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“There needs to be hope”

Interview with singer-songwriter David Rovics


05/05/2026

Hi there David. Thanks for talking to us. Could you briefly introduce yourself ?

I’m David Rovics. I’m a singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon. I’m basically fanning the flames of discontent with music in the tradition of the Wobblies, Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and a lot of other people over the ages from around the world who sing songs about what’s happening in an effort to educate and change things, to inspire people to do something about it.

I hate to do this, but could I ask you about Wim Wenders? At this year’s Berlinale, Wenders made a very confused speech in which he—inasmuch as it made sense at all—argued that Art is on a different sphere to politics. Which means that you shouldn’t be singing about politics. You should be singing about “important things”.

Yeah, it was such a bizarre thing. People often talk about how Art should be political, and I disagree with them, too, because I think Art can be anything. It’s just a tool like so many other things. It can be used for political purposes or escapist purposes. It can be right wing or left wing. It can be so many things.

It can encourage people to fight, or to empathize with each other and not fight. It’s a very powerful thing, but for Wenders to say that it’s not political or shouldn’t be political is just completely ridiculous. It has nothing to do with historical reality.

I don’t know who his funders are. I understand why, in Germany, he wants to just completely avoid the whole question of Palestine and Israel. I understand why he’d be annoyed with people who are trying to highlight that issue, because it’s so incredibly divisive, and he wants to host a film festival, not a big argument.

But still, this is the world we’re living in, where Israel is committing genocide and of course, film makers are going to respond to that, and they have done absolutely brilliantly. I would think that somebody like him would be commending the incredible film makers who have been risking their lives to cover what’s happening in Gaza, like the ones who just put out this film Palestine 36, which is brilliant.

You’re on tour in Europe at the moment. How’s that going so far?

Great. This is our third of three gigs in Germany, and we still have a month more of gigs around Scandinavia and England, Scotland, and it’s been just wonderful. All three gigs have been just fabulous.

You’ve always been explicit about your views on Palestine. Have you noticed any change in Germany this time around?

I haven’t, but I haven’t been here long enough to really say. I’ve been hearing so much about the scene in Germany. I hear a lot about protests that are happening here where the police are being violent. And, of course, I assume that there are protests happening where the police are not being violent, but I’m just seeing the ones where they are.

You see a lot of stuff on Instagram, every time somebody gets harassed for wearing a keffiyeh. You could develop the impression that this is happening all the time in Germany. We have been wearing keffiyehs all over the place, and we’ve gotten some maybe unhappy looks from some people, but we certainly haven’t been harassed by anyone.

Germany is always a complicated place when it comes to Palestine. It’s not new for it to be complicated. The first march I ever went on in Germany in support of the Palestinian struggle, there was one white German woman who was my girlfriend at the time, and it was me and one friend of hers. Otherwise, everybody in the crowd was Arab.

You are US-American. Let’s look at the States. Is Trump a qualitative shift in what’s happening there?

For anybody who’s alive in the US today, most people would say that it feels like a qualitative shift, because he just really seems to be just doing whatever he wants. He doesn’t seem to have a plan. There are other people who have all kinds of plans and want to influence him, but he himself seems to be just winging it.

That’s maybe new. He’s qualitatively different in that sense. But otherwise, in terms of the US pursuing Empire and invading countries all over the world for resources and on false pretences—that’s nothing new. It’s just that he’s so uniquely unable to even maintain a false pretence for more than five minutes.

He changes his tactics every half hour. So, it is new and scary for people in a way that most people haven’t felt that kind of fear of possible nuclear holocaust, because we haven’t had somebody who is so completely irrational.

George W Bush was pretty darn irrational, and all his advisors were making stuff up in order to go to war. So that’s really not much different, except that then it was a group of people working together to pull the wool over our eyes in a methodical way over the course of years in order to carry out their agenda. Whereas there doesn’t seem to be any real thought going on here.

I was thinking the other day that we haven’t had a US president who is so irrational. And then I thought: but we had George W Bush, and Reagan before him. We seem to be having the same discussion about uniquely mad US presidents once a generation.

Look at Reagan and George W. They all just seem so tame in comparison. Andrew Jackson maybe. With Reagan we thought that too. And Reagan was reasonable and equinimical. Maybe I made that word up.

What can our side do against the very real threat of Trump?

