Things need to change in mainstream pro-Palestine movements in Western Europe argues Arzu Merali, when so many of the racist, Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian narratives that have been employed to justify and enact genocide have been internalised by mainstream social justice organisations. The result has been to uphold those narratives and invite persecution of those protesting “Israel’s” massacres and atrocities.
The collective noun for canaries – in English – is opera. Imagine then, Sydney Opera House stuffed full to the brim with dead canaries. The early warning metaphor for societal breakdown caused by rampant racism has itself broken down long ago. Stick with the coalmine if you prefer, but there have been so many unheeded warning points this last decade of the horrors to come, the horror we are currently living through. Many of those warnings came in the shape of the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, action and thought. Comingled with Islamophobia, anti-migrant racism and the biological racisms of yesteryear resurging across Europeanised settings, the cases and events all fell below the radar of those who are supposed to care. The fourth estate, and the establishment and organs of state in this regard are more culpable than most. But civil society, and within it, ‘mainstream’ pro-Palestinian activism, also has serious questions to answer.
Caterina Aiena’s two reports for Islamic Human Rights Commission prepared for the United Nations this year have covered attacks on pro-Palestine protestors, commentators and activists by the state and its organs in the UK, France and Germany since October 2023. Some examples will appear on these pages but it is better to read them in full for a sense (they could not cover every case) of the magnitude and manner of state repression in this period. The recommendations from it follow at the end, though how seriously they will be taken by governments who have acted with impunity not just since October 2023, but for a long while before, remains to be seen.
We can go back any number of years, but for the sake of brevity, let’s pick a year to unpack: 2018. Let’s zoom in on Germany and the UK, because of the strange symbiosis between the two. One – Germany – was the country hailed as anti-fascist post Second World War[1]; led by the woman charged with carrying the leadership of the ‘free world’ after the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. The other – the UK – was still inhaling the fumes of the Brexit vote, rushing to leave the EU and with it, the perceived overlordship of Europe in general and Germany in particular. Yet, in countering pro-Palestinian activism there was no light to be seen between the pair. Arguably this was the pattern across Western Europe, but again space dictates snapshots not a thesis. All has been documented elsewhere.
Shrinking
The rise of Angela Merkel in 2009 heralded the idea that the Staatsraison (reason of state) for Germany is ‘unconditional support for ‘Israel’. In the years from then until 2018 various pro-Palestinian often BDS oriented events had been targeted by Zionists, and cancelled as a result of venue owners buckling under pressure, municipal facilities being withdrawn or local government interventions. According to a database compiled by pro-Palestine activists (which is acknowledged to present severe underreporting especially from the earlier years) 97 such cases were recorded in that period, with 25 and 13 reported for the years 2017 and 2018 respectively.
Readied to fight back, affected pro-Palestine groups brought legal challenges to the courts in Germany, with judgment in many cases being given across 2018. Simultaneously local, appeal and federal courts were finding for and against pro-Palestinian activists. In Oldenburg[2], the Administrative Court found in favour of those bringing the case, stating in a 20-page judgment that BDS campaigning fell within fundamental rights to freedom of expression and assembly which are protected by the German constitution and essential for democracy. Consequently, the rights of those protesting and organising had been violated by the cancellation of their event. Further, the courts advised the City of Oldenburg, that in considering requests for hall hire in all cases they needed to give due heed and consideration to: i) the fundamental rights to freedom assembly and expression; ii) the principle of equal treatment, and, iii) the applicant’s right to a hearing.
Similar judgments supporting the right to pro-Palestinian protest and castigating municipal and even federal authorities for their cancellations and interventions, followed from that period. Cases from Munich (2020, 2022), Bonn (2019) were examples of cancelled events. In Stuttgart the Palestine Committee there had its bank accounts closed by the State Bank in 2018 and 2022. These were but a few examples, and many of these cases faced multiple appeals sometimes retaining their victory and at other times losing.
