The following text was sent to The Left Berlin by Collective Alarm and we think we should share it with you:
On the night of August 16th, four locations in Berlin were simultaneously covered in red paint by pro-Palestinian activists. The locations struck were local representative offices for political parties belonging to the current “Traffic light coalition” (or “Ampel” in German), whose political leaders have been criticised for repression of pro-Palestinian protest. Also targeted were the offices of CDU representatives. The CDU leads the municipal ruling coalition in Berlin, headed by Kai Wagner. Under Wagner’s government, the Berlin police have exercised extreme violence on protestors, including minors.
The actions come as the war in Gaza approaches 300 days, during which a staggering 180,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of military decisions made by Israeli forces. While Germany faces pressure to cease supplying the Israeli military with weapons and provisions through cases brought by Palestinian families to domestic courts and the International Court of Justice, resistance to this pressure from the reigning Ampel coalition remains strong. Occurences of police violence against protestors in many German cities, including Berlin, remain frequent and arbitrary arrests at demonstrations are common. While detained protestors are subjected to sexualised violence, slogans associated with Palestinian resistance to occupation are routinely banned on the supposition that they incite hatred.
Following the paint attacks, Collective Alarm issued the following statement:
For ten months, Gaza has burned and crumbled under a violent and indiscriminate bombing campaign. For ten months, journalists in Gaza have paid high prices – sometimes with their own lives – to bring the world news of targeted aid trucks, intentionally starved civilians, and of a car with a visible child in it, riddled with upwards of three hundred bullets. For ten months, concerned people from many walks of life and of many political persuasions have noted the urgent need to halt a military campaign that does not make anyone in the region safe, and has been noted by experts to present no plausible route to the elimination of Hamas as a military force. For ten months, Germany has done nothing to ensure justice in the region and has actively hindered its realisation in Palestine as it has hindered expression of solidarity with Palestine from within its own borders.
Those who know Germany might know that contemporary politicians present Israel’s security as its “Staatsräson”, that is, the very reason for the existence of the [current] German state. From the outside, this might appear a genuine effort in state-to-state reparations for Germany’s perpetration of the Shoah/Holocaust. Perhaps one has to live on the ground, in Germany, to see how violent and cynical the enforcement of “Staatsräson” really is. A long-time supporter of Israel’s military, Germany has, since October, drastically increased exports of weapons, tank engines and munitions to Israel to approximately €320 million euro per year. Politicians engage in cruel and sometimes bizarre dehumanisation of Palestinians, combined with awkward virtue-signalling of their support for Israel. When a Palestinian and Israeli director jointly accepted an award at the Berlinale film festival earlier this year, making a speech that called for an end to the occupation of Palestine, Germany’s cultural minister Claudia Roth made time to tweet afterwards that while she had applauded the speech, her applause was only for the Israeli person on stage.
For those in Germany who advocate against genocide and occupation, the hostility of the state can be felt every day. Peaceful demonstrators for Palestine are regularly painted by tabloid media as a “Juden-Hass mob” (“Jew-hating mob”); slogans such as “From the river to the sea / Palestine will be free”, long since established to be calls for peace and equal civil rights between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean sea, have been banned, on the pretext that they express a genocidal intent. Pro-Palestinian critics of the German state have had their homes raided, and over and again armoured riot police have brutalised activists with little or no pretext. Multiple ambulances are often called to protests as a direct consequence of the police’s actions. Recently, the red triangle was banned on the supposition that it, too, incites hatred and violence. The triangle in question has its origins in social media posts by Hamas, in which it is used to indicate the tanks and positions of the invading Israeli forces that Hamas wishes to target. Its evocation has morphed into expression of Palestinians’ right to defend themselves, whether through Hamas or another organisation, from the incursions of an invading army. Their right to do so could not be any more established or clear. Conversely, to equate, as Germany does, the actions of a violent invading force with the identity and interests of Jews around the world, is itself antisemitic, and demonstrates how unserious Germany is about the actual task of protecting Jewish life. That some Germans also object to the red triangle on the basis that it evokes the symbols used by the Nazi regime to designate communists and queer people, is also an indication that many Germans are simply oblivious to the people who support the Palestinian movement, and are too sheltered to think or inquire beyond their narrow frame of reference.
With the red paint applied to these buildings, we make clear that those who represent these political parties, even at a local level, have blood on their hands. In summer, when Berlin’s anti-fascist museum celebrates the life and courage of Sophie Scholl and others, we condemn the successors of those who killed her for their failure to rise to the standard of courage she set. To those who wish to go through life with their fingers planted in their ears, we remind them that the moral fate of Berlin is intertwined with that of Gaza; as Gaza burns, the moral core of those who proudly arm its aggressors burns along with it.
Free Palestine from German guilt
Land Back
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free
Disclaimer
We receive information and documentation anonymously, and are in no way involved in organisation or planning of actions.
Collective Alarm is a media initiative aiming to provide information about direct actions taking place in Berlin. This is in response to the wide-spread suppression of information about direct action in German media, in particular with regards to Palestine, as well as the ongoing dissemination of defamatory, hate-mongering, and factually incorrect information about actions when they are covered. We believe information and awareness is key, and while it is also important for people residing in Germany to be informed factually and objectively, we believe that at this stage, international awareness is essential to pressure one of the most complicit countries in the occupation of and genocide happening in Palestine.
