Police intervene in protesters with dogs during a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Kant Street in the Wilmersdorf district in Berlin, Germany on October 19, 2024 [Erbil Basay/Anadolu]
No state has been as assiduous in attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as Germany.
Today, it is impossible to hold a pro-Palestine demonstration in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany without facing attacks from the police, intimidation from the state and accusations of anti-Semitism from the press.
In April, the Palestine Assembly, a high-profile pro-Palestine conference in Berlin was broken up by hundreds of police officers. British Palestinian rector of Glasgow University, Ghassan Abu Sitta, was stopped from entering Germany to attend the conference and deported back to the UK. He was later banned from entering the entire Schengen area.
Abu Sitta, a surgeon who volunteered in several Gaza hospitals since last year, was planning to deliver a speech on the horrific condition Israeli attacks have left the Strip’s health system in. A German court later overturned the ban.
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from entering Germany and prevented from even participating in the Congress via a video link.
German authorities said they targeted Abu Sitta, Varoufakis and others at the conference because they deemed their speeches “anti-Semitic”.
There is no truth to this claim. Germany is not silencing pro-Palestinian voices to protect the rights of Jews and combat anti-Semitism. This is apparent not only in the content of the speech it censures, but also in the way Germany treats anti-Zionist Jews who speak in support of Palestinian rights.
Iris Hefets, a German-Israeli psychoanalyst in Berlin, for example, was arrested last October on charges of anti-Semitism. Her only “crime” was walking alone with a placard reading: “As an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.”
Within the same month, more than a hundred German-Jewish artists, writers, academics, journalists and cultural workers published an open letter condemning Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and accusations of anti-Semitism directed at everyone – including Jews like them – who criticise Israel’s conduct.
“What frightens us is the prevailing atmosphere of racism and xenophobia in Germany, hand in hand with a constraining and paternalistic philo-Semitism. We reject in particular the conflation of anti-Semitism and any criticism of the state of Israel.”
So why is Germany working so hard to ensure no one speaks against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which triggered a genocide case at the ICJ?
The answer lies in Germany’s history – but it is not, as many assume tied to efforts to atone for the Nazi Holocaust and ensure that it never happens again.
Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler.
In the wake of World War II the German state’s reacceptance into the international community was made contingent on a process of de-Nazification. However, this process was soon abandoned. It was overtaken by the Cold War. Germany made amends for its crimes against the Jews – but not the Roma – by providing unconditional and unlimited backing to the newly founded “Jewish state”, the West’s military outpost in Palestine: Israel.
Eliminating the political structures that led to the rise of the Nazis – imperialism and the German military-industrial complex – would have run counter to the need to oppose the Soviet Union.
Source: aljazeera
