EU pol put on trial for defending Palestinian right to resist

Rima Hassan is breaking Europe’s Palestine taboos. France put her on trial

Prosecuted for defending Palestinians’ right to resist, the MEP says Gaza has exposed a ‘complete divorce’ between governments and their publics.

Liam Syed 

+972 Mag: July 16, 2026

SOURCE: https://www.972mag.com/europe-palestine-taboo-france-rima-hassan/

MEP Rima Hassan during the European Parliament Plenary, September 2024. (The Left/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

On Monday, EU foreign ministers were locked in a tense meeting in Brussels over whether to ban trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Every single one of the 27 member states agreed that these settlements were illegal, yet the measure fell short of the majority needed to force the European Commission to act, with Ursula von der Leyen’s executive continuing to resist. 

As those debates played out in Brussels, the politician who has done more than most to force that reckoning among European states was preparing for another court date amid a trial in which she stands accused of alleged “apology for terrorism.”

Rima Hassan was born to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother in a refugee camp in Aleppo, Syria, leaving her stateless at birth. The granddaughter of Palestinians expelled from the Galilee village of Al-Birwa during the Nakba of 1948, she arrived in France as a child and has since built her political career around the conviction that the struggle for Palestinian liberation belongs as much in Europe as in Palestine.