Others were not so lucky. All through the year more and more cancellations took place, whilst older court cases found in favour of anti-BDS authorities. This feverish period was set in motion by increasing numbers of non-legal declarations by municipal and state authorities, declaring BDS antisemitic. Cases are still being heard until today, with as much back and forth between successful cases for the pro- and anti-Palestine parties. However in the interim, the Federal State has intervened, passing in 2019, a motion calling BDS activity anti-semitic using the ever controversial but now increasingly adopted IHRA definition of antisemitism.
This upping of the ante, though still being challenged on case by case bases, not only had an increasingly chilling effect on civil society activism for Palestine, it provided a beacon for Zionist agitators across borders.
The script goes thus: a journalist, or a politician (often the same journalists and politicians as in other cases) raises a complaint; if it’s a journalist, a politician will comment making accusations of anti-semitism; as a result of the reportage, more media scrutiny appears, already taking the narrative as set – this group, person, event is anti-semitic / Germany is under attack / Jews need protecting from the hordes of (mostly racialised) protestors / academics / activists / artists etc. Variations, include the ‘alarm’ first being raised by a politician, media then report, you get what happens next.
I speak not simply as a disinterested observer. An IHRC event in Berlin in the autumn of 2018, to be held on a university’s premises with one of their departments as a supporting organisation, regarding the report launch of research on Islamophobia in Germany (mentioning inter alia, the collapsing of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim narratives), fell victim to such an attack. The fallout was not simply the cancelling of the event. The researcher involved and his family were intimidated for days before the cancelled event, job opportunities evaporated. So intense was the backlash that attempts to reorganise the event at a private venue had to be dropped because of security concerns,. Back in the UK a drip-drip of negative media started distracting from the Europe-wide project, overshadowing the findings. Of course, the irony is not lost on anyone with an iota of common sense. A project that posits the idea that attacking Muslims (and indeed others racialised through this narrative) for supporting Palestine, is a form of Islamophobia, was cancelled by the said same Islamophobia[3] in action. Thus cross-border solidarity between Zionist activists, whether in the media or political arenas has seen that one national setting can influence another with speed and ease, ratcheting up the repression of pro-Palestinian voices with alacrity.
Deteriorating
Meanwhile, the environment in Germany continued to deteriorate, with artists, academics and activists targeted: activists and academics losing jobs, artists losing commissions, having exhibitions, book launches, even publications cancelled. Worse still applicants for citizenship were now finding their pro-Palestinian sympathies becoming an obstacle to naturalisation. The fraught arena of citizenship, despite many improvements since the year 2000[4] had already been a problematic arena for Muslim applicants whose religious views were already being policed and sanctioned. Since October 2023, citizenship has now become contingent on accepting the ‘right of Israel to exist’. As this piece is being written, the Bundestag is getting ready to ratify a resolution that would make public funding for the arts and science also reliant on a declaration of Israel’s right to exist from recipients. Needless to say, the precarious state of refugees is worsened by the same requirements; ironic when so many have fled persecution for their political beliefs, arriving in Germany in the belief they will be free. It is even more ironic that the measures tying citizenship to belief in the right of ‘Israel’ to exist came with the new citizenship law that was seen as a major reform in relation to the previous measures: cutting down required residency time in Germany from eight to as little as three years and allowing dual nationality (which previously had not been allowed to non-EU heritage residents and had adversely affected German born applicants as well as immigrants with Turkish, Balkan and Moroccan heritage in great numbers).
It’s not that there hasn’t been push-back: over 1400 artists signed a letter of protest (following protests from an alliance of elite German cultural institutions focusing on BDS) on the curtailment of even the most mealy mouthed criticism of the Israeli entity’s genocidal reign. It’s that such voices, alongside the already marginalised voices of Muslims and other pro-Palestinians, have themselves become pariahs. Pastor Niemoller couldn’t be (still) more relevant in this regard: few if any spoke up when it was Germans of ‘migration heritage’ that were the targets across the 2000s and 2010s. Even anti-fascist, anti-racist campaigners have been guilty of Islamophobic rhetoric. Activist and academic Leandros Fischer narrates a particularly poignant (and to many, typical) example from 2014:
“When a mob of five thousand hooligans, many of them active neo-Nazis, gathered in front of Cologne’s main train station on October 26 to protest “Salafism,” the far smaller counter-demonstration assembled under the abstract slogan “against racism and religious fundamentalism,” apparently eager to disassociate itself from the Salafism.
