Timo Al-Farooq
Source: Al Mayadeen English
The wider the state casts its pro-Zionist dragnet, extending its offender profile beyond Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims to include Jews, university students, teachers, and even uninvolved social services providers, the faster Germans are waking up to the authoritarian remodelling of their state and the realisation of who the real enemy is.
The two-time genocidaire’s seemingly incurable narcissism and delusions of grandeur have allowed for a post-October 7 crescendo of authoritarian overreach in the country that is unprecedented in its post-WW2, allegedly de-Nazified history.
As calls for an immediate end to "Israel’s" genocidal war on Gaza grow louder, anti-war protests intensify and avenues of voicing discontent diversify, a hopelessly tone-deaf German state still refuses to reexamine its pivotal role in the ongoing wholesale slaughter as the second biggest arms supplier to the apartheid regime, its most loyal character witness in international courts, and its most dedicated public relations executive.
At home, Germany has expanded censorship, escalated physical violence against peaceful protesters and engaged in retaliatory lawfare against those who dare to speak out on behalf of Palestinians.
The "Aryan supremacist" fragility of German authorities
The participants of last month’s Palestine Congress in Berlin have especially been on the receiving end of the state’s desperate and petty retribution, with German authorities slapping speakers with travel and work bans, and launching equally frivolous criminal proceedings against them.
There seems to be a pattern: the more candid one's criticism of Germany’s genocidal complicity and growing authoritarianism, the harsher the reaction of the powers that be. It is no coincidence that two of the panelists currently being investigated by police are the ones who delivered the most scathing indictments of Germany’s supporting role in "Israel’s" endless string of atrocity crimes committed against the civilian population of Gaza.
Addressing the throng of uniformed coppers occupying what was supposed to be a safe space for Palestinians and their allies, journalist Hebh Jamal, the first and only speaker at the conference before it was violently shut down by police, held up a long-overdue mirror to these low-ranking state representatives:
“Germany […] you’re an embarrassment to the world. The international community does not take this country seriously. The international community sees how complicit you are in genocide.”
It is hard to imagine that this affront to the "Aryan supremacist" fragility of the Islamophobic, anti-intellectual and white male-dominated German security state, especially when coming from the articulate mouth of a hijab-wearing woman of color, was not the main consideration behind the decision to persecute Jamal.
Officially, she is being investigated for conducting an interview with a member of the now-banned Palestinian advocacy group Samidoun, and for writing an article for The New Arab in which she refused to be subjected to what she calls the “viciously racist discourse” of asking Palestinians to condemn Hamas.
Dror Dayan, a Jewish filmmaker, activist, and academic, is another participant of the Palestine Congress who is currently being investigated by Berlin police, officially for uttering the liberatory slogan “From the River to the Sea” and criticizing the historical revisionism of Germanys “Nazi grandchildren.”
At the conference, Dayan did not hold back with his disdain for Germany’s hypocrisy and genocidal continuity:
“This is not a liberal, multicultural progressive state, this is a state that cracks down on solidarity against genocide,” he told members of the media at an emergency press conference a day after police attacked and banned the congress. “This is a state that uses its own bloody past of murdering six million of our people to justify racism colonialism and genocide,” he went on to say.
It must have made the German authorities seethe with rage at this thankless Jew’s audacity of so calmly attacking their beloved nation, one that (at least in the self-delusional opinion of Germans) has bent over backwards to atone for its past crimes. The aggrieved German security state is now charging him with using “symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations.”
Silencing an eyewitness to genocide and settling old scores
While these cases are grinding their way through Germany’s Kafkaesque prosecutorial bureaucracy, two major legal victories by those associated with the Palestine Congress have put a damper on the state’s meritless lawfare against Palestine solidarity in the country.
On May 6, a Berlin court ruled in favor of anti-Zionist group Jüdische Stimme, a co-organizer of the congress, in a case involving the closure of its bank account in the lead-up to the conference, ordering the state-owned Landesbank Berlin to reinstate the account and pay all legal costs.
A week later, and just over a month after British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah was detained upon arrival at Berlin airport on the first and only day of the Palestine Congress and then deported, his Schengen-wide travel ban was overturned after a successful legal challenge.
Abu-Sittah, who is also the rector of the University of Glasgow, had spent 43 days working in Gaza following "Israel’s" genocidal assault and had been invited to the German capital to give eyewitness testimony on the Zionist regime’s deliberate destruction of the enclave’s healthcare system.
Another planned speaker at the Palestine Congress whom German authorities have slapped with a travel ban and even prohibited from engaging in any political activity is Yanis Varoufakis, the founder of the pan-European DIEM25 movement. Its political party, MERA25, is currently shaking up the electoral landscape in Germany in the run-up to the European elections as the only anti-Zionist party with majority appeal.
It seems the German ruling class has never forgiven him for his vociferous opposition to the anti-Greek austerity measures propagated by Germany during the eurozone crisis when he was briefly finance minister in the SYRIZA government. Varoufakis’s planned appearance at the Palestine Congress provided an excellent opportunity for the German state to settle old scores.
But the culturally provincial and intellectually illiterate German authorities are no match for the worldly and widely popular politician and economist who is now suing Germany for “violation of his basic rights and defamation.”
Free PR for the Free Palestine movement
While the recent legal victories constitute official records of pro-Palestinian vindication, outpourings of solidarity are another metric by which to gauge the success of a cause. A further indicator that Germany’s blanket repression against Palestine solidarity in general and participants of the Palestine Congress in particular is backfiring, is the wave of sympathy and support for Shokoofeh Montazeri, a Berlin-based anticolonial Marxist and an intersectional feminist.
In what has been described as an act of “collective punishment” and a new level of escalation in Germany’s war on Palestinians and their allies, two youth centers for girls in Berlin's district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg were shut down by the Green party-led local council just a week after the congress.
The reason: Montazeri, who is a managing director of the organization which runs the centers, had posted pro-Palestine content on her private social media account and been listed as a speaker at the conference. Not content with torpedoing her invaluable work, the district government is also suing Montazeri for hate speech and incitement under section 130 of Germany’s Criminal Code, a controversial law that has a history of being weaponized against critics of "Israel".
Germany’s unhinged crackdown against Palestine solidarity is having the opposite effect of its desired intention to quell opposition to Israel’s genocide, alienating more and more citizens and providing free PR for the Free Palestine movement and its frontline protagonists.
The wider the state casts its pro-Zionist dragnet, extending its offender profile beyond Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims to include Jews, university students, teachers, and even uninvolved social services providers, the faster Germans are waking up to the authoritarian remodeling of their state and the realization of who the real enemy is.
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