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The police in Berlin said they had blocked over half of the 41 scheduled Gaza solidarity protests, sometimes on the grounds that they would “emotionalize” residents of Palestinian origin. These included a children’s demonstration to mourn the Palestinian children killed by Israeli strikes in the past month. Permitted protests were banned from using slogans such as “stop the war” and “free Palestine.”
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Since fleeing Syria a decade ago, Wafa Mustafa has spoken out for political prisoners at the United Nations, held vigils outside war crimes trials and chanted in solidarity with Iranians protesting their authoritarian government.
Nowhere has the debate over what is legal and legitimate expression of dissent been more fraught than in Germany, where it has struck at the heart of how the nation defines itself, and prompted questions about which values should be prioritized at the cost of others.
Germans defending the restrictions note that the country has a less permissive stance on free speech than many democracies for subjects beyond Israel, a legacy of World War II and how the Nazis exploited the democratic process to seize power.
Last month, the police detained a woman standing in a Berlin square after she refused to put down a poster that read, “As a Jew and Israeli: Stop the genocide in Gaza.”
Over 100 Jewish writers, artists and academics signed a letter condemning Germany’s practices: “If this is an attempt to atone for German history, its effect is to risk repeating it.”
In August, childhood classmates of Bavaria’s finance minister, Hubert Aiwanger, said he once distributed an antisemitic flier and gave Nazi salutes — accusations he either dismissed as youthful defiance or denied.
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