At a pro-Palestinian rally held at a French university, the appearance of red hands has sparked accusations of promoting anti-Semitism.
According to the daily newspaper Liberation, on the 26th of this month, students from the Palestinian committee at the Paris campus of the prestigious Sciences Po University staged a stay-in protest at a building, with a sympathetic demonstration also taking place outside. Some performed a display, raising hand palms painted red in condemnation of Israel. Subsequently, posts criticizing the demonstrators appeared on pro-Israel accounts on social media, featuring photos of a man showing his bloodied palm outside a window and the red palm performance of the Sciences Po protesters. The red hand is a symbol of the history of Israelis being killed, suggesting that this performance encourages the killing of Israelis.
French Jewish cartoonist Joann Sfar criticized his social media, posting a sketch of a man showing off his red hand and saying, “This symbol started on October 12, 2000. It’s not a call for peace, but a symbol of the bare-handed massacre of two Israelis.” The massacre he mentioned refers to the Ramallah lynching incident that took place in 2000.
On October 12, 2000, two Israeli reservists mistakenly entered Ramallah in Palestine and were detained by Palestinian police. On that day, a memorial service for a Palestinian boy killed by the Israeli military was taking place in Ramallah, and rumors circulated that Israeli agents had sneaked into Ramallah and were captured. Angry Palestinian residents stormed the police station and killed the Israeli soldiers. One of the men involved in the killing displayed his bloodied hand outside a window, flaunting his “blood revenge.” The body of one of the Israeli reservists was thrown out the window and further desecrated.
In response to the controversy, Hervé Lenoir, a Sciences Po Palestinian Committee member, refuted Liberation, “The red hand is a general symbol criticizing someone or an organization for having blood on their hands.” He explained that they performed this act to criticize Israel for killing residents of the Gaza Strip. He also claimed, “This is a symbol widely used by, in particular, environmental activists and diplomats at the UN in the West.” Liberation reported that the environmental campaigning community Friends of the Earth featured red hands in February 2022 to draw attention to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and those who took part in the civil rights movement triggered by the death of George Floyd in the U.S. that year also used it.
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