Less than 10 years ago, Germany, and especially Berlin, was held up as a beacon of openness and inclusivity in a western world rocked by Brexit and Donald Trump. Angela Merkel’s decision to take in thousands of refugees displaced by the war in Syria boosted her country’s reputation in progressive circles, with many international artists and academics choosing to make the German capital their new home.
Yet the conflict in the Middle East is showing Germany in a new light, highlighting fissures in society and the arts world that until now had been easier to ignore.
As someone living in Germany, the level of state repression I’ve seen towards artists and activists who speak against Israel’s war on Gaza is terrifying. I never thought I’d see such a level of repression in Germany. Artists’ funds are getting slashed left and right. The government is pushing venues to cancel appointments with artists that criticize Israel (including jewish artists/activists). Cultural venues have been closed down by the government for hosting some of these activists (Oyoun Berlin was closed down after renting a space for an evening to the local charter of Jewish Voice for Peace). Activists have been arrested/fined for chants like “From the river to the sea we demand equality” or “Jews against genocide”. There have been countless non-violent activists raided by armed police in the early hours of the morning for their pro Palestine activism. Berlin police has enacted checkpoints in immigrant neighbourhoods. Journalists getting fired for asking the wrong questions. The state of Berlin is now trying to pass a law to allow universities to exmatriculate students on “behavioural” grounds (aka political stances). Politicians actively singling out activists on social media and redirecting insane amounts of hate their way. This place is getting very, very scary.
Activists have been arrested/fined for chants like “From the river to the sea we demand equality” or “Jews against genocide”.
I don’t doubt that they don’t know any nuance in anything that contains “From the river to the sea" but who was arrested for “Jews against genocide” and on what grounds?
Do you have a source for that?
For repression in Berlin in general:
https://jewishcurrents.org/an-anti-palestinian-crackdown-across-europe
Open letter of Jewish people condemning the supression by the German government, German and English Version:
https://taz.de/Offener-Brief-juedischer-Intellektueller/!5965154/
https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/freedom-for-the-one-who-thinks-differently/
Recent arrest of jewish activists for peace, German and English version:
https://www.theleftberlin.com/police-brutality-at-palestine-solidarity-sit-in/
Sorry, but I couldn’t find a single reference to “Jews against genocide” in any of these.
Also, open letters and opinion peaces by activists are by definition not neutral sources.
I’m not saying that police are necessarily acting correctly, but do you have any evidence that someone was arrested for “Jews against genocide”?
Blogs, letters, and articles about letters are very weak sources. They’re on the level of opinions. Do you have anything better?
You really should recheck your sources. F.e. this case here
The state of Berlin is now trying to pass a law to allow universities to exmatriculate students on “behavioural” grounds (aka political stances).
is not “behavioural grounds”, but because some students beat up a jewish student for political reasons and the university wasn’t allowed to expell them due to legal reasons.
If they beat up someone, they should be charged with the crime they did. Why do new crimes need to be invented?
Maybe more than a new crime it should be an aggravating circumstance. Beating someone for some petty reason and beating someone for political/religoius reasons are different in gravity.
Yeah, it will definitely not get used against activists. Beating people up is illegal. The persons involved in such things should be handled by the authorities. With that being said, trading your rights for “”“security”“” has always proven to be a stupid idea. Giving universities this power, especially given their track record of shooting down any kind of political dissent, will only end up in power hungry individuals abusing it.
The victim in that assault case has been shoving and grabbing students at the university before. That is of course much less severe than how he was beaten up, but in that discussion about throwing out students for violent behaviour that was conveniently ignored.
The whole discussion only started when he was attacked and it was about denying education to pro Palestinian and in particular Arab and other migrant sudents. It was headed among others by the racist major of Berlin (major in this case is also the head of the state government) who just a year ago won an election on the grounds of demanding police to release the names of suspect teenagers. This demand was made so the public could decide based on the names, if those suspects were “real Germans” instead of maybe “foreigners with a German passport”. This is far-right nationalist ideology and primitive racism.
So it is clear what goals are aimed at with the demand to throw students out of universities if they are suspect of a crime. If it would be put in place it would be used to remove “foreigners” from universities, not to remove “good kids who have made a mistake”.
