On Could 15, a pro-Palestinian demonstration was held in Berlin to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleaning and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. What unfolded that day was not solely a case of police violence, however a coordinated effort by German authorities, the media, and politicians to show fiction into reality in an effort to additional criminalise Palestinian protest.
In line with a public assertion issued by the Berlin police , a demonstrator had violently assaulted one among their officers, leading to critical damage and hospitalisation. The police claimed the officer was dragged into the group, intentionally attacked, knocked to the bottom, after which trampled or kicked by protesters. The message was clear: Professional-Palestinian demonstrators are violent, irrational, and harmful.
However this complete story is a lie.
Video proof, meticulously analysed by Forensis, an impartial analysis company based and led by members of Forensic Structure, has unequivocally disproven each single one of many Berlin police’s claims. The footage exhibits an officer with the quantity BE24111 written on the again of his uniform jacket advancing into the group with colleagues to arrest a protester. As they push individuals round, BE24111 begins punching protesters within the head and kicking them. He seems to injure himself throughout this violent match and retreats together with his colleagues.
There isn’t any violent mob. Nobody is dragging him into the group. Nobody knocks him to the bottom. Nobody kicks him. Quite the opposite, the footage exhibits demonstrators actively distancing themselves and shielding each other from BE24111’s assault. It was the officer, not the group, who carried out violence.
Regardless of the reality being uncovered, the injury has already been achieved.
The Berlin Police’s false narrative was shortly amplified by media shops and authorities officers, unleashing a wave of fearmongering and political opportunism. A police union consultant appeared on Welt TV channel and described the demonstrators as a “gang of murderers” who “would have killed the officer if they may have”.
The tabloid BILD ran a headline studying: “Jew haters kick cops” and quoted Stephan Weh of the German Police Union as saying, “when a colleague is dragged right into a crowd and trampled, shedding consciousness a number of instances, we’ve to say it’s pure luck that he survived the night time […] This insanity should finish earlier than one among our colleagues loses his life at such a gathering.”
The Public Prosecutor’s Workplace said it was “an assault on the organs of the rule of legislation” and launched a proper investigation into the incident below costs of “harmful bodily hurt” and a “critical breach of the peace”. The very individuals assaulted by police might now face prison prosecution based mostly on occasions that by no means occurred.
Germany’s Federal Inside Minister Alexander Dobrindt additionally seized the second, declaring within the Bundestag: “An officer at an anti-Israel demo in Berlin was dragged right into a crowd by aggressive demonstrators and severely injured… The police want the very best tools and acceptable powers. We’ll make this clear within the legislation.”
The state is not only spinning falsehoods; it is usually bent on utilizing them to legislate repression. That is a part of its total technique to criminalise pro-Palestinian activism, protest and speech below the guise of combating extremism.
On June 10, lower than a month after the incident, the State Workplace of the Safety of the Structure, a state safety company, launched its 2024 report, through which it categorised a number of pro-Palestinian organisations as “extremist” teams, together with Jewish Voice for a Simply Peace, BDS, and Palestine Speaks. This categorisation will seemingly end in extra intense surveillance, potential police raids on group members, and even bans on organisational actions.
Different teams have already been proscribed. In Could 2024, Palestine Solidarity Duisburg affiliation was banned and its web site shut down by the Inside Ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia state. Earlier to that, in November 2023, the federal authorities banned the pro-Palestinian group, Samidoun.
The state has come after not simply teams but in addition people. In April, three European Union nationals and one US citizen have been threatened with deportation for his or her pro-Palestinian activism. A yr earlier, Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a UK-based Palestinian surgeon, was barred from getting into the nation to talk at an occasion.
My husband and I have been positioned on a black checklist after we have been supposed to talk on the identical occasion. For a yr now, we’ve been topic to interrogation, harassment, and invasive searches each time we journey exterior the nation.
Numerous “symbols” of pro-Palestinian solidarity have additionally been suppressed. The phrase “From the river to the ocean, Palestine will probably be free” was formally banned by a Berlin decide in August 2024, for allegedly expressing help for terrorism. Then, in an much more chilling transfer, town of Berlin banned all Arabic-language chants at demonstrations in April of this yr, successfully criminalising a complete language and silencing complete communities, notably the Palestinian one, which is the most important in Europe.
In the meantime, police brutality at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany has change into disturbingly routine. Protesters are commonly kettled, crushed, and arrested with out trigger or clarification. What as soon as may need appeared distinctive is now customary working process.
The struggle to finish German complicity in genocide is being violently suppressed, each within the streets and within the courts. State-sponsored censorship, racialised policing, and violent erosion of civil liberties are carried out below the false banner of public security.
Whereas the German state continues to say that it’s “atoning for its previous” by cracking down on anti-genocide protests, in Gaza, the genocide is raging at full drive. Bombings proceed, little kids are ravenous to loss of life, and support seekers are massacred at support distribution zones. The Israeli navy is pushing ahead with plans to create a big focus camp for Palestinians within the southern Gaza Strip in preparation for his or her ethnic cleaning.
Appearing to cease this horror has by no means been extra pressing.
In these darkish instances, those that keep silent in regards to the German state’s lies and repression should contemplate rigorously what they’re acquiescing to. At present, it could be the pro-Palestinian activists and folks of conscience who’re criminalised, however tomorrow it will likely be others. German democracy is collapsing, and state repression won’t cease at a racialised group of protesters.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
