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Berlinale: Filmmakers say what the rest of the world is saying

At the Berlinale film festival, Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers called for equality and peace. German politicians want to ban such hateful talk


27/02/2024

The Berlinale film festival ended on Saturday evening with a gala, but if you read the German press, it was actually a “scandal”. The speeches were “alarming”, “shameful”, and “frightening”, full of “Israel hatred” and “antisemitism”. What had happened?

Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, an Israeli and a Palestinian, won an award for their documentary film No Other Land. Abraham spoke for just 36 seconds:

“In two days, we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under a civilian law, and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights, and Basel is not having voting rights. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.”

His co-producer Adra took just 21 seconds:

“I’m here celebrating the award, but also very hard for me to celebrate when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza. Masafer Yatta, my community, is being also razed by Israeli bulldozers. I ask one thing from Germany, as I am in Berlin here, to respect the UN calls and stop sending weapons to Israel.”

These are sober statements of liberal democratic principles. Who would dare to contradict? Should systematic inequality based on ethnicity (known in international law as “apartheid”) continue? Should Germany keep ignoring UN resolutions?

German politicians are claiming this will cause “damage to the Berlinale”. The opposite is the case: their demands for extreme censorship are a mortal threat to Berlin’s art scene. Do they even realize how far outside the global mainstream they are? In calling for a ceasefire, Saturday’s prizewinners were saying what the whole world except for Germany is saying – even Joe Biden has been mumbling about it.

Once again, we see how this virulent solidarity with Israel comes at the expense of Jewish life in Germany. What do we call this ferocious desire to silence Jews who don’t comply with the German Staatsräson? Last week, the Israeli director Udi Aloni said: “It seems like there is a new form of antisemitism in Germany, that no one calls antisemitism: the censorship of progressive intellectual Jewish voices.” He admitted that he was afraid to quote Walter Benjamin or Franz Rosenzweig in this country “because I might get canceled”.

It seems German politicians don’t want us to hear these speeches. They cannot defend the reality – so they try to avoid discussions about it. We must hear Israelis and Palestinians when they stand together to call for equality and peace.

This is a mirror of Nathanlel’s Red Flag column, written for Neues Deutschland

“It’s So Berlin!” 6: Tight Angle

The sixth installment in our series of photographs and cartoons about Berlin and Palestine.


24/02/2024

Following last week’s contribution Soli-Ceasefire, here is the latest in the series of works by Berlin-based Palestinian artists Rasha Al Jundi and Michael Jabareen.

Photo: Rasha Al-Jundi

If the State wants to spy on you, it will do it, whether on Signal or WhatsApp and whether it is a wide or tight angle.

Cartoon: Michael Jabareen

There seems to be a general public belief in the system imposed by the State, specifically the one designed and promoted to ensure “data protection” and “individual privacy”. The assertions we have been confronted with when questioning it include: “they limit surveillance using long bureaucratic procedures to make it difficult for anyone to put up a security camera”; or, “they use very “tight angles” so not everyone is included in the frame.”

While those statements may be true, this does not absolve Germany in general, and Berlin specifically from, actually, employing close surveillance activities against the public. Other than surveillance cameras, which are usually defended with statements like the above, secret service agents are crawling all over the city. Since October 7th 2023, their heavy presence has been usually spotted among pro-Palestinian demonstrators and within Arab or migrant majority spaces or cafes.

In this image, the abandoned item is a black coat, left hanging on building door handle.

Titled “Tight Angle”, the image depicts another common urban wildlife dweller in the city, the crow. Considered among the smartest birds on the planet, they are still caught in a meaningless conversation about which mobile phone application to use to protect their privacy.

Although activists are aware of the way the State system, bullshit aside, actually works, they seek other means to protect themselves and their chats through technology or app options out there. After Edward Snowden’s revelations, hundreds of media reports on governments employing private spyware and surveillance companies, even in the so-called “free and democratic world”, these conversations stand out as clear contradictions. If the State wants to spy on you, it will do it, whether on Signal or WhatsApp and whether it is a wide or tight angle.

Living in fear is not an option. Fear is the weapon these State agents in all their shapes and forms employ to silence activists. Their empty words and privacy promises don’t matter. Real actions do. Especially in tight angles.

Image taken in Schöneberg, Berlin (2023).

Commemoration for Hanau – Police Brutally Attack Palestine bloc

Eye-witness report by Lyna B, Phil Butland, and Elisa T


23/02/2024

Thousands of people in Berlin gathered on Monday to commemorate the victims of the 2020 Hanau massacre. The organising group Migrantifa reported that over 10,000 people took part in the subsequent march along Sonnenallee to demonstrate against racism in Germany.

