German-Israeli activist Iris Hefets was arrested for the primary time in Berlin just some weeks after the beginning of Israel’s battle on Gaza final October – for holding an indication which learn, “As a Jew and Israeli, cease the genocide in Gaza”.
That point, the police advised Hefets, a 56-year-old psychoanalyst who’s a member of the anti-Zionist activist group Jewish Voice for Peace, it was right down to a blanket ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
She was launched shortly afterwards however says: “I didn’t suppose I’d get detained for that – I used to be naive it seems.”
She was arrested a second time on November 10 for “inciting racial hatred” when she held the identical signal – her cost was just lately dropped. Her third arrest was for an indication warning that “Zionism kills”. Once more, she was launched quickly after however, this time, her signal was confiscated.
Hefets has lodged a grievance with the police to get her signal again, and intends to place it in a future “museum of Palestinian liberation”, she says.
She believes that, for the latter two arrests a minimum of, the choice to detain her was made on the recommendation of a brand new particular police activity drive which “is the contact level out there for all police forces in reference to the Center East battle”, a Berlin police spokesman confirmed to Al Jazeera. The duty drive was arrange on October 30 final yr – shortly after Israel’s battle on Gaza started.
This “Besondere Aufbauorganisation” (BAO) activity drive, which is a part of the Landeskriminalamt (LKA) – the police intelligence centre – retains a watch on “left-wing and international ideologies”, together with communist teams and pro-Palestine teams, the police spokesman confirmed. It points steering and directions to police forces about what phrases and phrases utilized by activists could also be deemed unlawful. For instance, the Berlin police spokesman advised Al Jazeera that, in Berlin, utilizing the phrase “from the river to the ocean” is at the moment thought-about a criminal offense.
“The felony classification of .. slogans is carried out in shut session with the Berlin public prosecutor’s workplace,” the Berlin police spokesman mentioned.
Free speech beneath assault in Germany
Palestinian protesters appear to be bearing the brunt of police crackdowns on protests in Germany – “We Jews are simply getting arrested, the Palestinians are being overwhelmed,” Hefets says. One instance was the brutal arrest of a hijab-wearing protester at a sit-in in Berlin central station this previous weekend, which was captured on video and posted to social media channels.
However Hefets believes her group of Jewish activists can also be being particularly focused at demonstrations due to its Jewish identification.
Final week, Jewish Voice’s checking account was frozen forward of mid-April’s Palastina Kongres (Palestine Congress) – for “regulatory causes”, in accordance with the state-owned Berliner Sparkasse financial institution. The group’s account has been frozen earlier than, in 2019, due to its help for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) motion.
“They [Jewish protesters] get in the best way of the narrative of Jews being protected by Germans towards Muslims – however whenever you see Jews marching, then you definately see it’s not wanted,” says Hefets.
Her case was one of many causes that Germany’s rating was dropped to “narrowed” within the Civicus Monitor, an annual rating that measures civic freedoms to protest.
“Germany’s downgrade must be a wake-up name for the nation and continent to alter course,” mentioned Tara Petrovic, Europe and Central Asia researcher at Civicus Monitor. However there have been many different incidents of heavy-handed policing – or, as critics cost, repression.
Earlier this month, Berlin police raided a 41-year-old lady’s house for writing “from the river to the ocean” 4 instances on social media. This was reported by police as “utilization of anti-constitutional symbols”, the identical legislation that bans displaying the swastika, the image of the Nazis.
However this was only one notably stark instance of Germany’s strict policing – or, critics cost, repression – of pro-Palestinian speech.
The legality of the phrase, “from the river to the ocean”, has been interpreted in a different way throughout Germany’s federal states. A courtroom within the central state of Hesse dominated in late March that an occasion named “From the River to the Sea, Palestine shall be Free for Everybody” might go forward, on the idea that the phrase might have many alternative meanings.
Nevertheless, in mid-November, the phrase was banned by the Federal Ministry of the Inside, which thought-about it a name to destroy Israel and mentioned it must be considered a slogan of Hamas, which has been formally labelled a terrorist organisation in Germany.
In November, the phrase was banned in Bavaria the place public prosecutors mentioned they thought-about the phrase to be supportive of Hamas and must be topic to the identical legislation that bans exhibiting the Nazi swastika.
A ‘very harmful restriction on expression’
Germany’s capital metropolis, Berlin, which is house to the biggest Palestinian group (estimated at 300,000) in Europe, has been a selected flashpoint for clashes between demonstrators and police.
