Gaza to Paris: How a Generation Learns to Protest

What does a Palestinian flag have to do with a French school that doesn’t have enough teachers?

Across France, teenagers have been blocking school entrances and taking to the streets, angry about overcrowded classrooms, missing teachers and deteriorating facilities. What began in the Paris suburbs in September has “spread across the country”, drawing in teachers, student unions and politicians.

But among the banners demanding better schools, Palestinian flags and keffiyehs have also appeared.

At a gathering in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, on 4 October, a small platform was decorated with a Palestinian flag. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, Gaza was not mentioned in the speeches, although keffiyehs were widespread and some young people described the destruction in Gaza as part of their political awakening. A few days earlier, Palestinian flags had appeared alongside French flags outside a school in nearby Sevran.

These teenagers were protesting about their education, not Israeli policy. But Gaza had clearly become important to some of them, even when they were protesting about something completely different.

The demonstrations have spread well beyond the schools where they began. There have been serious confrontations with police, including injuries to teenagers, adding another layer of anger to the protests.

La France Insoumise (LFI), the radical-left movement founded by veteran French politician and former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has been particularly visible. It has long supported the Palestinian cause and strongly criticised Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. It has also backed the French school protesters.

The French government has accused the radical left of exploiting the students’ anger. A Paris police intelligence assessment, reported by Le Monde, suggested far-left involvement from the early stages of the protests, including an LFI MP visiting a school to support students. But the assessment concerned only one area of the Paris suburbs, and other intelligence sources described a movement that began spontaneously, with political organisations becoming involved later.

A political party doesn’t have to organise a protest to influence it. It can get involved once the demonstrations have started, give them greater visibility and bring its own political agenda into the mix. But that doesn’t mean the students themselves don’t already hold strong political views.

We tend to ask who organised a demonstration, who printed the placards and who supplied the flags. But there’s another question worth asking. Where did the students get their political ideas in the first place? By the time they arrive at a protest, their views may already have been shaped by what they see online, the people they follow and the conversations they have with friends.

By the time a teenager arrives outside a French school carrying a Palestinian flag, the more interesting question may not be who gave them the flag, but what made that flag meaningful to them in the first place.

There is a comparison here with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that spread across American university campuses in 2024. Those protests were explicitly about Gaza, with students establishing encampments and demanding divestment from companies connected to Israel.

The French school protests are different. Their original demands have nothing to do with the Middle East, and there is no established evidence that the same organisations are directing both movements.

But who connects these different causes?

Student unions, political parties and activist networks can bring people together around shared political ideas. In France, LFI provides one example of a movement supporting both Palestinian solidarity campaigns and the current school protests.

The Palestinian cause is now closely associated with campaigns against racism, colonialism and inequality. Within many of these movements, Palestinians are portrayed as the oppressed and Israel as the oppressor. That makes it easier for activists involved in very different causes to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as part of the same struggle.

For Israel, the challenge goes beyond getting its message heard. In some of these movements, Israel has already been assigned a role on the opposite side of the causes they champion. French journalist Nora Bussigny’s “undercover investigation into anti-Israel activism”, reported by The Times of Israel, describes how otherwise disparate activist groups have found common cause in their opposition to Israel.

How did that happen? Was it the result of effective Palestinian activism and alliance-building, shortcomings in Israeli public diplomacy, the impact of the war in Gaza, or a combination of all three?

The images of destruction and civilian suffering in Gaza have undoubtedly influenced public opinion. But people don’t watch those images in isolation. They interpret what they’re seeing through the political views they already hold, and Israel’s security arguments may struggle to reach people who have come to see it as the oppressor.

A teenager in Paris can watch footage from Gaza, follow an American campus protest and see videos of French police confronting students, all on the same phone. Each event has its own history, but the material may be understood through similar arguments about injustice and authority.

One of the things I’ve learnt from covering conflicts is that people can arrive at the same political position for very different reasons. Some are motivated by personal experience, others by ideology, and others by solidarity with people they believe are suffering. They may agree on what they’re protesting against without agreeing on much else.

The difficulty comes when people become so attached to a political position that they stop questioning it. At that point, giving them more information doesn’t necessarily change their minds.

None of this proves that the students carrying Palestinian flags have been manipulated, or that Palestinian organisations are directing the demonstrations.

Whatever happens to the French protests, the political experiences these teenagers have accumulated will remain.

For Israel, the important question is not simply why a Palestinian flag appeared at a French school protest. It is how Gaza became part of the political identity of young people who had taken to the streets for an entirely different reason.

Because by the time Israel enters a conversation with the next generation, some of their opinions may already have been formed in places where Israel was never supposed to be the subject.