Sal Ahmed
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\u201cGermany<\/a> is promoting only those Jews who are willing to produce anti-Muslim discourse. Jews who do not perceive Muslims as such are being marked as a threat not just to the German nation but to Jews themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Udi Raz, 34, is sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where he lives, reflecting on a turbulent six months. Since Israel<\/a>\u2019s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Raz, an Israeli Jew raised in Haifa, has been fired from his job and had the activist group he\u2019s part of labelled antisemitic by Germany\u2019s official antisemitism commissioner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last Friday, German authorities arrested Raz, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, after they cancelled and then banned the group\u2019s three-day conference on Palestine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The conference, which was set to feature notable speakers including former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and leading British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, was cancelled by Berlin police within its first two hours on Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey came in and blocked the screening of a recorded video message, then they broke into the control room and switched off the electricity for the whole building with hundreds of people inside,\u201d Raz told Middle East Eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The recorded video message was from Abu-Sittah, who had been detained after landing in Germany. The doctor told MEE <\/a>that, in a basement room in Berlin\u2019s airport, he was questioned for three and a half hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the interrogation, Abu-Sittah, who spent 43 days <\/a>during the war treating patients in Gaza\u2019s al-Ahli and al-Shifa<\/a> hospitals, was told by German authorities that he was not allowed on German soil, that this ban would last for the whole of April and that if he tried to dial into the conference remotely \u2013 or send a video message to be played at it \u2013 that would constitute a breach in German law that could see him face up to a year in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nadija Samour, a lawyer involved with the conference, said organisers had not been \u201cgiven anything in writing about why the event was being cancelled. We had been cooperating with the police through everything, nothing said or done at the venue was illegal. From the very beginning, it was clear that there would be attempts by the police to shut the conference down.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA speaker was projected who was subject to a ban on political activity,\u201d Berlin police said on social media after closing the conference down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the last six months, German authorities have continued to crack down on the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany, including silencing several high-profile Jewish intellectuals, academics and artists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The country\u2019s responsibility for the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by Germany\u2019s Nazi government, and its post-war \u201cstaatsrason\u201d, or reason of state, a principle that places support for Israel at the core of Germany’s national identity, have contributed to an atmosphere in which even Jews are now regularly branded antisemitic for criticising Israel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘I was allowed to speak only to the extent that I had something bad to say about Palestinians, about Arabs, about Muslims’<\/p>\n\n\n\n – Udi Raz, Jewish activist<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Raz, who is a leading Jewish peace activist in Berlin, has been twice detained, labelled an antisemite, lost his job, and his organisation has had its bank account frozen, as well as being branded antisemitic by Germany\u2019s antisemitism commissioner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Israeli says there were clear signs that authorities in Berlin would try and shut down the event. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Berlin Senate had been trying for the past few weeks to stop the Palestine Congress from going forward – one of the strategies they used was to freeze our bank account. For weeks, we had been collecting donations and tickets receipts for the Palestine Congress. We still dont have access to those funds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raz says that Jewish Voice for a Just Peace is constantly reminding Germans of the structural inequalities and the genocide being carried out in Palestine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe want everyone to be treated equally, we want human rights and international law to be respected. That makes the German state very uncomfortable; they are OK with the apartheid regime and its genocidal crimes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jewish Voice for a Just Peace has been campaigning for an immediate end to hostilities in Gaza and demanding that the German government suspend diplomatic, economic support and weapons sales to Israel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raz told MEE that he feels there exists a clear disparity in the treatment of pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhenever I had the opportunity to speak from my own perspective, I was allowed to speak only to the extent that I had something bad to say about Palestinians, about Arabs, about Muslims. Whenever that was not the case, and I brought up the Palestinian narrative, insititutions were pointing at me and accusing me of antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Previously a tour guide at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Raz was fired for referring to Israel\u2019s occupation of the West Bank as \u201capartheid\u201d on tours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Since 7 October, several Jewish groups, academics, artists and human rights activists \u2013 including Israelis like Berlinale-winning<\/a> journalist Yuval Abraham, who was branded an antisemite in Germany – have called out Germany for suppressing any criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and the Palestine solidarity movement in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last week, a leading Jewish American philosopher, Nancy Fraser, was disinvited<\/a> from taking up a professorship at the University of Cologne after signing a letter expressing solidarity with Palestinians and condemning the killings in Gaza carried out by Israeli forces. <\/p>\n\n\n\nGerman censorship <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Fired and branded antisemitic<\/h3>\n\n\n\n