In the context of the US, it seems to me that the capability of the Left to organize is so degraded at this point, because of real, long-term systematic efforts on the part of the secret police to disorient the Left. They’ve been doing that for over 100 years. It’s been the main purpose of the FBI.

I think, in the wake of 9/11 and then with the rise of social media and everything that’s happened with the power of these algorithms to brainwash people, they’ve really succeeded in creating a situation where people don’t know how to organize without alienating everybody. The form of organizing that takes place is the kind that you organize a demo that nobody wants to ever go to a demo again. That’s not what we need.

The first thing we need is to remember how to organize again, and remember how to build a movement based on solidarity and bringing people together to fight for a common cause. We must understand the power of culture in that process, and use music and art to bring people together, which is something that has been systematically forgotten by the US Left in a way that has not been forgotten in most of the world.

There’s really basic stuff that needs to happen before any serious organizing is going to be able to happen. It’s a sad situation. I always want to be able to say something more hopeful, but it’s just a dismal, bleak situation on the Left in the US. You can have demos all over the country against Trump, and they hardly mention the fact that the US has just killed the entire leadership of Iran and is bombing bridges and schools.

What’s your view of the rise of the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America?

I view it as a basically positive development that has attracted a lot of energy. A lot of people have gotten involved, and they’ve supported campaigns of people like Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and AOC. All that is very positive, even if they don’t have power—because they’re such a small minority. Even if they’re running as Democrats, they don’t represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

But they can have some kind of a voice, and they can expose the rest of the party for being so warmongering. Every time Sanders puts out a bill saying, “Do you support sending arms to Israel?”—the Democrats have to vote Yes or No. That exposes who are the ones who support this genocide and who’s opposing it, but they always continue to send the arms.

It’s a positive development, but the DSA also faces the same kinds of problems as the rest of the US Left. It hasn’t figured out how to rise above sectarianism. There’s still this paranoia about associating with the wrong people who have the wrong opinions about something. The paranoia permeating the US Left also permeates the DSA.

Let’s go on to the role of culture. I don’t want to misquote you, but you said something like US culture has not managed to be as political as other cultures?

US culture historically has been profoundly political. Music and art and culture have been so central to the social movements like the Industrial Workers of the World in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement. These were all tremendously musical movements that were incredibly impactful on society because of their emphasis on using music and art to organize and educate and inspire.

That’s not at all unique to the US. Music that came out of these movements spread around the world and impacted people in many other societies as well. But what has happened, especially in the past 20 years, has been a divorcing of culture from politics in the minds of so many Americans.

Most of the time in most of the country, when you have some kind of political rally, there is no live music, and there’s very little in the way of any artistic expression. It’s like people with signs. It looks like a protest from some TV series that’s making fun of protests for how boring they are.

The Left Berlin has a radio programme, and the people who do the music tease me for suggesting the music of old white men. For the anniversary of Kent State, I said why not play Neil Young’s Ohio? And they say there is all sorts of really interesting Latino music, hip-hop, rap that is still very political and still talking to poor people. I’m just too old to get it. Do you think that it’s possible that there is still this music going on, but it’s addressing a different audience?

Oh, definitely, yeah. In all kinds of genres. The thing about the whole rock phenomenon, people like Neil Young and everything that came out of the 50s, 60s, 70s, it’s not people’s fault that they happen to like all these musicians who are white men, because the industry itself is a totally racist industry.

Its definition of rock music was: it’s a white form of music. If you’re not white, then you’re playing rhythm and blues. It was also a white male phenomenon. All the singers of all the rock bands had to be white men. That was the arrangement. All the other members of the bands had to be white men.

The only exception to that rule was San Francisco, because nobody in San Francisco would cooperate with the industry. They allowed San Francisco to be an exception to the rule for a little while. So that’s where Janis Joplin came out, Jimi Hendrix.

Sly and the Family Stone

Yeah, and so many other bands that were not all-white or all-male. San Francisco was allowed to be the exception. But that was the industry. But when you don’t look at the industry, and you look at the music that’s coming out of the people all over the world, either overtly or metaphorically political music is everywhere. People like Silvio Rodriguez are performing political music in packed stadiums in many Latin American countries.

