Activities

• The Mouvement contre le Racisme, l’Antisémitisme et pour la Paix (Movement against Racism, Antisemitism and for Peace – MRAP) was established on May 22, 1949. In 1977, the organization changed its name to Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples (Movement against Racism and for Friendship among Nations). The organization explains that it removed the word “antisemitism” since “the notion of racism de facto includes antisemitism.”

BDS Activities

• In March 2022, MRAP 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, MRAP participated in a campaign titled “#StopTradeWithSettlements,” calling “for an EU law that will end trade with illegal settlements once and for all.”
• In December 2020, MRAP was a signatory on a statement calling for France to “act for the immediate suspension of the EU-Israel association agreement and the bilateral security and military cooperation agreements” as “Isn’t it time to stop Israel from continuing colonization, annexation and its policy of apartheid?”
• In September 2020, MRAP 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 October 2014, MRAP called for sanctions against the state of Israel and the suspension of the European-Israeli Association Agreement.

Screenshot, http://ancien.mrap.fr/english/international/proche-et-moyen-orient/palestine, February 16, 2017
Translation: “Occupation is illegal. Don’t contribute to injustice against Palestinians. Don’t buy fruits and vegetables from the Israeli settlements. [The brands] Carmel-Jaffa-Jordan River.

• In its article “Enough is enough: sanctions against the state of Israel!” MRAP describes Israeli actions during the 2014 Gaza war as “war crimes.”
• During the 2014 Gaza war, demanded “dissuasive economic pressures on the state of Israel” and promoted a BDS campaign against Israeli products produced on “stolen Palestinian land.”
• MRAP signed a statement by the organization Collectif National pour une Paix Juste et Durable entre Palestiniens et Israéliens (CNPJDPI), of which it is also a member, which “welcomed the historical decision of the UN General Assembly to admit Palestine as a ‘non-member observer state,’” and simultaneously asked the French government to implement “sanctions against Israel for all its violations of international Law,” to condemn “the illegal siege of Gaza,” and to refuse “to support any French investment, whether in the colonies or …serving the colonization.”
• In 2012, MRAP denounced the cooperation between the European Union and Israel, describing it as supporting Israeli violations of UN resolutions. MRAP further called the cooperation a “crime towards the Palestinian people.”
• In 2012, MRAP welcomed the South African government’s decision to label products produced in the West Bank.

Other Anti-Israel Activities

• In August 2022, MRAP was a  signatory on a statement condemning the decision by the Israeli Ministry to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. According to the statement, “France has a duty to protect Palestinian civil society organizations against Israeli attacks. The French government must formulate clear demands vis-à-vis Israel accompanied by sanctions, and move from words to deeds.”
• In June 2022, MRAP held a demonstration calling to release Georges Ibrahim Abdallah from prison. 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 March 2022, MRAP called for the release of PFLP “comrade” Salah Hamouri, referring to him as a “defender of the rights of the Palestinians.” Hamouri was previously arrested for “attempting to assassinate Ovadia Yosef…and for his involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” Until his arrest, he worked for the Palestinian NGO Addameer, an organization that is identified by Fatah as an official PFLP “affiliate.”
• In July 2021, MRAP published a statement “against apartheid and ethnic cleansing.” According to the statement, “MRAP salutes the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli anti-colonial activists in solidarity with the Palestinians…[and] demand sanctions against Israel, in particular the suspension of the European Union-Israel association agreement.”
• In April 2021, MRAP was a signatory on a statement “against Israeli health apartheid.” MRAP falsely claimed that Israel has legal obligations to ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control, while altogether ignoring that Palestinians residing in Jerusalem are part of the Israeli health care system; that under the Oslo Accords the PA is responsible for health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; and that the PA has adopted its own vaccine policy for its population.
• In March 2021, MRAP was a signatory on a statement calling on “all people of conscience, local communities, institutions to reject the IHRA definition.” According to the statement, “The promoters of the IHRA definition have made the opposite choice: to give priority to the unconditional defense of the State of Israel, even if it means weakening and dividing the fight against anti-Semitism. As organizations and personalities resolutely committed against racism in all its forms, we will never give in to this blackmail.”
  • 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 April 2020, MRAP signed a letter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) “support[ing] the Prosecutor’s finding that there is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been and are being committed in the occupied Palestinian territory, that the International Criminal Court can properly exercise its jurisdiction over the entire territory of the State of Palestine, and fully support without any further undue delay, the opening by the International Criminal Court of a full and thorough investigation into international crimes committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.”
• Referring to the murder of four teenagers in 2014 (three Israeli and one Palestinian), MRAP authored a post titled “Israel, a rogue state, responsible for these four murders.” According to MRAP, “all four are the victims of a colonialist policy led by the Israeli state that flouts the rights of the Palestinian people.”
• Described the murder of four Israelis in a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem by a Palestinian terrorist as being a result of a policy of the “rogue state” [Israel] that aims at “…transforming the political conflict around the status of Jerusalem to a religious conflict.”
• Calls for the “liberation of all Palestinian political prisoners,” omitting the context of violence under which arrests take place.
• As a member of CNPJDPI, MRAP hosted an event supporting Palestinian prisoners. The event’s advertisement described the conviction of Ameer Makhoul (whose wife was one of the speakers at the event) as being “without any evidence other than the confessions extorted under torture.” Makhoul is the former head of the organization Ittijah and was sentenced in 2010 to nine years in prison for spying for Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war.
• Referring to the arrest of those onboard a boat headed to Gaza in 2011 that attempted to break the legal blockade around Gaza, MRAP “condemned with severity the attack of the Israeli commando” and described it a “piracy act” in which “the passengers have been kidnapped.”
• MRAP was “offended” when French President François Hollande stated his support for direct negotiations without preconditions between Israelis and Palestinians, instead of “seeking a solution at the General Assembly of the United Nations.”
• Described Magav, the border police unit of the IDF, as “the armed wing of a colonial, racist, and segregationist system.”
• In 2016, a lawyer from MRAP aided in representing the mayor of the French city of Montreuil during his trial for affixing a banner in support of Marwan Barghouti that stated, “Palestinian political activist, unanimously described as the Palestinian ‘Mandela’.” Barghouti has been referred to as the “chief of staff of the Intifada,” for his role in attacks during the second intifada.
• In October 2015, MRAP accused Prime Minister Netanyahu of being a “negationist” and declared that “This negation of history by…the colonialist state, and the fact of transferring to the Palestinians the burden of the genocide…falls within the will to subdue the Palestinian people to realize the Great Israel, to which the racist hawks never renounced.”