Palestinian-American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat writes in a brilliant article that what is happening in the US against the Palestine solidarity movement is nothing more than the boomerang effect described by Aimé Césaire in his 1950 Discourse on Colonialism. The same thing she is arguing for can be applied to Europe, especially Germany. The violence of the European colony that is Israel comes back to Europe with all its discrimination and violence against the Palestinian people and its allies. And just as Germans mostly ignore and/or justify it there, they will ignore and/or justify it here as long as it is exercised against non-white bodies, as long as it does not touch them, while their government oversteps all democratic boundaries.

For decades, the German state and the German establishment have been repressing the Palestine solidarity movement. This has ranged from the firing of voices critical of Israel in the public media, to the banning of demonstrations such as the 75th anniversary of the Nakba in Berlin in May 2023, to unjustified arrests. Since October 2023, this has increased in all areas of public and social life and has reached worrying levels.

Demonstrations, associations, classes and educational events, as well as cultural and social centres, have been closed and banned over the past year. People have been fired for calling for a boycott of Zionist products, even the Mera25 candidate for the general elections, Melanie Schweizer, a former federal ministry employee, has been fired from her job for speaking out about the German state’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine. Conferences, lectures, plays and exhibitions have been cancelled. The use of any language other than German and English at demonstrations has been banned. Slogans and symbols have been criminalised. Thousands of people have been arrested at demonstrations and rallies. In Berlin alone, there are more than 4,000 cases waiting to be heard in court. Police have raided the homes of activists and later banned them from taking part in demonstrations or meetings. Activists have been doxed in reports in the public and private media. Excessive police forces are at demonstrations a common sight. They attack demonstrators, especially in Berlin, using things like non-reglamentary gloves, pepper spray, dogs and sometimes snipers on rooftops. People who survived the genocide in Gaza and managed to come here are being quickly deported. People who are not from the EU and people who are from the EU are getting letters from the immigration ministry. These letters tell them that they are being watched and that they might be sent back to their own country. Well-known activists such as Ghassan Abu Sitta, Yanis Varoufakis and Ali Abunimah have been banned from entering the country. Even the UN rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, has had problems carrying out her work in the country.

This has been done by the government and the leaders of some German federal states, who are moderate and right-wing. They have adopted the main ideas and rhetoric of the most rancid German nationalism. This is paving the way for the far-right. These measures, which are against freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought and academic freedom, many of which are against the country’s laws, are being justified by their Staatsräson, i.e. the staunch defence of Israel, and their supposed fight against antisemitism.Their reason of state has allowed the establishment and a section of the German population to finally be able to express ultra-nationalist sentiments, which were repressed after the Second World War, on the streets and on the internet. 

The link made between Israel and a unified Germany has allowed racist language to be used freely. It has led to people being defined as to whether they are the ‘real’ Germans, mainly white people, aka ‘bio-deutsche’. Those who are not fully German by blood but only by passport are seen as less German. Not only are mass deportations of migrants being planned, but also the withdrawal of German citizenship from dual citizens. They specifically mention that citizenship will be withdrawn from extremists and antisemites, i.e. anyone who criticises the capitalist status quo from the left or anyone who supports Palestine, while there is not a single mention of the extreme right. In this German way of thinking, there are clearly first and second class German citizens. This is very worrying because many of these second class Germans have been living in this country for generations, but if they do not support another state (Israel), they do not deserve to continue being German.

People who have been paying attention to what is happening in Germany should be worried about what is coming, as it is eerily similar to the worst of the last century: A country in full economic and moral crisis, longing for good times of the past. A State becoming more openly racist, accusing migrants of all its problems, excluding them from society, prosecuting and expelling them, taking away their nationality and sometimes even killing them or letting them be killed. A government that is increasingly warmongering and wants to turn its factories into arms factories. A country with a growing extreme right that has dragged all public discourse to extreme and dangerous positions. A large part of society and most of the state have taken off their mask of moderates and anti-racists, and are increasingly revanchist and punitivist against anyone who does not share what they consider to be their idea and reason of state.