What I want to say: Those cases are complex, have a lot of nuance and it is totally not ok that @febra@lemmy.world is going around and doing propaganda totally distorting the complexity of those cases.
some students beat up a jewish student for political reasons and the university wasn’t allowed to expell them due to legal reasons
You mean they can’t expel students for bigotry-related violence? I call bullshit.
They can’t expel people for things they do off campus. That is true. However it also shouldn’t be the case, as we had our wave of “red scare” persecutions of people in the 70s, destroying peoples lives based on often farbicated charges against people who were considered “too left”.
Denying people access to education based on criminal charges is a slippery slope and in the current environment it is likely, that these will solely be used for political persecution.
Also it should be noted that the claim, that the attack was bigotry related is made by the victim and his supporters, with the victim having a history of violently engaging pro palestinian protestors on campus, ripping off posters that remembered killed palestinian women and children and repeatedly demanded all pro palestinian voices to be banned from campus.
The police didnt classify it as a hate crime so far and the claims of it being a hate crime are made on the allegation that jewishness and pro-israel and pro-zionism stances are identical. (Which is in itself antisemtic and used to repress jewish people in Germany who are critical of zionism)
You might call bullshit, it is bullshit, but sadly it is a fact. See this german article here: https://www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2024/02/berlin-hochschulgesetz-universitaet-gewalttaeter-sanktionen.html
I would say that’s because that society has found some degree of ideological security, an indulgence paper even, in supporting some dogmatic formalized single face of the Jewish people. Since that imagined document sort of shields them from necessity to look honestly at crimes much worse, I’d say quite a lot of things may happen to people who try to dismantle it, especially if they are Jewish. It’s much more inconvenient to be accused of supporting fascism from that direction, after all.
Crime against jewish people is on the rise in Germany, as are neonazis. Hate crimes against jews were also rising before the Gaza war, by the way.
If Germany didn’t try to protect jewish people it would mean they learnt nothing from the past.
The chancellor has said the safety and security of Israel is Germany’s raison d’êtat.
Before I get downvoted to hell by Gaza sympathisers, let me add that Israel is currently committing massive war crimes against the Palestinian people and those responsible must be tried and punished in an international court of law.
All of these things can be true at the same time:
a) Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity
b) Hamas has committed crimes against humanity
c) Israel has a right to existence and to security
d) Palestine has a right to existence and to security
I don’t get how some people feel they have to pick only two out of these four.
They’re not protecting ‘Jewish people’. They’re protecting Israel. There’s a massive difference.
They’re protecting Israel by persecuting hate crimes committed inside of Germany?
They’re not persecuting hate crines. That’s the entire point of the article. They’re withdrawing funding and bringing legal charges against people who accurately describe the situation in Gaza as a genocide committed by a racist settler colonial state.
Most of Israel’s population are either fleeing persecution in other middle Eastern countries or descended from people who fled persecution in the middle east. Both Christians and Muslims have the luxury of having entire continents where they are the majority of the population. Whenever Muslims get persecuted Iran and Saudi Arabia and the majority of the middle east/ north Africa/ se Asia will stand behind them. With Christians Europe and the Americas. The only country where Jews are in the majority is Israel. It’s the only place in the world where the Jewish people are guaranteed protection by a government. So yeah actually protecting Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.
With Christians Europe and the Americas.
Oh yeah, tell that to Assyrians from Nineveh plain. Or even NK Armenians.
It’s the only place in the world where the Jewish people are guaranteed protection by a government. So yeah actually protecting Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same.
Sober up a bit, this piece of text doesn’t make any sense.
For centuries, the Jews in the Middle East had lived in peace with their Muslim, Christian, Druze or Yazidi neighbors.
Many of them had sought refuge in that region many generations earlier at the invitation of Turkish and Arab rulers after being brutally expelled from the Iberian peninsula by Christians.
But strangely, as soon as a small minority of European Jews with typical European arrogance, ignorance and zero respect for the local culture began to present themselves as the only legitimate representatives of worldwide Jewry and to expel (almost) all Arabs (except the Jewish ones) from Palestine with brutal violence, tensions arose between the resident Jews and the non-Jewish majority society in the neighboring Arab states.