Throughout the demonstration, the police repeatedly targeted pro-Palestine protesters, escalating their aggression. This culminated in a forceful charge into the crowd, where cops in riot gear launched brutal assaults on individuals.

 

What happened in Hanau?

On February 19, 2020, in Hanau, Germany, a far-right extremist gunman murdered nine people from migrant communities. Police were subsequently criticized for failing to respond to emergency calls, for arriving several hours late to the scene, and for not properly notifying the families of the deceased. Furthermore, although the gunman was known to the police, he was allowed to renew his firearms license as recently as 2019.

It was later disclosed that 13 of the police officers working in Hanau that evening were subsequently suspended for partaking in racist, far-right group chats, as reported in a recent article. Much of the media response was correspondingly inadequate, racist, and vilified the victims. Seda Artal, an organizer for the 19 February Initiative recalls: “I think the first headline I read was ‘Shisha murders.’”

What happened on Monday?

On Monday, February 19, 2024, a crowd of 10,000 Berliners marched in mourning, holding the names of the nine people killed in Hanau: Gökhan Gültekin, Ferhat Unvar, Mercedes Kierpacz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Sedat Gürbüz, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Hamza Kurtović, Kaloyan Velkov, and Vili Viorel Păun. The demonstration consisted of various blocs, representing different groups and organizations united against the pervasive racist policies that enable far-right extremist attacks. 

While the police maintained a presence throughout the whole march, there was a notably larger concentration of officers around the Palestine bloc. In previous demonstrations, the police’s tactics have been clear: isolate the Palestinian bloc from the rest of the march, so that they could have full-reign on arrests and violence. This demonstration was different; the rest of the blocs stood in solidarity with the Palestine bloc, chanting together for the freedom of Palestine. 

 

“Where were you in Hanau?”

The police, undeterred by this show of solidarity, continued to single out Palestinians and their allies, warning that anyone chanting “forbidden” statements or concealing their faces would face arrest.  Intermittently, they forced themselves into the crowd, violently hauling people away. Demonstrators responded by holding up keffiyehs and umbrellas to block police filming, while chanting “Where were you in Hanau?”, drawing attention to the authorities’ apparent readiness to brutalize anti-racist protesters rather than prevent racist murders.

 

As the march was reaching its conclusion, police officers in riot gear charged several times into the Palestine bloc. In response, the crowd linked arms to protect each other, refusing to allow the police to disrupt the memorial. Many people were badly assaulted, violently pushed and shoved to the ground, with cops’ knees on their backs.

“They walked right into the people and … kind of jumped in it and started punching people and pushing them on the ground.”

Gustav, a demonstrator, reported their experience to theleftberlin: 

“As I have seen it many times now, at some point of the demo the police put their helmets on and waits for a reason to brutally attack the people. I don’t know what they say was the reason this time but from what I saw and understood they wanted to separate the Palestine bloc from the rest of the demo. The organizers of the demo stopped the rest from walking any further so the police couldn’t separate the demo. Then it started to get more aggressive. They started to attack after they moved in the middle of the demo. As we see in the videos they walked right into the people and in one of the videos kind of jumped in it and started punching people and pushing them on the ground.”

“I loudly shouted that I was not resisting… Within seconds, I was lying on the ground with a knee on my back.”

Another demonstrator reported their experience trying to leave Monday’s demonstration (translated from German): 

“Yesterday we stayed at the Hanau demo until the end, even after the escalation. As we tried to go home, five of us went towards the U-Bahnhof. Halfway there, I turned around and saw at least ten cops running after us. My impulse was to run, but the cops ran after us. On Karl Marx Straße, I raised my hands against a wall and loudly shouted that I was not resisting. Two seconds later, my head (and my nose) were slammed against the wall. Within seconds, I was lying on the ground with a knee on my back. I did not resist and said several times that I wasn’t resisting and hadn’t done anything. After two minutes, a policeman told me to turn my face. As I looked at him, he just said ‘that’s the wrong person.’ Afterwards they reluctantly set me free and angrily asked why I ran away… afterwards they began to chase and arrest random people on Karl Marx Straße… I have bruises on my nose and jaw since then from the violent pushing and shoving.”

Migrantifa reported that four stewards were arrested, as were a number of other demonstrators.

