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Statement by Ramsis Kilani

The appeal against Ramsis Kilani’s expulsion from Die Linke has been postponed. Here is his personal statement


15/10/2025

The decision of Die Linke’s Federal Arbitration Commission in the appeal proceedings against my expulsion from the party by the Berlin State Arbitration Commission has been postponed until the end of November 2025.

The reason for the delay in the decision was a document submitted at short notice the day before today’s hearing by Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan, who had requested my exclusion.

Here is my statement:

Die Linke is postponing the decision at a time when an effective, loud, and internationalist Left is urgently needed. 

Even if the current ceasefire offers the population of Gaza a sigh of relief, Trump’s 20-point plan cannot resolve the root causes of violence in Palestine. Occupation, settlement expansion, apartheid, and oppression continue, as does German support for them. Die Linke will have to continue to confront this reality.

The last-minute introduction of a document containing further allegations into my appeal proceedings, which were supposed to concern my right to fair and statutory treatment, has shifted the focus of the matter under discussion.

Voices in solidarity with Palestine

Although the Federal Arbitration Commission made it clear at the beginning of the hearing that this document could not serve as the basis for the negotiations, I was repeatedly questioned about the new allegations.

In contrast, my response to the reasons for exclusion given by the Berlin State Arbitration Commission, which I objected to, played a subordinate role.

This confirms my impression from the proceedings so far that Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan, as members of the reformist wing, will use any means to silence voices of solidarity with Palestine.

First response to new allegations

I will comment in detail on the allegations made, but I’ll say this upfront: Unlike the Berlin State Arbitration Commission, which explicitly did not accuse me of antisemitism, Schubert and Schirdewan are once again attempting to imply that I am antisemitic. I categorically reject this.

Schubert and Schirdewan deny me any solidarity within the party. This is particularly absurd because Katina Schubert had already denied me any solidarity within the party before the trial and attacked me in the press.

Furthermore, Schubert and Schirdewan accuse me of not advocating peaceful conflict resolution and non-violence. This, too, is beyond misleading. Of course, as a socialist, I strive for non-violent conditions in every respect. At the same time, as a leftist, I have a responsibility to identify the structural violence and conditions of oppression that underlie the events of October 7 and the genocide in Gaza. In doing so, I do not fall short of international law, which, in a context of violent occupation and oppression, grants the oppressed the right to resist. This applies to the Palestinians as well as to the Kurds and other oppressed people, even if they do not share my socialist principles. 

The fact that Katina Schubert herself does not stand firmly on the ground of complete non-violence and—in contradiction to the party line—supports arms deliveries to Ukraine, demonstrates the double standards of those who support my expulsion.

Equal rights for all

The real issue is the debate about whether it is possible in a pluralist left-wing party to advocate for a democratic one-state solution that enables equal rights for Jewish and Palestinian people. This is important because I am by no means the only one in the party who shares this position.

I am overwhelmed by the solidarity from broad sections of the party. The demonstration we organized together on September 27 was a milestone in making active solidarity with the Palestinians visible in Germany and exposing the federal government’s unwavering support for the genocide. Ines Schwerdtner’s recognition of the genocide played an important role in this. Let us continue to stand together in solidarity with Palestine.

Berlin, October 11, 2025

This statement originally appeared in German on the Sozialismus von Unten website

Red Flag: A haunted house in support of genocide

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin reports from the Nova festival exhibition at the former Tempelhof Airport.


Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC licensing, Oleg Yunakov, Nova Festival Exhibit in New York City

It takes a long time to enter the exhibition at the former Tempelhof Airport, even though it’s quite empty just two days after opening. The square in front of the huge Nazi building is fenced off. You have to pass by police officers, security guards, and Hebrew-speaking men in trench coats. Online tickets and photo IDs must be checked before a meticulous screening with a metal detector.