Those musicians are all over the place, including in forms of music that would be very familiar to people who are into rock and roll, like the folk punk phenomenon. Whether you’re into hip-hop, whether you speak Spanish or Arabic, you can name people from every part of the world. Just the names of these musicians will bring a tear to somebody’s eye, because they mean so much to them. This is profoundly political.

You mention Fairuz to somebody from the Arab world, or Victor Jara to Spanish speakers. These are profoundly important people.

We’re mainly talking here about the Global South. Do you think it’s possible to build a new political music scene with a mass audience like San Francisco in Europe or the US?

Yeah, It can totally be done. People need to realize that that’s what needs to be done. Especially in the US, and probably beyond, there’s this constant drum beat of division against the sixties generation. It’s astounding, because it’s more than 50 years since then.

But there’s still this constant drumbeat of derision from the mainstream about the sixties. They just have to make sure that everybody still remembers that playing music and having a good time, and free love, and puppets and guitars are all just terrible, terrible hippie stuff that nobody should be associating with.

People get the message enough and they think: maybe we don’t actually need more acoustic guitars in the world.

Today you were playing with Liadland. Liad is a soon to be former Israeli—she’s giving up her citizenship. She also plays electronic music. Is mixing with people of completely different genres and backgrounds the sort of thing you do often?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That goes over well or not well, depending on the audience. It’s not that everybody into one form of political music likes other forms of political music. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. Different styles on the same bill can work well, or it cannot, but I do it a lot.

One thing it can do at least is introduce people to a sort of music that they would never have thought of listening to themselves.

Absolutely. It’s such a great chance to hear new stuff, and it’s the main way I hear new stuff too.

What future projects do you have planned?

We do have another tour planned if there’s enough jet fuel left in the world. That’s a big if at this point, right? We do have a tour in Canada, in British Columbia, in late June, early July.

Do you have a message of hope for the next generation?

I heard Jesse Welles say this. I don’t know if he’s ever heard of me before, but I’ve been saying the exact same thing for decades. He said, to paraphrase: If you don’t have hope, then there’s no hope. Hope is a requisite to anything else happening. For social movements to get off the ground, there needs to be hope.

A sense of optimism is absolutely essential, as is a real, serious embrace of cultural means of communication—building the movement and inspiring people, educating people, embracing music and art. But it all starts with having some kind of hope for the future, some kind of vision for what you’re going to do that’s going to change things. But it all starts with hope.

My main hope is that we can maybe keep things going long enough for the aliens to come from some other galaxy and rescue us. In Star Trek, one time they came to a planet, and they asked the computer some questions about the planet. The computer said: According to our calculations, things are so unequal on this planet that the civilization will collapse in 250 years. So maybe it’s a good idea to invite aliens.

Palantir’s accelerated digital fascism

A leftist reading of the Palantir Technologies manifesto


The well-known and controversial technology firm Palantir Technologies recently published a manifesto. The document is neither a technical paper nor an economic vision. It is an explicitly political document that announces a new phase in the trajectory of digital capitalism, a phase in which it has abandoned its claim to neutrality and decided to reveal its full ideological face.

Palantir is not an isolated case. It is one of several major technology companies that sell their technologies to systems of repression and human rights violations. As such, it has been condemned by international human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Most damning of all, reports have revealed a direct partnership between Palantir and the Israeli military, where Palantir, like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, has supplied data and targeting systems used in military operations in Gaza, making these companies effective partners in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

The manifesto is a declaration of a project for a digital fascist alliance, one that does not rest on traditional violence alone, but on digital surveillance and repression, data analysis, artificial intelligence and manipulation of public opinion. An alliance whose crimes are embodied today in their clearest form in Trumpism, its alliances and its aggressive wars.

1. From Silicon Valley to the White House

Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the most important financial backer of Trump’s political career, is not merely a businessman who supports a political candidate. He is the ideological mind that gives this project its political logic, and who has openly declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

This alliance is no coincidence. It is a fusion of two projects that share a single goal: the concentration of power in the hands of a financial and political oligarchy that believes itself to possess a “natural right” to govern its own societies and those of others.

This alliance finds its institutional expression today in what is known as the technological acceleration movement, which includes Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others, who are moving in a coordinated manner with the second Trump administration.

What unites them is not full ideological uniformity, but class position and shared interest: the abolition of any regulatory or democratic constraint that limits their capacity for accumulation, domination and expansion of control.

