Germany's Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity

What happened in Hesse is part of the systematic suppression of free speech and freedom of expression in Germany, shielding the German state and it's ally, Israel, from accountability and justice for their genocide of the Palestinian people. Germany has a habit of shielding it's allies from genocide, as they did the same with the Ottoman Empire when they committed the Armenian genocide.

An administrative body, not a court, decided an entire organisation's political activity crossed an undefined line, with police executing dawn raids as the German state disagreed with the group's message. This is political repression by policing, and is a very dangerous step, a slippery slope, that Germany has already slipped right down. The burden of proof was inverted: the association had to prove it wasn't violative, while the state needed only to assert it was. Guilty until proven innocent.

Germany has created a legal framework where criticising Israeli government policy is increasingly classified as antisemitic. Their definition of antisemitism includes examples conflating anti-zionism with jew-hatred, which is contradictory, as this is itself, antisemitic by the dictionary definition. This allows the German state to brand any criticism of Israel's illegal actions as defined by international laws Germany has signed, any expression of Palestinian national aspirations, or any call for boycott as non-permissible and illegal. The effect is to foreclose debate on one of the most urgent human rights crises of our time.

Germany is trying to use moral authority earned from it's failed attempts to confront its Nazi past to shut down solidarity with Palestinians today. Don't forget, the denazification programme was actually largely wound down early, cancelled in the early 1950s due to America's Cold War priorities, with many former Nazis reintegrated into German society, government and international institutions like NATO.

The state wraps itself in the language of "never again" while supporting and enabling policies that international legal experts describe as Apartheid, illegal occupation and war crimes, like collective punishment and genocide. Germany criminalises Palestinian flags, watermelon stickers and chants at protests, while arming the IOF who are dropping German bombs on refugee camps, rapes and murders hostages, while starving people to death.

Germany is exploiting antisemitism, which it was the main perpetrator of in the 20th century, to immunise a foreign state from accountability in a genocide Germany is profiting from through arms and weapons sales, while silencing those who speak for its victims. It perverts the memory of the Shoah into a shield for contemporary injustice, because when jewish voices critical of Israel are dismissed as "self-hating," when Palestinian Christians and Muslims see their suffering rendered invisible as it doesn't fit a convenient narrative, Germany is pretending it's protecting jewish lives, which rings so hollow, the echoes are deafening.

The very term antisemitism is itself a European lie, a pseudoscience manufactured by Germany. The term Semite originates in linguistics, not biology, describing a language family (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic), not a race or people. The racialised Semite is a 19th-century European invention, born from orientalist eugenicist pseudoscience, not from any actual Semitic-speaking community's self-understanding.

The term antisemitism, coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German white supremacist, who rebranded old religious hatred as modern, scientific racial dogma to make it sound more legitimate, and never included Arabs or other Semitic-language speakers. This false racial framing was adopted by zionists, who weaponised the false belief that jews constituted a distinct race or nation, using it to argue for separation and statehood: zionists co-opted supremacist German pseudoscience for their benefit.

Invoking Semite as a people-group perpetuates colonial, racialised pseudoscience, because antisemitism is a historical nonsense term, falsely used by zionists to further their racist ideals and jewish supremacy. It's a European lie, just like Israel having a right to exist is. Antisemitism was invented, jews aren't a race, Judaism is a religion. Are all Christians one race, are all people who are Christian in Uganda, Britain, Nepal and Vietnam all one race? No, obviously not.

The raids on Palästina e.V. aren't about this group, but a message to every activist, student and journalist who questions Germany's full-throttled support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians: you are next if your speak out. Remember Martin Niemöller's poem, First They Came. It is happening again. The 35 officers, the dawn raids, the media spectacle are all designed to intimidate. Already university campuses self-censor, cultural events are cancelled and people are losing jobs. The space for solidarity with Palestine shrinks by the day in Germany, and the German state is doing it with the same repression as they did in the 1930s.

This is how oppression works in "liberal democracies", not with gulags or show trials, but with administrative bans, vague legal categories and the slow suffocation of dissent. It's no less real for being legal: Apartheid in South Africa was legal, as was the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. The German state is proving once again, that they're the banality of evil. Never again meant nothing to the German state.

Ironically, the state's actions are themselves antisemitic, not in targeting jews, but in reducing jewish identity to unconditional support for Israel, in presuming jews can't tolerate criticism, in treating Diaspora as a political instrument for a foreign state.

True commitment to jewish safety wouldn't require silencing Palestinians, but require opposing injustice wherever it occurs, including when committed in Israel's name, which zionists long claim is being done in the name of all jews and Judaism. Zionists are themselves antisemitic.

Germany's crackdown is state repression, using the language of responsibility, executed by police and aimed at those who refuse to look away from Palestinian suffering. That's called oppression, and it's a betrayal of the very lessons the Holocaust should have taught German society.

The German state is absolutely no moral authority, ethical powerhouse or arbitor of truth, justice or accountability. These are the most recent German state genocides, some of which they have admitted, and others thay have not, totalling more than 18 million innocent human beings the German state has wilfully murdered just because they were who they were.

Location: Namibia

Estimated Deaths: at least 100,000 Nama and Herero, 80% of the population

Germany finally admitted it in 2021

Location: Turkiye

Estimated Deaths: at least 1.5 million Armenians

Location: German-occupied Europe

Estimated Deaths: at least 14 million people - approximately 6 million jews, 3 million non-jewish Poles, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 20,000 homosexual people, 200,000 Jehovah's witnesses, Freemasons, Communists, Socialists, Trade Unionists, political dissidents and others

Location: German-occupied Europe

Estimated Deaths: approximately 500,000 Roma and Sinti people

Location: Occupied Soviet territories

Estimated Deaths: approximately 1.4 million Byelorussians, 1.6 million Russians and 3 million Ukrainians

Germany has still not formally admitted this genocide