On the day commemorating the 77th anniversary of the start of the Nakba, Israel carried out one of the worst attacks in what has been a relentless genocide. For 24-36 hours, it razed schools, hospitals, and what little life remains in Gaza. Preliminary figures speak of 300 people wounded or killed, plus those still lying under the rubble. And just a few hours later, it began its ground invasion with the aim to occupy the entire Gaza Strip and eliminate or expel the remaining Palestinians. However, the German news is not reporting this suffocating assault.
We began the week with news of the trip by the president of the genocidal state, Herzog, to the German capital. There, he was received by the newly elected chancellor Merz of the CDU, and together they discussed future holidays on a wonderful beach in Tel Aviv, a city that a few weeks ago became twinned with Berlin. German media also reported on the state visit to Israel by the president of the German republic, Steinmeier of the SPD. There, the German president had a pleasant meeting with the proscribed war criminal Netanyahu. With these meetings, the new German government has made its international policy clear: total alignment with the fascist and genocidal government of the colonialist state of Israel.
This position was all the more evident at Thursday’s rally commemorating the Nakba in Berlin. This year, pro-Palestinian activists in the city—who have endured institutional and police violence for years, and which has been exacerbated in the last 19 months—issued an international call for solidarity. Groups from different countries responded to the invitation and came to the German capital. The intention to hold a remembrance march was quickly thwarted.
For months now, the police and the Berlin government have unconstitutionally banned marches, meaning that only static rallies can be held, restricting movement and confining oppositional voices. They’ve also pulled various ‘bans’ out of their sleeves, like not speaking any language other than German or English, which excludes languages important to the attendees, like Arabic, Yiddish, and Hebrew. They’ve criminalised certain slogans like ‘from the river to the sea’ or ‘Zionists are fascists’ or ‘children-murder Israel,’ and they’ve “banned” drums and music.
For over a year now, anti-genocide rallies, marches, and events have been surrounded and attacked by violent Berlin police who are out of control and clearly believe they are above the law. And to a large extent, they are.
Photo by Xénia Gomes Adães
This brings us to 15 May 2025. When the organisations of the Nakba demonstrations were notified that they would, yet again not be allowed to march, a group of lawyers promptly tried to defend the freedom of assembly and expression that anyone who considers themselves to live in a real democracy should have. They presented an appeal with the Berlin city administrative court and surprisingly the judges ruled in their favour. The assembly authority, part of the police force, quickly appealed to the higher court instance, where they ruled in favour of the assembly authority and banned the participants from marching just 30 minutes before the demonstration was supposed to begin. The police clearly counted on the judiciary’s support and had already set up cordons around the square and stationed trucks and commandos in all the adjacent streets. Even those of us who have attended anti-genocide demonstrations over the past 19 months were surprised by the incredibly disproportionate presence of riot police, who came prepared with pepper spray, non-regulation gloves, dogs, and water trucks, in addition to their batons and service pistols.
The police obviously had orders to make mass arrests and escalate until the protest became unbearable. At the beginning of the rally, they checked banners and confiscated flag poles so that they could not be used as weapons. During the more than four hours that the rally lasted, the police made frequent brutal incursions into the crowd and took people away in painful manoeuvres designed, among other things, to frighten the rest. After hours of arrests and indiscriminate attacks, the police surrounded the demonstrators. Further, while a Jewish activist from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), who had come from Great Britain to show their support, spoke of the historic struggle of the Jewish people against injustice and the absolute need for solidarity with the Palestinian people, dozens of police officers climbed onto and/or surrounded the truck where the speeches were being made and arrested some of those present. From then on, it was even more of a bloodbath; so much so that several police officers suffered bruises and injuries to their hands.
Seeing the videos and the brutality with which they beat defenceless demonstrators, who after 19 months of abuse have still remained peaceful, as the videos clearly show, one wonders, with those iron-reinforced gloves, how hard they are hitting them to injure their hands?
Needless to say, over 30 protesters were injured, including some with broken noses, head lacerations, and head traumas, and four were seriously injured while in police custody. Not only that, but the paramedics who came to assist some of the injured people were in many cases denied access to their patients, and in a few occasions the paramedics themselves were also victims of police brutality.
It is estimated that the number of detainees is about 88, in some of the most brutal arrests we have seen so far. Some of whom spent 24-48 hours in detention with literally just hard bread and water.
In true Israeli army style, the police attacked, arrested, and searched independent journalists who were there covering the event, preventing them from doing their job while defending Zionist journalists, including a couple who collaborate with openly Nazi media outlets.
And what does the German press have to say about this? With a few honourable exceptions, such as junge Welt, the German press has done the same as it does with the genocide. It has repeated word for word the information given by the police, without of course checking its veracity, and has flipped the narrative, making the injured police officers the victims of the mob. Not a word about the fact that these injuries were self-inflicted while they were beating up the demonstrators.