“This had the rather unsettling effect of equating young discriminated Muslims with the direct political heirs of Himmler and Goebbels.
“At a subsequent meeting convened to discuss the aftermath of the demonstration, I witnessed how left-oriented German students could genuinely not fathom why the counter-protest’s slogan was outright wrong. This drew the desperate ire of a comrade of Iranian background, a symptom perhaps of a deepening rift between significant parts of the Left and Muslims living in Germany.”
Few listened to the anti-Zionist Jewish activists and groups making the very necessary connections between a then and now of 100 years of barely suppressed fascism. They still clamour today, highlighting not just the state’s descent into neo-fascism as police brutalise protestors day in day out, but Zionist groups linked to neo-fascists.
Recent anti-racist demonstrators in Germany this last year have abused and expelled pro-Palestine protestors from their mobilisations against the rampant rise of the right. It makes no sense, it would be laughable, except that it is real, and is happening with greater regulatory.
Worse still perhaps, is that in many of the larger pro-Palestine movements then and now, the perception that mainstreaming requires distancing from those racialised and demonised has affected how both mobilisations work and who is allowed to be seen to be present. Thus in the UK, a combination of gatekeeping and pre-emptive censorship of slogans and banners has created an atmosphere where protestors attending marches can be isolated from event leadership and then targeted by Zionist media and activists, resulting in their images being circulated over social media and post-event arrests and charges. As the paraglider case proved, even supposedly progressive media piled on to create an atmosphere that saw three young women caught up in the emotion of witnessing a sudden genocidal onslaught, charged and found guilty of anti-terrorism offences.
Meanwhile, all pro-Palestinian demonstrations, regardless of the extremes of self-censorship and ally shedding, were termed ‘hate marches’ by the then Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Though widely condemned by international organisations, within the UK and as vanguard to European state efforts against similar demonstrations of pro-Palestine feeling, the term has taken off. It is regularly regurgitated by power adjacent think tankers in various nation contexts. This appellation should have been no surprise to organisers, having been levelled for decades at the annual Al-Quds Day protest in Berlin. Unchallenged in that context it has now been ‘mainstreamed’.
Documenta 15
Aiena’s report reproduces many stories of police brutality and state (sponsored) discrimination.
The loss of Angela Merkel as German Chancellor heralded the collapse of any last vestiges of opposition to a US led pro-Israel campaign that has left sovereign states, and even the putative European federation beholden to the support of the Israeli regime. The case of the arts festival Documenta 15 (held in 2022) has been covered relatively extensively. Labelled antisemitic over an interpretation of an image in a mural, there has been little coverage of the racist and Islamophobic attacks on artists as a result of the claims. The curators for that year were Ruangrupa, the artists’ collective from Indonesia. The accusations of anti-semitism resulted in exhibits being covered, and talks, which could have addressed the accusations, being cancelled. The violence and threats of violence embedded in multiple acts of vandalism were overlooked even when reporting from the letter in support of victims of that violence. Muslims – routinely accused of being insensible to artistic vision, only able to destroy what they can’t understand or accept – were here in racialised projections – the victims of violence against their freedom of expression. The controversy still rages about Documenta 15 and underpins a large part of the push for the ratification of the policy to be imposed on arts and science research.
For the purposes of this piece however, a case from Documenta that has received less attention and crosses the divide between Germany and the UK is that of British artist Hamja Ahsan. He not only experienced first-hand the violence at Documenta when the venue hosting his work (alongside collectives Question of Funding and Party Office) was broken into and vandalized, with spray-painted slogans reading “187” and “Peralta.”[5] In August of that year while in London, Ahsan posted a Guardian piece on Facebook about Germany’s increased defence spending, referring to Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, as “a neo-liberal fascist pig”. He also posted a Telegraph story about a press conference involving Boris Johnson and Scholz with the caption “two pigs”.
In Germany a few days later for Documenta 15, Ahsan came under attack from no Stefan Naas, from the Free Democratic Party (FDP), who shared a screenshot of Ahsan’s Facebook post on his X account calling it “unbearable”.