Who could have guessed something like this? BOO! Ugh! Evil, barbaric, backward, anti-Semitic Arabs!
But simultaneously it was a big relief for the Zionist government of early Israel. Even if it was only backward Arab Jews who came, second-choice Jews so to speak, they were urgently needed to get the new state up and running without Palestinians.
There simply weren’t enough European Jews left to replace the attainted and expelled native Arabs. But remembering their own expulsion plus the corresponding brainwashing and birth rate, the Arab Jews actually became the spearhead of aggressive Zionism.
There are many peoples on earth who don’t have their own state. Regardless of religion, however, no one would come up with the idea of supporting one of these peoples in its attempt to choose a country, expel the native people and establish its own state on their land.
The idea per se is only not totally ridiculous for those being stuck in the racist European ideology of the 18th or 19th century.
Apart from that, people have always persecuted, fought and massacred each other, completely independent of religion.
Zionists began immigrating to Palestine over 100 years ago. They did NOT do ANYTHING of what we rightly expect of immigrants today. That is to say, they did not adapt to the culture of the locals or at least learn the local language any more than other European immigrants to other countries in the world have ever done. The Europeans in general still do not do it up to this day, to be honest, we only demand it of those who want to immigrate to our countries.
Since 1967, Israel, as an occupying power, has been the government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in practice and under international law. This means that all the duties that a government has, you know, increasing the benefits and preventing harm, etc., are the duties of the State of Israel towards the people of the occupied territories.
In the 67 years since the Six-Day War, has Israel done anything to fulfill these duties? What did Israel do during this time to avert harm to the population of the occupied territories and, for example, to improve the prosperity, security, freedom, health care and educational opportunities of the people living there?
In fact, it was the changed awareness and the changed policy in those states where Jews had been particularly intensely persecuted that significantly improved the security of Jews worldwide after the Second World War. And it was (and is) the racist expansionist policy of the Zionists and the State of Israel that reduces this increase in security, both in the State of Israel and for Jews worldwide.
It’s the only place in the world where the Jewish people are guaranteed protection by a government.
They failed massively on this part on last September. Not only did they ignore several countries warning then but they actively moved soldiers from protecting the border to Gaza to the Westbank to help in their illegal settler campaign. And even after being engaged in massive battles in Gaza they KEEP fucking things up in the Westbank, ensuring that the people there will continue to hate Israel. And that’s by no means a new development but they have been doing so for decades.
So yeah, they are doing a really shitty job at protecting their people.
there is not a massive difference. jewish and israeli identity are intertwined. Many jewish people sought refuge in israel because they had nowhere else to go. European jews after WW2 or arab jews in the late 40s/50s who were expelled out of muslim countries, for example. And again, defending israel’s right to exist is not the same as defending the israeli government or the war crimes the idf commits.
Jewish and Israeli identity are intertwined
No, they are not. But that is exactly what Israeli propaganda is trying to make you believe.
And because German politicians and media are cowards, they simply repeat Israeli propaganda when it comes to issues concerning the Jewish people or Israeli issues.
For this reason, the following Jews and Jewish organizations have probably never been invited to a German talk show or as experts on Jewish or Israeli issues:
Gideon Levy, Breaking the Silence, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Max Blumenthal, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Simone Zimmerman, Jewish Currents, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JJP), IfNotNow, Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Never Again Action, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV)
Watch them, read them.
I am convinced that this bias in German media is one of the main reasons for the increasing anti-Semitism in Germany.
When the only Jews you are shown are ardent supporters of an oppressive apartheid state that commits genocide and/or ethnic cleansing, and when that state presents itself as the core of Jewish identity, it is just too easy to conflate Jewish and Zionist and Israeli identities.
c) Israel has a right to existence and to security
This has no right to be true. First, a state does not have an intrinsic right to exist. A state is a social tool, crafted to help humans survive and thrive, in coexistence as how it came to be. If tools turn out to be primarily used for war and suffering, they are no longer tools for the betterment of humanity. You can argue Israel stealing more land is a betterment for their people, but the animosity caused during the process is eventually reflecting on the people benefiting from the betterment, both as outside perception and as shifting the thinking of the Israeli people about what is better for humanity, and it is not a good way to go forward.
