Palestine conference in Berlin stopped by the police

The conference, which was backed by pro-Palestinian groups, including the DIEM25 party of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, aimed to highlight what they call Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The police intervened after two hours on Friday when a speaker who had been denied entry to Germany started his speech via video link. The power was cut, and the last two days of the conference were cancelled.

250 conference participants were asked to go home, and 900 who were supposed to attend the last two days were told that it has been cancelled.

The speaker, British-Palestinian surgeon Salman Abu Sitta, wrote an essay in January expressing his understanding of the Hamas attack on Israel last October. He himself recently worked as a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza.

He was stopped at passport control in Berlin on Friday, detained for several hours and sent back to the UK with a ban on staying in Germany until Sunday, that is after the conference.

– Intolerable in a democracy

Karin de Rigo, one of the organizers of the conference, calls the police intervention intolerable in a democratic society and says they were treated like criminals.

But Interior Minister Nancy Faeser praised the police for their decisive intervention. She had previously asked the police to be on the lookout for hate speech during the conference.

Germany’s strong support for Israel and fear of anti-Semitism has its background in the Holocaust, the German genocide of 6 million Jews during the Second World War.

But in Germany as in other countries, there is growing opposition to the war in Gaza, not least in the large Turkish and Arab immigrant population.

On guard against anti-Semitism

Activists complain that protests and demonstrations in support of the Palestinians are regularly interrupted by the police, who are on guard against anything that can be interpreted as anti-Semitism, and on Saturday the police were on standby in case there were protests after the cancellation.

Germany is one of Israel’s strongest supporters and still sells large quantities of weapons to the country.

There was widespread support for Israel after the Hamas attack, and that support has continued in broad layers. All expressions of support for Hamas were banned, as well as anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli statements.

But Prime Minister Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock have recently begun to speak out more critically about the war in Gaza, including by asking Israel to refrain from a planned offensive against Rafah.