Ahsan’s responses to Naas’s post, seem par of the course for a platform like X (formerly Twitter). In one tweet, he accused Naas of attempting to shut down his event, calling him a “neoliberal Apartheid regime lackey.” Not the most flattering but hardly a controversial insult given the topic or indeed the times. Indeed, much worse is daily said across the platform by the powerful against the powerless without so much as the bat of an eyelid. Except apparently not in Germany. Several German publications, including Bild, began covering the Twitter spat, branding Ahsan a “hate artist” and expressing outrage at his “insults” towards Scholz.
Ahsan, received floods of abuse and threats as a result, to the extent that he feared for his safety. He cancelled all his remaining events, informed Documenta of his security fears and asked for an escort to the airport. He states that the abuse included everything from calls to burn his art, to threats to kill him. No-one has been held responsible for this abuse.
This horrific story does not end here. Back at home in the UK, Ahsan received documents from the Kassel prosecutor’s office in December 2022. The document stated he had “insulted” the two politicians knowing that the comments “would impede the politician’s political career, which was exactly what you intended to do.”
If convicted, he was told, he could face a fine of around €12,000; failure to pay which could result in imprisonment. He had to crowdfund to pay his legal fees. In 2024, Ahsan was found guilty and fined. At the time of writing, Ahsan is awaiting the result of an appeal. The toll on Ahsan has been, understandably, huge.
His case has highlighted the lengths that the German establishment will go to to silence opponents. In the UK, at least at the point of writing, calling a politician a pig has yet to invoke criminal prosecution. However, as the coconut and paraglider cases have shown, we are not far off. Those cases have generally been reported in derogatory and alarmist terms. The British press’ obsession with free speech curtailment as a result of Muslim demands (it feels to someone my age that this has been a fairly routine accusation since the Rushdie affair of end 1988, punctuated until today by Charlie Hebdo type incidents) is truly just Muslim specific. These cases, with demands for the sanctioning of pro-Palestinian speech, have shown that the sacred cow of free speech and (political) expression, was always a myth. Speech and action is only free, it seems, when targeting Muslims and those racialised as such (or racialised other ways). No such rights are afforded to those victimised by such.
We have already had so many cases over almost 25 years, of teenagers writing ‘extremist poetry’ on the backs of till receipts being prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws, Muslim bookshops raided and owners arrested because of their stock, and of course the never-ending cases of students downloading material for their degree or A-Level essays and then being charged for downloading terrorist manuals etc. All these cases, numerous in the 2000s, immediately chilled civil society and anti-racist movements, and the pro-Palestine movement was not immune then and it is especially not so now.
London protestors in the early mass demonstrations last year complained of how stewards told them to refrain from certain chants – long before there was any clamour from Zionist organisations and their shills in parliament. It is sadly reminiscent of the time police were called to deal with two protestors by supposedly pro-Palestine rally organisers, for displaying flags and attire in support of the resistance. This incident took place long before any laws banning the same. They did result in the pair’s homes being raided by anti-terrorist police and both being detained, questioned and interrogated. Thus far nothing changes, and the organisers of these events seem insensible (or worse) to the effects of their decisions.
Incredulousness
Much of the disappointment of those now targeted and protesting outside traditional racialised settings stems from an inability to see Western European states as anything other than representative democracies, where all (racialised liberal and mainly ‘white’ or ‘white’ adjacent) are equal. As direct action movements have multiplied in recent years, this fantasy, despite extreme repression, has persisted.
When climate activists were given custodial sentences for having a meeting on Zoom discussing disruption, or when others were targeted under anti-terrorism laws, parts of the liberal press (such that is left in the UK) were aghast. Much talk of miscarriages of justice, and creeping authoritarianism arose. To the Muslimised sections of British society this was rank hypocrisy. The injustice of the case was neither new (there have been decades worth of such travesties under anti-terrorism laws, see Ansari for snapshot of 2000 – 2006). It was as if such repression is only fit to be described thus when whiteness is involved. Worse still is the treatment of direct action protestors regarding Palestine. Some consideration is required into why the treatment of protestors arrested and charged with offences has changed from court victories and vindication to being held without access to family and friends and bail under anti-terrorism laws as in the case of the Filton 10. Does the changing demographic of those who protest have an impact? In other words, does increased Muslim participation facilitate the increased repression? Or, relatedly still, is it the mission creep of anti-terrorism laws that many warned about back when they were reintroduced in 1997? Understanding these issues needs to be a priority within such movements and wider civil society. Thus far the failing opposition to the state’s crackdown on pro-Palestine feeling is not an aberration but a natural progression for an inherently racist state and its organs, and mainstream pro-Palestinian movements are facilitating this failure by their exclusionary and muted organising thus far.
