After 41 years in French prison, revolutionary Lebanese communist and freedom fighter Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was released on 25 July. He was flown back to Lebanon to a hero’s welcome at Beirut airport, where hundreds of jubilant supporters had gathered, many of them waving Palestinian and Lebanese Communist Party flags.
Abdallah was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for alleged complicity in the killings of Charles Robert Ray, US military attaché, and Yacov Barsimantovin, Israeli diplomat, in Paris in 1982 and the attempted assassination of US Consul General Robert Homme in Strasbourg in 1984. Abdallah has maintained his innocence in both cases but has defended them politically, describing them as ‘acts of resistance’ against ‘Israeli and American oppression’. He has been eligible for parole since 1999 but attempts to release him were repeatedly blocked by the US. Abdallah was due for release in 2013 but the then Socialist Party French government blocked the move, condemning him to indefinite imprisonment.
Despite over four decades in prison, making him Europe’s longest-held political prisoner, Georges Abdallah has remained steadfast in his political convictions: communist and anti-imperialist. During his trial he declared ‘I am a fighter, not a criminal… the path I have followed has been imposed on me by the human rights abuses perpetrated against the Palestinians’, and he has credited ‘keeping up the struggle’ and continuing to be ‘militant’ for how he has survived his many years of imprisonment. His release is due to decades of relentless mobilisation by Palestine activists in France and across Europe, where he had become a symbol of uncompromising resistance and political struggle that refused to yield in the face of its enemies. Georges Abdallah and the movement that forced his release must serve as an example to the whole Palestine solidarity movement, that victory will come through resistance, perseverance and uncompromising political struggle on the streets, from Palestine to the imperialist heartlands. No one is free until we are all free, liberation for all political prisoners now!
Cassandra Howarth
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 307 August/September 2025
