Let’s Free Palestine from German Racism Disguised as Guilt

What was the nature of the crime that Moayeri allegedly “endorsed”? Did she express support for Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization in Germany? No: the slogan does not mention Hamas or any other Palestinian group. Did she call for killing Israelis? No: the slogan makes no mention of violence, whether directed against Israeli soldiers or civilians.

Balzer rejected previous German court rulings that found the slogan’s meaning “ambiguous,” saying it “unquestionably denied the right of the State of Israel to exist.” Even if one were to accept the false premise that “denying Israel’s right to exist” is a criminal offense, that argument would still not stand up to scrutiny.

If a Palestinian state were to be established in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, it would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The literal meaning of the slogan does not exclude the “two-state solution” which is supposed to be the position of German foreign policy, at least in theory.

In Gulliver’s TravelsJonathan Swift describes a country where the authorities are obsessed with tracking down suspected traitors. One of their tricks for doing so is known as the “anagrammatic method”:

By transposing the letters of the alphabet into any suspicious paper, they can reveal the deepest intentions of a disgruntled party. Thus, for example, if I were to say, in a letter to a friend, “Our brother Tom has just caught hemorrhoids,” a skilled decipherer would discover that the same letters which compose this sentence can be analyzed to give the following words: “Resist—a plot is started—the tour.” And this is the anagrammatic method.

George Orwell pointed out that this passage was a disturbing premonition of 20th-century totalitarianism. But the anagrammatic method is positively liberal when compared with Balzer’s approach to identifying thoughtcrimes, which is not limited by the need to rearrange letters into a semi-coherent sentence.

To find a real point of comparison, we must go beyond the literary canon to a scene from The Castlean Australian cult film. An unsympathetic judge asks a disorganized and disheveled lawyer which particular section of the Constitution he is relying on to support his argument. “There is no particular section,” he replies. “It’s just the mood of the thing.”

Balzer’s sentiment-based approach to criminalizing speech acts builds on months of efforts by politicians and other public figures in Europe and North America. American university administrators who have been taken to court in Congress have gotten into trouble because they were afraid to challenge the absurd claim that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for genocide.

In Britain, Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman issued a diktat urging police to “consider whether chants such as ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should not be interpreted as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel wiped off the face of the planet.” Shortly afterwards, Braverman was dismissed in disgrace after inciting a mob of drugged-up fascists to attack police officers in London.

Another Conservative politician, Robert Jenrick, sought to provide rhetorical cover for the racist thugs who have been terrorizing British Muslims since last week by endorsing the incendiary myth of “two-tier policing”:

I thought it was absolutely wrong that someone could shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the streets of London and not be immediately arrested, or project genocidal chants onto Big Ben and not be immediately arrested.

Jenrick faced a backlash for suggesting that a greeting used by Muslims around the world should be considered a crime. But the second part of his remarks was equally sinister: a clear reference to the incident earlier this year when activists threw “from the river to the sea” outside the British parliament during a Gaza solidarity protest.

In Germany itself, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser claimed that “from the river to the sea” was a Hamas slogan – a patently false claim, since the slogan predates Hamas’s very existence – while Justice Minister Marco Buschmann suggested that the slogan could be understood as “approval of the massacres committed in Israel.” Like Birgit Balzer, Buschmann did not find it necessary to refer to the actual words of the slogan: it is just the spirit of the thing.

What makes the manufactured controversy over the slogan “from the river to the sea” particularly repugnant is the context in which it is taking place. Critics of the slogan are not really attacking what it says, but what it does not say. But they would never consider applying the same methodology to slogans like “Israel’s right to defend itself” or “Israel’s right to exist,” which are always on the lips of its supporters.

The text “From the River to the Sea” does not explicitly state what the future status of the Israeli Jewish population will be in the context of a free Palestine. This is not surprising, since it is a slogan rather than a detailed manifesto or the text of a peace agreement.

The slogan proposes either dividing historic Palestine into two states or creating a single democratic state based on the equality of all who live there. The idea that this would necessarily involve the murder or forced expulsion of all Israeli Jews is patently false and is based on a grossly racist view of the Palestinians as a people driven by an insatiable bloodlust.

On the other side of the discursive barricades, the phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself” does not say what methods of “self-defense” Israel can legitimately use. Its close cousin, “Israel’s right to exist,” does not say what form a Palestinian state should take alongside Israel, or even whether there should be a Palestinian state at all.

By now, it is entirely reasonable to assume that anyone who speaks of “Israel’s right to defend itself” is condoning the massacre of Palestinian civilians, since that is how the slogan has been used by government officials in Europe and the United States over the past ten months. This hostile interpretation is far more well-founded than the delegitimization of “from the river to the sea.”

But the idea that a public figure could be prosecuted for speaking about “Israel’s right to defend itself” in the context of a genocidal massacre is simply absurd. There have been far more explicit statements of support for violence against Palestinian civilians in the last ten months, with no political consequences for those who made them, much less legal repercussions.

Birgit Balzer’s decision comes shortly after the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly against the creation of a Palestinian state under any circumstances. This stubborn denial of Palestine’s right to exist, which is the consensus of the Israeli political class, is imposed by the most powerful military machine in the region. This is the reality that Palestinians live every day.

The decision comes after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed the obvious fact that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is an ongoing exercise in colonization that has imposed a system of racial apartheid from river to sea. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s response was to claim that he agreed with the ICJ while adamantly opposing any sanctions against illegal West Bank settlements:

A government under my leadership will not support a boycott of goods, services and commodities from Israel. In all honesty, I find such demands contemptible.

Scholz’s remarks only make sense if he considers the settlements to be an integral part of the Israeli state, which is of course the case. Scholz also insisted that his state would continue to supply weapons to the Israeli armed forces as they turn Gaza into a mass grave.

Balzer claimed that his decision was necessary to ensure that German Jews felt “safe and comfortable” in the country. In reality, his sole purpose was to protect war criminals and their accomplices, allowing them to feel “safe and comfortable” in the knowledge that they could commit murder with impunity while the state monitored the language of their critics.