A Berlin court has convicted a pro-Palestinian activist of condoning a crime for leading a chant of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a rally in the German capital four days after the Hamas attacks on Israel, in what her defence team called a defeat for free speech.
The presiding judge, Birgit Balzer, ordered 22-year-old German-Iranian national Ava Moayeri to pay a €600 (£515) fine on Tuesday, rejecting her argument that she meant only to express support for “peace and justice” in the Middle East by calling out the phrase on a busy street.
Balzer said she “could not comprehend” the logic of previous German court rulings that determined the saying was “ambiguous”, saying to her it was clear it “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist”.
There’s been plenty of pro-Palestinian protests in Germany. Most of the news you’re hearing regarding this are from Berlin (as in the state, not “the federal government” or something), where previously there was a great tohuwabohu from people like you over Nakhba protests being outlawed. Very similar lines of argument already back then.
And it’s also been bullshit back then: The Berlin police outlawed them, and courts upheld that ban, because in each and every previous year the Nakhba protests turned violent. Organisers did not have the protesters under control, public safety got endangered, and organisers could not demonstrate how this time it would be differently.
So, rather unsurprisingly, Berlin also reacted harsh to the protests post 7th of October. Elsewhere everything went very differently, not the least because the Palestinian diaspora elsewhere in Germany is saner.
What I don’t get though is what you people are trying to achieve by pushing that kind of narrative.