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Palestinian protesters face police crackdowns on rallies in Germany
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/1/we-jews-are-just-arrested-palestinians-are-beaten-german-protesters
German-Israeli activist Iris Hefets was arrested for the first time in Berlin just a few weeks after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza last October – for holding a sign which read, “As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza”.
That time, the police told Hefets, a 56-year-old psychoanalyst who is a member of the anti-Zionist activist group Jewish Voice for Peace, it was down to a blanket ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
She was released shortly afterwards but says: “I didn’t think I would get detained for that – I was naive it turns out,” she says.
She was arrested a second time on November 10 for “inciting racial hatred” when she held the same sign – her charge was recently dropped. Her third arrest was for a sign warning that “Zionism kills”. Again, she was released soon after but, this time, her sign was confiscated.
She believes that, for the latter two arrests at least, the decision to detain her was made on the advice of a new special police task force that is targeting activists in pro-Palestine groups.
Free speech under attack in Germany
Palestinian protesters seem to be bearing the brunt of police crackdowns on protests in Germany – “We Jews are just getting arrested, the Palestinians are being beaten,” Hefets says. One example was the brutal arrest of a hijab-wearing protester at a sit-in in Berlin central station this past weekend, which was captured on video and posted to social media channels.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5G8_BzMw9C
But Hefets believes her group of Jewish activists is also being specifically targeted at demonstrations because of its Jewish identity.
Last week, Jewish Voice’s bank account was frozen ahead of mid-April’s Palastina Kongres (Palestine Congress) – for “regulatory reasons”, according to the state-owned Berliner Sparkasse bank. The group’s account has been frozen before, in 2019, because of its support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“They [Jewish protesters] get in the way of the narrative of Jews being protected by Germans against Muslims – but when you see Jews marching, then you see it’s not needed.”
Hefets’s case was one of the reasons that Germany’s ranking was dropped to “narrowed” in the Civicus Monitor, an annual ranking that measures civic freedoms to protest.
“Germany’s downgrade should be a wake-up call for the country and continent to change course,” said Tara Petrovic, Europe and Central Asia researcher at Civicus Monitor. But there have been many other incidents of heavy-handed policing – or, as critics charge, repression.
Earlier this month, Berlin police raided a 41-year-old woman’s apartment for writing “from the river to the sea” four times on social media. This was reported by police as “usage of anti-constitutional symbols”, the same law that bans displaying the swastika, the symbol of the Nazis.
A ‘very dangerous restriction on expression’
Germany’s capital city, Berlin, which is home to the largest Palestinian community (estimated at 300,000) in Europe, has been a particular flashpoint for clashes between demonstrators and police.
Prosecutors have registered 2,140 possible criminal cases and launched more than 380 investigations between October 7, 2023 and mid-February 2024.
Recent arrests amount to an “almost unprecedented” crackdown on freedom of speech since October 7, according to Berlin-based migration and criminal lawyer Alexander Gorski. He warned that laws which were originally designed to combat hate speech in Germany are now fast approaching a “very dangerous restriction of expression which could set a precedent which severely limits the freedom of expression in this country”.
An example of one of the protest signs which has caused protesters to be arrested in Germany. The activist said police told her that the sign’s combination of a Jewish flag in Palestinian colours could be understood as “a call to destroy Israel”.
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