Such shows of violence are routine for Palestinians and their allies, as they undergo weekly attacks and detentions by the police for protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. At the Luxemburg Liebknecht demonstration in January, the police viciously targeted the Palestine bloc, sending 15 people to the hospital and brutally beating a 65 year-old grandfather who nearly died as a result.

Moreover, last week at a pro-Palestine protest, the police violently dragged a pregnant woman out of the crowd and detained her for an hour without medical attention. At a sit-in outside Axel Springer Haus last week they also attacked many protestors, including Jewish activist Rachael Shapiro. The police are instrumental in the German state’s campaign to criminalize the Palestinian cause, and do everything within their power to stifle and censor criticism of Israel.

 

Hanau is not an isolated case

A popular chant among demonstrators was: “Hanau war kein Einzelfall” – Hanau was not an isolated case. This echoes people’s frustrations with politicians and the mainstream media, who often depict attacks like the Hanau massacre as isolated and unforeseeable tragedies, rather than recognizing them as glaring examples of the escalating tide of racism and fascism in Germany.

Last November, representatives of Germany’s far-right party, the AfD, attended a meeting in Potsdam where they discussed a plan to deport asylum seekers, foreigners with a residence permit, and “non-assimilated” German citizens. 

But racism in Germany is primarily a White German problem. The German government put out a report stating that in 2019, 90.1% of Islamophobic attacks and 93.4% of anti-Jewish attacks were committed by right-wing extremists. Hate crimes were found to have risen by 5.8%. Moreover, well over 200 people have been murdered by racist right-wing perpetrators since 1990.

Rather than comprehensively addressing the escalation of far-right extremism and striving for true unity, dignity, and respect for all, German politicians and media outlets have opted to evade their own ultra-nationalist, genocidal history. They have pawned off their historical responsibility onto Muslim and Arab people, who they accuse of “imported antisemitism.” 

Far-right extremism and fascism do not emerge in isolation; they are a product of white supremacist tenets pervasive to our society and systems. Effective opposition to the far-right requires a collective and sustained effort to address every aspect of white supremacy.

The power of solidarity

Monday’s demonstration united diverse groups and communities in a powerful stand against racism and fascism. The organizers halted the march several times in solidarity with the Palestine bloc undergoing police assaults. This stands in stark contrast with some recent protests against the AfD, where Palestinians and other migrants were excluded by fellow demonstrators.

The interconnected nature of the struggles against the AfD and for Palestine is evident, especially considering the AfD’s staunch support for Israel, which surpasses that of any other party in Germany. With the AfD convening its national conference in Essen in June, significant protests are expected.

As we mobilize against the racist far-right and endeavor to eradicate white supremacy, Palestine should always be at the forefront of the fight. We must stand united against racism, police violence, and the German government’s support for and financing of the genocide in Gaza.

Free Palestine. Free Gaza. Stop the Genocide.

 

All photos and videos: Elisa T, Lyna B, and theleftberlin readers

Letter from the Editors, 22nd February 2024

2 Years Ukraine Invasion


22/02/2024

Hello everyone,

 

This week’s demonstrations for Palestine are on Friday at 4pm at the Auswärtiges Amt under the motto Let Rafah Live, and on Saturday at 2pm at Wilmersdorferstraße / Kantstraße under the motto Palestine will never die.

This week saw the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There will be several events this weekend organised by Leftists with different perspectives on how to respond. On Friday at 6pm, there’s a demo at the Bundestag Stop the deaths in Ukraine – for a ceasefire and negotiations. On Saturday there are at least 3 actions: at 1pm Peace in Ukraine and Russia at the Bundeskanzleramt, at 1pm Defend Peace at Brandenburger Tor, calling for military support for Ukraine, and at 3pm Stop the Warmongerers at U- and S-Bahn Lichtenberg.

On Friday, the Alliance of International Feminists is organising an event Down with Imperialist Feminism. This is a soli-event to get in touch and raise money to cover the costs of the 8M Demonstration this year. Doors open at 6pm, and from 6-8pm there will be an open discussion round with the alliance-Orga team and YOU! Following that, there will be an opportunity for us to come together and spend the night with music, some delicious foods and drinks. Spread the word come over and join us! This event is open to all! It all takes place at Reichenbergerstraße 63A.

On Saturday, there will be a demonstration Görli stays open. Berlin’s Senator of the Interior Spranger and mayor Wegner claim that they are winning back Görlitzer Park for residences and making it safer. To do this, they are building a a fence around Görli and closing it at night. But residents and tens of thousands of other people already use the park all year round to grill, to jog, or to access the sport and children’s areas. In Summer they chill, in Winter they skate or come to the winter market. The demonstration to keep Görli open, but with better funding starts at Falckensteinstraße 14 at 2pm. It is organised by Görli Zaunfrei, who is our Campaign of the Week.

