeli settler colonialism. This isn’t neutrality. This is white supremacy.
Gaza has become their moral exception. Their blind spot. Their expendable other. The news every newsroom twists itself to avoid.
But here is the truth: Palestine has no army, no jets, no ships, no nuclear weapons. What we have is resistance. Hamas is not a state military. It is the outcome of decades of siege, occupation, apartheid, and abandonment. And while European leaders rush to condemn Hamas at every opportunity they get, they refuse to condemn the occupation that birthed it. They erase our right to resist, while glorifying the Ukrainian resistance, heaping on it weapons and praise.
In Ukraine, Molotov cocktails are “heroism”. In Gaza, stones are “terrorism”. That’s hypocrisy. That’s the algorithm of white empathy.
What is happening in Gaza is not a war between two armies. It is the wholescale destruction of an occupied people by one of the most advanced armies in the world. It is genocide aided by Western arms, protected by Western silence, and beautified by humanitarian lies.
France wants to pretend its complicity is historical, that it ended with the end of formal colonialism. But how do you explain the weapons? The diplomatic immunity? The refusal to abide by the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? The banning of pro-Palestinian protests in Paris? The surveillance of Muslim students?
I left Gaza in a United Nations-escorted evacuation, organised by the French consulate in Jerusalem, my name selected among thousands. I was not allowed to carry anything. No laptop. No books. No memories. Just the clothes on my back and my phone.
I passed through Israeli checkpoints where soldiers looked at me as if I were not human. Four hours across the desert felt like four decades. And now I’m here, walking the boulevards of a city that claims to love freedom, while my people die for daring to want it.
Do not tell me this is just politics. It is racism. It is hypocrisy. The genocide of my people is being watched from balconies draped with Ukrainian flags.
I don’t want pity. I want accountability. I want justice. I want to see Palestinian flags hanging next to those of Ukraine, not as competition, but as truth. Because if solidarity depends on skin colour, borders, or geopolitical interest, it is not solidarity. It is supremacy.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