One need only take a look at the reaction of all sorts of people, even from the so-called left, to the videos of police brutality in Berlin at this year’s Women’s Day demonstration. For example, the antisemitism commissioner of Brandenburg, Andreas Büttner, who belongs to the left-wing party Die Linke, justifying the beatings because the demonstrators did not follow the rules (like the aforementioned no marching, no Arabic, no slogans, etc…), i.e. the police can and, for some, should send people to hospital for demonstrating and saying “From the river to the sea” or “Intifada”.

After an election in which the hatred of minorities, which has found its highest expression since the antisemitism of the past, has been rewarded. The winner, Merz of the CDU, has made some of the most blatantly xenophobic speeches, especially against the Arab population, outside of the far-right Alternative for Germany, the second largest force. One can only expect that this picture will only get worse if society, which claims to oppose all this authoritarianism, does not react.

For make no mistake, the German state is fully aware of what it is doing. It is testing the anti-democratic limits of how far it can go before its population objects, and its population is for the most part insultingly inactive.  We are living the metaphor of the frog being slowly boiled alive, unnoticed, until it is too late to jump out of the pot and the atmosphere is too hot.

To this end, through its speeches and media, it is trying to keep its bio-German population in line by keeping the trauma of 7 October alive. Leading politicians continue to talk about mass rapes and dead babies, while ignoring the now official statements of former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who claimed that Israel preferred to kill its compatriots according to the Hannibal doctrine rather than let them be kidnapped so as not to have to negotiate the exchange of hostages. 

In Germany, from primary school onwards, it is taught that Israel’s existence is linked to that of Germany because of its responsibility for the extermination of the Jewish people in Europe in the last century. In fact, almost every city in Israel has one or more villages, towns or neighbourhoods twinnedwith Germany. So 7 October, which they keep comparing to the Holocaust, is also their trauma. Like the Holocaust (which is treated in Germany as something unique and unrepeatable, not as the second genocide committed by their country in the same century, after that of the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia, and in which other peoples were also exterminated, including the Sinti and Roma, who are still ignored to this day), 7 October is completely decontextualised. In the news and in official statements, the attack on Israel came out of nowhere and was carried out by Islamist barbarians who, out of pure anti-Semitism, want to do away with what Hitler could not. So anything is justified to wipe out these “new Nazis” and their families.

While ceremonies are held as if the hostages and dead of 7 October were their hostages and dead. The victims of that day with dual German/Israeli citizenship are constantly talked about, while the Palestinian/German victims, whom the Foreign Ministry has not even mentioned after 16 months of genocide, are again ignored. Even in death, there are second-class German citizens.

This transfer of the trauma of the 7 October attack to the German population is being fed by over-exposing them to biased information about attacks in recent months committed by non-Bio-Germans, and by reporting on possible and worse jihadist attacks that could happen in this country, while ignoring those committed by right-wing Bio-Germans. Meanwhile, they ignore the danger from their own violent right-wing extremists, who are already organising and rearming, and who are part of their defence and security forces of the state and the police. This fear of an attack by the “other”, both in their proxy state of Israel and within their borders, leads to an irrational fear and total dehumanisation of millions of people, especially Arabs, both in the Middle East and in Germany.

Racist statements, which a few years ago would have caused at least some discontent in German society, are now mainstream. In the German parliament one hears statements from supposedly moderate politicians and politicians talking about the ‘poison of Islam’ that is contaminating Europe. These unchallenged statements are generalised to all Arabs and lead to racist and violent actions by the police, arbitrary arrests, loss of work and residence rights and finally the expulsion of people whose only crime is to defend the rights of the Palestinian people.

This disenfranchisement of a section of its population is largely ignored and/or encouraged by the white German population, while its government takes note of how far it can go. This divide and rule means that in the recent demonstrations against fascism and in the demonstrations called by the trade unions against the state cuts, the demonstrators and organisers excluded and barred from their demonstrations the pro-Palestinian bloc, which tried to point out that state fascism has already arrived for a part of the German population without Alternative for Germany being in power, and that part of the money from the cuts is being used to send arms to Israel and to arm to the teeth an increased German riot police.

