Mouna Naïm
in Le Monde
Those who worked with Jean-Marie Gaubert, whether as an activist or in his professional life, mourn the loss of a man whose discretion, modesty and sobriety were matched only by his generosity, lucidity, efficiency and loyalty to his convictions, particularly his support for the rights of the Palestinian people. Obstinate, sober and modest, Jean-Marie Gaubert preferred concrete and efficient work to prestigious functions. He was an activist in the shadows, even though he and others were at the origin of many projects and initiatives. But he never fell into the obsessive and almost sacrificial austerity of those who defend a cause.
He was, his friends assure us, a bon vivant, a fine connoisseur of classical music and Romanesque architecture, a history buff and also a tireless hiker.
When, in October 1974, Jean-Marie Gaubert founded the Association médicale franco-palestinienne (AMFP) – with professors Paul Milliez, Marcel Francis-Kahn and Michel Larivière, as well as Marie-Claude Hamchari, the widow of Mahmoud Hamchari, the PLO representative in France, who had been assassinated two years earlier – he was not a novice in politics. A member of the PSU from the early 1970s, then of the PSUM (PSU maintained), he took part in the adventure of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Left and the Communist Workers’ Organization.
It is this brief passage within the internationalist extreme left that seems to have been decisive in his commitment to Palestine. The AMFP, of which Jean-Marie Gaubert became president in 1988, was one of the very first pro-Palestinian structures in the French political landscape. From the outset, it supported the PLO and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and worked on the political and practical levels – very much focused on the Palestinian camps in Lebanon until 1985, then on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, without abandoning Lebanon.
Faithful to his convictions, Jean-Marie Gaubert was also one of the founders, in 1985, of the International Coordinating Committee of NGOs on the Question of Palestine (CICP), whose creation had been decided by the UN General Assembly, on the proposal of the UN Committee for the Defence of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
The CICP, which had a permanent secretariat in Geneva, played a pioneering role in the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, in that it served as a semi-institutional venue for the PLO and Palestinian NGOs to meet with Israeli NGOs, at a time when an Israeli law criminalized any meeting with the PLO. The CICP also facilitated meetings between Palestinians “from within” and “from Tunis”. Jean-Marie Gaubert also participated in the activities of the International Information Centre on Palestinian and Lebanese Prisoners, Deportees and Disappeared, created in July 1982 in Paris during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In 1993, he was one of the main promoters of the platform of French NGOs for Palestine, which includes 21 members.
His struggle was not limited to Palestine. He was secretary general of the French League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples, since its creation in 1976, and contributed to the organization of several sessions of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, created by the Italian socialist senator Lelio Basso, a great figure of the Italian resistance during the Second World War. His professional career also reflects his loyalty to his convictions. One of the founders of Italiques, a workers’ cooperative production company (Scop), Jean-Marie Gaubert then joined Incidences, another cooperative specialising in communication, of which he was the production manager and administrator. At the same time, he was very active in the Scop confederation.
in: Le Monde