On a scrappy intersection in Berlin police officers in riot gear sit inside a row of 14 trucks and watch as demonstrators gather. Mixed in age and ethnicity, demonstrators carry signs and banners ranging from creative to provocative to problematic.
“This is the real Love Parade” reads one; another, reads: “Germany silence is criminal complicity”. A third has an oversized cartoon of Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu and the slogan: “Prime minister of genocide”.
Each week since late October they have marched through Berlin in support of the Palestinian people and in protest against Israel’s military response in Gaza to the Hamas attacks of October 7th.
In the home of the Holocaust, however, the attacks – and the local response – are testing like never before two of Germany’s most solemn postwar vows.
The sense of obligation the German state feels towards the state of Israel has collided with Israel critics’ freedom of expression and assembly – constitutional rights agreed in postwar Germany, also in response to Nazi-era abuses.
No one takes their right to march more seriously than Berliners. Germany’s demonstration capital has around 5,000 registered marches annually, on average 14 daily. All such demonstrations are overseen and accompanied by Berlin police. On its website the Berlin police describe marches as “an elementary component of a democratic community”.
Where opinions are expressed in an “unpeaceful manner”, however, police are obliged to “intervene, to warn and, as a final means, use physical violence”. On the fringes of a recent Saturday demonstration many marchers who spoke to The Irish Times said – unprompted – that police violence is now common at pro-Palestine marches in the capital.
“I’m from Syria and have seen quite a bit of police violence,” said writer Firas Alshater, who came to Germany 12 years ago. “I’m totally shocked by the arbitrary police violence I’ve seen here.”
For 28 year-old Berlin woman Annika, another marcher, the local police show “no restraint” towards marchers. “A few weeks ago I saw them detain a pregnant woman. They just push into a crowd and grab people.”
A Berlin-based Irishman “Martin” – not his real name – was one of those grabbed as he stood on the sidelines of a pro-Palestinian demonstration last April. “About 20 of them stormed in and launched at me, I went down backwards on to the ground,” he recalls. “I was punched on my right side, kicked in my left ribs, I hurt my back.”
Video footage shows Martin being lead away, handcuffed. He insists he did nothing illegal, just chanted “free Palestine”.
Martin says he was photographed and kept lying on the ground for an hour and 15 minutes. His back “was in agony” and took five weeks to right itself. By then Martin learned he was being charged with assaulting the police. “So 20 of them came in on top of me but somehow I was assaulting them. Now I know this approach is not unusual.”
His presence at the march, and the charge against him, appears to have made its way into Germany’s border database. As a regular visitor to Dublin, Martin says he is now stopped and quizzed every time he returns to Berlin, his home for the last 20 years. “They are monitoring and profiling activists, and I believe it is officially sanctioned. It is intended to intimidate, to make people afraid to come to protests.”
Many marchers see the police response as ordered by German politicians facing a growing dilemma. Many of those who lined up to condemn the Hamas murder of at least 1,300 Israelis last October struggle now to respond to Israel’s killing of an estimated 40,000 people in Gaza.
Crackdowns are now common: on pro-Palestinian university protests; on pro-Palestinian artists accused of anti-Semitism. Some report a growing atmosphere of denunciation.
One Irish marcher in Berlin tells The Irish Times how their employer received an anonymous email that they were employing a drug-addicted, unstable person who was a “danger to the community” and attending “violent demos”.
“This email threw everything at me, hoping something would stick,” the marcher said. “I’ll never know who sent it and it made me feel very vulnerable in work, paranoid and distrusting.”
With a 40-minute delay, the march gets under way and takes more than an hour to cover a kilometre. A collection of different pro-Palestinian groups, the loud, sometimes angry, chants include: “Israel is a terrorist state”, “Zionism is a crime, get your hands off Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – the latter banned since November in Germany as a “hallmark” of Hamas.
As the route turns a corner at the headquarters of the Springer media company, a vocal supporter of Israel, marchers cross paths with around 30 people holding Israel flags and signs with slogans including “Bring them home now” and “Believe Israeli women”.
Guarded by police behind a barrier, insults – and dozens of plastic water bottles – fly in their directions from the pro-Palestinian marchers. After the larger march passes one of the pro-Israel demonstrators says that “these things can go either way”.
“If the police weren’t here they would have gone for us,” said Martin, a 65 year-old Berliner.
Shortly after the altercation the march comes to a halt. For around 90 minutes nothing happens and marchers begin to leave. After a two-hour delay, still nearly two kilometres from their goal of city hall, organisers announce that police have ordered the demonstration to be broken up. Police repeat the message a few minutes later, then officers in riot gear move in and carry away people to vans as angry marchers follow and film.
Nearby Martin rolls up his flag for another week. “They keep people cooped up for hours, to create the intimidating and hostile atmosphere they need for their reports.”
The next day’s police report says that protesters, despite repeated warnings, “used banners as screens” and shouted “pro-Palestinian and inciteful slogans”.
Of 400 police deployed some 10 were injured but remained on duty, the report adds, while 24 people were detained and 31 criminal investigations started, including for grievous bodily harm, breaches of the peace...sedition and violence against police.
A police spokeswoman says there is no record of how many pro-Palestinian marches since October reached their registered destination, nor does it collate how many people have been charged with attacking police.
“We have many demonstrations in Berlin, our colleagues are under huge pressure, most are doing overtime and would rather be somewhere else,” said the police spokeswoman. “In a heated atmosphere, with bottles and other objects flying, people are sometimes detained incorrectly. This is not in the interests of the rule of law, but it can happen.”
None of Berlin’s pro-Palestinian marchers know where all this is going, with some fearing the weekly standoffs could lead to fatalities.
Iris Hefets, a regular at the Saturday marches, has been protesting since last year’s October 7th attacks – even after all pro-Palestinian marches and many Palestinian symbols were banned for a few weeks.
Nearly a year on Hefets, a trained psychoanalyst, sees Germany’s ongoing political and police crackdown on freedom of expression and assembly as an immature form of Holocaust guilt reduction. “The mature form of guilt acknowledges ‘I did something bad to you’ and tries to repair something even it can’t be repaired,” she said. “The immature form is to try to undo what was done. If I promised to feed your cat but didn’t and your cat died, the next day I will buy a new cat.”
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