2. The Manifesto

Palantir described the manifesto as a summary of its chief executive Alexander Karp’s book “The Technological Republic”. Within a few days it received millions of views and angered many people.

But anger must not be content with emotional reaction, for the strongly right-wing manifesto deserves a precise, left-wing reading, a reading that goes deeper than indignation.

The manifesto contains 22 points, constructed with deliberate architectural precision. Some points appear moderate or even humane on the surface, such as calls to respect politicians’ privacy or to avoid taking pleasure in an opponent’s defeat.

But these points are neither innocent nor coincidental. They are the calculated facade used to win over the hesitant reader and give the manifesto a “balanced” appearance before it reveals its true face. What appears logical in the manifesto is therefore not proof of its balance, but further proof of its cunning.

The manifesto is, in short, about promoting a comprehensive ideological agenda centered on militarization, domination and a hierarchy between civilizations.

3. Fatherland, Conscription, Control, Racism

Point 1 asserts that “the engineering elite in Silicon Valley has a moral obligation to participate in the defence of the nation.” This moral framing is not innocent. When military and security contracts are presented as a “moral duty”, social pressure becomes a mechanism to compel engineers and programmers to serve the war and repression machinery. Any dissenting voice within technology companies is silenced in the name of “patriotism.” This is the transformation of individual conscience into a commodity in the service of the military-security state and its institutions of repression and surveillance.

Point 2 calls for a “revolt against the tyranny of apps”, meaning the rejection of consumer technology in favour of deeper security and military systems. This is not a critique of consumer capitalism, as it may seem. It is a call to redirect technological capacity towards the war and surveillance machine rather than the entertainment market.

Point 5 declares that “the question is not whether AI weapons will be built; the question is who will build them.” This closed logic aims to eliminate any debate about refusing the militarization of technology. When the choice is presented as “us or the enemy”, the possibility of saying “no to weapons altogether” is erased. It is the same logic used by Cold War administrations to silence peace movements and restrict left-wing organizations. It returns now in digital disguise.

Point 6 demands that “conscription should be a universal duty” and calls for reconsidering the fully volunteer military in favour of mandatory conscription. This demand reveals the manifesto’s fascist face: when the state fails to recruit volunteers to fight its wars, it resorts to institutional coercion and calls it “shared responsibility.” Most revealing of all is that the company demanding young people sacrifice their lives in defense of “the West” simultaneously earns billions of dollars from the war contracts in which those young people die. Duty for all, profit for the few.

Point 17 claims that “Silicon Valley must play a role in handling violent crime.” This proposal appears pragmatic on the surface, but at its core it is an expansion of private security companies’ powers to bypass the state’s role and transform themselves into an independent force for social control. It operates according to profit logic rather than legal logic, independent courts and democratic accountability.

Point 20 demands “resistance to the pervasive intolerance towards religious belief.” This point does not spring from a genuine defense of freedom of conscience. It is an opportunistic use of religious discourse to build an ideological alliance with conservative and religious currents that are most receptive to mobilization behind war projects.

Point 21 is the most revealing of the manifesto’s deep ideological dimension when it declares that “some cultures have produced vital advances, while others remain dysfunctional and backward.” This sentence is the theoretical foundation of colonial racism, which justifies domination, occupation and the killing of peoples under the guise of “rational management of civilization.”

This logic does not differ fundamentally from “the white man’s burden” that justified colonialism in earlier centuries. It is reproduced today in the language of algorithms and big data. What makes it more dangerous than its predecessor is that it does not require visible colonial forces. A database and a targeting algorithm are sufficient.

4. The Algorithms of Death

Reports have revealed that Palantir has established strategic partnerships with armies and security institutions to build targeting databases that are actually used in military operations. In Palestine, the use of artificial intelligence systems to build targeting lists is extensively documented. This has led to massacres of civilians in Gaza.

What the company calls an “intelligent targeting system” is in practice a machine for administering killings with industrial efficiency. Killing no longer requires a responsible human decision. It requires an algorithm, sufficient data and a green light from an apparatus that is not subject to any democratic accountability.

Most important in this context is that the use of these systems cannot be separated from the discourse that justifies classifying entire societies as backward or threatening. The crime does not begin with the bomb. It begins with the classification.

