On July 16, the European coordinator of the Palestinian prisoner solidarity network Samidoun, Mohammed Khatib, was summoned to a hearing at the Belgian asylum office. The background is a procedure against Khatib to revoke his refugee status. Khatib was born in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, in Ain al-Hilweh, and, like millions of Palestinians around the world, is officially “stateless”. He has lived in Brussels for years and is politically active there.
The procedure against him was initiated by the Belgian Minister for Immigration, Nicole de Moor, of the conservative Christian Democratic and Flemish (CD&V) party. In April, she announced in a press release that she had asked the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons (CGRS) to revoke Khatib’s refugee status. The Commissioner-General is Sophie Van Balberghe, who was only appointed to this post by de Moor in March 2023. In her actions, de Moor relies on the so-called Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis (OCAM). In a report, the unit described the activist as a “hate preacher”.
Resistance quickly formed against this repression. By the end of April, more than 250 Belgian and international academics had signed an open letter condemning the action against Khatib. In it, they made it clear, among other things: “The purpose of refugee status is to protect people’s lives and their right to dignity. It cannot be granted or withdrawn on political grounds.” They also emphasized that Khatib is not accused of any criminal offenses. Finally, they accused de Moor of attacking freedom of expression in general and specifically with regard to Palestine. “De Moor’s announcement is part of a wider context of repression and defamation targeting the Palestinian movement and its supporters in Belgium,” the letter states. This assessment was recently confirmed by Amnesty International, which in its report criticized Belgium, among others, for the fact that pro-Palestinian demonstrations “were disproportionately restricted.”
The Belgian government has so far been unimpressed by this, and is continuing its campaign against Mohammed Khatib. In addition, as Samidoun criticized in a statement, the government refused to allow Khatib and his lawyer to see the alleged evidence against him. As a result, Khatib and his comrades have thus far only been able to rely on public statements. They say that these “read like Zionist propaganda” and generally “criminalize Palestinian existence, resistance and organizing.”
“Perhaps most egregiously,” says Samidoun, “they state, on the basis of no evidence at all, that Khatib ‘calls to target Jews around the world,’ despite the fact that Mohammed has never spoken of ‘Jews’ as the enemy but only Zionism, imperialism and colonialism, and they are unable to produce even a single statement to back up this charge, which relies entirely on the conflation of Judaism and Zionism.”