Union Juive Française pour la paix (UJFP)

Activities

BDS Activities

• Supports BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel, despite the fact that such boycotts are illegal under French law. UJFP states that “this campaign is characterized in several axes: boycotts (economic, athletic, trade-union, cultural, and academic), divestment, sanctions (political, economic and judicial).”
• As a member of the Collectif National pour une Paix Juste et Durable entre Palestiniens (CNPJDPI), signed a “call for the suspension of the European Union- Israel association agreement.”
• In March 2022, UJFP was a signatory on a campaign to “call for sanctions on apartheid Israel.” The campaign called for: 
  • “Investigating Israeli apartheid and reactivating the UN mechanisms to combat apartheid to impose targeted sanctions on Israel, including military embargo.”
  • “governments to ban and shops and supermarkets to deshelve products from Israel’s illegal settlements and campaign to end contracts and investments in companies supporting these settlements, particularly those listed in the UN Database.”
  • “Holding institutions that promote our dispossesion, such as the so-called “Jewish National Fund” (JNF), accountable and join efforts to uncover their complicity with ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” 
• In February 2022, UJFP participated in a campaign titled “#StopTradeWithSettlements,” calling “for an EU law that will end trade with illegal settlements once and for all.”
• In August 2021, UJFP signed a letter to the States Parties to the Arms Trade Treaty calling to “put an end to Israel’s notorious use of arms and military equipment…by immediately imposing a comprehensive two-way arms embargo on Israel.” According to the letter, “This systematic brutality, perpetrated throughout the past seven decades of Israel’s colonialism, apartheid, pro-longed illegal belligerent occupation, persecution, and closure, is only possible because of the complicity of some governments and corporations around the world.”
• In July 2021, UJFP was a signatory on a press release titled “Palestine: ethnic cleansing continues, resistance too!” which called for a “Suspension of the Association Agreement between the European Union and Israel” and an “Embargo on arms trade and security agreements with Israel.”
• In September 2020, UJFP called for the UN General Assembly to “Launch international investigations into Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole, as well as associated State and individual criminal responsibility,” to “Ban arms trade and military-security cooperation with Israel,” and “Prohibit all trade with illegal Israeli settlements and ensure that companies refrain from and terminate business activities with Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.”
• Signatory to a 2017 statement marking the anniversaries of the 1917 Balfour declaration, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, and the Six Day War. The statement calls for “the suspension of the EU’s Association Agreement with Israel” and on the international community “to cease all complicity with continued settlement activity and the myriad of ways that Israel violates international law.” The statement condemns the 1947 UN partition plan, claiming it “resulted in the 1948 Nakba, the demolition of more than 530 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, and is thus a process of ethnic cleansing”; and claims that European countries “made Palestine carry the consequences of the monstrous genocide of the European Jews by the Nazis; and subsequently they did nothing to require that Israel respect UN resolutions.”
• In an interview titled “Nothing will change as long as Israel won’t be sanctioned,” Pierre Stambul, a senior member of UJFP, declared that “Fundamentally, nothing will change on the ground as long as Israel, a rogue state, is not sanctioned.” He further delegitimized the existence of the State of Israel saying that “Since its founding the UN has behaved unjustly against the Palestinian people. The 1947 partition of Palestine was an ignominy.”
• UJFP argues that “the Palestinian people pays for crimes (antisemitism, the Nazi genocide) committed by the European society” and in 2016 filed a petition addressed to the French Prime Minister, calling for the boycott of Israel, claiming that “for decades, the Palestinian people suffers from the occupation, the colonization, the blockade… the negation of their rights, the massive imprisonment, the destructions of houses, extrajudicial executions…the worse discriminations.”
• In 2015, Richard Srogosz, member of UJFP and president of BDS 57 (a local branch of BDS France), sent a “letter to pharmacists informing them about the international boycott campaign against the company [Teva], and inviting them to discuss the issue.” In parallel, BDS 57 campaigned to “persuade pharmacists to not commercialize TEVA’s generics, and replace them with generics of another brand.” In response, Teva, together with the organizations Avocats sans Frontières and France-Israël, sued Srogosz.

