Germany's hypocrisy: Protest the far-right but support Israel's genocide in Gaza

A wave of protests is currently sweeping through Germany: Hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets for the past few weeks in opposition to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

The protests were triggered by the recent revelation by investigative news website Correctiv that a secret meeting was held by high-ranking AfD members, establishment politicians and prominent businesspeople to discuss, among other things, the mass deportation of Germans from immigrant backgrounds, as well as migrants and asylum seekers.

The AfD party is currently soaring in the polls and is predicted to sweep to power in three upcoming state elections in September in what could become a stepping stone to federal victory in next year’s general elections.

Germany’s political ruling class and media are framing this ad hoc outpouring of organised anti-AfD sentiment as anti-racist and anti-fascist pro-democracy protests. Yet upon closer inspection, the flawed and disingenuous nature of this new “Aufstand der Anständigen”, or “insurrection of the decent”, which former chancellor Gerhard Schröder once famously exhorted, becomes painstakingly clear.

"Where have these hundreds of thousands of concerned and allegedly morally upright citizens been at any point in time since 7 October when Israel’s most fascist government to date started slaughtering Palestinian women, men and children by the tens of thousands?"

Let’s begin with the obvious that must be on anyone’s mind who has been tracking German politics during the last few months of Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial genocide in Palestine: 

Where have these hundreds of thousands of concerned and allegedly morally upright citizens been at any point in time since 7 October when Israel’s most fascist government to date started slaughtering Palestinian women, men and children by the tens of thousands?

Where has their concern for democracy been these past months when their own government, a three-party coterie of nominal Social Democrats (SPD), traitorous Greens and centre-right ordoliberals (FDP), has been eroding democratic norms and freedoms and repressing Germany’s Palestine solidarity movement?

Where were they when the political ruling class’s uniformed street-level enforcers which make up the nation’s police forces attacked peaceful anti-war protesters and harassed BIPOC activists, egged on by German media's virulently anti-Palestinian reporting?

A spectre of authoritarianism hangs over Germany again, this time via a crusade against what it labels as antisemitism, applied blindly against all forms of criticism of Israel—and targeting Arabs, Muslims & anti-Zionist Jews, writes @talrooq

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— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) December 22, 2023

Where was the self-righteous indignation of these protesters when Germany positioned itself firmly behind Israel at the International Court of Justice, which has since ordered Israel not to commit genocide in Gaza?

Where is the German outrage at the government’s decision to join other Western nations in halting funding to UNRWA, a key source of humanitarian support for Palestinians in Gaza, amidst Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign, a move which the organisation’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, has described as “additional collective punishment?”

Yes, the alleged good intentions of these pseudo-progressive and predominantly white (no surprise there) anti-AfD protesters is fooling no one.

Their supposed anti-racism means squat when it wilfully excludes one of the most racist of ideologies, namely Zionism, the ultimate manifestation of which we are currently witnessing in Western-backed Israel’s genocidal conquest of Palestine which has already killed 28,000 Palestinians in less than four months.

The result of this (oxy-)moronic German reality of racists protesting against racism has been widespread abuse against Palestinians and their allies who have joined these anti-AfD protests.

Salah Said, a Berlin-based Palestinian activist who was interrogated and threatened at his home by state police because of a social media post criticising the raising of the Israeli flag in front of Berlin’s City Hall, posted a widely shared video message on Instagram recounting his experience at a protest organised by the German section of Fridays for Future (FFF):

“I’m shaking, I can’t even cope with the amount of discrimination and repression we have faced today. Germans who attended that protest have attacked us, spat on us, violated and abused us…just because we were wearing kuffiyehs and Palestinian flags […] There were so many Israeli flags there. […] We were asked to leave the protest. People came to us and told us we don’t belong to Germany. We are terrorists. They told us that we are not part of this movement.”

FFF Germany is emblematic of what Marc Lamont Hill & Mitchell Plitnick have identified as the “limits of progressive politics”, namely the failure of the left to extend its opposition to regressive policies to the oppression of Palestinians, and the climate group has been heavily criticised for its anti-internationalist stance in favour of Israel.

"Their supposed anti-racism means squat when it wilfully excludes one of the most racist of ideologies, namely Zionism, the ultimate manifestation of which we are currently witnessing in Western-backed Israel’s genocidal conquest of Palestine"

This is despite the global movement’s leading figure, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, repeatedly voicing her solidarity with the Palestinian people and their pursuit of freedom.

The farcical contradictions underlying these mass protests do not end there as mainstream Germany has failed to to address yet another pressing question: how is it that when a political party which is not in power discusses a hypothetical master plan for the mass deportation of immigrants, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets, but when the government that is in power actually puts a similarly perfidious plan in motion, no one bats an eye?

I am talking about the controversial “Rückführungsverbesserungsgesetz”, or Repatriation Improvement Bill (look at oh so progressive Germany trying to put a positive spin on deportation!), which the Bundestag passed on 18 January.

Among other things, the bill expands the already authoritarian powers given to the nation’s racist police forces in dealing with undocumented migrants and makes it easier to deport criminal offenders and “Gefährder”, a uniquely German term describing a person likely to threaten public safety, but one applied predominantly to Muslims.

The new legislation comes as no surprise; it is the fulfilment of a promise made by Chancellor Olaf Scholz last year following Hamas’s 7 October attack against Israel to “deport on a large scale.”

By toughening an already Kafkaesque migration-related legal bureaucracy, the German government has again shown that it is not above weaponising immigration to score political points with an increasingly xenophobic electorate in the hopes of disrupting the disenchanted-white-voter-to-AfD-pipeline.

Germany’s anti-AfD mass mobilisation has quickly outed itself as a sham, even if many a white liberal has yet to arrive at the self-realisation that their indignation at the AfD is not necessarily a marker of their anti-racism, but a testament to their hypocrisy and hyperopic vision that makes them see the racists in the distance but not the ones directly in front of them.

Anti-racist yet pro-genocide, defending democracy by eroding it: such are the tragicomical and dangerous paradoxes at play today in the liberal white supremacist confederacy that is the Federal Republic of Germany.

Timo Al-Farooq is a freelance journalist based in Berlin, Germany.

Follow him on Twitter: @talrooq

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.