Jewish Moroccan activist and BDS Morocco founder Sion Assidon, 77, died on Friday following a nearly three-month coma.
The Casablanca public prosecutor announced on Saturday that the cause of death was sepsis following a head trauma. Assidon fell from a ladder while gardening on August 19, resulting in cerebral-meningeal hemorrhages, cerebral contusions, and a skull fracture, according to the autopsy.
The BDS movement, however, said his wounds were due to a “deliberate attack a few months ago by assailants who remain anonymous and may well be connected to the authoritarian regime in Morocco.”
Assidon was considered in Morocco to be one of the last Marxist revolutionaries, and dedicated much of his life to opposing Zionism, normalization with Israel, and the defense of Palestinian rights.
He was born in 1948 to a Berber Jewish family in Safi. The family moved to Agadir, then Casablanca, and then France, where Assidon was said to be influenced by Marxism.
While in Paris in 1967, Assidon said he “witnessed firsthand the height of French media racism against Palestinians and Arabs, in general,” and “discovered that the Zionist movement had been spreading nothing but lies, and that Israel was in fact the real aggressor.”
In March 1970, after returning to Morocco from France, Assidon founded the Marxist-Leninist organization Harakat 23 Mars. During what is known as the Years of Lead in Morocco (the period of King Hassan II's rule from the 1960s to the 1980s), Assidon was at the forefront of the fight for democracy and against political violence. This activism ultimately led to him being arrested in 1972 and sent to prison for 12 years.
In 1982, while inside Kenitra prison, Assidon sent a letter to Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat, in which he pledged his readiness to join the Palestinian resistance through the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Rabat. Assidon also consistently refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist group, deeming them part of the Palestinian revolution and liberation movement.
In 1986, he founded a computer company and married a Palestinian-American woman, with whom he had a son.
Then in 2010, he launched the Moroccan branch of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. He remained active in his BDS work right up until his fall in August. On August 2, he was involved in the pro-Palestinian sit-in outside the US consulate in Casablanca, and then on August 3 took part in the protest against the docking of ships destined for Israel at the Port of Tangier.
There was an irony surrounding Assidon’s name, Sion, given his ant-Zionist stance, something that he himself responded to in a 2009 interview with Akhbar Al-Youm (Morocco).
'I didn’t choose to be called Zion'
“I didn’t choose to be called Zion, nor did I choose that historical coincidence. Even my parents, when they named me, were unaware of those implications. The only incident I’ve ever had in my life regarding my first name, ‘Sion’, happened in 1999, when someone attacked me in the national press, asking: ‘How can this Jew named Zion defend the rights of the Palestinian people?’
“My response, and I still repeat it today, was this: Mount Zion is one of the hills of Jerusalem, and when that word is used in literature or history, it symbolizes Jerusalem itself. So I said, word for word: ‘I am proud that my name symbolizes the city of Jerusalem, the City of Peace.’”
He told Arab Weekly in 2019, “You mustn’t confuse Zionism with Judaism: the Israeli government says it represents Jews the world over, but that’s not true.”