And you still haven’t made it into “Oct 7 06:29am, The Moment the Music Stood Still, The Nova Music Festival Exhibition.” That is the full name of the traveling show that Berlin mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) brought to Berlin for 1.4 million euros. Before entering, you have to watch a five-minute film about the dance festival near the Gaza border, with young people recounting their euphoria. As the sun rises on October 7, the DJ suddenly turns off the music and shouts “Red alarm!”

Only then do you pass through a black curtain into a cavernous, darkened hall full of party lights—the atmosphere is less like a memorial and more like “the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World,” in the words of Emily Colucci.

A neon sign saying “Restaurant” is barely visible—this was once an airport. But now the space is full of objects that were left behind when fighters from Hamas and other Palestinian groups attacked the festival: tents, Christmas lights, clothing, burned-out cars, and sand on the ground. During the attack, 378 Israelis were killed, including 344 civilians, and 44 were taken prisoner.

Among the curated debris, screens show gruesome scenes captured in shaky cell phone videos. In the darkness—didn’t this all happen in the morning?—there is a cacophony, with people screaming over the techno hit “Glue” by Bicep. Some people were mowed down while cowering in bunkers. How many of them were killed by the Israeli army has not been established, as the Netanyahu government continues to block any independent investigation.

Many of these video and audio clips are well known from traditional and online media. A bulldozer tears down a barbed wire fence as people cheer. Who built this fence, and for what purpose? Who was trapped here? The exhibition not only ignores the context, but actively hides it.

A map shows where dead bodies were found, but a region marked in red on the map has no name. An introductory text refers to the armed fighters as “angels of death,” but there is no attempt to explain what they were fighting and murdering for. As the author Naomi Klein put it, the exhibition, which has already been in several Israeli and U.S. cities, tells a “simple fable of good and evil.” Immersive techniques help visitors slip into the role of victims. As Colucci put it, it’s a “macabre nightmare version of an Instagram museum.”

For Klein, this form of commemoration, which aims to overwhelm rather than provoke reflection, cannot be separated from Israeli politics. Shoes from the Nova festival are laid out on a table—a clear callback to the Auschwitz memorial cannot be missed. If the massacre were indeed a repeat of the Holocaust, then absolutely any reaction would be justified. But was it?

Klein proposes a completely different analogy: “History is crowded with chapters in which Indigenous peoples, starved and immiserated by colonial oppressions, finally rebel, with those rebellions at times including atrocities.”

The attack of October 7 could be compared to the uprising by the Herero in German South-West Africa in 1904, which began when Herero fighters massacred more than 100 German settlers, including women and children. The German government used this to justify the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples. Any attempt to commemorate these settlers or the German soldiers without mentioning the context, as a politician from the far-right AfD did in Swakopmund, would look suspiciously like genocide denial. 

In an interview in the magazine The Diasporist, Ben Ratskoff, professor of critical theory in Los Angeles, drew attention to a particular difficulty in a German context: “non-Jewish Germans—the beneficiaries of Nazism and the Holocaust—can, through experiencing the exhibition, in fact imagine themselves as a Jewish victim.”

Two politicians from the CDU’s far-right fringe, Wegner and Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer, were present at the opening. Their party was built by Nazi war criminals like Hans Globke. With the help of technology, even they can slip into the role of victims. Thus, responsibility for Antisemitism no longer lies with the Nazi billionaires who fill the CDU’s coffers, but rather with foreign barbarians. Even the Nazi airport can thus be symbolically whitewashed.

The exhibition could have stopped on the afternoon of October 7. But it becomes grotesque when it shows the survivors getting sports therapy and benefit concerts. 

We see the effects of the attack on them—were there no other effects worth mentioning? The Nova festival has been used to justify countless Israeli war crimes, including killing at least 70,000 Palestinians and wounding hundreds of thousands more.