The leaked information that ministers have interfered in the prosecution of activists, is horrendous but only shocking if you didn’t already have a grounding in government and security services interference in legal proceedings as a matter of course. Any number of informants, arrested by the police and charged with terrorism have found charges dematerialise and releases appear when their handler agency has been pushed to get involved or has involved themselves to ensure their activities are kept out of the limelight. Some of these cases are well known, many more not so. Then there is the failure of strategic litigation, scuppered almost completely by the withdrawal of legal aid for such cases. Even when a case can make it to court, like the attempt to ban supply flights for Israel from the US landing at Prestwick airport to refuel during the 33 Day war between the entity and Lebanon in 2006. Sure of a win based on law and also a highly sympathetic judge, the judgment against was so clearly the result of political intervention it should have lit up the front pages had there remained a fourth estate worthy of the name.
Betrayals
This beyond naïve, nay delusional, faith in the system was shown perhaps most starkly in the UK with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader in 2015. Attacked by Zionists as an anti-Semite and largely laughed at and pilloried by mainstream press, Corbyn’s Labour Party nevertheless caught the mood of disenchantment and desperation of a country breaking under racialised hierarchies and still reeling from austerity imposed after the 2008 financial crash. The accusation of hating Jews based solely on his pro-Palestinian activism had no effect on the electorate in the snap general election called by the newly crowned Prime Minister Theresa May in order to increase her majority (something considered a given by the commentariat and her advisers at the time). The shock result of a hung parliament with the country without a functioning government for many days and the possibility of a minority Labour government in the wings was a crucial moment where the possibility of change was in fact thrown under the bus by the very people in whose words so much hope, by so many, had been placed through the ballot box.
The accusation of anti-semitism against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had not affected this incredible reversal of fortunes for the incumbent Tory Party. It is worth remembering that this is a country in which, when Michael Howard became leader of the Tory Party (and thus opposition in 2004), polls showed that 1 in 5 would not want him (or any other Jewish person) as Prime Minister because of his faith. Only 53% of those polled felt indifferent to having a Jewish Prime Minister compared to any other faith.
Of course, the state always recalibrates. It is our responses to that recalibration and the learning or not of lessons that defines our futures. Hitherto a mass movement for change, the Corbyn Labour Party’s leadership appeared to concede all sorts of matters to Zionist factions within its structure, in exchange, we can only assume for their support and deliverance thereafter to power. What utter fools. An entirely unnecessary enquiry and chain of events that resulted in suspensions and expulsions of pro-Palestine activists ensued, giving succour to the idea that something was exceptionally wrong in the party, and cementing the idea that pro-Palestinianism is wrong in the mind of a public that had not made such spurious connections (in large part) thus far. Other demonisations followed and research needs to be made into how media and political demonisation of migrants, apartheid, Muslims alongside Palestine all collapsed into the meaning of anti-semitism. Anti-semitism, if you read much of the post 2017 election media, is not anti-Jewish so much as pro-Muslim/migrant/Palestinian. These have all finally collapsed into the pre-eminent dog-whistle narrative. It was employed at the drop of the hat in the summer in the UK during the riots; in coverage of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans running riot (or conducting an anti-Muslim pogrom if you prefer) in Amsterdam; in all justifications of genocide since October 2023 and the months in-between.