Gradually, this loss of rights and freedoms will be experienced by a larger part of the population, as the leader of the party with the most votes in these elections, Merz (CDU), has already taken his first steps towards a more generalised authoritarianism, calling for a review of the status and funding of NGOs that have been critical of his party’s move towards more reactionary policies in recent months. Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry of the outgoing ‘moderate’ government has launched a website where citizens can anonymously report people who believe in conspiracy theories. The presentation of this snitching system explicitly mentions the denunciation of antisemitic theories, which in this country does not refer to the theories propagated by the extreme right that advocate the extermination of the Jewish people, but to anything related to the movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people and against the occupation, genocide and apartheid they are suffering.

In December 2023 in the COP28, the Colombian president Gustavo Petro stated that ‘What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future’. With this, Petro warns of the export of the violence exercised against the Palestinian population to any population in the global south that flees the consequences of the climate crisis caused by the West. He also warned that ‘Hitler is knocking on Europe’s door’. And the fact is that what we are seeing in Germany is a rehearsal for a revival of a play from the last century, a rehearsal of that same colonialist violence brought home that can lead once again to the expulsion, dispossession and murder of the so-called ‘other’. What we are seeing is fascism spreading through the ruins of the German rule of law.

I attended a small public event organized by fellow Jews and allies, where we gathered to publicly grieve, reflect on, and learn about the ways we have been harmed by Zionism. A speech was given, names of Palestinians murdered in the ongoing genocide were read as people lay on the ground holding flowers. Suddenly, the police swarmed in on a person holding a sign that said “from the river we do see nothing like equality”. The police wanted to detain them to “check over” the sign. They refused, stating that it did not violate any laws, including the Berlin government’s ban on the statement “from the river to the sea“. Nonetheless, a number of armed officers grabbed them and violently arrested them as they stood peacefully with a sign advocating for justice. 

They were charged with Volksverhetzung – one of the main German hate speech laws which criminalizes inciting hatred, and as there is no formal antisemitism law yet, this often implies inciting so called antisemitic hatred. Although this charge was later dropped in the post a few weeks later, the damage was irreversible. During the police attack on the peaceful sign holder, people stood up to verbally defend the protester, but one person made the mistake of calling a police officer an asshole. This man was violently arrested and charged with Beleidigung – a law that criminalizes insulting individuals or groups, punishable with jail time even. Yes, you read that correctly, insulting someone is a criminal offense in modern Germany. Shortly after, a young Palestinian person was also arrested and charged with Beleidigung for apparently insulting an officer in Arabic. He denies this charge completely. 

Since October of 2023, I noticed these two laws seem to offer frequent justification for many other arbitrary and excessively violent arrests of activists in Germany standing against genocide and oppression in Palestine. In March 2024, an activist was charged with Volksverhetzung for wearing a jacket that said “from the river to the sea”. Under Volksverhetzung, he also had a t-shirt confiscated (it was returned after 5 months with dropped charges). Beleidigung was also the pretext used against Udi Raz as grounds to justify a recent arrest; police laughed at her kippah, so she pointed out that this was antisemitic. This was considered an insult to German Polizei, thus a potential criminal offense. These are just a few of the more publicized cases, but these are by no means the exception. 

Although certain German judges have thrown out some of these charges, the brutality and oppression facing those who are in solidarity with Palestine is only getting more severe. For at least the second time in the span of a year, German police forbade all languages other than English and German at a public demonstration on the grounds that they need to check speech for Volksverhetzung (the first case I know of happened here in April, 2024 where people were forbidden to pray in Arabic during Ramadan at a legal protest camp for the same reason). As if this was only testing the waters, the German state is currently ramping up to possibly alter Volksverhetzung law to expand police power and criminalize speech further. While it wasn’t so surprising that the Beleidigung law could be used for such repressive purposes, it was only through a thorough excavation of the histories of both of these laws that I began to understand how German forces could hijack Volksverhetzung, a law seemingly created to fight discrimination and protect human rights, to become a key tool in state violence against vulnerable populations. Through this understanding, it became clear that German police employ both of these laws with their original intentions: persecution, oppression, and maintenance of domination hierarchies. Let’s take a wild ride down into the wacky worlds of German hate speech and insult law.