Prosecutors have registered 2,140 potential felony circumstances and launched greater than 380 investigations between October 7, 2023 and mid-February 2024.
Current arrests quantity to an “nearly unprecedented” crackdown on freedom of speech since October 7, in accordance with Berlin-based migration and felony lawyer Alexander Gorski. He warned that legal guidelines which had been initially designed to fight hate speech in Germany are actually quick approaching a “very harmful restriction of expression which might set a precedent which severely limits the liberty of expression on this nation”.
In a single case in December, seven residential and enterprise properties had been raided by 170 cops an announcement was posted on Instagram by feminist collective Zora expressing help for “all revolutionary Palestinian freedom fighters” together with the PFLP (the Fashionable Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine), which has been categorised as a terrorist group by the EU since 2002 – as a “progressive drive”. Investigations are ongoing.
“Germany rightfully determined that there must be restrictions on political speech after the second world battle, however a few of the legal guidelines which ought to shield democracy are narrowing down the political discourse round Palestine and Israel,” Gorski mentioned.
Since October 7, this has led to “absurd” conditions comparable to “Jewish activists being detained for alleging Israel is committing a genocide”, he added.
One other German-Israeli member of Jewish Voice for Peace within the Center East, a feminine software program developer in her mid-50s who spoke to Al Jazeera on situation of anonymity, was detained by 5 cops for holding up an indication “One other Jew for a Free Palestine” after coming to Berlin for quite a few protests in February.
The activist mentioned police advised her that the signal’s mixture of a Jewish flag in Palestinian colors could possibly be understood as “a name to destroy Israel”.
“After they first surrounded me – this nonetheless haunts me at night time,” the activist mentioned, including that the expertise had made her query her determination to maneuver right here. “The police wish to body all of it as hate speech, however what we’re saying is freedom.”
Chatham Home fellow and Germanist Hans Kundani described the nation’s “Zionist McCarthyism” for its zeal in cancelling or prosecuting those that criticise Israel or its response to October 7 in an essay titled Zionism uber alles (“Zionism above all”).
Regardless of lukewarm public help for the battle on Gaza – 69 % of German residents responding to a ballot by broadcaster ZDF mentioned Israel’s navy actions in Gaza had been unjustified in late March – lawmakers have continued to help it unwaveringly. “What has emerged within the final decade will not be a lot a post-Zionist Germany as a hyper-Zionist Germany,” Kundani wrote.
Regardless of demographic change, he added, “German elites have doubled down on their dedication to Israel” partly as a result of “they concern their understanding of the teachings of the Nazi previous is now not extensively shared, they usually wish to make it non-negotiable earlier than it’s too late.”
‘Somebody grabbed my face from behind – it was the police’
Palestinian activist Ola Alzayat attended a protest in February and explains that, being pregnant, she took particular care to remain out of bother.
Abruptly, “any individual grabbed my face from behind. I didn’t know what was occurring”, she says.
It was the police. In a video of the incident which has been seen by Al Jazeera, a visibly pregnant Alzayat could be seen being dragged away by the neck, along with her keffiyeh pulled from her neck to her face. She is screaming: “I’m pregnant, please, please!”
Alzayat says that officers slapped her face when she tried to maneuver, leaving her with bruising. They initially accused her of making an attempt to “stop an arrest”, later including one other accusation of hitting cops with a flag, though she claims to not have even had a flag along with her.
She says she was carried by 5 officers and put right into a police automobile, from which she noticed her husband being arrested as nicely. Although the cost of stopping an arrest was dropped, she says investigations proceed over the allegations that she assaulted a police officer.
Artist and activist Stella Meris has been arrested 3 times since October 7. At an anticolonial demonstration that she took half in, she mentioned the police declared that Palestine had “nothing to do with colonialism” and so Palestinian flags had been banned.
“They arrested me and tried to sort out me to the ground only for carrying a Palestinian flag,” she says. “They mentioned it was the identical because the swastika, an unlawful image I might by no means present in a public area.”
At one other demonstration, Meris was holding an indication which learn “from the river to the ocean, we demand equality”. After leaving, she went to a close-by metro station, the place she says about 15 cops had been on the lookout for her. She was arrested on costs of inciting racial hatred. “At the moment I didn’t know that the slogan was within the technique of being criminalised,” she says.
