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Red Flag: Germany reintroducing conscription (really!)

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin wonders: what could go wrong?

Nathaniel Flakin
01/10/2025

When you see headlines about Germany reintroducing conscription, you’ll be forgiven for thinking of Hitler’s 1935 Law on Building up the Wehrmacht. But we are talking about a completely different law on a “new, attractive military service” passed by the cabinet on August 27, with a Bundestag debate scheduled for October 9.

The Federal Republic of Germany has Wehrdienst in the constitution. Back in 2011, it was paused indefinitely. Now, the government wants hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers—and not nearly that many people are volunteering.

Starting on January 1 of next year, the Bundeswehr will send a questionnaire to every 18-year-old about their interest in the army. Men will be required to fill it out, while for women it remains optional. By summer of the following year, men will be required to go to a physical.

The draft law would allow the government to conscript people by decree. This would not require a “state of defense”—it would be enough if the government decides that they want more soldiers than they can convince to volunteer (and gets approval from the Bundestag).

So while people say this isn’t compulsory military service, it actually is—it’s a soft launch for conscription, laying the foundations for compulsion in the near future.

Popularity

Germany’s massive rearmament program is very popular, at least for the moment. One survey from the summer showed 70% in favor of increased military spending, and 59% in favor of conscription.

Yet there are caveats: Among 18- to 29-year-olds, so the people who are supposed to fight, only 29% are in favor. Why not conscript boomers instead?

When asked if they would personally take up arms to defend Germany if it was under attack, only 16% said “definitely” and 22% said “maybe.” A large majority says they would probably or definitely avoid any fighting.

The decision to spend half a trillion euros on weapons is leading to austerity across the board. In the coming years, we will see cuts in education, health care, wages, and pensions—transportation costs are already going up. But many of these attacks have not popped up in household budgets.

So people are in favor of vaguely defined “defense” as long as they don’t think they have to make any personal sacrifices for it. As living standards decline, however, people will start to wonder how much money they want to put into the pockets of Rheinmetall shareholders. (Look at the car party factory in Wedding being converted to weapons production—there will be another demonstration on October 12).

A history professor once told me that demographics put us in “post-heroic age.” When people used to have six or eight or ten children, sure, they might be willing to relinquish one or two of them to the “holy fatherland.” But with just one or two kids? Maybe not.

Liberals

What bothers me most right now is not the imperialist warmongers, from the CDU to the Green Party—they are doing their jobs for the ruling class, after all. I am more upset by liberal and even lefty friends repeating a watered-down version of the militarist propaganda. This goes from Heidi Reichinnek of Die Linke affirming that of course “the Bundeswehr needs to be better equipped” to Berlin magazines accepting the premise that we might get attacked by Russia any day.

I would encourage people to think of any previous war from the imperialist epoch. At the time, they were always sold as “defense” — and in retrospect, everyone recognizes pointless slaughter in the interests of war profiteers. As the joke goes, a liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current one.

The imperialist powers are locked in escalating conflicts for zones of influence. Governments talk about “freedom” or “democracy” or whatever, but it’s all about whose corporations get to control disputed territories in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, etc. That was the basis of the 20th century’s wars—and it’s the basis of the coming wars as well.

The very politicians who say they want to “defend” our “freedom” are cutting funding for our schools and hospitals, and having us beaten up when we express disagreement. The capitalist state is only there to defend the capitalists.

I am willing to fight—but not for a state that serves Nazi billionaires. I am willing to fight for my class, which is international.

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.

Palestine: Why recognition comes too little, too late

On the costs of delayed and unsubstantial recognition

Remo

Western countries are finally recognizing Palestine as a state, but this overdue gesture falls short in two ways. It is too little, because Palestine has long met the criteria of statehood under international law. And it is too late, because decades of political hesitation—coupled with Israel’s relentless expansion of illegal settlements—have eroded the very possibility of a viable Palestinian state.

Too little: Palestine is already a state

International law has long provided the criteria for statehood. The Montevideo Convention of 1933 requires a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity for international relations. Palestine meets them all.

There is a permanent population of millions. There is a defined territory—even if its borders have been repeatedly violated since 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. There is a governing authority in Ramallah, with legislative, executive, and judicial organs, however constrained. And there is no denying the capacity to establish relations with other states: Palestine has been recognized by more than 150 UN member states and admitted as a non-member observer at the United Nations in 2012. The usual objection is that Palestine lacks “effective control” of its territory, but that is a consequence of occupation, not a disqualification from sovereignty. International law is explicit: occupation does not erase a state, it only suspends its ability to exercise authority. If it were otherwise, Kuwait would have ceased to exist when Iraq invaded in 1990, or France during Nazi occupation.