The modern German Volksverhetzung law, known as Article §130, is rooted in Prussia’s 1794 law code, the Allgemeines Landrecht, which banned expressions of incitement against the kingdom and against certain religious groups, along with speech that dishonored individuals, thereby also serving as the root of Beleidigung legislation (Goldberg 483). It was then written into Prussian law in 1851 as Article 100 after the 1848-49 uprisings to suppress radical leftists and maintain the power of the monarchy. The law penalized “‘whoever endangered the public peace by inciting [anreizen] hatred or contempt of members of the state against each other’ … with either a fine of twenty to two hundred Thaler or a sentence of one month to two years in prison” (Goldberg 483). The article ended up being used for “arbitrary, unjust, politically motivated prosecutions and the widespread muzzling of critical debate on public matters”(Goldberg 487). Echoing modern times, Prussian Interior Minister Otto Theodor von Manteuffel stated that this law embodied a battle between “defenders of law and order and the protectors of civilization versus terrorism.”  Article 100 was reformed into Article 130 in 1871 to apparently focus the law on punishing actual violence rather than arbitrary Feindlichkeit, or hostility (Goldberg 487). Despite the so-called reform, it seemed as though matters only got worse: “Article 130 was used to repress class, ethnic, national, and political differences. Indeed, that law became so identified with government campaigns against organized labor and Social Democrats that it came to be known as the Klassenkampfparagraph” (Goldberg 481) This is the same Article 130 which governs Volksverhetzung today, albeit with some updated wording. It should be noted that shortly after creating Article 130, the government expanded the law to persecute Catholics (Goldberg 487). Amendment 130a was created to silence Catholic critics of the Protestant state during the Kulturkampf (Recall that Hitler also had some problems with the Catholics).  

Unfortunately, Volksverhetzung only became more repressive as time went on. As Germany tried to “Germanize” the Poles in East Prussia, German police, prosecutors and judges used these hate speech laws to suppress Polish nationalism (Goldberg 489). Scholar Ann Goldberg recalls an outcry in 1906 by the Polish community because “popular songs, poems, picture postcards, and other visual images ranging across Polish life”  had been banned and criminalized under Volksverhetzung (Goldberg 490). This is hauntingly similar to the use of Volksverhetzung today if you replace the word Polish with Palestinian. Palestinian slogans, images, posters, protests, speeches, flags, t-shirts, instagram posts and even the traditional keffiyeh have been criminalized. 

Amir Ali, a Palestinian who who resides in Munich, told Al Jazeera in October of 2023: 

“I was even forbidden to walk inside the city for 24 hours because I was wearing a keffiyeh. There’s a crackdown on all pro-Palestinian voices across Germany, and in my opinion, they don’t want anybody to speak up about the crimes against humanity being committed by the Israeli state.” 

Scholar Ann Goldberg continues on Polish persecution under Volksverhetzung: “What rankled was not only the repression but also the biases of the authorities and the blatant partiality with which justice was meted out, sparing German racist hate speech against Poles, even when it outrightly called for violence” (Goldberg 490). This has a haunting resonance today. Take for example, cases of “from the river to the sea”; as previously established, Palestinians and those in solidarity are attacked and arrested by the police and charged with Volksverhetzung when they even hint at the phrase in regards to liberation of Palestine, but when the line is used favor of Israeli genocide and illegal annexation of Palestine, they are protected (watch this video here). And we must of course remember that the German state itself calls for, justifies, and funds the ongoing genocide in Gaza while using Article 130 to silence those who speak out. 

