They are trying to silence us – we fight back!
A new Occupy against Occupation camp will start on Wednesday the 6th of November, one day before the Bundestag is set to vote on a shameful and racist resolution. In word and in effect, the resolution is a sweeping attack on the ongoing national protests against genocidal complicity.
Simultaneously, as cover for escalating state repression, it shifts the blame for Germany’s own long-lived history of antisemitic crimes onto the Arab ‘Other’ — with only a brief, secondary mention of rightwing antisemitism.]
One year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, hundreds of thousands are estimated killed, and the scale of the loss and harm by disease, injuries and manufactured famine is yet to be fully reckoned with. Meanwhile, Israel has expanded its war to the West Bank and Lebanon, murdering, bombing and invading, all with German weapons and German support.
It is in this exact context of untold and immeasurable death and suffering, brought about by Israel and its enablers, that the Bundestag seeks to enact a resolution that would:
- punish criticism of the Israeli state with loss of funding for culture and science workers
- push for university crackdowns on students, teachers and researchers voicing dissent against Germany’s imperialistic state interests,
- further criminalise protest against genocide, with immigrants and non-German citizens increasingly targeted,
- and conflate opposition to a rogue genocidal state with antisemitic bigotry, equating Judaism with Zionism in the process
We refuse this resolution, as we refuse German support for genocide and racist weaponisation of antisemitism!
We demand:
- Scrap the Resolution!
- Immediately ban the export of weapons of war and military supplies to Israel!
- End the repression against the Palestine solidarity movement!
The resolution is manipulatively titled ‘Resolution for the protection of Jewish life’. In actuality, it protects nothing but Germany’s complicity in genocide. It enforces only a wider, more vast silence throughout German society. And it does so by turning the screw on any and all who stand in solidarity with Palestine.
Lastly, the resolution puts the mantra of ‘Never Again’ front and centre. To make this reference to Germany’s historic responsibility testifies, more than anything, to a twisted un-learning of the nation’s own lessons following from its crimes. So let’s come together and make the lesson clear: ‘Nie Wieder Gilt für Alle – never again for anyone’.
You try to silence us? We fight back!
You support an occupation state? We occupy!