As is always the case with Germany’s Staatsräson, empathy is only offered for certain lives. A wall, stretching for dozens of meters, shows the faces of 378 dead Israelis. How long would a wall need to be to show the faces of over 1,000 Palestinian babies under one year old who have been murdered? How long would a wall for all the victims of the genocide have to be?

The state plans no exhibitions to commemorate Palestinians who have been killed. Quite the opposite: on the day the exhibition opened, Wegner’s police were beating up pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The heavily armed men in black uniforms, brutally assaulting young people, seem almost like “angels of death.” But everything has a political context.

This text was first published in German in nd. It was translated by the author, who made numerous small additions. Nathaniel is currently among the freelancers on strike at The Berliner magazine due to management’s decisions to run ads for the Nova festival exhibition.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

16 October 1968: Tommie Smith and John Carlos celebrate Olympic victory with a Black Power salute

This week in working class history


The 1968 Olympics were always going to be political. The US war in Vietnam was intensifying, and the world was still reeling from the aftermath of the student riots and general strike in France—as well as uprisings in Prague. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, giving new strength to an increasingly militant movement against racism in the US. Then, ten days before the opening ceremony, Mexican security forces massacred hundreds of protesters in Tlatelolco Square.

Before the Olympics, the Olympic Project for Human Rights—a group of Black athletes—called for a boycott unless its four demands were met: remove white supremacist Avery Brundage as head of the International Olympic Committee, hire more Black coaches, expel South Africa and Rhodesia from the Games, and restore Muhammad Ali’s heavyweight boxing title (stripped after he refused to fight in Vietnam).

The boycott didn’t gain much traction, but Black athletes were not going to be silent. On 16 October, the second day of the Games, Tommie Smith won gold in the 200 metres, while John Carlos took bronze. Before stepping onto the winner’s podium, Smith and Carlos each wore one black glove. As the Star-Spangled Banner played, they raised their fists in a Black Power salute. They wore no shoes to symbolise Black poverty, and beads and scarves to protest lynching.

The press was outraged. The Los Angeles Times accused Smith and Carlos of making a “Nazi-like salute.” The Chicago Tribune called it “an act contemptuous of the United States” and “an insult to their countrymen.” Brundage—who had approved the Nazi salute at the 1936 Berlin Olympics—ordered both athletes to be expelled from the Olympic Village. They were ostracised, forced to leave Mexico, and pursued by the FBI.

By taking a stand, Smith and Carlos became heroes to millions of downtrodden Black US-Americans. But racism persists—inside and outside sport. As Carlos later reflected, Black athletes “thought that winning medals would supersede or protect them from racism. But even if you won a medal, it ain’t going to save your momma. It ain’t going to save your sister or children. It might give you 15 minutes of fame, but what about the rest of your life?” Their struggle continues.

Help Haneen Koraz Empower Voices Through Art

Fundraiser for @animator_haneen’s animation workshops for children and women in Gaza


“The last scene stuck.” On the 7th of October, Saturday, we were all preparing to film the final scene of an animated film dealing with the issues of girls with hearing disabilities during the workshop. Meet Haneen Muhammad Koraz, Trainer and maker of stop motion cartoon films. She has worked in the field of visual arts since 2012 at the Theater Days Foundation. She participated in many local and international festivals and won many artistic awards for producing cartoon films with different topics. She won third place in the Partners Short Film Competition for producing a film for the Gaza Municipality and third place in the One Minute Film Competition with the Sawa Foundation. She participated in the International Animated Cinema Festival, In Kairouan – Tunisia. She recently received the Al-Taawoun Award for Excellence in the Cultural Sector 2022, “One Day We Will Be,” for producing “Studio Without Voices” for making cartoon films. In addition, she received grants for projects and initiatives from institutions inside and outside Palestine that support the idea of ​​making hand-made cartoon films.

