Leandra wrote and read her testimony in English, and the court interpreter translated it into German. Any errors have been intentionally retained for authenticity.
First of all, I’m convinced at this point this is not going to be a fair trial; therefore I do not believe this court will properly listen to what I’m about to say. Nevertheless, that is not going to stop me from saying it. I would like to say that I had to pinch myself today, to confirm this is real. To confirm that I really am here, in court, sitting in a glass cage, after almost nine months living in a prison cell for thinking and acting upon the thought that millions of Palestinians have the right to exist in their own land. I acted upon the certainty that war crimes and crimes against humanity were and are being committed by Israel’s military offensive in Gaza; namely, the bombing of hospitals, schools, universities, homes, and infrastructure; a full blockade of food, water, medicine, and electricity; children being shot in their heads in cold blood by IOF soldiers, or being murdered by starvation, or having limbs amputated without anaesthetic. Those are facts. No political statements, no propaganda but facts.
Since October 2023 I joined almost every single legal protest in Berlin demanding to stop the genocide, only to be met with the blatantly unjustified police brutality we ended up getting accustomed to. We were not only ignored by the authorities but physically attacked and criminalised for speaking up against mass murder. Were we really expected to do nothing while the government continued to publicly and financially support those atrocities? While the German state continued to allow the flow of money and weapons that are making bloody murder possible?
As someone cleverer than me wrote, to stop the genocide is not, primarily, a political demand but an ethical one. Because, when the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on whoever has the least power, there is an ethical duty to stop the gears by all means necessary.
On the 27th of November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as the country’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes relating to the Gaza war. By December 2024, an Amnesty International report concluded that the “unprecedented scale and magnitude” of Israel’s assault on Gaza amounts to a genocide. A conclusion Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg had already shared earlier this year. Meanwhile, here in Germany, a democratic European country that has supposedly learned from its genocidal history, a subsidiary fully owned by Elbit Systems Ltd, Israel’s largest private weapons supplier, continued to operate on German soil without any consequences whatsoever. We are referring to some property where forced labour was imposed during the Holocaust. Corporate links with National Socialism didn’t seem to be a problem for Elbit Systems, as it doesn’t seem to be a problem now, for the German state in relation to other companies that are also profiting from the Palestinian genocide as they did from the Holocaust. Elbit Systems is a criminal corporation, a murderous business that keeps growing its revenue out of the hideous crimes we all got to painfully witness with our phones, in real time, every single day for almost two years prior to our action.
But at the end of the day, I’m not Palestinian. I’m not part of the population that has been occupied, displaced, killed, and tortured for the past 70 years. Still, I was born in a territory that became a state out of the most brutal colonisation process in history: Argentina. Eighty to ninety percent of the indigenous population, millions of people, entire civilisations were exterminated and tortured to death in that part of the world by the Spanish empire. The very name of my city reminded me of this every day: The Kilme was a community that used to live around 1,200 kilometres northwest from where the city of Quilmes sits. As the story goes, the entire community was displaced from their own land in the Andes in a torturous manner. They were forced to walk barefoot without food nor water all the 1,200 kilometres until most of them died on the way, and the last ones did it right there, where I was born. It is said that many of them had their feet amputated during the process and were forced to continue walking anyway. Not surprisingly, I grew up questioning the very meaning of my nationality, as it didn’t seem to have any. Everything around me looked European: the architecture, the food, the people on the TV, the philosophers I studied in high school were European, and so was most of the literature. But the Incas or the Kilme’s knowledge and culture was nowhere to be seen. There was one thing that did not look European: the poor kids living on the streets, breathing from plastic bags with glue, asking for food and money in the train stations of Buenos Aires. I grew up with a society and a territory broken by colonisation through an enormous and shameful class gap between brown and white people.
That’s exactly why fighting against it in the present time came as an opportunity to me. An opportunity to express my deepest beliefs on freedom, and, most importantly, indigenous freedom. All that seemed to be completely taken away from us in the territory I was born in will not be taken away from the indigenous people of Palestine – the ancestral wisdom, the ways of life, in community, respectfully with the land.
But no. I did not have to pinch myself today because the current events are, actually, not surprising at all. Because it would be naïve to believe that the ones making decisions on this matter do so relying on their own moral intelligence, as if they had an. Because it must be a great relief for them to say “there is no such a thing as Palestinian people” as they stand in front of them, to whom all the boring “genocidal hysteria” must be very inconvenient to their dream of owning a yacht, to whom there is and always have been a subcategory of people that is not only born to suffer but habituated to it. As it clearly shows the normalisation of the use of torture by Israel against Palestinians, torture is a structural feature of the ongoing genocide and broader settler colonial apartheid, which is possible because of the absence of meaningful measures taken by the European Union against the Zionist entity some of them created. This is no secret: the Zionist security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, publicly describes the degradation of prisoner conditions as one of his highest goals. In custody, Palestinians are not only kept constantly handcuffed in dark cells with iron beds and pit toilets – they are also held outdoors, without shelter or blanket or in capes, often referred to as “monkey capes”. Detainees are kept blindfolded and fully shackled for prolonged periods, sometimes causing injuries leading to amputations. Severe physical violence is routine. Israeli guards subject Palestinian prisoners to severe beatings, burn them with cigarettes and force them to take hallucinogenic drugs. Pepper spray, tear gas, electric shocks, and assault dogs are also used. Sexual violence against children, women, and men is systematic, as well as denial of medical care. I will not describe the sexual abuse to respect the victims. Senior ministers of Israel describe torture as a “holy job” and abusers as “heroic warriors”. Since October 2023, torture in detention has been used to an unprecedented scale and videos of it shared on social media.
Journalists and civilians have been allowed access to witness and even use phones to record the abuse of Palestinians. Since then, Israeli authorities have arrested more than 18,500 Palestinians, including at least 1,500 children. In addition, more than 4,000 individuals have been subjected to enforced disappearance, and it is likely that many are no longer alive. Specific groups have been targeted for detention and heightened abuse, sometimes resulting in violent death: activists, medical doctors, political figures, human rights defenders, and journalists. Hundreds of health and rescue workers have been arbitrarily arrested while performing their medical duties. And let us not forget the new law recently passed imposing the death penalty on Palestinians only. According to the bill, those Palestinians sentenced to death will be held in a separate facility with no visits allowed.
Torture has always been a central feature of the dispossession of Palestinians by the Zionist entity, and it’s not confined to cells and interrogation rooms. Across the occupied Palestinian territory, Israeli authorities have engineered a “torturous environment,” designed to break resistance and dignity. Mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, military and settler violence, all tools of collective torture, have turned the Palestinian territory into a space of collective punishment – punishment for existing and resisting the occupation of their own land.
Since October 2023 all Palestinians have been treated collectively as “terrorists” and “security threats.” By targeting the totality of people, across the totality of the occupied land, Israel’s settler colonial genocide became the ultimate form of torture: continuous generational and collective. Over 150 years ago, the Zionist settlement project began as an ethno-national project addressing the Jewish question, which is antisemitism in Europe. For Palestinians who were forced to host this project, to host is to be hostage, to host is to be erased; the Palestinian story begins before the genocide, before the Intifadas and the empty peace agreements and before Zionism and Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Elbit Systems executives are the ones that should be sitting in court in glass cages, not us.
On the 8th of September 2025 I not only took action against Israel’s largest private weapons supplier – I took action against the extermination of the Palestinian people. I took action to insist upon the existence of a single human reality, populated by billions of sacred human beings to whom universal law of protection must and will be applied.
Long live the resistance.
