Are you allowed to shout “Juda verrecke!” in Germany? No. Unless you shout in English: “From the River to the Sea! Palestine will be free!” The area from the Jordan to the Mediterranean should be free. Free of “Zionists” in other words, as they used to say: free of Jews. Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) therefore wanted to have the slogan banned as a slogan of the terrorist Hamas.
Now, for the first time, a German regional court has ruled on the matter and acquitted a man who held up a poster with that slogan on it, of the charge of using the symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations. As a liberal, I am in a dilemma here. Basically, I tend to take the Anglo-Saxon view that not only thoughts but also words should be free. Everyone should have the right to make themselves ridiculous, contemptible, in short: impossible. So I have to welcome the Mannheim regional court’s ruling.
If it weren’t for the reasoning. The slogan dates back to the 1960s, according to the judges, and goes back to the Fatah organization founded by Yasser Arafat, which now rules the West Bank. “The idea at the time was to establish a secular, democratic and egalitarian state throughout Palestine, in which Jews would enjoy full equality, but without the privileges of Zionism.”
Erm, no. That’s what it said in the Fatah constitution, just as the communist SED in the 1950s stood for “the unity of Germany, people’s democracy and a just peace treaty.” Everyone knew back then that this meant the Stalinist dictatorship. “It has to look democratic,” said Walter Ulbricht in 1945, “but we have to have everything under control.”
Arafat was more honest. According to the Fatah constitution, the primary goal of his state between the river and the sea was to be “the eradication of the economic, political, military and cultural existence of Zionism.” In other words: the expropriation, disenfranchisement, disarmament and cultural “eradication” of the Jews. And there is no need to imagine what would have happened after that; Hamas demonstrated it on October 7.
Not to mention that this “democratic and egalitarian” Palestine without Zionists, of which the Mannheim judges rave, would have been built on the ruins of a state that the United Nations created in 1948: Israel.
The judges apparently think it is OK to support the violent dissolution of a state, as long as the goal is as noble as Arafat’s Jew-free Palestine. In Mannheim, German judges say that Zionism is a “privilege”, not the desperate response of the Jewish people to centuries of persecution, not least by German judges.
It would be logical if the terrible lawyers had allowed the demonstrators to shout “Juda, die!” That would have been more honest, in any case. As a liberal, I could almost live with that better.