This narrative is once again used again by politicians, who claim that the police have defended the German rule of law from dangerous imported antisemitism. They take another step down this racist, Nazi-style path, announcing new measures against these dangerous foreigners and trying to ban all solidarity with Palestine.
Meanwhile, many Germans—misled by state-funded propaganda and confused by the narratives promoted in their media— have found convenient justification to stay off the streets in solidarity with Palestine, even after 19 months of genocide, even though they are privately beginning to think that Israel is going too far.
These, and all the measures announced so far by the new German government, suggest that fascism, at least for the migrant part of society, has already arrived. Freedom of expression, assembly, and the press are clearly being curtailed. And following the rules of all good authoritarians, as Orwell so aptly put it, everything is being sold as actions taken to defend Germany from antisemitism and to guarantee freedom of assembly and expression.
Without immediate and forceful reaction from the German population these measures will soon be applied to other inconvenient groups, from trade unions to climate activists, appropriating even more of the meagre space they have left to dissent.
All this, in addition to the German government’s aspirations to have the largest army in Europe, should make even a nascent historian’s hair stand on end.
It is time to act. Within Germany, join groups and do not stop speaking out, whether on the street, at work, or in your private life.
Outside Germany, boycott. Don’t come. If you are a tourist, make it clear to airlines, hotels, etc. why you are not coming. If the state has invited you to work or study, explain in your letter of resignation that it is all of us, united, who will stop fascism.
Today more than ever, ¡No pasarán!, and with coordination, ¡Berlin será la tumba del fascismo!.
Interview with lawyer Benjamin Düsberg
After the police attacks on the Nakba demonstration, Roser spoke to Benjamin Düsberg, who, among other things, is the lawyer for some of the Berlin 4.
Before the march for the 77th anniversary of the ongoing Nakba, I think one of the solidarity lawyers went to the first court instance to fight for the right to march, which was at first allowed. And then what happened after?
Exactly. For several months now, it’s generally forbidden for pro-Palestinian demonstrations to march at all, which is a scandal in itself. And surprisingly, for the Nakba demo, the administration court overturned the decision of the Berlin police to forbid marching, so it seemed that the Nakba demo was going to be allowed to march. Then, the police complained about this decision, and the higher administrative court overruled the administration court and reinstalled the ban.
But can the police forbid the march? Do they have the power to do that, or is it a court’s decision?
According to the Berlin law which regulates the assemblies, the police, under specific circumstances, may have the power to forbid marching. But, of course, this needs a solid legal justification. This means they must establish why the ban is necessary to maintain public security. But in fact, there’s no valid legal justification for such a ban. There is no empirical proof that a demonstration causes fewer problems because it’s not allowed to march. The opposite is true: the potential for escalation is much higher if the assembly is not allowed to march. Apart from that empirical question, the freedom to march is at the core of the fundamental right of freedom of assembly.
The Berlin police argued that the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, in general, are inclined to break laws and to prevent this, they say it’s necessary to forbid marching. The administration court, which is there to check such decisions of the police, didn’t follow this argument but was then overruled by the higher administration court.
And you were there, no? Do you know how many people got arrested?
According to the numbers from the organizers of the demo, there were about 88 people arrested.
And could you speak to some of them? Could you help them?
Yes, to some of them I had contact, but of course there were too many arrests to have contact with everyone. Two protestors were kept in preventive detention in the police prison, one of them for more than 50 hours. The argumentation was to prevent their participation in other pro-Palestinian demonstrations, which allegedly would instigate them to commit demonstration related crimes.
What were they accused of?
One of those persons was accused of resisting and assaulting police officers.
You’ve been in a few, I guess, pro-Palestinian marches. Did you see an escalation in police violence in this one?
I’m not sure if it was an escalation because the repression against pro-Palestinian demonstrations is generally very intense. But the pictures and videos I saw from this demonstration are really awful. Yes, I have seen a lot, but I was still astonished by this time.
The Nakba demo seems to have been a record day in the number of arrests, but according to some newspapers, we have just about 7000 processes in Berlin. Considering the demos have been largely, if not almost entirely pacifist, what charges are people facing?
At demonstrations, it almost always begins with so-called ‘thought crimes,’ e.g., slogans deemed illegal by the police, such as ‘from the river to the sea,’ among others. Arrests by the police usually happen without warning, so even minor defensive movements by those arrested or bystanders often lead to accusations of resistance or assault, which in turn lead to further violent arrests. University occupations involve charges such as trespassing. In some cases, even linking arms during such occupations is considered resistance to law enforcement officers.
