Attendees arriving for the final sessions of the “Palestine and Europe” conference in Paris on Friday were met with extremist graffiti scrawled at the entrance of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, where the closing day’s events were taking place.
The messages had been painted overnight on the ground outside the centre’s main entrance.
The phrases, written hastily in yellow and blue paint, included slogans such as “Anti-Zionism equals antisemitism” and “The Arab Center is a Hamas and Qatar agent,” along with further accusations targeting individuals participating in or linked to the conference — among them “[Fransesca] Albanese is a Hamas agent” and “Dominique de Villepin is a Hamas agent.”
The graffiti comes amid a wider campaign led by extremist lobbying groups in the run-up to the event.
The French magazine Le Point earlier published pieces by Erwan Seznek and Ismaël El Boukoutro alleging that the conference was “pro-Palestinian” and “anti-Zionist.” The outlet escalated its campaign with another article last Sunday, attacking several speakers, including French scholar François Burgat, former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese, Orient XXI editor-in-chief Alain Gresh, and other guests such as Véronique Bontemps and Muzna Shihabi, as well as Arab intellectual Azmi Bishara.
The media campaign was accompanied by political pressure endorsed by French Higher Education Minister Philippe Baptiste, which prompted the Collège de France to cancel its hosting of the conference.
Despite these developments, the scheduled sessions went ahead shifting the venue to the center's offices in Paris, with the participation of researchers and journalists.
The appearance of extremist graffiti joins a growing list of incidents in France involving the cancellation of academic events on Palestine — a precedent critics say the Higher Education Minister helped cement by yielding to Israeli political and media pressure.
French and international academic and university institutions have since issued a series of condemnations of the political interference surrounding the symposium “Palestine and Europe: The Weight of the Past and Contemporary Dynamics.”
In official statements and open letters, they warned that the Collège de France’s decision to bow to external pressure represents a serious breach of academic freedom and threatens the independence of an institution that has stood for more than four centuries and hosted leading thinkers from Michel Foucault to Pierre Bourdieu.
The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies has previously organised three academic conferences in partnership with the Collège de France in Paris, all of which were well received in French academic circles.