Good afternoon, dear friends and comrades! We stand here across the world before German institutions, united against all suppressed people– as Palestinians, Jews, Germans, foreigners, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ siblings. Today, we are all Palestinians.
PALESTINIAN LIVES MATTER.
These are horrible, horrific times in Germany. I am aghast. I am truly aghast. I have lived in this country for nearly 10 years and I used to pride myself on the values of freedom of expression and intellectual debate in this country. What has happened in Berlin in the last days is beyond words. Their draconian crackdown on free speech and freedom of assembly is an embarrassment.
The renowned British-Palestinian surgeon and rector of Glasgow University, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who worked for 44 days treating the Palestinian victims of bombs and bullets in Gaza, was banned from entering Germany on the baseless grounds of potentially disturbing the “public order and safety of the attendees.” The Berlin police broke down our doors and raided our private spaces during Alma Sittah’s livestream. A leading expert on the Nakba, he has now been banned from even remote political activity in Germany.
Our Jewish comrades from Jüdische Stimme were arrested for simply holding up a a sign that said “Jews Against Genocide.”
Jews who live in this country, whose families were exterminated in the Holocaust, are not allowed to have an opinion about genocide.
You are out of your fucking mind Germany.
You can continue to violently storm and illegally ban our assemblies, you can break down our doors, turn off our electricity and arrest our comrades, but you will NOT silence us. You stand alone in the Western world, Germany, in your brazen, unending support of the annihilation of the Palestinian people. We stand on the side of Nicaragua as they bring Israel before the ICJ and close their embassy in Berlin due to Germany’s complicity in this genocide, and we accuse you!
SHAME ON YOU.
Please wake up. The entire world is laughing at you and we are right there with them. The mobilization of 2.500 police for a small, peaceful assembly is nothing more than a sign that you’re losing the narrative, dear Germany. Your own citizens can already see through your zone of interest. Nearly 70% of the people in this country do not think what is happening in Gaza is justified, and 87% think more pressure should be put on Israel.
…I am standing here telling you that German Zionism is nothing more than displaced Aryan nationalism and a continuation of the narrative of White settler colonialism.
All of the German news organizations and journalists who have smeared the congress as an anti-semitic hate assembly, who stand on the side of Zionism and spread its propaganda and lies in the name of absolving German guilt from its Nazi history, are complicit. As someone who was raised in fundamentalist, evangelical, White Christian, anti-Semitic Zionism, I am standing here telling you that German Zionism is nothing more than displaced Aryan nationalism and a continuation of the narrative of White settler colonialism.
We must fight against and unequivocally denounce this indoctrination and the misuse of memory culture in this country. We see through your attempt to dupe the good intentions of your well-meaning citizens. Your Staatsräson hangs on nothing more than your feeble, imperialist interests, the purely narcissistic interests of the ruling class.
You have raided the homes of comrades in Berlin, you have confiscated their equipment, and you have frozen the bank account of our Jewish siblings. In a truly comical attempt to hold onto your own self-serving narrative, you have banned Yanis Varoufakis from entering this country or even holding a speech here via social media. You have literally banned a European parliamentarian and former Finance Minister of a European country, while tolerating and even in some instances embracing the AfD.
You are open to court antisemitic conspiracy theorists such as Elon Musk while simultaneously charging Jews with antisemitism for simply carrying a placard of the star of David in pan-Arabic colors with “stop genocide” or “ceasefire” written above it. How long can this racist appropriation of Judaism go on?
The ARD’s removal of Annemarie Jacir’s Palestinian film Wajim from their program… Germany has tried to further silence our Palestinian siblings by distributing leaflets at schools calling the Nakba a myth… Palestinians are antisemites at birth, according to the German state.
And worst of all, you have hidden our dear Palestinian comrades behind the mask of terrorism. They have been violently arrested, imprisoned and silenced. Palestinian students and their allies are being threatened with expulsion from universities in Berlin. The German government is threatening some of the most vulnerable people on this planet with deportation, people who have no safe place to return to. If their homes and relatives haven’t already been exterminated and reduced to gut-wrenching rubble in Gaza, they are being threatened on a daily basis by murderous rampages from gangs of right-wing, fascist settlers.
If you can’t bring yourself to look at the vicious and callous dehumanization of Palestinians in this country, then at least bring yourself to look at the sweeping suppression and violence against left-wing Jews! Jews who criticize Israel are being spat on, fired, brutally arrested and canceled, all in the name of antisemitism.
