“Gentlemen, I stand before you simply to ask that you wash your hands, stained with our blood and the blood of our children, before claiming the right to judge us. Whoever tramples on the blood of 25,000 martyrs, killed during the imperialist-Zionist invasion of Lebanon in 1982, is nothing less than a direct accomplice of Reagan and Begin in their war to annihilate our people. Twenty-five thousand martyrs in three months, all for your so-called peace. Forty-five thousand wounded, all for your idea of justice. For ninety days, Beirut became a testing ground for U.S.-Israeli weapons. And yet, in your eyes, Reagan’s administration is the victim and the plaintiff. None of this is surprising, except, perhaps, to those still deluded enough to believe there’s a difference between imperial France and its notion of justice.”
— Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, Paris, February 23, 1987
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault begins with the 1757 execution of Robert-François Damiens as a starting point for tracing the transformation of punishment from public physical torture to disciplinary surveillance. Damiens’ body was torn apart with red-hot pincers, his wounds filled with molten lead and sulfur before he was dismembered and burned. This was not merely a criminal punishment; it was a political ritual meant to reaffirm the king’s authority by instilling terror in the collective body.
Yet Foucault overlooks the colonial dimension of these disciplinary systems. While France transitioned to “reforming” modern prisons at home, it deployed the same techniques with even greater brutality in its colonies. In the detention centers of Algeria and Guiana, and the prisons of Vietnam, Syria, and Lebanon. The case of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah most starkly reveals this continuity, where the colonized body becomes a site of disciplinary and racial experimentation.
On June 19, 2025, the French Court of Appeals is scheduled to review the release request of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who has been held hostage in French prisons for 41 years without a fair trial or legal justification. Abdallah has been imprisoned since October 1984, despite a court ruling granting his release. His struggle has now stretched across four decades. From a public school teacher in the northern Lebanese village of Akroum, he became a global symbol of struggle. His journey began during the 1978 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, where he was wounded in battle. He soon after joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Lebanese Communist Party. Driven by PFLP’s slogan “Behind the enemy everywhere,” he chose to take the struggle into the heart of the empire backing the Zionist entity.
To fully understand Georges Abdallah’s case as the longest-held political prisoner in Europe, one must go beyond his 1984 arrest. Defined by his legendary resilience in the face of imperialist violence in its most brutal forms inside prisons, Abdallah’s defiance also manifests through his unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners’ movement. Over the years, he has launched several hunger strikes in support of their collective actions: in February 2012, August 2016, April 2017, and most recently, October 2022. He has also sent numerous solidarity letters, most notably to Ahmad Saadat, Secretary-General of the PFLP, and to the martyred commander Walid Daqqa, whose death struck Abdallah deeply, despite the geographic distance and the absence of any organized prisoner movement inside Lannemezan Prison in southwest France.
In his letters, Georges Abdallah addresses a wide range of grassroots and protest movements, feeding them with intellectual and moral support. During the Arab uprisings, he voiced solidarity with protesters across the region, most notably in a message to the Lebanese people during the October 2019 revolution. To him, the uprising was a revolt against impoverishment and corruption, a rejection of the banking system’s dictates and the IMF’s prescriptions, and a stand against the violence of imperialist economic policies. During the ongoing al-Aqsa Flood battle, Abdallah issued multiple messages to the people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. To follow his case as a symbol of political steadfastness now requires a timeline, not for simplification, but to begin to grasp the depth and continuity of his journey.
Following in the footsteps of Wadie Haddad
Wadie Haddad, the historical leader of external operations in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), can be seen as the foundational figure behind the theoretical and practical framework that Georges Abdallah would later adopt. In 1968, Haddad established the External Operations branch, known for its high-profile international operations; the creation of the Revolution Airport in Jordan; drawing in revolutionaries from global movements, among them, the Japanese Red Army, Nicaraguan fighter Patrick Arguello, and Venezuelan militant Carlos.
At the core of Haddad’s doctrine was a rejection of transforming the Palestinian armed revolution into conventional urban warfare, as happened in Amman. Instead, he favored the establishment of training centers in Yemen and Iraq and emphasized the importance of international operations. The defeat of this doctrine was not solely due to Zionist attacks and assassinations, but also due to internal Palestinian rifts and the failure to further develop the model. It was instead replaced with an exclusive focus on guerrilla warfare tactics and the formation of urban militias.
This article cannot fully explore the complexities of revolutionary combat theory, but the brutal assaults on guerrilla bases in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, and the geopolitical constraints during al-Aqsa Flood, highlight the cost of abandoning transnational revolutionary movements capable of striking imperial powers in their own capitals. Throughout the current war, even as the US, UK, and Germany have launched direct military operations against resistance forces in Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen, resistance beyond the region has remained sporadic and individual, such as the operation carried out by Elias Rodríguez in May.
Regarding the continued imprisonment of Georges Abdallah as a political prisoner, journalist Ghassan Charbel notes in Secrets of the Black Box that no definitive link has ever been established between Abdallah and the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions, which he was accused of leading as part of the External Operations unit. Charbel emphasizes that, despite the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War and the complexities of the European environment in which the group operated, it remained notably resistant to infiltration.
Anis al-Naqqash adds that his own case was grouped with Abdallah’s, even though no concrete connection existed between the two. He recalls meeting Georges Abdallah during their shared time at Moulin Prison in France, where they engaged in extensive political and ideological discussions about Lebanon and the resistance movement. Al-Naqqash insists that Abdallah’s life sentence was deeply unjust, not only because the assassinations he was accused of were never conclusively linked to him, but also because a prior agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Algeria with France to cease operations by the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Factions had already been reached before Abdallah’s arrest. This strongly suggests that the ongoing imprisonment is less about legal grounds and more a result of political pressure and a punitive response to his unwavering ideological convictions.
“Knowing that you’ve gathered today, just beyond the barbed wire and watchtowers, only meters from my cell, fills me with strength and warms my heart.”
— Georges Abdallah, October 2024
The case of Lebanese prisoner Georges Ibrahim Abdallah stands as an extension of France’s colonial legacy, where punishment is weaponized as a tool of domination. Refusing to release him while turning his 41-year imprisonment into a slow execution embodies the shift from public bodily torture to contemporary methods of annihilation. Through the use of time, imprisonment becomes a systematic dismantling of the human self, depriving both body and consciousness of freedom.
France’s refusal to implement the 2013 release order issued by its own Court of Cassation under US and Israeli pressure—reveals how colonial hegemony operates as a panoptic system, reproducing control and violence under the guise of legality. Through legal and media discourse, labeling the prisoner a “terrorist” strips him of rights and personhood, echoing the very logic of colonial domination.
source: Al Akhbar