by Eric C. Sapp, LSPC Staff Attorney
NOTA BENE: The views expressed in this essay are solely those of the author in his individual capacity and do not purport to convey any official positions taken by LSPC, AOUON, or any other person or entity.
After four decades of incarceration, the Lebanese Marxist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah was released in July 2025 from Lannemezan prison in France, making him among the longest-serving political prisoners in Europe and one of the longest-serving for a Palestine solidarity activist anywhere on the planet. His case was one of the prominent political trials of the post-1945 era bearing on anti-imperialist and/or anticolonial insurgencies and could be usefully compared to more famous trials in pre-revolution Cuba or in apartheid South Africa.
The direct model for Abdallah’s trial was the strategy employed by Algerian independence fighters during the 1950s-1960s. Implemented by lawyer Jacques Vergès in the case of Djamila Bouhired, accused of a terror attack, the defense of rupture sought not to acquit, but to flip the narrative against the prosecuting government. Bouhired was convicted; she avoided execution of a death sentence due to public pressure. Tactical loss (conviction, as conventionally construed) was considered a strategic victory because she was able to promote, with dignity, the anticolonial position of the Algerian Front for National Liberation. Vergès would later write that, in contrast to an ordinary defense strategy marked by “a fundamental need to respect the established order”, “in most rupture trials, the aim of the defendant is not to obtain the acquittal of the accused, but to highlight his ideas.” It is a very risky strategy, the deployment of which depends on a complex, uncertain calculation of the lines of force comprising a historical conjuncture.
Prosecuted for complicity in the homicides of an American and an Israel official, in the period between the 1978 and 1982 Israeli invasions of Lebanon, Abdallah’s statement to the court in 1987 was defiant. He declared the court was “far from being apolitical” as “it is the imperialist war that your Court has given itself the right to put on trial.” If some of his assertions were hyperbolic then, in retrospect they appear prophetic. “Annihilation and balkanization join together beneath the mystifying banner of the rights of Western man.” By “annihilation”, he referred to ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine and to the armed conflict between Israeli forces and resistance forces (including Palestinian groups and their allies in Lebanon). By “balkanization”, he referred to the legacy of European colonial division of the Arab world into nation-states. These phenomena resonate in our time.
Abdallah’s statement went beyond Middle East politics to articulate a conception of the legitimacy of combatting a legal system viewed as itself “criminal.” Rather than defend on the basis of innocence or the absence of evidence tying him to the alleged offenses, Abdallah sarcastically thanked the French for associating him with the perpetrators of the acts, which he described as honorable.
That he employed a rupture defense is easily comprehended; Vergès was, after all, Abdallah’s attorney. One may question whether it was the wisest strategy, especially the decision to stick with it at the post-conviction stages. Abdallah had an appealable case because his other, prior attorney collaborated with French intelligence, in violation of professional duties of confidence. Abdallah declined to appeal on that basis because, as explained in an interview soon after his release and deportation to Lebanon, he preferred that the miscarriage of justice in his trial remain a permanent stain on French law. Surely, the stain would be more indelible, not less, were appellate proceedings to confirm procedural irregularities. Abdallah’s approach took the rupture strategy in the direction of martyrdom: his incarceration itself bore witness to his cause’s sincerity. During imprisonment he viewed himself not as a political prisoner but as a “miltant” whose terrain of struggle was the institution.
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