The French Solidarity Movement with the Palestinian people and Palestine lost one of its eminent advocates, Bernard Ravenel, who passed away last January 15 in the French capital, Paris, amid the grief of the friends of the Palestinian people in France.
   The Palestinian cause has occupied his attention since the early sixties, when he was a founding member of what was known at that time as the “Unified Socialist Party.” Among its founders was the socialist leader Michel Rocard, who was the Prime Minister of France during the eighties. This party was one of the tributaries of the French Socialist Party, which was It was re-established in 1971 by the late French President Francois Mitterrand. Ravenel wrote a book chronicling the march of the Unified Socialist Party, which was established mainly in 1960 against the background of its founders and supporters' opposition to the French colonization of Algeria.
Within this environment, Bernard, who studied history and later became a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, defined his intellectual and political choices in confronting colonialism, calling for peace, and comprehensive and nuclear disarmament. He was an active member in European movements calling for disarmament and spreading peace and freedom, and in this context came his commitment To defend the justice of the Palestinian cause in France within the solidarity movement.
In 2001, with the outbreak of the second movement in Palestine, the two main wings of the French Solidarity Movement with Palestine decided to unite. The first wing was AMFP (The French-Palestinian Medical Association), which was founded in 1974 by a group of French doctors with a left-wing Maoist orientation, with direct support from the director of the Palestine Liberation Organization office. At that time, the martyr Izz al-Din al-Qalaq, who were active in supporting the Palestinian camps in Lebanon. As for the second wing, it was the “France Palestine Association”, which was founded in 1979 and was close to the French Communist Party in its founding. The association was moving at the French political and media level and calling for a solution to the Palestinian issue on the basis of United Nations resolutions, uniting the two wings within the framework of an important association called AFPS, i.e. the French-Palestinian Solidarity Association. Bernard Ravenel was its first president until 2009. During his presidency, the association became comprised of thousands of members and supporters, and it has branches in almost all French cities. It became an active framework and interlocutor on all occasions. pertaining to Palestine.
Also during this period, Bernard Ravenel was one of the founders of the Russell Court for Palestine, which was established in 2009 as a court of public opinion that includes lawyers, writers, artists and activists. It calls for an end to Israel's international immunity in front of the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, which are condemned by international law. The head of the court was the famous French ambassador Stéphane Hessel He is of Jewish faith, a survivor of Nazi camps and one of those who contributed to writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Bernard Ravenel was interested in the issue of popular resistance in Palestine, even before the Fatah movement adopted it in its sixth conference in Bethlehem in 2009, as a strategic choice in its work. He studied in depth the experiences of popular resistance in a number of countries of the world, especially India, and stopped at the experience of the first intifada in Palestine at the end of 1987. In his lectures and writings, he used to talk about the central role played by the martyr leader Khalil Al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) in establishing the popular committees in all the Palestinian lands to be the structure and continuation of the uprising, which was able to attract large sectors of world public opinion and its media and constituted an important turning point in the Palestinian cause.
The second topic that attracted Bernard's attention is the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, specifically Israel. He wrote a book and articles on this topic in France, calling for attention to the occupying country's possession of nuclear weapons, as is the concern and is almost exclusively in the political and media circles in Iran and its so-called attempt to obtain weapons. Nuclear.
Bernard sought to create the largest platform to support the struggle of the Palestinian people in France, to include solidarity movements, political parties, trade unions and civil society associations, all of which work in a coordinated manner for the benefit of Palestine. From 2001 to 2009.
Bernard Ravenel's commitment to supporting the Palestinian people and their struggle did not prevent him from being openly and creatively critical of some policies and options of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian National Authority.
Bernard continued to participate in the defense of the Palestinian cause in all platforms and the attempt of the pro-Israeli occupation lobby in France to distort the Palestinian struggle and link it to anti-Semitism. He did not hesitate to criticize one of the former French prime ministers in 2017 when he said that opposing the Zionist movement and criticizing its policy against the Palestinian people is one of the forms Modern anti-Semitism.
Bernard Ravenel, who deserves to be honored in Palestine and at the highest levels, left a political and intellectual legacy that must be studied and published.