Morocco: ProPalestine activists denounce increased state repression
Mustapha Dakar, Mohamed Boustati, Ismail Lghazaoui, Abderrahmane Azenkad and Said Boukioud are among a growing list of Moroccan activists recently sentenced to prison by local courts for criticising their country’s normalisation of relations with Israel.
According to a tally compiled by the Moroccan Front for the Support of Palestine and Against Normalisation - a coalition that brings together some 20 associations, unions and political parties - 20 people have been arrested and sentenced to jail terms for this reason since 2021, and the number has been accelerating since October 2023.
Boustati is one of the latest to be sentenced. He received a one-year prison term at the end of March for defamation over Facebook posts about Israel’s war on Gaza that were deemed offensive to the Saudi state.
The posts contained general political criticism of Arab states' positions on the war and normalisation deals with Israel, according to the statements of his lawyer to AFP.
At the end of December, 13 members of the Moroccan Front for the Support of Palestine and Against Normalisation were also convicted.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
They were each given a six-month suspended jail sentence and fined 2,000 dirhams ($210) for organising a sit-in in front of a Carrefour supermarket in the city of Sale, calling for a boycott of the chain, which has been accused of being complicit in Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.
A little earlier, Lghazaoui, an agricultural engineer, was sentenced to one year in prison and fined 5,000 dirhams for incitement to commit a crime or misdemeanour, after urging others to "surround the American embassy in Casablanca" and shed "our blood for Palestine" in a video.
These convictions - and other similar cases - have sparked condemnation within Morocco, where various rights organisations and political parties have denounced increasing repression of freedom of expression on this sensitive issue for the monarchy.
In December 2020, Morocco reached an agreement with the United States to normalise its relations with Israel in exchange for the US recognition of its claims over Western Sahara.
The territory, a former Spanish colony with rich fishing waters and significant phosphate reserves, is controlled for the most part by Morocco but claimed by the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement backed by Algeria.
By signing the deal, Morocco formalised a 60-year history of discreet military and intelligence cooperation with Israel. It became the fourth Arab state to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel in just four months, following the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.
Since then, the two countries have signed several bilateral agreements, including in the military sphere, while trade relations have been developing.
‘They terrorise people’
Voices against the normalisation process with Israel began to be heard as soon as the agreement was signed and have intensified since Israel’s war on Gaza.
A recent Arab Barometer survey showed that popular support for the deal plummeted in the kingdom from 31 percent in 2022 to only 13 percent in 2023 and 2024.
At the same time, anti-normalisation demonstrations have drawn crowds of thousands of people.
‘They arrest activists to scare them and send a message to the rest: if you continue to speak out, this is what will happen to you’
- Yassir Abbadi, Moroccan Front for the Support of Palestine and Against Normalisation
Saadia Elouallous, a member of the national secretariat of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, which is part of the Moroccan Front for the Support of Palestine and Against Normalisation, told Middle East Eye that around 6,000 marches or sit-ins had been organised across the country in the past four years.
While the authorities generally tolerate the protests and continue to publicly defend the Palestinian cause, they are simultaneously working to discourage any opposition to the kingdom’s policy towards Israel, according to activists.
Sion Assidon, a veteran activist within the Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, describes the state's strategy as an attempt to intimidate pro-Palestine advocates.
"The official line is to let people demonstrate even if it's not true, as we saw in Agadir, Oujda and Meknes," he said.
According to him, the three cities witnessed what he calls a "deterrent fight", where the police allegedly used batons to disperse people from the start of the demonstration.
"Then, they terrorise people by targeting one person among all the others who speak out. This puts the others in a vulnerable position. It's simple: they arrest the average man so that all the other average men fear for themselves."
Yassir Abbadi, a member of the Moroccan Front for the Support of Palestine and Against Normalisation, makes the same observation.
“They arrest activists to scare them and send a message to the rest: if you continue to speak out, this is what will happen to you,” he told MEE.
Moroccan activists also denounce a distorted use of the kingdom’s legislation to repress dissenting voices.
“They arrest somebody and then invent some excuse for having arrested them,” Abbadi said.
Assidon cited, among several examples, the case of the 13 activists convicted at the end of December.
“They are accused of gathering without authorisation when there is no such thing in the penal code. Only occupying a public road requires authorisation, but there they were in the parking lot,” he said.
The detained activists are awaiting their appeals. However, for Assidon, the monarchy’s manoeuvre is clear: “The regime is repressing anyone who opposes its policy of linking its fate to that of the occupation of Palestine.”