From Haneen- I deeply believe that every person has the right to express himself freely, and that art, making and learning cartoon films is one of the means of free expression, audio-visually, for all segments of society. I tried to change the reality, even if just a little, for the children and women in the tents I have conducted workshops specifically for children. Children and women draw, color, discuss, play, learn using the photography program, photograph scenes, write stories that express their suffering and reality, draw cartoon characters, and record their voices on film. They have created many cartoon films. There is a film called “Queens” that talks about the suffering of children in the tent, how they live, and how they overcome the problems of water and fire, bringing firewood and bread, and not playing. The women made a film called “Red Autumn,” which talks about how the women left their homes, belongings, and rooms and migrated to other regions for fear of war, and how they lost their valuables and memories during the period of displacement.

I am Belal Koraz, the brother of Haneen. I currently live in Virginia, USA. I created this fundraiser as a way to try to get help to Haneen so she can continue her work that is so important at a time like this.

To ease the minds of any persons wanting to donate, once we receive the donations, I will wire transfer from my bank directly to my sister in Gaza. Thank you for your support at such a heartbreaking time.

You can donate to the fundraiser for Haneen here. There will be an exhibition including several of Haneen’s works in bUm on Tuesday, 21st October, 2025.

Decentralised, democratic, but disciplined – politics in 3D

As the English Left struggles to reproduce itself, positive regionalism should play a part in what comes next


14/10/2025

Two weeks after the huge far-right mobilisation in London, UKIP leader Nick Tenconi and a ragtag group of about 200 people who like to wear flags, carry crosses, and shout at hotels, hit the streets of Newcastle. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, was a no-show, presumably in court or on a sun lounger in the Med.

Around 3,000 counter-protesters gathered in the city, split between a 400-strong group blocking the far-right on the quayside and the majority rallying at Grey’s Monument.

As I listened to the speeches from community and faith leaders, local politicians and trade unionists, I looked around the sea of placards and flags. The messages of resistance had a distinctly regional flavour –‘Racism? Nah, you’re alreet pet.’ ‘Geordies are black and white. No shouty daft lad from Luton will convince me otherwise.’ ‘Haddaway and shite, fascists.’

One of the speakers was met with a cheer after saying, ‘I’ve never felt safe to proclaim I’m a Mackem in Newcastle city centre until today.’ A historic rivalry dating back to the English Civil War, when Newcastle and Sunderland were on opposing sides, was temporarily set aside and subsumed into a broader regional identity. There were groups from Scotland and Yorkshire all mingling under the numerous Northumbrian flags. Geordies, Mackems and Smoggies (Teessiders) with roots in Mumbai, Dhaka, Guangzhou, Lagos and Ramallah were all gathered in a shared sense of northern civic pride. There were no membership-tests based on skin colour or length of stay. Whether you’d just arrived or had generations of North East heritage, it didn’t matter – if you were here, you were one of us.

This was not just a demonstration against toxic English nationalism; it was a beautiful expression of inclusive regionalism.

The defiant atmosphere reached its peak when a section of the counter-demonstrators rallied outside a hotel housing some recently arrived Geordies from foreign shores. We blocked the far-right from gathering there and eventually sent them back down towards the quayside with their tails between their legs. With police lines drawn, cheeky chants of ‘your English flags are made in China’ rang out across the streets. The mood was jubilant and celebratory; we felt united.

Victory that Saturday afternoon was not always guaranteed, though. A lot had changed since the racist riots and huge counter-demonstrations of summer 2024. Reform had stormed the local elections in the North East, taking control of Durham County Council and making considerable gains in Northumberland. The racists had momentum, emboldened and validated by the Labour Prime Minister’s ‘island of strangers’ speech. Nationally, the rhetoric had ramped up from stopping the boats to mass deportations, with London witnessing the largest far-right rally in history. Just two weeks after that, the good people of the North East stood up and were counted, at a moment that felt significant.

