Thank you for everything, Georges!

(regarding the release of Georges Abdallah)

The release of Georges Abdallah was decided on July 17, after more than 40 years of detention. And even if we will only be truly relieved when Georges arrives in his native Lebanon, the event compels us to say a few words.

When the campaign for Georges Abdallah’s release was launched over 20 years ago, the various structures of the International Red Help could not have imagined the length of a struggle that would become formative for us, although it began with just a few modest actions aimed simply at making Georges and his cause known.

The mobilization campaign seemed to follow the usual pattern. First spreading within revolutionary circles, it eventually reached broader forces of the reformist and democratic left. This expansion, reflected in hundreds of demonstrations and thousands of initiatives, can be explained by three elements:

• Firstly, by the obviously political nature of Georges’s detention. We won’t revisit every episode in which the French justice system trampled on all the values, rules, and principles it claims to uphold—starting with the separation of powers—in order to prolong this detention as an expression of the French state’s support and complicity for Zionist and imperialist aggression.
• Secondly, by those very Zionist and imperialist aggressions, those endless massacres of which the ongoing genocide in Gaza is only the latest example. This string of tragedies constantly reminded us over the years of the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance to which Georges belongs.
• Lastly, by Georges’s own resistance—by the way he rejected every form of blackmail for repentance, by the way he endured every hardship of an interminable detention, and by the way he kept alive the historical propositions of the Arab revolutionary left: a free, secular, and democratic Palestine from the river to the sea. Moreover, he has always defended the liberation of Palestine as an integral part of the struggle for a communist and internationalist perspective.

This courage and determination were not only an encouragement to the movement demanding his release. Georges has offered multiple generations of militants a tremendous example of resistance—an active, daily resistance that not only stood firm in its positions but also knew how to connect with the struggles that emerged after his arrest.

Throughout all these years, Georges has nourished and inspired our struggles. So for all of that, with all our heart, thank you Georges Abdallah, thank you and welcome home.

International Red Help
International Secretariat
July 17, 2025