Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 27 July 2024

Authorities in Berlin are threatening me with prison for giving a speech via Zoom to an audience in Germany on that country’s role in Israel’s ongoing holocaust against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

I gave the talk anyway to thousands of people viewing it online, and you can watch it in the video above. It was part of the Palestine Conference in Exile held online on 25-26 July.

About two hours before my scheduled talk on 26 July, I received via a lawyer in Germany a 15-page notice from government authorities in Berlin informing me that I am prohibited from participating in the conference by any means, including online. The penalties include fines and up to one year in prison.

As I spoke from the United States, Germany can claim no jurisdiction over me, but I have been given to understand that German authorities may still open a criminal case against me for violating the order. So be it.
As I stated in the talk, I do not take orders from a regime that is participating in a genocide, and I take inspiration from Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

I would have made the same decision to speak even if I had been in Germany, and I am conscious that those organizing for Palestinian rights there, especially members of the Palestinian community and their Jewish comrades, have already faced serious repression, including bans, police beatings, home raids, arrests and other repressive measures.

Conference organizers say that the ban “echoes previous oppressive measures” and shows “once again the repressive face of German democracy.”

The organizers add in reference to the action against me: “The persecution of a journalist exposing Germany’s support of genocide mirrors the suppression of dissent and it raises critical questions about whether Germany has fully internalized the lessons of its past or if it is repeating the same mistakes under a different guise.”

In April, German authorities violently raided and shut down a Palestine conference in Berlin, banning speakers including Greek politician Yanis Varoufakis, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, historian Salman Abu Sitta and me.

The only person who managed to speak before that conference was violently shut down was journalist Hebh Jamal. She participated in this conference too.

Ghassan Abu Sitta, the surgeon who treated victims in Gaza during the first month and a half of Israel’s genocide, was detained at the airport as he entered Germany to speak at the April conference, slapped with a ban on political activities, also threatened with fines and prison, and deported to the UK.

In Germany – the country whose leaders cry “Never Again!” – bearing witness to genocide is now a crime.

It was in response to that state violence and censorship that organizers held this conference completely online. Panels with other speakers will be published on the conference website in coming days.

Germany is guilty of genocide
My 20-minute talk covers Germany’s role in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Germany’s historical complicity with Zionism, a racist, fascistic and colonial ideology.

I talk about how Chancellor Olaf Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock have spread fabricated Israeli atrocity propaganda that justifies and incites genocide, and I called for both German leaders to be brought to justice.

I try to answer the question of why Germany, which purports to be a modern democracy, would arm and support Israel as it exterminates Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

I explain that, in fact, the German alliance with Zionism predates World War II and has its roots in the anti-Semitic ideas of Protestants in the 19th century. It continued through the Nazi Holocaust and remains intact into the present day.

Indeed, far from being the modern democracy it proclaims itself to be, many of the institutions of West Germany – later reunified Germany – were founded by former members of the Hitler regime.

Former Nazis occupied many senior positions in the government of West Germany.

Kurt Kiesinger, who was West German chancellor in the 1960s, had joined the Nazi party in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. He had, as journalist Beate Klarsfeld explained, been a “high officer of Nazi propaganda” during the war.

Modern Germany’s intelligence service, known by its initials BND, was founded by Reinhard Gehlen, a senior Nazi spy chief under Hitler, and later a close collaborator of the CIA.

And well into the 1970s, the top ranks of West Germany’s justice ministry teemed with former members of Hitler’s Nazi party.