At the end of 2023 I wrote that the pro-Palestine movement had to learn the lessons of demonisation. It hasn’t. Supine in its larger established organisations of both secular and Muslim bent in the UK, it has continued to undermine actual Palestinian and pro-Palestinian resistance to extermination, by focusing on victimhood whilst eschewing the very real military victories against Zionist forces in Gaza, Lebanon the Red Sea and all over West Asia. And yes that includes the (at the time of writing) two Operations True Promise from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In the UK, Sayyeda Warsi’s dinner table test for Islamophobia is failed routinely in these circles, as all those resisting are tarred with the brush of ‘Islam’. It is not simply a case of political difference or opposition in a decontextualised ‘abroad’, it has left pro-Palestine protestors vulnerable to arrests for carrying imagery of the erstwhile PM and Home Secretary as coconuts, it has seen pro-Palestine journalists raided at dawn by anti-terrorism police and all their devices confiscated. It has seen the son of Holocaust survivors, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, arrested by the same for condemning Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Amongst his few but very eloquent words he stated:
“We have to fight colonialism everywhere because Israel has colonized the American mind, the British mind the European mind. More importantly they’ve colonized the Jewish people everywhere, they have colonized Judaism the tradition, the beliefs, the religion the experience of Jews for 2,000 years was colonized by Zionism and these Jews are supporting in great numbers not just here but everywhere in the west they are supporting the genocide. Shame on them.”
Premature Anti-Nazism and Anti-Genocidism
An interesting thread circulates on X while this is being written. It recounts how accusations of ‘premature anti-Nazism’ and ‘anti-fascism’ abounded after the Second World War. This targeted those who had (before the US became a part of the war) had raised the alarm against fascism across Europe (particularly Franco’s Spain) and the Nazis in Germany in particular. These accusations were a precursor to the McCarthy witch-hunts, and resulted in the black- and greylisting of many artists, the blacklisting of political activists and the exclusion from political life of those deemed guilty of opposing fascism. This included those who had gone to Spain to fight Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War.
In the clamour since October 2023 to shut down all anti-genocide protests we can see that without serious change this is a future awaiting thousands upon thousands in Western Europe and the US. This cycle however has repeated many times since the end of the Second World War and this is not the first time that pro-Palestinianism will be impacted. Any number of academics in Germany are already jobless and blacklisted, told point blank they will never work in academia in Germany again. In the UK, the wave of such cases has started, stemmed only because of the success of Professor David Miller’s employment tribunal victory that has established anti-Zionism as a protected belief. Civil society organisations are silenced and excluded, politicians and broadcasters suspended or cast out of jobs and political parties. Given the scale of human suffering we are witnessing at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime, some thousands of us being blacklisted for calling it out seems a small price to pay to speak truth. However, the fear of it chills the movements and the organisations that lead these movements. Their capitulation to the narratives, also excluding other organisations, also undermining, rejecting or minimising the resistance are worse than the repression of the state. It is a betrayal that will and has already opened the door to greater repression than blacklisting.
The regular wide-eyed stares of surprise at repression need to be replaced by a united pro-Palestine movement working in solidarity with other anti-racist organisations and understanding that their activism means nothing if it is not also set on changing the status quo ante of the repressive societies they live in.
As the toxic culture of pro-Israelis accelerated in Germany, Susann Witt-Stahl and Dror Dayan documented the attacks on and resistance from anti-Zionist Jews in Germany (and also the UK). Their 2022 film ‘The Time of Slanderers – A Critical Intervention’ is compulsory viewing.
Rolf Becker in the opening section entitled, ‘Hitler’s Extended Arm’ is brutal in his more than apt comparison with Germany in the 1930s:
“As Bertolt Brecht said, I believe in 1932, just before the Nazis took power: the enemy has deformed most of our terms beyond recognition. That’s the situation we are facing now.”
In this situation, anti-Genocidism is anti-Nazism. At some point, no doubt, that will be universally acknowledged. Meanwhile, those who decried it too early will pay a price. Also from the film, Becker’s poem opens:
Some day
The Jews that are still left
When this insanity is over
Will begin to look for traces of Jews
Who were not complicit
But warned
Thus Germans pointed
After Hitler’s demise
To Germans who only the previous day
Had been persecuted or killed
They were now to bear testimony
That there had been other Germans too.
Will a word of my warning
Still resonate then?
