German Police Shut Down Pro-Palestine Conference

On April 12, in another round of repression against Palestine solidarity organizers, German police shut down the Palestine Congress in Berlin. They arrested several attendees and ordered delegates to leave immediately. German officials also prohibited scheduled speaker Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a Palestinian-British surgeon and the rector of Glasgow University, from even entering the country. The Congress aimed to raise awareness about charges of Germany’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in the International Court of Justice, which have been raised by Nicaragua.

German police dramatically stormed the stage of the conference and proceeded to shut down speakers after the Congress had already begun, interrupted and stopped the conference livestream, and broke into the control room to shut off the power. Red Media reported that “900 police are deployed to the congress, whose start they held up for hours. They demanded that organizers allow all German media into the congress, ironically to ‘safeguard free speech’ and then denied entry to most of the registered delegates.”

German police have arrested several activists participating in the Congress, including Jewish activists. Anti-Zionist Jewish activists are heavily targeted in Germany, despite Germany’s attempt to justify its support to Israel as “collective guilt” over the Holocaust and repenting for its infamous antisemitism. Yet, according to researcher Emily Dische-Becker, almost a third of those deplatformed, arrested, or otherwise sanctioned for alleged antisemitism are themselves Jewish. Videos from the repression show a Jewish activist being arrested outside of the conference, with police seizing a banner that read “Jew Against Genocide.”