But even as the crowds were dispersing, the recriminations on the Left kicked in. During the build-up, there had been some tension between the various anti-racist groups organising the counter demonstration. On the day, it was clear that some wanted a mass mobilisation to block the far-right at the quayside, while others wanted to keep the rally focused at the Monument. In the end, the crowd split and was spread across two locations. Huge credit to those 400 on the quayside who stood firm, blocking the racists’ route through the city centre. These counter demonstrators were subjected to kettling, with reports of aggressive and violent policing. Ultimately, the result was a victory, but the process was messy and fractious.

Splits on the left are sadly nothing new, with the recent high-profile spats at the top of ‘Your Party’ offering plenty of ammunition to our opponents, whilst draining enthusiasm from our supporters. There is no doubt the process of forming a new socialist party will be messy and fractious; the big question is whether it will ultimately result in victory.

Whilst I don’t want to relitigate the issues surrounding the numerous botched launches of ‘Your Party’, I would say that first impressions count. Those calling the shots have failed to give a positive and reassuring first impression of the project. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will ultimately fail, but it does mean the project will have to work twice as hard to gain the trust of activists and the wider public.

Thankfully, things between Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, and their respective teams have de-escalated from threats of legal action. Pursuing that route would have precipitated their mutual destruction in the court of public opinion and strangled the party at birth. Crisis temporarily avoided.

The major challenge will be stewarding the movement into a mass membership party with structures and governance that enable truly democratic decision-making. What emerges must be capable of holding together a broad coalition of ideas and traditions, whilst forging a new form of participatory politics that is not controlled from the centre. It must be decentralised, democratic, but disciplined – politics in 3D, if you will.

When I helped set up Majority in 2024 alongside former North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll and other highly experienced activists, this is the approach we took. Not aiming to control all activity centrally but to support self-organising groups, people’s assemblies and innovative campaigning. Underpinning this with a code of conduct that mirrors the Nolan principles in public life but can be summed up as ‘play nice and don’t be a dick’. The culture is more important than the rulebook, or to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, we must stop ‘dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.’

Our aim is to get more good people into progressive politics and rebuild trust in our democracy. Because the challenge for the English Left is not limited to promoting our policies and capabilities, we must also convince the public that democracy is worth saving. If we don’t, we are building our house on sand.

Outside of ‘Your Party’, there have been some interesting developments on the Left of British politics. We have a resurgent Green Party with over 100,000 members, and in Zack Polanski, they have a popular leader who performs well in the media. We also have Andy Burnham, the only English politician with a net positive approval rating, testing the waters for a Labour leadership bid. Interestingly, neither are MPs, but rather regional politicians – one is a London Assembly Member and the other a Metro Mayor.

In the case of Metro Mayors, English devolution has delivered us a new type of elected representative with significant budgets and executive powers, one that is crucially beyond the reach of parliamentary party whips. Existing regional identities can now be expressed in a form of regional politics capable of flexing its muscles and facing down Westminster, as Burnham did during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Both Polanski and Burnham have made public ownership a key plank of their political pitches, going much further than Labour in this area. This agenda provides us with a chance to innovate – to plan and manage our public services in a 21st-century context.

Imagine if we did take back control of our water, not as a centrally administered 70s-style nationalised industry, but as a regionally managed public resource. Imagine regional water boards with local politicians, trade unionists, billpayer representatives and environmental groups, all working together as public stewards of our most vital resource. Don’t like the way your regional water board is managing things? Organise and vote them out via a democratic process in a local election, via your trade union, billpayers or environmental group. Sure, it won’t be perfect, but it will be a damn sight easier than getting rid of a private CEO.

It’s not quite Lenin’s ‘every cook should learn to govern’, but with more routes to democratic participation at a local and regional level, we could rebuild our collective civic muscles. When participation is built around a strong regional identity, backed by political structures that actually respond, taking back control becomes more than just a slogan. Or as the Geordies might say, ‘late-stage capitalism. Nah, you’re alreet pet.’

Editor’s note: To learn more about Hugo’s work at Majority, visit their website here.