It is not just Jewish people who will be accountable. Those of us in pro-Palestine movements have much to be justifiably aggrieved with. But we also bear responsibility for the deformation of terms that crush the movement daily. It is a horrendous state of affairs.
No one of us should be surprised. This cycle of repetition needs breaking.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. Follow her on X, BlueSky and Instagram @arzumerali or read more of her work on www.arzumerali.com.
Caterina Aiena’s recommendations are copious and are addressed to the UN, the EU and Nation States. Below are those aimed at the latter[6]. The full report and recommendations can be found online. I share these because pro-Palestinian civil society, whether secular, Islamic, leftist are any and no combination of the above need to also see how their behaviours have internalised the behaviours of the state in dealing with other parts of the pro-Palestine movement. It is a harsh criticism, but based on pre- and post-October 2023 behaviours, deserved. Without serious consideration of the impact and damage these behaviours have had not just on the cause of Palestine but also within anti-racist movements in Westernised settings.
IHRC calls on states:
- to formally discard the non-legally binding IHRA definition of antisemitism that stigmatises dissenting positions on the Israeli occupation with the accusation of antisemitism and abridges fundamental rights, particularly freedom of speech. The antisemitism accusation that is based on the IHRA definition becomes an instrument used to protect the persistence of racial domination of Israeli Jews over Palestinians.
- to endorse the Jerusalem Declaration in lieu of the IHRA definition. It provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel from Anti-Semitic statements and actions.
- to respect the European Court of Human Rights’ opinion that has recognised recently in connection with campaigns relating to Israel that ‘[a] boycott is first and foremost a means of expressing opinions by way of protest. A call for a boycott, which imparts those opinions while appealing for specific actions arising from them, thus falls in principle within the protection of Article 10 of the Convention”.
- to stop arbitrary banning of demonstrations. Bans are clearly something that stand outside the bounds of international conventional counter-terrorism requirements. Most of the bans have been pursued by indefinite, blanket orders, with no limits or definition, simply applying to fundraising, the display of the Palestinian flag, the wearing of the Palestinian keffiyeh, and chanting the “Free, Free Palestine” slogan.
- to encourage member states to review the definition of counter-terrorism and extremism and their implementation, by providing that”
(i) decisions cannot be taken solely by ministerial decrees;
(ii) necessary safeguards are put in place for anyone who feels they have been wrongly labelled an extremist;
(iii) right to appeal must be guaranteed at all times;
(iv) the practice of blacklisting must be impeded.
- to prevent the ministers of education or other relevant government actors from providing strict disciplinary procedures on how to discuss the situation in Palestine and referrals to counter-terrorism departments at schools and universities
- to ensure free spaces of confrontation and expression of political views and refrain from boycotting and cancelling of the events and targeting intellectuals, artists, and activists.
- to stop conditionalising the obtaining of national residence permit or citizenship on the recognition of Israel’s right to exist.
[1] The rise of AfD included, the idea of the de-Nazification of German settings has not for a long carried the weight it used to. As with rest the of the west, Fascism has not crept but fairly leapt back into the mainstream.
[2] A city in Lower Saxony, close to the Netherlands Border, with a population just shy of 200,000.
[3] Sadly this was not even the first time an IHRC event was cancelled because of Islamophobia. In 2014 the first of what was to be an annual event of more than ten years standing: IHRC & SACC’s Institutional Islamophobia Conference, was cancelled by the venue hosts, Birkbeck College after the intervention of Camden Council’s Prevent Officer and advice from the local police. The incident is described here, at the Law on Trial 2015: The Islamophobic university event, from 2015.
[4] As discussed on these pages before in ‘New Citizens for Old: How Islamophobia makes Contemporary Germany’, The Long View, Volume 3, Issue 2, March 2021.
[5] It is suspected that the slogans referred to the California penal code section on murder and the Spanish neo-Nazi activist Isabel Peralta, who has encouraged violence against Islam.
[6] Policy Recommendations from ‘The Authoritarian Drift of the European Democratic State: the Crackdown on Pro-Palestine Movement – Part II’ by Caterina Aiena for Islamic Human Rights Commission.