The State of Israel is a malfunctioning machine that is spewing out more poison than it is manufacturing goodness. Malfunctioning machines need to be repaired, and if they can’t be, disabled and discarded/recycled, not kept active and doing harm saying they have a right to exist.
If we reject the UN and international law, as you appear to be doing by denying Israel’s right to exist as defined in the two state solution, we basically go back to the right of the strongest. Putin would agree with you.
A couple presumptions you make are the very causation for today’s problems:
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UN, which deep-seated inequality and over-representation ingrained to it right from its very beginning as giving substantial privileges to 5 WWII winner imperialist powers as permanent members with unconditional veto power, even on resolutions that question their validity, which they have been abusing for as long as the UN existed , as infallible authority.
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The international law, which is used by the aforementioned powers to keep the status quo after they drew the borders and partitioned the world according to their greed, and still circumvent to further their agendas without facing repercussions, as infallible, just and fair compromise and authority.
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Two-State solution with current borders implied. The original and rejected two-state solution that was forced upon Palestinian territories as peaceful division, that also meant to leave the Arabs with bleak desert and give all the shores and fertile lands to Jewish people, which also gave way to acceptance of way fairer division of land with populations and prosperity in consideration, ended in Zionist terrorists causing a contemporary (mainly cultural) genocide. Later attempt at two-state solution was prefaced with Zionist terrorists giving back the occupied land and agreeing to the fairer share of the land, which didn’t happen. The idea behind recognizing both Palestine and Israel as states never came to fruition, mainly due to Israel wanting unfair share that would result in a de facto infeasible Palestinian statehood. Israel statehood’s only fair foundation is bloodied by their own hands by forcing their statehood with stolen land, off-driven Arabic people, and cultural genocide. Hard to accept such poisonous machines as a useful tool.
One more thing: The strongest already ousted the previous strongest, demonized them and made them the only focus, all the while making the current rules to ensure their own prosperity. They are also making sure these rules continue to be obeyed by the less powerful by enforcing them with waepons of war and purpose-built indirect weapons like exploitative economic implementations.
Lastly, Putin has a lot of people like you that think harmful tools be kept harming people for the sake of keeping the tool/machine on. Putin also has his own circumventions of a just and fair, reason and rules based world order, and subsequently suck dick together with all the democratically-elected de facto western hegemons and the ancestral eastern tyrants.
The State of Palestine hasn’t been doing more harm than good, at least in a way that it isn’t repaired or kept in check, like continuous genocide and land-grab, is it? You can argue it is run by terrorists and thus it is a malevolent tool, but nevertheless its harm is contained via use of other tools like anti-missile systems and proper border defense. I don’t see anyone equipping Palestine with such defensive weapons, which they can use to defend lives and land against Israel while not having to resort to guerilla tactics that necessarily involve offensive strategies for defense.
I’m assuming your first thought at the next response would be the pedantic “But Israel produces its own defensive Iron Dome and nobody gives it to them. So should the decades-long oppressed and deliberately-impoverished Palestine do while under the most heavy bombardment since WWII !. That shows the difference between how civilized world and 3rd world savages deal with threats.”.
They don’t, but you are making it seem as if Israel’s right to exist and security is not endangered much less than that of Gazans, and as if Hamas’ crimes are in any way comparable.
That is, your are lying without actually saying a direct lie, which is a valid combination, really not unusual for Germans I might add.
You are putting words into my mouth in order to be able to disagree. Also, I’m not German. You might want try to keep the racist stereotyping in check.
Free speech should not include inciting violence or hatred. Germany is well aware of the negative impacts that unchecked incitement leads too. It’s interesting to see how they’re walking this line in the face of the competing political forces in the country but it’s good to see people standing up against hate in general.
Yup. Free speech should be free. Ai monitoring known terrorists is how one remains a free society. Looks like the US needs to invest in the technology and deploy it on campuses ATM.
I wonder if they would do that against zionist terrorists attacking protestors rn. Even the police isn’t responding so it’s highly unlikely US will implement this.
Alright. Time to make AI art without boundaries then. /S