Right2TheCity, the non-German working group of Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen are organising two events on Sunday. At 2pm, there’s a Tenants’ Support Forum for people in Wedding. Having issues with your landlord? Questions about your rent? Want some support navigating the Berlin rental market? Come talk with tenants in a similar position! It starts at 2pm in Linkstreff, Malplaquetstraße 12. Then at 5.30pm in the Rote Insel, R2CKino will be showing the film The Healing. Neighbourhoods in Copenhagen face racist, xenophobic housing policy that seeks to evict tenants and privatize their social housing. “The Healing” is about how one community uses powerful, creative, joyful forms of resistance to energize their fight.

Our latest Palestine Reading Group will be taking place on Sunday at 7pm in our usual venue of Agit, Nansenstraße 2. This week we’ll be discussing the Israeli “Left”. Follow the link for suggested reading. We hope that the Palestine Reading Group will soon have a new, larger, venue, but we’re still working on the finer details. This means that for the time being, the dates and venue of Reading Group on our Events page are tentative. We will be post the definite information in future Newsletters. You can also join our Telegram Group to keep up with the debate and suggest future subjects or readings.

There is much more going on in Berlin. To find out what’s happening, go to our Events page. You can also see a shorter, but more detailed list of events in which we are directly involved in here.

Please note that the Berlin LINKE Internationals Summer Camp has been postponed, because the original date clashed with a national demonstration against the AfD. Summer Camp will now take place on 21-22 September, still in the Naturfreundehaus Hermsdorf. More information, including a draft programme, should be available soon.

If you are looking for Resources on Palestine, we have set up a page with useful links. We will be continually updating the page, so if you would like to recommend other links, please contact us on team@theleftberlin.com. You can also find all the reading from our Palestine Reading Groups here.

And Berlin-based Palestinian storyteller Rasha Al Jundi is launching a limited print sale to support taking her ongoing project “When the Grapes Were Sour: Embroidered Palestinian Stories from Exile” (@embroidered_exile on Instagram) to the UK between May and June. Al Jundi has received Al Mawred’s Wijhat grant, which will partly fund her travel and logistics costs. She still needs to raise additional funds to support documentation and production costs of new stories of Palestinian exiles living in the UK. You can find more information on her website. The selected images are from her one and only trip to the occupied homeland, which she documented as a visual diary titled “I Just Want to Kiss the Earth”, original published on theleftberlin.

In News from Berlin, man assaulted by police on Luxemburg-Liebknecht demo is still alive, Postbank workers to strike, protest outside Russian agency following suspicious death of Navalny, and Berlin employment agency eager to find more jobs for Ukrainians.

In News from Germany, CinemaxX and CineStar employees plan a 4-day national strike, public transport workers to strike in Lower Saxony, and Lufthansa ground staff also plan to strike.

Read all about it in this week’s News from Berlin and Germany.

New on theleftberlin, Nathaniel Flakin looks at the Nazi connections of many German companies, Rachael Shapiro reports from her violent arrest outside Axel-Springer Haus, the latest photo and cartoon in Rasha Al-Jundi’s and Michael Jabareen’s series It’s So Berlin!, Hari Kumar looks at the death of Alexi Navalny, and Nathaniel Flakin contests the Central Council of Jews’ claim that it speaks for all Jews.

This week’s Video of the Week shows the brutal police attack on the demonstration commemorating the Hanau massacre 4 years ago. We’re currently writing a report from the demo which will be published on theleftberlin.com soon.

You can follow us on the following social media:

If you would like to contribute any articles or have any questions or criticisms about our work, please contact us at team@theleftberlin.com. And please do encourage your friends to subscribe to this Newsletter.

Keep on fighting,

The Left Berlin Editorial Board

Who Gets to Speak for Germany’s Jews?

Crunching the numbers…


21/02/2024

The Central Council of Jews in Germany is supposed to represent the Jewish community. Yet their right-wing, racist views aren’t necessarily shared by the majority of Jewish people in this country.

On January 28, the German Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine published a disturbing article: “Gaza’s civilians not innocent.” This unabashed support for war crimes was authored by Tobias Huch, an eccentric and unsuccessful German politician with no connection to Judaism. Yet it was published in the official organ of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Such terrifying racism could be seen as representative of the Jewish community.