Although Volksverhetzung law was originally designed to repress minority groups and leftists, in the 1890s, a grassroots Jewish advocacy and defense organization, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, attempted to repurpose the law to help protect Jews from anti-Jewish hate speech (Goldberg 483). Their attempts had some scraps of legal success, but ultimately failed, in part due to widespread anti-Jewish racism within the courts (Goldberg 494). Even at the time, some Jews were skeptical of repurposing the law to fight anti-Jewish racism, and others were openly against it (Rohrßen 149). The German left generally agreed with the latter group, and sought to abolish these laws as they saw them as a threat to basic democratic principles (Goldberg 494). 

With the installation of the Third Reich, there was no hope of repurposing the law to fight for protection of vulnerable groups. Furthermore, the Nazis understood the original purpose of the law and attempted to make it even more repressive. While they never officially ratified a new version of the law, a suggested version put forth in 1933 was highly influential in how the law was to be interpreted and later re-written (Rohrßen 125). This suggestion gives us an invaluable glimpse into the fascist reinterpretation of Volksverhetzung, which still has echoes today. A Nazi jurist suggested updating the wording to focus on protecting the “peace of the people” from public discussion, printed matter or other writings which included “inflammatory” words on state affairs (Rohrßen 126). It should be understood that to Nazi Germany, and perhaps the modern German state, “people” are defined as Aryan Germans (just as, for example, America defined “all men created equal” as wealthy landowning white christian males). And we know that Hitler sent legal scholars to the US to study American apartheid and Jim Crow laws (Teter 216-217). Echoing article 130a (recall it had been used to persecute Catholics), it would be considered “especially serious” if civil servants and religious officials committed these crimes. For all “especially serious” violations of this law, deprivation of citizenship would be one possible consequence (Rohrßen 127).

This ideology is still prevalent today, although now under the guise of the war against antisemitism. Felix Klein, Federal anti-antisemitism Commissioner, while making a sweeping condemnation of many Muslims, was in favor of  denial of citizenship for those who inflamed the German state through critique on Israeli war crimes and genocide.  The state of Saxony-Anhalt was the first German state to require a commitment to “Israel’s right to exist” as a prerequisite for citizenship, and indeed the whole country followed suit in June 2024, requiring all applicants for citizenship to commit whole-heartedly to Israel. Invoking its namesake of upholding a [white] Christian Democracy, the CDU proposed to cut “humanitarian protection” for non-German nationals (ie deportation) and a revoking of citizenship for German dual citizens if they receive a prison sentence of one year for “crimes with anti-semitic motives.” As previously established, these “antisemitic” crimes are often prosecuted under Volksverhetzung and most often applied to racialized, peaceful protestors, Jews included (refer to my article for more cases). What’s more, the German Left: Social Democrats, the Greens and Free Democrats – also hope that “antisemitic attitudes or actions”  will rule out naturalization. As antisemitism has been redefined to mean Palestinian people, Muslims, leftist Jews and critics of state violence and genocide, one must wonder how far we have come from Germany’s darkest years. As we keep exploring the history of this law, we must realize with heavy hearts, we have not come very far at all.

The Volksverhetzung law did not change much in the postwar years. Actually, in some ways, it remained exactly the same: “Although Section 130 of the German Criminal Code was subject to significant fluctuations in its interpretation, its wording had remained unchanged since the creation of the Reich Criminal Code and the provision was therefore not affected by the denazification efforts”. (Rohrßen 151)  Once again, some considered abolishing the law. However, after the Holocaust,  “anti-antisemitism and the Jewish cause became synonymous with democracy” (Goldberg 495) and West Germany was having trouble with its image as a post-Nazi democratic state. There were hundreds of widely reported anti-Jewish incidents, including vandalizations of cemeteries, carried out in West Germany between the end of 1959 until February 1960. West Germany needed a quick way to deal with its damaged image as a violent, racist state that failed to denazify. One quick fix was to sweep German dirt under the blue and white flag: to symbolically make amends to the Jewish people through funding the Israeli military. And another method was to attempt, at least on the surface, to protect human rights through repurposing Volksverhetzung. 

