Palestine Congress cancellation shows Germany has hit new low — activists

Since Israel began its war on Gaza in October last year, Germany has put its political, diplomatic and military weight behind Tel Aviv. It has also intensified the crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices.

The most glaring example of how far the German state can go in its unabashed support for Israel came on April 12 when a peaceful pro-Palestine meeting was broken up forcefully by the police.

The three-day Palestine Congress, being held in Berlin, was supposed to be a forum for speakers to raise their voices against the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and put pressure on Germany to revise its military support to Israel.

Even though the organisers had permission to hold the event, the police first barred attendees from going to the venue and later barged in to disrupt the congress altogether by switching off the power.

“Cutting the electricity of the hall where 200 people were gathering to discuss peace is a new low even for Germany,” says May Zeidani Yufanyi, a Berlin-based activist.

For days before the scheduled start of the congress, the organisers were feeling the pressure. German media had misleadingly labelled the meeting as a gathering of “Israel haters” to turn the public mood against the activists who are seeking an end to the Israeli aggression in Gaza.

“The orders to shut the event came from the top of the government and the media is silent - what’s worse is that the media is actively spreading false information,” says Yufanyi.

Negative media reports were followed by a crackdown on the event’s organisers. The bank account of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace, one of the organisers, was frozen by a major German bank.

Prominent people, including Ghassan Abu Sitta, rector of the University of Glasgow, who was supposed to attend the congress, were not even allowed entry into Germany.

Axel Springer’s controversial spin

Germany takes pride in its democratic values, freedom of speech and human rights. Its official media spends considerable resources to expose state repression and highlight the plight of minorities in other countries.

But when it comes to the pro-Palestinian voices or criticism of Israel on its own soil, the role of Germany’s media is anything but impartial.

For the little while that Palestine Congress was allowed to continue, it was flooded with more than a dozen hostile journalists who were taking pictures and making videos of the participants.

Days before the event, right-wing publications, which are part of Axel Springer SE, started calling for an outright ban on the congress, which was being organised at a crucial time for civilians in Gaza - Israel has already killed more than 33,000 people in the Palestinian enclave.

Instead, the German media labelled pro-Palestinian protesters as anti-Semitic, against freedom of the press, and dangerous for Germany, says Yufanyi.

Die Welt, an Axel Springer paper, ran an editorial with a headline “God bless the IDF”. The same editorial linked the Palestinian slogan “from river to the sea”, which basically reflects Palestinian aspiration for a country of their own, as something that alludes to a call to kill the Jews.

The German media also keeps using derogatory terms like "aggro-Arabs", which means aggressive Arabs, and "imported antisemitism" to describe the pro-Palestine movement.

This is despite 84 percent of reported antisemitic crimes in Germany are committed by white far-right groups and not, as the media narrative would imply, by “immigrants”, according to official figures.

“Far-right and neo-nazi groups receive nowhere near the attention or repression that we see in the fight for Palestinian rights,” Caoimhe McAlister, activist for Irish Bloc Berlin, tells TRT World.

Axel Springer also used its publications to run Israeli real estate advertisements, which included houses and properties built on illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Attempt to erase history

Germany has for decades tried to deal with its Nazi past - the time during World War II when millions of Jews were slaughtered by German troops, activists say.

Now as a close ally of Israel, it is going overboard with its crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices, something that is akin to radicalisation of the German society.

Diana Nazzal, a pro-Palestinian activist from Palastina Spricht (Palestine Speaks) tells TRT World that German government’s efforts to discredit Palestinian cause are not limited to political and media spheres.

“Official anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim movement is apparent in the efforts to revise the history in Israel’s favour through school curriculum,” she says.

The best example of this is the Myth Israel 1948, a brochure that was distributed in schools recently. It’s basically a booklet that denies that Nakba happened, the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the creation of Israel.

The brochure was handed out to secondary school students in Berlin’s Neukolln at the behest of Germany’s SPD (Social Democratic Party) and CDU (Christian Democratic Party).

But this isn’t the first time Palestinians are being targeted in German schools.

Diana Nazzal, a Palestinian-German living in Kreuzberg, remembers how intimidated she felt as a 16-year-old when her history teacher called Palestinians suicide bombers despite knowing her ancestory.

She says that while there was no empathy towards Palestinians and the Nakba, “they were teaching every year about the Holocaust and they have so many memorials about it.”

Police surveillance

Germany has been exerting pressure on pro-Palestinian voices for years. But the systematic and officially-sanctioned censure of Palestinians has increased since October 7, activists say.

The government’s anti-BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement) resolution in 2019, which linked boycott of Israel to anti-Semitism, was a step toward silencing Palestinian voices, says Diana Nazzal, a Palestinian-German activist based in Berlin.

The German officials thought the resolution was needed because they saw BDS as the ‘Don’t buy from Jews’ campaign that was launched by the Nazi Germans.

However, Caoimhe McAlister, an Irish activist living in Germany for 14 years, says, “This is obviously an attempt to equate Palestinian solidarity to National Socialism, which to many Irish people living here is honestly just baffling.”

Through this move, they stamped anybody that is involved in a peaceful boycott of Israel as an anti-Semite.

Any link to this kind of boycott-related activities started to be used as a pretext to cancel an event, rescind a job offer, or deny a residency permit.

And authorities can label you as a BDS supporter on small pretexts such as if you sign an open letter or just for ‘liking’ a social media post which supports BDS, she says.

Nazzal says as a German she feels frustrated for the restrictions being imposed on Palestinians’ freedom of speech.

The German government’s hostility towards any solidarity with Palestine was evident after the Israeli attack on Al Ahli Arab hospital on October 17th, says Nazzal.

A mourning vigil was organised outside the Brandenburg Gate where people lit candles.

German police officers literally walked over the candles, saying the gathering wasn’t allowed, says Nazzal.

“Even mourning for our deceased people was forbidden.”