The “Zentralrat” is recognized by the German state as the official representative of all Jewish people. In reality, it represents 104 official Jewish communities organized around synagogues, with a total of 92,000 members. Let’s crunch the numbers.

The Council is only open to Jews with matrilineal Jewish heritages. As Wieland Hoban has explained, the rules state that “solely the child of a Jewish mother is Jewish by birth, and patrilineal Jews must therefore convert before they can be appropriately considered Jewish.” This means that a person with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother would be recognized as a Jew by the Israeli state  — but is not counted as a Jew in Germany.

Despite the notorious difficulty of defining who is Jewish, estimates put the number at around 225,000 in Germany. In other words, the Central Council cannot even claim to speak for half of Germany’s Jews.

Joseph Schuster, the Council President since 2014, is a conservative politician who has called for “upper limits” on migration — a position he shares with the German Right. Schuster and other Central Council officials tend to come from the small community of assimilated German Jews. They do not only tend to hold conservative views: As Emily Dische-Becker has explained, since Jewish life in Germany always feels so precarious, they also identify much more strongly with Israel than Jewish people in the U.S. do.

Yet this sector makes up only a tiny fraction of Germany’s Jewish community today. Starting in 1991, Germany allowed Jews from the former Soviet Union to immigrate with relatively few formalities. Just over 200,000 “contingent refugees” arrived before the law was abolished in 2004. (That law, by the way, was changed due to pressure from Israel’s government, which was upset that more post-Soviet Jews were moving to Ashkenaz than to the Erez Israel. The SPD and the Greens made it far harder for Jews to immigrate — a reminder that the Israeli state does not have the same interests as Jewish people!) These post-Soviet Jews now make up some 90% of the Jews registered via synagogues. Politically, they are all over the place, from urban liberals to Putin-loving AfD supporters. Some have a strong connection to Judaism, while others never considered themselves Jewish except for purposes of immigration law.

In the last 15 years, thousands of Israelis have come to Berlin. It’s impossible to say how many there are, since most of them have European passports, but estimates put their number between 10,000 and 30,000. Walking around Neukölln, an immigrant neighborhood that is often demonized as a hotbed of antisemitism, it’s hard to miss people speaking Hebrew. This relatively new Israeli community tends to be left-of-center: some of them are militant anti-Zionists, while others see themselves as “apolitical” and simply needed to escape the oppressive right-wing climate in Israel. They have diverse views on Zionism — but it’s noteworthy that the German press has not reported on any Israelis returning from Germany to serve in the IDF’s genocidal campaign against Gaza.

Finally, Germany is also home to Jewish immigrants from the rest of the world, including lots of young people from North America, South America, and Europe.

Adding these numbers up, there will always be some uncertainty, but it’s clear that the Central Council does not represent the actually existing Jewish community in Germany today. And even for the minority who are official counted: electing leaders via synagogues is not a good method to define political positions. There is no lively debate at religious services, and politics are discussed by opaque structures behind closed doors. The Central Council is more like a German government agency, financed by the state in order to manufacture Jewish support for German imperialism.

Alternative Jewish voices, such as Jüdische Stimme, face terrible persecution. The Berlin government is trying to shut down Oyoun, a PoC-run cultural center due to claims of “hidden antisemitism.” Oyoun’s “crime” consisted in providing space for Jewish voices who don’t agree with Germany’s Staatsräson. Anti-Zionist Jews have been detained, fired from their jobs, spat on, and assaulted by cops — without a word from the Central Council. As Dische-Becker has calculated, some 30 percent of the cancellations due to supposed “antisemitism” have been directed against Jews.

On December 11, the German government and the Central Council organized a pro-Israel demonstration at Brandenburg Gate. Despite hundreds of organizations signing the call, a grand total of 3,000 people showed up — including numerous Iranian monarchists waving the flag of the Shah. Very few Jewish people chose to show their support for Israel. That same day, just down the road, some 5,000 people had joined one of the almost daily protests in solidarity with Palestine, and many of them used signs to refer to themselves as Jews for Palestine. It is, of course, impossible to know how many Jewish people were at each event. But it certainly seems like far more Jewish Berliners were on the streets for Gaza than were standing with Israel.

This is obviously not to claim that the majority of Jews in Germany are left-wing. But they’re not all conservative either. Here, as everywhere, the Jewish community is endlessly diverse. The Central Council doesn’t represent this heterogenous community — it only represents the Jews that the state wants to hear from.