The danger of the model that Palantir is building lies not only in its direct military applications. Even more dangerous is what can be described as the “surveillance society”, when control becomes internal rather than external.

When an individual knows they are being monitored at every moment, they begin to impose surveillance upon themselves. They change their language, avoid sensitive subjects, distance themselves from radical dissenting ideas. This voluntary self-surveillance limits and weakens left-wing and progressive movements from within, without any need for arrests or direct restrictions.

5. The Left-Wing Alternative

The Palantir manifesto is not merely a document from a technology company. It is an alarm bell that progressive forces must hear clearly: the battle over the future of technology is no longer lurking in the wings. It has stepped into the open.

The fundamental question is not how technology is used. It is who owns it and who determines its goals. Technology will not become a tool for emancipation as long as it remains in the hands of digital monopolies allied with right-wing, war and repression projects.

Any serious discussion must begin with the necessity of collective ownership over digital infrastructure, and with subjecting algorithms and artificial intelligence to genuine democratic control that represents the interests of peoples rather than monopolistic elites.

It is not sufficient to produce intellectual criticism without building actual technological alternatives: social platforms free from monopoly and repression, search tools that respect the privacy of all users, artificial intelligence systems managed in a democratic and transparent manner. These are not hobby projects for the future. They are an urgent strategic necessity.

6. Technological Disarmament and the Silence of the Workers

Building alternatives alone is not sufficient unless it is accompanied by an organized campaign to strip the monopolies of their technological weapons. Just as the historical workers’ movements fought to disarm capital in factories and on farms, there is today a need for an equivalent struggle to collectively wrest lethal algorithms, targeting systems and mass surveillance from the grip of these companies.

This struggle takes several forms: boycotting their services, exposing their secret contracts with governments, prosecuting their leaders before international courts for complicity in war crimes, and pressuring public institutions to sever their ties with these companies.

It is striking and deeply suspicious that the Palantir manifesto does not mention a single word about workers, trade unions, the right to organize, or the strike. This silence is not accidental. It is an admission that the fascist technological project cannot confront the workers’ question, because workers alone, if they organize themselves, are capable of halting the production lines of death. A general strike in Silicon Valley or even in Palantir’s own offices is this project’s nightmare.

7. Digital Fascism by Its True Name

The Palantir manifesto clearly reveals that we are facing a new form of fascism: the alliance between monopoly capital and aggressive national political power, and the use of violence, repression and civilizational hierarchy to protect this alliance from any popular threat.

The only difference is that this fascism’s tools today are algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence, and it is precisely this that makes it more closed and more difficult to resist than what came before.

While Palantir CEO Alexander Karp finishes his philosophical manifesto in his elegant office, the algorithms his company has built continue their work of identifying targets, tracking migrants at borders and supporting the machinery of militarism across the globe. Philosophy and crime are two sides of the same coin.

The struggle for social justice and emancipation passes today inevitably and substantially through the struggle to liberate technology from this aggressive class alliance. It is not a technical question or an abstract ethical question.

It is a political question all the way through, and part of a historical struggle over who shall have control of the future.

6 May 1943: The birth of Andreas Baader

This week in working class history


May 6th marks the 83rd birthday of Andreas Baader, founding member and one of the leaders of Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), an anti-imperialist guerrilla group that tried to denazify Germany through armed forces. Followed by the anniversary of his comrade’s death, journalist Ulrike Meinhof, on May 9th, and the birth of the RAF itself in May 1970, this week and month are a heavy time to reflect on the influence and legacy of the RAF in Germany.

With a criminal record for petty offenses, Baader arrived in Berlin in his early 20s, had links to Kommune 1, and was part of the 1968 student movements. Radicalized by the police killing of the student Benno Ohnesorg,  Baader soon made a name for himself in the left-wing scene. In Berlin, he met Gudrun Ensslin, a communist writer, who became his partner in life and crime. The pair joined the APO (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition) and planned and carried out arson attacks in department stores, which led to their imprisonment.

During a subsequent visit to the prison for an interview, the group met Ulrike Meinhof, who was already a renowned left-wing journalist at the time and also a member of the APO. After Baader’s escape and a visit to Palestine in 1970 to learn about resistance, weapons, and liberation movements, the RAF members returned to Germany for the 1972 Mai-Offensive, which consisted of bomb attacks against US army bases, police headquarters and, ultimately, against Axel Springer publishing house.