“Resistance” rhetoric

• The organization claims that it “Stands with the resistance of the Palestinian people and supports the Israeli and Palestinian anti-colonialists.”
• In April 2022, UJFP participated in a march in Paris to “support Palestinian resistance.” During the march, participants chanted “Long live the armed struggle of the Palestinian people,” “Palestine will live, Palestine will win, free Georges Abdallah!”
  • Abdallah was convicted and sentenced by a French court to life in prison for “complicity in the assassinations” of Charles R. Ray in 1982, a US military attaché serving in Paris, and Yacov Bar-Simantov, a second counsellor at the Israeli embassy in Paris.
• In 2016, Pierre Stambul, a senior member of UJFP, justified terrorism and declared that “The Palestinians tried everything: The armed resistance, the pacific resistance, the armed struggle, attacks, diplomacy. International law recognizes that an occupied people have the right to defend itself.”
• In 2014, UJFP promoted the event “Support for the Palestinian resistance” organized by the radical organization EuroPalestine. At the event, “the comrade Ziad Ahmed of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP) presented. The PFLP is a terrorist organization designated as such by the US, EU, Canada, and Israel. Ahmed accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing, home demolitions and expulsions of Palestinians.”
• In May-June 2016, members of UJFP Stambul and Sarah Katz travelled to Gaza and met with officials and members of the PFLP terrorist group and the Union of Agricultural Work Committee (UAWC), an official PFLP affiliate organization:
  • Mohamed al Bakri, leader of UAWC who “requested and obtained our [Stambul and Katz] authorization to enter in Gaza,” is “a PFLP member very active in Khan Younis region.”
  • Doctora Mariam, “member of the PFLP direction.”
  • Michel Warchawski, founder of the Alternative Information Center (AIC), who was jailed in the 1990s for publishing an informational pamphlet for the PFLP terror group.

Other activities

• In October 2021, UJFP was a signatory on a joint statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to the statement, “This unprecedented designation is merely the latest escalation in Israel’s widespread and systematic institutionalized campaign that has aimed to silence and discredit any Palestinian individual or organization that dares seek accountability for Israel’s grave human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity…the international community, especially the European Union and its member states who are key supporters of and donors to Palestinian civil society, should ensure that banks and financial institutions in their jurisdiction are notified Israel’s designation of Palestinian organizations is unfounded and inapplicable.”
• In March 2021, UJFP was a signatory on a statement stating that “we affirm our right to support the Palestinian people, victims of a colonial and racist policy. This is why we call on all people of conscience, local communities, institutions to reject the IHRA definition.”
  • The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly 30 countries and counting, represents the international consensus definition of antisemitism, as well as how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. An example of the latter includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
• In March 2017, Stambul and Katz presented their book “chroniques de Gaza, mai/ juin 2016” (chronicles of Gaza, May/ June 2016), based on their trip to Gaza in 2016, to “describe the cage of Gaza using pictures.” The presentation took place at Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgiques’s (UPJB) facilities. In the description of the event, Gaza is characterized as “a cage buckled on the floor…Gaza is a laboratory where every two-three years the Israeli occupant experiments the most sophisticated weapons against a disarmed population.” Terrorism and other violence emanating from Gaza are erased: “Gaza is regularly defamed as terrorists, fundamentalists. Defamed by those who have committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet, in Gaza, they resist peacefully… they discuss politics in the wider diversity.”
• UJFP claims that “Zionism resulted in the creation the State of Israel in 1948, and caused the Nakba” and accuses the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) to be “an instrument of the Israeli Zionist propaganda.”
• Omitting the context of violence under which it was built, UJFP opposes the “separation wall” and refers to it as an “instrument of supplemental lands expropriation in the West bank and of Apartheid between Jewish and Palestinian populations.”
• Delegitimizing Israeli sovereignty, UJFP denounces the “colonization policy of the Negev” and “participates actively in the international campaign ‘Stop the KKL-JNF,’ the Jewish National Fund…an instrument of dispossessions of the Palestinian people from its lands.”
• Supported the “flotillas” that attempted to break the blockade around Gaza and instigate confrontations with the Israeli Navy. A member of UJFP was on the boat “Louise Michel” in June 2011.
• Referring to the possibility of the United States moving its embassy to Jerusalem, Stambul declared that “this might be incitement for Israeli religious fanatic to attack the Christian and Muslim holy sites.”