Deportable Dissent The Weaponisation of Migration Policy in Germany’s Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity

Racism is racism, whatever it is, and regarding antisemitism, over 90% [of the perpetrators] are Germans. We fight antisemitism in our community. But criticism of Israel can never be called antisemitic. Because calling out genocide is not antisemitic. Calling out settler colonialism and apartheid is not antisemitic. It is a call to confront crimes against humanity, uphold the rule of law, support Indigenous struggles, and advance a decolonial future. It’s protecting the rule of law.

Majed Abusalama, Co-founder of Palestine Speaks

The repression disproportionately targets people seen as migrants, this is also what I found in my research. I was studying encounters between Muslims and Jews in Berlin. And I could show through different examples that whenever these are framed as if they are designed to address Muslim antisemitism, those who are in power will provide us with press coverage, we will be celebrated by the media, we’ll get donations, and so on. But whenever we meet each other as equals and if we dare to do it in public, those who are in power will point at us, call us antisemites, and basically subject us to boycott, divestment, sanctions, police brutality, state violence. And all that to make the point that Germany’s political elite and the discourse in general is not designed to protect Jews, but only those Jews who are willing to reproduce anti-Muslim racism.

Udi Raz, doctoral researcher and activist with Jewish Voice for Peace

Since 7 October 2023, the German government has increasingly entangled migration policy with its political repression of the Palestine solidarity movement and longstanding Islamophobia. Much of this convergence rests on the widely promoted idea of ‘imported antisemitism’. The concept, popularised since the early 2000s, constructs Muslim, Arab, and/or Palestinian communities as the primary source of modern antisemitism and threat to Jewish life in Germany, effectively absolving white German society of its historical and current role.2 

That is despite the fact that antisemitism remains widespread in white, non-Muslim Germany. In previous years, over 90% of antisemitic crimes were committed by right-wing Germans.3 Prominent political figures, such as the Bavarian Vice President and Economy Minister Hubert Aiwanger who distributed antisemitic far-right propaganda leaflets in his youth and yet was able to keep his post when this became public, illustrate this reality.4

Scholars like Anna-Esther Younes have shown that the narrative of imported antisemitism helped frame the 2000 reforms of the law on citizenship, which marked a shift from jus sanguinis (citizenship by bloodline) to a partial jus soli system, allowing children born in Germany to foreign parents to acquire citizenship under certain conditions. At the same time, the government introduced stricter integration requirements, including language proficiency and cultural assimilation, framing citizenship less as a legal status and more as a conditional reward for loyalty to the prevailing national values.

As Younes notes, the construction of a ‘Muslim antisemitism’ discourse in Germany mirrors the logic of the US-led War on Terror and War on Drugs, imperialist campaigns that have long served to justify the surveillance, criminalisation, and incarceration of racialised populations.5 Similar to the War on Terror, the securitised narrative has justified expansive policing, legal exceptionalism, and ideological loyalty tests6 targeting migrants. The outcome is a racialised security regime that instrumentalises antisemitism accusations to legitimise colonial repression abroad and suppress dissent and the rights of migrants domestically.

The ‘imported antisemitism’ framing was revived after 2015, following the increasingly racist discourse after the major arrival of Syrian and other overwhelmingly Muslim refugees, when politicians began openly proposing sharper asylum restrictions based on presumed antisemitism.7 Angela Merkel spoke of migrants bringing ‘a different form of antisemitism’ into the country, but gave no evidence to back this assertion.8 This comes amidst a European and global trend of border securitisation and militarisation and a crackdown on the rights of migrants, as detailed in the Transnational Institute’s Border Wars series9. 

In 2013, Germany had passed a resolution on combating antisemitism that identified right-wing extremism as ‘the most significant carrier of antisemitism’ in Germany. It mentioned Islamist and left-wing antisemitism but emphasised the structural nature of the threat from the far-right.10 By contrast, a 2018 resolution on the same topic zoomed in on ‘imported antisemitism’.11 It called for integration courses to promote Israel’s ‘right to exist’, encouraged mosque associations to work with Jewish partners, and urged the deportation of non-citizens suspected of antisemitism – something that would soon become reality.

There is a draft of this new naturalisation law, you know, the only country that we have to say has the right to exist is Israel… People have a right to exist, not countries. 

Majed

In June 2024, the German parliament passed a new citizenship law mandating an ‘antisemitism check’ for anyone applying for naturalisation. In defining antisemitism Germany relies on the problematic International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition12 that conflates anti-Zionism and antisemitism, which can in practice mean that social media activity, such as liking a post with the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’, can disqualify an applicant from naturalisation.13 The reformed law also introduced a ‘sincerity clause’, allowing authorities to deny citizenship if they suspect the applicant’s allegiance to ‘German values’ is not genuine. The right-wing CDU party even tried to mandate an explicit ‘commitment to Israel's right to exist’ and the possibility of de-naturalising Germans ‘who deny the right of the State of Israel to exist’, but this was not passed.14

In practice, this has led to absurd assessments of moral and political loyalty. In one case, a Palestinian applicant was denied naturalisation – even before the new citizenship law came into practice – after stating in his interview: ‘There is no Israel. There are Jews, but Israel not as a country’. Officials interpreted this as evidence of ‘anti-Zionist antisemitism’. Even his later clarification that he would recognise the state of Israel ‘after an Oslo peace process’ was rejected. The immigration office argued that his answer left open ‘who [he] considers to be the guilty party’ in the conflict.15