The group then went into hiding. Whilst Baader, Ensslin, and other member Raspe were  apprehended by the police in Frankfurt, Ulrike Meinhof remained at large for longer. The RAF continued their resistance behind bars in the form of hunger strikes, and then were transferred to the high-security wing of Stammheim Prison, in whose courthouse the Ulm 5 were recently brought to trial. Remaining RAF members’ acts, intended to release the prisoners, proved in vain: the occupation of the German Embassy in Stockholm, the kidnapping of Hans-Martin Schleyer, former SS-officer and Chairman of the Employers’ Association, as well as the hijacking of a Lufthansa aircraft.

In 1976 Ulrike Meinhof hung herself in her cell; the following year in October, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader were found dead as well, the latter with a shot in the back of the head. The state said it was meant to look like murder; the comrades said that it was. To this day, the Rote Armee Fraktion remains one of the most significant anti-imperialist movements in Germany in the fight against fascism and its oppressive anti-democratic laws, restricted fundamental rights, police authority and violence, and the nazification of the government and the state. Politics that echoes eerily familiar in today’s Germany.

German trade unions clamp down on Palestine activism

Repression in Berlin – report #9


A leaked memo reveals how Germany’s largest union body consorted to exclude pro-Palestinian speech at this year’s May Day demonstration. In an internal strategy paper, the Leipzig branch of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) lists various “unacceptable” and “inappropriate” political positions, slogans and symbols, most of which entail supporting Palestinian liberation.

The document split pro-Palestine symbols and slogans into two types. The first category is “completely unacceptable” and would lead to immediate removal from the protest and reporting to the police. These include: the red triangle, denying the Zionist state’s existence, the slogan “From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” any relativisation to the Holocaust (such as the claim that israel is currently committing a Holocaust-like crime against the Palestinians) and antisemitic statements such as “Israel, murderer of children.”

The second category is “inappropriate but not criminal,” in which case, the memo notes, stewards should either ensure that the individuals are not visible at the front of the protest, or that they simply leave. These include: Palestinian flags, Palestinian keffiyehs, “one-sided portrayals of the Middle East conflict” and flags and symbols of “problematic groups.”

The document then refers to several pro-Palestinian and communist groups as “potential disruptive elements,” categorising them as “authoritarian/anti-Semitic leftists.” The Socialist German Workers’ Youth (SDAJ) and the Communist Party (DKP), are considered “problematic,” while Young Struggle, Zora, Handala, Communist Organisation (KO), Gewerkschafter4Gaza and Communist Aufbau (KA), are labeled as “highly problematic.”

In 2024, during the Munich May Day demonstration, as different groups chanted for Palestinian liberation, the DGB leadership stated to the press: ”They are not part of our movement, and we do not share their views.” Meanwhile that same year, in Berlin, the DGB leadership tried to exclude pro-Palestinian representation by issuing a pre-demonstration statement banning all national flags. Despite the attempted repression, on the day, many participants chanted for Palestine and were thereafter told by stewards that pro-Palestine slogans were antisemitic and even reported to the police. Towards the end of the demonstration, the stewards, collaborating with the police, violently tried to separate this bloc from the rest of the protest, pushing demonstrators and pulling at banners.

This year, Berlin’s May Day demonstration, organised by several internationalist, leftist and communist groups, and proudly in support of Palestine, was met with a different kind of repressive hurdle. A few hundred meters after the protest left Oranienplatz, it collided with a large concert taking over the route, leaving extremely limited space for protesters to pass and find their way through. It was only after hours of efforts and resilience from the organisations, stewards and demonstrators that the protest was able to carry on together. The concert in question was organised by Die Linke. Several organisers called out this event as sabotage, sowing division and part of a broader strategy of appeasement.

“We have to shut down their business”

Interview with Nikodem Kaddoura from the Bridges of Resistance camp in Hamburg


Hi, thanks for talking to us. Could you start by introducing yourself?

Sure. My name is Nikodem Kaddoura. I’m part of the campaign Stop Nakba Now!. We’re a nationwide campaign that is confronting Germany’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza.

Today we specifically want to talk about the camp that you’re organizing in Hamburg, running up to Nakba day

Right. There is an action week from May 9 to May 16 in Hamburg. There will be a protest camp at the Moorweide throughout the week, and on the 16th, there will be a nationwide protest gathering near to the port of Hamburg.

