Before the start of a pro-Palestinian rally — one of the scores being staged almost daily here since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza — an organizer on a bullhorn yelled out the do’s and don’ts as ordered last week by the Berlin police.
No burning the Israeli flag. No shouts of “Death to Israel.” And absolutely no repeating the slogan “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out and fight alone” — a rhyming chant in German that had become increasingly common at pro-Palestinian rallies here before being nipped in the bud by German authorities.
Some demonstrators may have said such things, conceded Leila El Abtah, a 29-year-old protester who is the daughter of a Palestinian father and a German mother. But, she insisted, even thoughtful criticism against Israel is being misinterpreted here as hate speech. “There are more of us speaking out about Israel now,” she said. “Because of what happened during Hitler’s day, it is making Germans nervous.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is echoing on the streets of Europe, sparking a rash of protests — both peaceful and violent — and ratcheting up tensions across the continent. Saturday in London, 45,000 protesters gathered outside Israel’s embassy, chanting “Free Palestine.” In France, a nation already facing an uptick in anti-Semitic violence before the Israeli strikes on Gaza, pro-Palestinian youths last week looted and set fire to Jewish businesses in a suburb of Paris. French authorities have banned anti-Israel protests, but thousands of young demonstrators have defied the edict, engaging police with rocks and bottles.
Pro-Israel demonstrations have occurred, too, but few have been as large or as vehement as their pro-Palestinian counterparts. For politicians, the news media and broader German society, the outburst of rage aimed at Israel and, many argue, Jews in general is testing both the limits of freedom of speech and the weight of history in Western Europe’s most populous nation.
“We’re aware that the world is watching us, how we’re handling the situation,” said Berlin police spokesman Stefan Redlich, adding that one person has already been charged with incitement for allegedly shouting “Heil Hitler!” during a protest. “It’s clearly part of the right of freedom of expression to criticize states that are waging wars. [But] it’s one thing to criticize the way Israel leads a war and another to call for people from Israel to get hurt. That’s the red line.”
The face of rage here now bears little resemblance to the 1930s and 1940s. Some ethnic Germans have joined the protests, but the majority of those taking to the streets are part of a vast pool of Muslim immigrants and their German-born children.
The protests are rattling Germany’s fast-growing Jewish population, which in Berlin alone has tripled to nearly 30,000 since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
One imam at Berlin’s al-Nur Mosque is under investigation for recently calling on God to smite all “Zionist Jews.” Last week, a group of about 30 Muslims gathered outside an empty Berlin synagogue and hurled anti-Semitic abuse from the street.
“They pursue the Jews in the streets of Berlin . . . as if we were in 1938,” Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, the Israeli ambassador to Germany, recently wrote in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.
Levi Salomon, spokesman for a group that campaigns against anti-Semitism in Germany, said the Jewish community was shocked by photographs taken at a Berlin demonstration last week where the clothes of children were brushed with red paint. To some, such images allude to the death of Palestinian children in the Israeli strikes on Gaza. But Jewish leaders here have condemned them as a revival of anti-Semitic myths that paint Jews as child killers who used their victims’ blood in religious rituals.
“I’ve monitored anti-Semitism in Germany for 20 years, but this is the worst image I’ve seen,” Salomon said.
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3 Responses
and ISIS paraded in the streets of the Hague (Netherlands) calling out death to the Jews
The pro-Palestinians are the modern day Nazis.
Yidden, Yidden please wake up today,
Hashem wants to bring Moshiach our way,
Look at your surroundings the nations hate us.
See this as a sign that there is no one we can trust,
Golus is not the pit stop that we seek,
Rather it’s Geulah, that is our destination we must reach.
Let’s turn to our Father in heaven and not be arrogant fools,
Beseech Him and say, “Tatty we want to be with You.”