On Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Genet and representing the Palestinians

In July 2014, the people who took part to the banned demonstration in Paris against the intervention of the Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza were expressing their support of a besieged people. However, this very support was also an excuse to demonstrate their religious and ethnic allegiances as well as their political opinions. The use of the Palestinian struggle for recognition as a tool in domestic political debates is not a recent trend in French political culture: it can be traced back to 1968 when the Palestinian cause was discovered in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. A pioneer of the Palestinian cause, Jean-Luc Godard, was recently accused of anti-Semitism when he was considered for a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars in 2010. The same year, in Marseille, a conference celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Jean Genet’s birth was almost cancelled because it could supposedly have caused problems of public safety. Long after their works on this topic came out, both authors’ positions regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are still considered extremely controversial. This article explores the speeches of both men regarding movements of Palestinian resistance after they visited refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon in the 1970s and the 1980s. It argues that, as fiery anti-Zionists, Jean Genet and Jean-Luc Godard unconsciously create a mythology of Palestinian struggle for recognition and independence in order to protest against its representation in the mass media of capitalistic societies.