Who’s gonna be speaking at the camp?

We’re currently still in the announcement phase on social media, but we’ve already confirmed a number of speakers. These include Yasemin Acar, Judith Scheytt, Fabian Goldmann, Fabian Lehr, Alena Jabarine, Elisa Baş, Hebh Jamal, Riad Othman and many more.

There will be many more speakers contributing to around 40 workshops and panels throughout the week. You can find the full and continuously updated program on our website.

Why a nationwide protest camp in Hamburg?

We have to look at the last two and a half years. There have been many protests and a lot of important organizing and a large solidarity movement gathered on the streets. Solidarity is important, but at the same time many of us are asking: what comes next? Solidarity isn’t the goal. It’s the first step that is necessary, but we need something after which we can hold on to, something that allows us to move from outrage to strategy.

That’s why we have to disrupt the complicity of Germany and the genocide in Gaza. It’s not enough to only address the complicity in the abstract. We want to make it visible through protests, political education and direct confrontation with all the structures that sustain the apartheid, the genocide, and all the systems in Israel.

When we look at Hamburg, we have to say that complicity isn’t only political. It isn’t just the government or Staatsräson. It is also economic and logistical. There are whole chains of complicity, and companies are profiting from the suffering of Palestinians, as well as from other people across the Global South.

In that context, the port of Hamburg is a central hub where these chains converge. In the last three years, 17,000 boxes of ammunition were shipped from Hamburg to Israel. And these are only the ones we know about. Because of the lack of transparency, this is probably only the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know about the technology and all the other military goods that were shipped to Israel.

This is a specific material complicity. Our question is not whether Germany is involved. We ask whether we are ready to confront the infrastructure through which that apartheid, settler colonialism, and genocide are maintained?

Our campaign is called Stop Nakba now. When we talk about the Nakba, we have to be clear that it’s not a closed chapter of history. The Nakba is still ongoing. It is a continuing process of displacement, ethnic cleansing and settler colonial violence against Palestinians.

What we’re witnessing today in Gaza didn’t begin two and a half years ago. It must be understood as part of a much larger history – includingf Zionist settler colonialism, forced displacement, oppression, mass killing, and now an act of genocide. This is why the Action Week is placed around the memorial day of the Nakba. We want to address the complicity to support the Palestinians.

Last year, we had the largest demonstration in Germany for Palestine ever. Six days later, the ceasefire was called, which we know wasn’t a ceasefire, but it demobilised the movement worldwide. How do you think we can win back the people who were demonstrating in September and are no longer on the streets?

I think it’s connected to the point I made earlier. We have to give hope to the people  giving logical next steps. When we’re talking about the solidarity movement that wants to free Palestine, we will not liberate Palestine within German borders. But in Germany, we have the responsibility, at least, to disrupt the systems that enable apartheid, displacement, and genocide. If we’re serious in this solidarity, then we have to weaken these structures and oppression that make this violence possible.

On the other hand, it’s very important to combine our struggles. Our protest camp is being held under the motto Bridges of Resistance. The focus should be on the connection to other struggles, including international struggles and social struggles here in Germany. These struggles are not separated. They are deeply connected. That’s why we want to gather not only a big mass but also a diversity of people from different struggles.

Are there any specific struggles you want to talk about?

If we look at the austerity and the situation of social services in Germany, we can see this very clearly. We are constantly told that because of the debt break there is no money for housing, for education, healthcare, environment or social infrastructure. At the same time, billions are being forced into militarization.

How is it possible that Rheinmetall last year made a record profit while wages are under pressure, and more and more people are living under increasingly difficult conditions? How is it possible that there’s always money for war but never for people’s needs?

We also want to address the school strike movement because young people are facing climate collapse, militarization, austerity, racism and repression. But these aren’t separate issues. They are connected through a system that prioritizes profits over life. If we are serious about building resistance, then we have to build bridges between these struggles. They are part of the same system, and they have to be fought together to achieve the goals of liberation.

One of the interesting things about the last school strike, particularly in Berlin, was the number of demonstrators wearing kuffiyahs and carrying Palestine flags. This is new in Germany. What concrete links are you able to build with the school strike movement?