Given the precedent of Jewish activists attempting to use Article 130 to fight anti-Jewish racism, Germany nobly decided to repurpose the law to ‘protect’ Jews and other non-white and/or non-Christian populations; in 1960, Germany finally updated the 3rd Reich wording of the Volksverhetzung law. The Jewish community, however, had an important warning, which had been vocalized since the 1890s (Rohrßen 149). Jewish Germans advocated that the law be used to protect all vulnerable groups, not solely Jews. The fear was that isolating Jews as a separate and privileged group would “play into the hands of antisemites” (Goldberg 497). Jewish German leadership recommended the wording “parts of the population (Teile der Bevölkerung)” rather than specifying certain races or nationalities. Although the language remains non-specific, politicians have been racing to change that: alarmingly, new CDU Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently advertised that he will greatly expand police power and control through changing Volksverhetzung law to focus on “anti-semitic perpetrators” by further criminalizing anyone who questions Israel’s “right to exist.” Furthermore, aforementioned Felix Klein, Federal Anti-Antisemitism Commissioner, has also been fighting since at least August 2023 to change the language to be specific. Germany has also singled out the Jews as a “separate and privileged group” by creating the vast array of Antisemitism Commissioners who often employ this law. Recall that no other religious or racialized group has a single commissioner for their “protection,” and only a microscopic 0.33% of the German population is Jewish. The fact that Jews can also be persecuted for “antisemitism” through this Article 130 reveals Germany’s true intentions.

As we further investigate the language used to rewrite the law in 1960 and the way this language was interpreted we might be included to crinkle our noses at the ranking fishiness, a fragrance specific to German law.  The new version of Article 130 added language on penalizing attacks on “human dignity, or Menschenwürde (Goldberg 495).  Although Germany had developed refined definitions of human dignity in relation to modern notions of human rights, jurists chose to define dignity in terms of military doctrine and the old Prussian honor codes it referred to: “The result was some noticeable, and sometimes distressing, limitations on the reach of German hate-speech legislation. As a leading critic of the jurisprudence of § 130 would complain twenty-five years later, the habit of looking to military law, and more generally to old-style ideas of personal honor, rather than to the great ideals of the constitution, survived” (Whitman 1341). We will shortly return to a deep investigation of German honor, but suffice it to say that this old notion of militaristic honor had nothing to do with human rights but rather with maintaining social, racial, and class hierarchies through deadly violence, and was even a fundamental ideology of the Nazi regime. 

Although Article 130 eventually lost the wording on human dignity, “Hate-speech regulation was accordingly not construed to require a general climate that guaranteed minorities an equal sense of dignity; it was understood as something like a more “humane” and philosophical law of insult. This left little room for a law of hate speech that would address itself to the deeper structure of social relations-indeed, no room even for a law of hate speech that would require tavern-keepers to take down signs excluding Turks” (Whitman 1342). There was indeed a 1985 case where “no entry” signs against Turkish people were allowed under Volksverhetzung law. Apparently, if we want to further understand Volksverhetzung, we must explore the laws and philosophies which it orbits around: German insult law and German Honor. 

© Jason Oberman, all rights reserved, 2025

Works Cited:

• Goldberg, Ann. “Hate Speech and Identity Politics in Germany, 1848-1914.” Central European History, vol. 48, no. 4, 2015, pp. 480–97. JSTOR
• Rohrßen, Benedikt. “Von der „Anreizung zum Klassenkampf“ zur „volksverhetzung“ (§ 130 stgb).” Juristische Zeitgeschichte, vol. 34, 12 Dec. 2009, . 
• Teter, Magda. “Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism”. Princeton University Press, 2023
• Whitman, James Q. “Enforcing Civility and respect: Three societies.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 109, 2000, pp. 1279–1398

We will be publishing parts 2 and 3 of this article on theleftberlin.com soon