Pro-Palestinian protests: “There is this excessive police violence”

At the beginning of June, Alexander Dobrindt received a letter from the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner. The letter begins with "Dear Minister," but then the pleasantries are over. In it, Michael O'Flaherty very clearly denounces the German interior authorities' handling of the protests in connection with the Gaza Strip . The Irishman is primarily concerned with reports of "excessive police deployment" against demonstrators – particularly in Berlin . It is a criticism one would expect to be addressed to an authoritarian state, not to a German Federal Minister of the Interior.

State Secretary Bernd Krösser appears correspondingly irritated in his response. He wants to make it very clear "that freedom of expression and assembly is a fundamental legal right in Germany ." Since Hamas's attack on Israel , only a single-digit number of pro-Palestinian rallies have been banned in Berlin. "I have no doubt that the Berlin authorities are acting proportionately."

Aside from the fact that well over a dozen pro-Palestinian rallies were banned in Berlin in the first six weeks after October 7, 2023, the State Secretary's positive outlook is at least questionable. Courts regularly thwart the Berlin Senate's hard line against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, while reports of police violence are increasing. And Berliners with an Arab immigrant background now feel stigmatized as Hamas sympathizers. "I don't know of any other federal state where such vicious action is taken against assemblies when people express solidarity with Gaza," says Clemens Arzt.

As a professor of constitutional law, he spent years training police officers in police and public order law. Even today, the 67-year-old still goes to demonstrations to see for himself – most recently on Nakba Day in May, when Palestinians commemorate their expulsion. "Israel haters kick police officers," the Tagesspiegel newspaper summarized after the gathering in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Clemens Arzt, however, had a different experience of the demonstration: "There is this excessive violence from the police, these blows to the face, this is unbridled violence." The officers, he said, are acting with a severity against the demonstrators that he has not seen in recent decades.

Berlin, in particular, with its history of often violent May Day protests, had long opted for a policy of de-escalation. This meant that the police did not immediately intervene in every possible crime, for example, if a demonstrator was masked. Officers would then wait for an opportune moment to remove them from the crowd without causing much fanfare.

After October 7, 2023, the opposite approach was taken: The use of pro-Palestinian demonstrators' slogans such as "From the river to the sea," which, depending on the context, can be interpreted as an attack on Israel's right to exist, is now considered a propaganda offense and thus potentially a criminal offense. Violations are usually punished immediately and with apparent robustness. According to Clemens Arzt, this automatic process regularly leads to escalation: "It's a basic pattern that the police classify a statement as a crime of opinion, then enter the crowd, and a confrontation ensues." In doing so, the police follow the line set by politicians: "Of course, there is massive pressure," says the constitutional law professor.

The CDU -led Senate set the tone for this immediately after Hamas's attack on Israel: Almost half of the registered pro-Palestinian demonstrations were banned. Vendors on Sonnenallee in Berlin-Neukölln took down their Palestinian flags for fear of losing their residency rights in Germany. Many schools prohibited students from wearing the Palestinian scarf, the keffiyeh, while others prohibited public discussion of the Middle East conflict.

Immediately after October 7, 2023, the Berlin Senate's concern about violent riots was significant. The capital is home to the largest Palestinian community in Germany; federal ministries are based here, as are many media outlets. This fueled the protests . The day after the Hamas massacre, radical Palestine activists from the Samidoun group celebrated the attack in Berlin-Neukölln. Shortly afterward, unknown assailants threw Molotov cocktails at a synagogue in the Mitte district, but they failed to explode. And on Sonnenallee, young men repeatedly engaged in street battles with the police late at night.

But even weeks and months after October 7, the Senate continued to focus on confrontation rather than de-escalation. The goal was no longer just the protests on the streets, but also at universities.

The university leadership's initially liberal stance toward pro-Palestinian activists was denounced by the state and federal governments as supporting anti-Semitism. 1,400 academics who called for peaceful protest and against the clearing of a camp at the Free University of Berlin (FU) in an open letter faced massive criticism from Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger, FDP. Her department subsequently investigated whether the signatories could be denied state funding.

Julia von Blumenthal, President of Humboldt University, wanted to resolve a lecture hall occupation last year through dialogue with the protesters. However, due to "orders from the very top," as she put it, from Berlin's Senator for Education, Ina Czyborra (SPD), in consultation with Governing Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU), she was forced to have the police clear the area. The President of Alice Solomon University, Bettina Völter, on the other hand, opposed the deployment of police in a similar situation. For this, she was publicly reprimanded by the Governing Mayor: He said it was "completely incomprehensible" that the President viewed the police as a threat and not the "masked and violent anti-Semites."

At the end of 2024, the numerical results of this restrictive policy were as follows: 1,451 antisemitic offenses were recorded in Berlin in connection with the Middle East conflict, compared to 533 the previous year. The sharpest increase was in cases involving the display of symbols or signs of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations, so-called propaganda offenses, from 44 to 531. Violent offenses such as bodily harm or breach of the peace, however, fell from 72 to 67.

However, courts repeatedly acquit defendants, especially in propaganda offenses. "Based on the overall circumstances of the individual case, it was clear to an objective observer that the statement was not intended as a symbol of Hamas, but rather as a show of solidarity with the Palestinians in the current Gaza war," the Berlin Regional Court ruled in an exemplary case from April of this year. But even though it is now widely known that the violence at the protests originates from a maximum of 30 to 50 people, blanket judgments continue to be made. "15,000 Jew-haters are allowed to march," wrote the Bild newspaper at the end of June about a pro-Palestinian demonstration.

The clear lines being drawn are all the more surprising given that sentiment toward Israel is currently shifting due to the army's extremely brutal conduct of the war in Gaza. Even Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who recently wanted to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite an international arrest warrant, has since expressed criticism of the Israeli government. According to recent polls, only 13 percent of Germans support Israel's actions in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, the Israeli flag continues to fly in front of Berlin's Red City Hall, but the suffering of the people in Gaza appears at most in the sidebar of political statements. Jannis Julien Grimm believes that the Berlin Senate's handling of the protests is "poisonous for the city's social cohesion." The protest researcher from the Free University of Berlin and his research group have conducted several studies on the protests by Palestinian sympathizers and their impact on the city. "Not only is there a lack of empathy, there is no attempt at understanding one another at all," says Grimm. This applies to both sides, "except that the pro-Palestinian community has the short end of the stick compared to the state."

From approximately 150 interviews conducted by Grimm and his team, it became clear, among other things, that antisemitic attitudes have increased. At the same time, antisemitism has also become a battle cry, like "wokeness": "In the context of Palestine solidarity, this criminalizes an entire community." People feel they are under general suspicion.

"Migrant communities, including the Späti owner, feel that they are no longer perceived as ordinary citizens," says Grimm, "but, as after 9/11, suddenly again as 'the others.'" As Muslims, as Arabs, as potential Hamas sympathizers. The consequences of this are clear: "The demonstrations are increasingly becoming the only place where you have people around you who understand your own pain."

Grimm's assessment is consistent with that of Human Rights Commissioner O'Flaherty. In his letter, he criticizes the fact that the very broad definition of antisemitism used by German authorities has led to criticism of Israel being categorized as antisemitic in some cases. Researcher Grimm can now relate a lot to this from his academic community: Anyone who publicly expresses criticism of Israel's war in Gaza, for example, receives hate mail and threats. "Everything up to slashed tires is included," says Grimm.