France’s Jewish student union on Friday was locked in a bitter dispute with a far left member of parliament over mutual accusations of violent and intimidating behavior at a public meeting in Paris on Tuesday night that featured a convicted Palestinian terrorist.
A group of activists from the French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF) led by the organization’s president, Samuel Lejoyeux, protested at the meeting, staged by a group of pro-Palestinian NGOs and headlined by Salah Hamouri, a Palestinian with French citizenship who was expelled from Israel last year. Hamouri — a lawyer for Adameer, a Palestinian prisoner organization — was sentenced in 2005 for a plot to assassinate Israel’s then Sephardic chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, serving six years in jail before being placed by the Israeli authorities in administrative detention until 2022.
When the UEJF activists confronted Ersilia Soudais — a member of parliament for the far left La France Insoumise (“France Rising” — LFI) party — she accused them of violent behavior and filed a legal complaint. In response, the UEJF filed a legal complaint against Soudais for defamation on Thursday.
In an interview with her party’s website, Soudais claimed that security staff at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where the meeting took place, were attempting to remove the UEJF activists just as she arrived at the venue with her husband. She said that one activist had approached her with a raised fist, shouting “your ideas are disgusting,” before her husband stepped in to prevent an escalation. Once the meeting ended, she continued, she left the building through a back entrance where Lejoyeux and other UEJF members were waiting. The group tried to engage her in discussion, she said, but she refused, telling them “I don’t debate with people who assault me.”