This dehumanization and suppression did not begin on October 7th. You have fired Arab and Palestinian journalists at Deutsche Welle. You have arrested and threatened the prominent South African anti-Zionist Jewish artist Adam Broomberg for years. In a literal throwback to the 1930s, you have canceled the bank account of our dear comrades at Jüdische Stimme for the third time in the last decade, this time asking for a list of the names and addresses of all of its active members.
Let us not be distracted from the dehumanization that is plaguing our Palestinian siblings, however. The Frankfurter Buchmesse’s cancellation of Palestinian author Adania Shibli, whose novel focuses on the Nakba and atrocities committed by the Israeli army during the founding of the state of Israel, was yet another act of demoralization. The ARD’s removal of Annemarie Jacir’s Palestinian film Wajim from their program and subsequent deletion of it from their media library was yet another muzzle constricting Palestinian voices. Germany has tried to further silence our Palestinian siblings by distributing leaflets at schools calling the Nakba a myth. These are not singular events. This is just normal, every-day reality for Palestinians living in this country. Palestinians are antisemites at birth, according to the German state.
If you can’t bring yourself to look at these acts of suffocation, then at least look at what is happening to world-renowned Jews in this country. In the famous words of Naomi Klein, Germany is running out of intellectual Jews to cancel and add to their hall of fame bad Jew list. You may have succeeded in hiding our Palestinian siblings behind the mask of terror, but the Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s attempted cancellation of Masha Gessen was a failure. Your attempt to clap at only the Israeli and not our dear Palestinian sibling was a failure. Your attempt to silence our Israeli comrade in Leipzig under the guise of democracy was a failure, Mr Scholz.
These means of state suppression are nothing more than a distraction from the complete and utter annihilation of Palestine that is currently underway. If you decide to ignore the burnt bodies of little babies pulled from the rubble in Gaza, of orphaned children who are wailing because they want their leg back, of children who are subjected to the unimaginable cruelty of having their limbs amputated without anaesthesia, then at least have the guts to look at your own people on fire! May you rest in forever power, dear Aaron Bushnell.
If you can’t bear witness to the fact that little children in Palestine want to die, they want to die because they are being starved by our cruel and rapacious state apparatus, they want to die because they are orphans living through a nightmare more surreal and cruel than any of us standing here can possibly imagine…if you refuse to bear witness to the unimaginable darkness of this evil and hide behind your banal function of state, then at least have the moral courage to acknowledge the World Central Kitchen workers who were systematically targeted and brutally murdered by the IDF.
With Bushnell’s clear-headed, concerted decision to self-immolate… he demanded that we look at our own complicity in this heinous, genocidal war on Palestine. He demanded that we look at our own banal, cruel silence…
If you choose to look away from reports of Palestinian women being barbarically raped and subjected to unspeakable horrors in Al-Shifa hospital, or reports from doctors of prisoners’ limbs being amputated after they were improperly and savagely shackled, then at least have the guts to look at the US activist Rachel Corrie who was deliberately crushed to death and killed by her own country’s arms’ industry over 20 years ago in Rafah. This image will surely forever be seared into the memories of the Nasrallah family’s children who watched these horrifying events unfold through a crack in their garden wall.
The few safe spaces we had left are dwindling, but we will not stop talking about Palestine, dear Germany. Berlin’s withdrawal of funding from Oyoun will not stop us from talking about Palestine. Uni zu Köln’s house ban of our comrade from SDS will not stop us from talking about Palestine. Uni zu Köln’s cancellation of visiting professor Nancy Fraser will not stop us from talking about Palestine, dear Germany. Your disgusting, racist float at Karneval this year will not stop us from talking about Palestine, dear Köln.
I ask all of you to join us in the movement to stop this, my dear friends. We cannot fight this in our tiny, privileged, individualistic bubbles that are largely built on the extorted hands of modern-day vassalage. It is truly amazing to see thousands of you out on the streets at anti-fascist demos, but let us not forget that lesser evilism plays directly into the hands of this viscous machine.
With Bushnell’s clear-headed, concerted decision to self-immolate, not to commit suicide but rather to perform an act of public martyrdom, he demanded that we look at our own complicity in this heinous, genocidal war on Palestine. He demanded that we look at our own banal, cruel silence and to not accept what the ruling class has decided will be normal.
It isn’t too late, dear friends. We can still go to demos, we can still make our voices heard on the streets. We can still choose the right side of history. You will never stop us from moving and talking about Palestine, Germany. I know it’s been said so many times already, but I’m going to say it again. None of us are free until all of us are free. There is no peace without liberation. You will NOT silence us Germany. Not now. Not ever.
Free free Palestine!!