We will have students at the camp to give workshops, and we will try to directly address the school strike movement. As you said, in Berlin there was massive solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Even in Hamburg, there was a big solidarity movement.

We have to connect, because I have hope in our young generation. It’s time now to change something within the system, and to change the system.

If people come to the camp, what can they expect?

We will have plenty of political education, discussions and networking. And we will talk about direct action – How can we disrupt these chains of complicity? How is it possible for us to change something within our borders?

As I said, our responsibility here in Germany is to build a movement that is strong enough to disrupt the global war machine. We need to cut off the material support that is necessary to sustain apartheid and genocide. This is how we can  create a ground for Palestinians to be able to continue their resistance against the Israeli regime and to liberate themselves We planned a whole action week to discuss these things and also to take some first practical steps.

The aim is to build a movement that can put real pressure on the structures enabling militarisation and violence, and to create conditions that support ongoing resistance.

How many people are you expecting at the camp? It’s during the week, so some people will be working.

Hopefully as many as possible, I hope that throughout the week hundreds of people will be at the camp, thousands at the protest. I hope we will be 10,000 and more. Who knows? It’s a very important campaign, and we have to gather in front of their doors. Hamburg is, as I said, a central hub for the maintenance of the Israeli structures, of their part in the genocide. So we have to go directly where it hurts them.

There’s a national demonstration being called for the day after Nakba day. Originally in Berlin, people said: we’ll do a Berlin demonstration on Nakba day, and then we’ll come to Hamburg. Now the Berlin demo is going to be at the same time as the Hamburg demo. This is a shame. What should we be telling people now?

It’s up to the people. But I can only address the last two and a half years. We’re protesting on the streets, addressing politicians, maybe in front of the Bundestag or Brandenburger Tor, but at the end, it’s only symbolic. We’re protesting and addressing politicians who will not change anything.

We have to be the change we want for our people, and we have to bring the change. We have to ask: who iscomplying with genocide? It isn’t just the politicians, it’s the companies. These are the value chains of goods being shipped to Israel. We have to address these people – and not only address them, but also confront them.

That’s why we have to go to Hamburg in front of their doors, because the biggest companies involved in this genocide are located in Hamburg. We have the German offices of Merz. We have Hapag-Lloyd. We have MSC. We have plenty of companies making billions of profits in the last two and a half years who are still doing their businesses without any disruption.

And there are also the ports from which the weapons are sent

Yes

There have been a number of camps recently –which is a welcome development – from organisations like Shut Elbit Down. Some of these camps have been shut down or attacked by the police. How likely is it that you’re going to have any problems?

Hopefully not. We have good enough lawyers who we’ve been working with for a long time. They are in solidarity with the Palestinian movement and our activism  in Hamburg. We most probably will not face any repression, because at the end, if the state will try any repression against us, we know that we will win a legal process in court.

All of these repressions are an act of weakness from the state, because they are afraid of our activism. They know that our work can hurt the government and this capitalist system.

What’s going to happen after that? You say this is not just about having a symbolic demonstration. It’s not just changing minds but also changing practice. What do you think can happen as a result of the camp?

ther countries like Greece or Italy, have a big movement of port workers who have blocked shipments. This is where we have to start – first with this week, to make the complicity visible and create awareness for this topic, then to go on and try to disrupt them.

Every single Euro they make from the suffering of the Palestinian people, has to be revenged. It can’t stay like this. We have to shut down their business, like when you talked about Shut Elbit Down. We have to shut down all the companies which are making profits from the genocide in Gaza and throughout the whole Global South.

What can people in Berlin do to support the camp and demo?

We have two pages on social media. The one is the campaign account – Stop Nakba Now. The other one is the camp account: Bridges of Resistance. Stop Nakba Now also has a website. You can stay up to date from these channels. There are pickup points in Berlin, so people who want to join this campaign can pick up material, like posters or information sheets to share throughout Berlin.

Is there any transport organized from Berlin?

We have organised two buses that will bring people from Berlin to the rally in Hamburg. You find information about times and tickets on our website. 

Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think we should talk about?This week will be expensive, and we are a grassroots movement, so we don’t have a lot of money. We have a crowdfunding campaign. We need every single euro or every single cent that people or organisations are able to donate. We listed the costs we have so that people can understand why we need the money and for what the money will be used.