Georges Abdallah’s Release Is Long Overdue

He’s the longest-held political prisoner in Europe — one of the last detainees from the wave of armed struggle movements that receded in the 1980s. He also counts among the prisoners with the longest unbroken period of detention for militant activities related to the Palestinian cause. In 2023, Israel released the previous “record holder” Karim Younis, convicted forty years earlier for the killing of an Israeli soldier; another long-jailed detainee, Nael al-Barghouti, arrested in 1978, was released in a 2011 exchange before being reimprisoned in 2014.

But if — according to a count this June by Israeli NGO B’Tselem — there are today some 9,440 Palestinians in Israeli jails, you won’t find Georges Ibrahim Abdallah among them. Rather, this October 25, Abdallah began his forty-first year in prison in France, at the Lannemezan penitentiary in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Born in Lebanon in 1951, he is serving a life sentence for complicity in the 1982 assassinations of US and Israeli state officials in Paris.

This October 25, Abdallah began his forty-first year in prison in France, at the Lannemezan penitentiary in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

In Europe, that moment was the height of what is often referred to as the “Years of Lead.” Between 1968 and the mid-1980s, ultraleft groups such as Italy’s Red Brigades, West Germany’s Red Army Faction, and Action Directe in France took the doctrine of class war to extreme lengths, staging assassinations and other violent attacks. Like their European counterparts, Arab and pro-Palestinian militant groups sought to bring the fight against Israeli colonialism to its Western backers. This was the case with Abdallah’s group, the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Forces (LARF).

The Years…