Escalation
Several activists have been released on appeal, but their comrades view this as part of the kingdom's strategy of blowing hot and cold - maintaining pressure on activists while attempting to contain public discontent.
“They reduce the sentence or release them to respond to public pressure and to make the regime look good in the public eye,” Abbadi said. “But even five months is a long time for a social media post.”
Several activists were pardoned by the king himself, who traditionally releases hundreds of people - usually common law prisoners - on national or religious holidays.
‘The regime is repressing anyone who opposes its policy of linking its fate to that of the occupation of Palestine’
- Sion Assidon, BDS activist
“The problem with that is that they release actual criminals, abusers, etc - and that if you are granted a royal pardon, it means you are a real criminal. So, activists arrested for Palestine don’t want the pardon because it means they committed a crime, which is not the case. They should never have been jailed in the first place,” Abbadi said.
“In recent months, I don’t know why there has been an escalation of arrests: activists, journalists… [It's] about Palestine, but not only,” he added.
The young activist was also placed in police custody four years ago after calling for the release of political prisoners on Facebook.
“It’s clear that we’ve known more lenient times,” Assidon told MEE.
“Before 2020, we demonstrated for Palestine and everything went well. We were almost escorted,” he added.
"And now, look at the arrests of journalists or that of Fouad Abdelmoumni," he said, referring to the prominent human rights defender and outspoken critic of Morocco’s political system who was sentenced to six months in prison in March.
Abdelmoumni was accused of “insulting public authorities, spreading false allegations and reporting a fictitious crime he knew did not occur” in a Facebook post that criticised Moroccan-French relations and alleged that Rabat was using spyware to target dissidents.
In October 2019, investigations by Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories found that Moroccan authorities were behind the hacking of smartphones of several journalists and rights defenders, alongside possibly thousands of other individuals - including Algerian officials and French President Emmanuel Macron - using the Israeli spyware Pegasus. Abdelmoumni was one of them.
In recent years, activists have sounded the alarm on the state of human rights in the kingdom amid a broader crackdown on free expression that has been ongoing for years. This has included the arrest of several journalists and rights defenders under the guise of morality cases.
At the end of March, Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on Moroccan authorities to “urgently end their intensifying repression of activists, journalists and human rights defenders solely for exercising their right to free speech”.
“The Moroccan monarchy’s effort to present itself as progressive stands in stark contrast to the country’s repressive security forces,” said Balkees Jarrah, HRW acting Middle East and North Africa director.
Recent examples of this tightening crackdown include the early March arrest of four relatives of YouTuber Hicham Jerando - a Moroccan activist based in Canada who has denounced alleged corruption by senior officials in the kingdom - as well as the one-year prison sentence handed to Said Ait Mehdi for his criticism of the authorities' handling of the post-2023 earthquake response.
‘Things must be said’
Despite the repression, Moroccan pro-Palestine activists do not seem ready to give up the fight - though they are taking certain precautions.
"I am careful about what I say. Of course, I don't insult anyone and I only base my statements on proven and verifiable facts. But of course, they can always come after me," Elouallous told MEE.
“I fear for myself, like everyone else. We take risks, but measured risks,” Assidon said. “However, things must be said, and so I say them.”
‘We must show that the position of the Moroccan people is not that of the Moroccan state’
- Saadia Elouallous, Moroccan Federation for Human Rights
While the Moroccan media, which is mostly under the thumb of the monarchy, strives to present normalisation as advantageous for the kingdom and emphasises the historical ties between Morocco and Israel, popular opposition to the deal and Israel’s war on Gaza remains strong in the country.
“There is a big media campaign about the benefit of normalisation for Morocco, about a lot of people in Israel being of Moroccan origin, etc, and unfortunately, some people believe that. But Moroccans always protest. The majority of Moroccans care about Palestine, but it’s in the back of their minds,” Abbadi said.
For the moment, the demonstrations are continuing unabated. At least two are organised every week in various cities across the country, Elouallous told MEE.
Sunday, 6 April saw one of the largest protests in several months, with tens of thousands of people gathering to denounce the "massacre and displacement" of Palestinians in Gaza.
Other demonstrators called for the "abolition" of the normalisation deal, which they described as "betrayal".
"We cannot let people believe that we are happy and submissive to this decision that comes from above,” Elouallous said.
“We must show that the position of the Moroccan people is not that of the Moroccan state, and the demonstrations show this."
middleeasteye.net