The international community has long recognized this reality in principle, but has failed in practice. In 1947, the UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) explicitly envisaged two states which, as reaffirmed in numerous resolutions since, should exist “side by side”. It was never implemented, as intercommunal tensions in Mandatory Palestine escalated into open war between Arab and Jewish forces. The newborn State of Israel emerged from this conflict, while the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank came under Egyptian and Jordanian control, respectively. Over the decades, the Palestinian state was further smothered in its cradle, even as UN resolutions continued to accumulate. The General Assembly recognized the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination in the 1970s, and in 2012, Resolution 67/19 conferred non-member observer state status to Palestine. In other words: Palestine is a state by law and by fact. What international law has confirmed, politics has long denied, and that denial has carried a devastating cost.

Too late: the West looked away while the land was taken

For decades, Western governments declared support for a “two-state solution” while privileging their economic and diplomatic relations with Israel. During this time, Israel entrenched what it called “facts on the ground”, such as settlements, roads, and infrastructure deliberately built to reshape the territory and foreclose Palestinian sovereignty.

Settlements in the West Bank, deemed illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, now number in the hundreds. According to the United Nations, in 2024 there were approximately 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), spread across about 350 settlements.

Moreover, in 2002 Israel began building a separation wall. While justified by Israeli authorities as a security measure, large portions of this barrier cut deep into land internationally recognized as Palestinian, annexing farmland, separating villages from schools and medical facilities, and undermining contiguous Palestinian territorial integrity. In 2004, the International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion declared that the parts of the Wall passing through occupied territory are illegal under international law because they violate, among other norms, the rights of property, freedom of movement, and the right to self-determination.

And now comes the E1 project: 3,400 to 3,500 housing units east of Jerusalem, designed to link the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to the capital. This corridor would cut the West Bank in two, severing Ramallah from Bethlehem, making territorial contiguity geographically impossible and a Palestinian state less viable. These measures have not only fragmented Palestinian land, but also fractured the daily lives of its people—restricting movement, trade, and access to basic services. Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has been explicit about its purpose: the plan, he declared, will “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.

The project does not stand in isolation. It reflects a long-standing political vision. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly framed the West Bank as the ancestral land of the Jewish people, has declared at Ma’ale Adumim that “there will be no Palestinian state” because “this place belongs to us”. Such statements underscore that the settlement enterprise is not an accident of policy but a deliberate strategy to ensure that recognition of Palestinian statehood—whenever it comes—arrives too late to matter on the ground.

The West’s partial, and conditional, recognition, does not erase the decades when such statements went unchallenged and when settlement expansion proceeded unchecked. Words now cannot reclaim the territory that bulldozers and concrete walls have already reshaped.

The cost of delay

This hesitation has had two devastating consequences. First, for Palestinians, it has meant the steady erosion of their land and rights. Every new settlement, every demolished home, every olive grove seized has made statehood less feasible. In the West Bank, land is carved away settlement by settlement; in Gaza, life itself is starved out. Both dynamics serve the same purpose: to ensure that Palestinian sovereignty remains a right on paper but impossible in practice.

Second, the delay has corroded the authority of international law itself. If clear rules—against annexation, against settlement, against occupation—can be ignored for decades, then what remains of the global order? If law cannot defend Palestine, how can it defend Ukraine against Russian aggression or the Philippines against maritime encroachment? Selective enforcement makes law indistinguishable from politics.

The zebra in the room

For now, Palestine remains the zebra in the room—obvious to anyone who looks, yet officially unacknowledged. It was Benjamin Netanyahu, then opposition leader, admitting it more than three decades ago: “When you walk into the zoo and see an animal that looks like a horse and has black and white stripes, you do not need a sign to tell you this is a zebra. It is a zebra. When you read this agreement, even if the words a Palestinian state are not mentioned there, you do not need a sign; this is a Palestinian state.” The zebra is still there. What has changed is that the cage has grown tighter, and the stripes are harder to see under layers of concrete and barbed wire.

Recognition today is not meaningless. Symbols matter, and Palestinians deserve the validation of their rights. But it is also insufficient. Recognition risks becoming a symbol of the West’s guilty conscience—a gesture too little, too late, for a people whose statehood exists in law but is vanishing. Unless it is given substance, recognition will remain only another entry in the long catalogue of promises to the Palestinian people that history has left unfulfilled.

Freedom of Brutality by the German State.

When it comes to Palestine demos, the German police are out of control

Edy Green
30/09/2025

Over the last few years the German state has increased its levels of repression towards any form of Palestinian solidarity, as well as a disproportionate increase of targeting of Arabic and Muslim voices and persons. The police act with impunity in their arbitrary violence and scant regard for constitutional laws, often clashing with the high court’s ruling, yet facing zero consequences or accountability for their law breaking. The hostile and often false narratives of political leaders and the complicit media class create a falsified legitimacy for the draconian policing of those supporting Palestine, with ever increasing “new normal” levels of violence becoming established.

If we examine the European convention of human rights, articles: 8 (Right to Privacy), 10 (Freedom of Expression), and 11 (Freedom of Assembly & Association) are being ignored on a daily basis here in Germany. In early May 2024, the ELSC (European Legal Support Center), presented the first comprehensive Database of anti Palestinian repression in Europe. 2032 (recorded) incidents occurred between 2019 to 2025, of which 736 took place in Germany alone, with nearly half of those transpired in Berlin. Such serious breaches of European law occurred that the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Michael O’Flaherty, expressed his concern directly to German Interior Minister, Alexander Dobrindt, about the (lack of) Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Peaceful Assembly over protests related to Gaza in Germany.

O’Flaherty noted restrictions on events, symbols, or other forms of expression in this context in Germany, also citing reports of the police using excessive force against demonstrators, including minors.

Berlin has almost twice as many police officers as other EU and German cities, totalling 500-594 officers per 100,000. All the while Germany extols its virtues of being a progressive nation, yet in actuality operates as a state in which a highly militarised and violent police force faces zero accountability for injuring & brutalising its population, whilst disregarding constitutional fundamentals such as right to protest and freedom of opinion, often in the name of freedom of opinion.

One comrade recounts:

“After a demo in October I ended up being checked for internal bleeding and organ damage in hospital, after being beaten by multiple police simultaneously. They had started their attacks in the crowd, and I rushed to help someone I saw being kicked on the floor. I was attacked by multiple police officers, my arms were held by two, each using their free hands to punch my ribs, chest, and stomach repeatedly, whilst another held my head back in a pain grip, meaning I couldn’t physically move whilst getting beaten. I was detained, put in a van, and driven to a police station in Potsdam, where we were made to wait outside in the cold winter weather for about 30 minutes, until being processed and released, with no charges. My body was still in so much pain the next day that I went to hospital, where they examined me for organ damage and internal bleeding, using the CT scan, and I proceeded to fall into a state of shock, lasting several hours.

I have since recently returned to a hospital ward post police treatment, after a demo at Checkpoint Charlie, where I was punched several times in the neck and face by one policeman, 34311, smashing my glasses into my eyebrow, requiring stitches, and leaving me with migraines for several days. This same policeman, number 34311, is being charged by a group of lawyers called Advocardo, who specifically target police who do the most damage. They asked me to be a witness in that case, after seeing the video of this attack online.”

This is but one of many examples of the extent of violence, as well as the tactics employed: the “pain grip”, targeted pressuring of sensitive body parts to gain compliance, is directly learnt from the IDF, taught to police and militaries worldwide for extreme crowd control, the distressing result of which is that the restricted airways lead to the victim being rendered completely prone and vulnerable, easily led and subsequently beaten, without any opportunity for bracing for the assault, leading to increased damage inflicted.

These accounts will be portrayed by the German media as violence toward police, so registered by the police themselves, when it is the complete opposite. Even demonstrators who get carried away are recorded as perpetrators of violence. For example, the now infamous case of the Nakba stomping: the supposed breaking of one officer’s legs was entirely fabricated, and rejected by the courts upon review of video evidence. Yet the police and media sources who reported the falsehood were not held accountable.

Previous demonstrations impacting far more civil disruption were allowed to play out with minimal police interactions, and certainly no expectation or experience of unwarranted violence. Specifically, during Extinction Rebellion’s early actions, Potsdamer Platz was blocked in entirety from five a.m. to nine p.m., ending when Police (none in riot gear), peacefully removed protestors away into vans for processing. Years later, they escalated the repression of climate protests after it seemed the state became embarrassed by the lack of control over its infrastructure, leading to some scandal in the mainstream media at the heavy handed tactics, seemingly as it was imagery of white Germans being persecuted.

It is now guaranteed that at any given Palestinian demo, Police are dressed to oppress: full helmets, riot gear, and often sporting specific “self defence gloves” (sand filled for further damage inflicted, courts finding that use of these in extreme beatings could be considered attempted murder). At no point during any protest does it feel the police are there for anything but violence; they project their monopoly of it from the beginning, until enacting it after orders allow them to do so. They are the escalators, they are the instigators, they are the gatekeepers of violence, and everyone knows it.

Another comrade recounts :

“At the IQP (International Queer Pride), 2024, I was attacked from behind by the police and detained and booked, not formally arrested. I had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance afterwards, my most major injuries were two cracked kneecaps, a deep laceration on my arm that required stitches, and an almost broken arm that I had to keep in a cast for two weeks.

I still did not receive any charges a year later, so nothing to legally connect and report the attack by the police. “

Longer term realities of expressing opposition to genocide accrue state violence of different kinds, including but not limited to: job and home raids, deportations, targeted detainment and harassment, and online and infiltrating surveillance. One example was two Girls and Young Women shelters in Berlin being shut down, due to “hatred of Israel and antisemitism “. In actuality, staff members marched in support of Palestine, posted “banned” slogans on their private instagram pages, and appeared as speakers at the Palestine Congress, which was banned and shut down by German authorities on the orders of Berlin mayor Kai Wegner, the same man who said, “The Israeli flag will remain hanging on the Red City Hall until the last hostage is free—and nothing will change that”.

With Netanyahu’s current determination to get those hostages killed, it seems Germany is staying with Israel until it sinks into its future international ostracisation and legal prosecutions for the horror it is unleashing.

Giovanni Fassina, Director of the ELSC, noted:

“The audacity with which German authorities bend and undermine the law should not surprise us at this point. However, it remains shameful. We have witnessed this time and time again: German authorities are now routinely making up baseless accusations to justify increasingly harsh measures against the Palestine solidarity movement.

These increases and normalisations of authoritarian behaviour are of grave concern. The recently updated Weapons Act (WaffG) in June 2025 prohibits dangerous weapons being carried in public places, yet it allows the police to detain and search anyone they perceive as a risk. This brings about stop and search tactics, which unsurprisingly mainly affect young men of ethnic minority groups, as we have seen occur in the UK after similar laws were passed years ago. We can safely assume that wearing the Keffiyeh, or having any pro Palestine symbols (the ever dangerous watermelon), will allow the police to apply greater acts of intimidation & repression, they must be held accountable for their barbarism.

4 October 1936 – The Battle of Cable Street

This week in working class history

Phil Butland

The early 1930s were a time of crisis and a growing Fascist threat. In 1922, Mussolini became the Italian leader. 11 years later, President von Hindenburg appointed Hitler as the German Chancellor. In 1936, General Franco staged a coup in Spain. In 1932, Sir Oswald Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF or Blackshirts). The BUF had their own paramilitary fighting force, which terrorised Jewish communities, bombing houses and carrying out indiscriminate racist attacks.

In 1934, the Daily Mail, a major mainstream daily newspaper, ran a headline “Hurrah for the Blackshirts.” Mosley was interviewed in The Tatler. In the same week that Franco was appointed head of Spain’s coup government, Mosley announced that the BUF would march through East London, home to half the Jewish population of Britain. After initially hesitating, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), then the Communist Party (CP), called for barricades to defend the area. The Labour Party and the Jewish Board of Deputies told their members to stay away.

Local activists, led by the local ILP and CP branches and Jewish groups, mobilised 100,000 people behind the slogan “They shall not pass”—the same slogan that was being used by anti-fascists in besieged Madrid. Tram drivers used their vehicles to block the intended route of the BUF march. This mass mobilisation prevented 3,000 Blackshirts from marching through the East End, although the fascists were supported by approximately 10,000 police including the entire Metropolitan Police Mounted Division.

As the newspaper The Guardian reported at the time: “In Cable Street a crowd seized materials from a builder’s yard and began to construct a barricade. They used corrugated iron, barrels, coal, and glass to construct a barrier, even pulling up paving-stones. When the police intervened they were greeted with a shower of stones.” They did not pass.

Local Communist activist Phil Piratin reported the effect: “Nothing had changed physically. The poor houses, the mean streets, the ill-conditioned workshops were the same, but the people were changed. Their heads seemed to be held higher, and their shoulders were squarer—and the stories they told! Each one was a ‘hero’—many of them were… The people knew that fascism could be defeated if they organised themselves to do so.” As fascists mobilise in Europe once more, we must learn the lessons of Cable Street.

Photo Gallery: Together for Gaza demonstration and concert – 27th September 2025

Alexanderplatz to the Grosser Stern

The Left Berlin

Photographs by: Compañera Emiliana, Jan Maas, Brian Janssen, and Ina Ko