Crucially, the law also allows the authorities to revoke citizenship retroactively for up to ten years after it has been granted, if evidence emerges that the applicant allegedly failed the sincerity or anti-antisemitism test. At least one case of precisely that happening has already emerged: In October 2025, a Syrian national who had lived in Berlin since his childhood received German citizenship but was notified that he was set to lose it again only days later. The reason being that he posted a photo of Hamas fighters with the caption ‘Heroes of Palestine’.16   

The changed naturalisation law comes after a long debate marked by increasingly Islamophobic and racist speech in which centre-to-right politicians and media have openly called for dual citizenship to be revoked if an individual is found to be ‘antisemitic’. For example, Reem Sahwil, a refugee from Lebanon who gained national attention as a child after a viral video showed her bursting into tears in front of then-Chancellor Merkel over Germany’s immigration bureaucracy, faced a backlash for sharing pro-Palestinian content online following the start of the genocide in Gaza. In response, the CDU politician Eckhardt Rehberg publicly called her naturalisation a ‘mistake that must be corrected’.17 This must be seen in the broader context of an increasingly strong right-wing AfD party, which came second in the 2025 federal elections based on anti-migration and Islamophobic rhetoric. In late 2023 prominent members of the AfD and some members of other parties called for ‘re-migration’, meaning the expulsion of people not considered sufficiently German18. The AfD faced backlash at the time for the idea, culminating in one of the largest anti-racist demonstrations in decades.19 But it only took two years until mainstream parties are openly implementing what is de facto re-migration under a different named, disguised as the fight against antisemitism.20

To revoke someone’s citizenship or refugee status – and every lawyer will actually tell you this – in Germany it's not based on any sort of what’s necessarily lawful. It’s incredibly influenced by politics.

Hebh Jamal, Palestinian journalist living in Germany

I have a friend who has a Lebanese passport, for example, who is working here and had a punishment that was equivalent to 40 days. And it was like, for holding a poster that says ‘From Riesa to the Spree’ [two Berlin rivers] instead of ‘From the River…’ – like it's a joke and she got a fine for that. And that affected her visa status because she had to go renew it while that was happening. 

Jamila21, Palestinian activist living in Berlin

While Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe, estimated at 250,000 to 300,000 (including those holding other citizenships), who settled there for various reasons, it also has a long history of denying status to Palestinians. This is partially because of Germany’s failure to recognise Palestinian statehood, which has resulted in the invisibilisation of Palestinians at an administrative level and myriads of bureaucratic issues for affected people on a daily basis. 

The German state’s approach to Palestinians fleeing genocide reveals deep-seated racism and political interference in asylum law. While Israeli citizens received swift and bureaucratically smooth assistance in the aftermath of October 2023, including automatic visa extensions until April 2024, Palestinian refugees from Gaza faced heightened repression. The Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) suspended asylum procedures for Palestinians from Gaza, citing the ‘unclear and dynamic’ situation on the ground as justification, resuming them only in July 2025.  Furthermore, they typically only receive subsidiary protection rather than full refugee status, which entitles them to fewer rights and restricted family reunification.  This institutional stalling tactic effectively traps Palestinian refugees in legal limbo. At the same time, the German government refused to evacuate its own citizens from Gaza – let alone Palestinians – while swiftly evacuating German nationals from Israel. 

In October 2024, the Bundestag passed a non-binding resolution explicitly instructing the authorities to use criminal, residence, asylum, and nationality law against those deemed antisemitic – clearly aware that the Palestinian and pro-Palestinian community in Germany is made up of a large share of people who do not hold or have only recently been awarded German citizenship and are thus particularly vulnerable to threats to their residency status. The resolution further encourages state agencies to deny funding, withdraw awards, and pursue deportations based on IHRA-defined antisemitism.22 Thereby, it politicised asylum law that is supposed to be grounded in purely humanitarian criteria. The migration lawyer Alexander Gorski remarked that this marks a new stage in authoritarian governance, where deportation becomes a tool of political censorship: ‘The state punishes dissent by targeting residence rights – this is straight out of the far right’s playbook’.23

The former Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pushed this trend further, promoting legislation that would permit deportation for ‘glorifying terrorism’ via social media.24 While she denied that a single like or post would be grounds for removal, legal experts confirmed that people are already being expelled on this basis.25 According to the legal aid organisation 3ezwa, several thousand people are currently threatened by deportation because of their pro-Palestinian activism.26

Following the resolution, German authorities have also increasingly begun to re-open asylum cases on the basis of tenuous associations with pro-Palestinian protest activity.27 Migration lawyers report that even a single family member’s presence at a demonstration can lead to renewed scrutiny of the entire household, particularly when the individual is a young Arab man. Accusations often rely on ‘guilt by association’ tactics, such as attending a protest where others chanted banned slogans. These re-openings (Widerrufsverfahren) are frequently justified with vague claims of procedural errors or security concerns, leading to a chilling effect on participation in public demonstrations.28

Another striking example, reported by Al Jazeera, involves two Palestinian medical students whose visa renewals were denied, though they had not engaged in any criminalised activity and despite having, in so-called ‘security interviews’, criticised Hamas and ‘recognised’ Israel. Their involvement in PalMed, a network of Palestinian medical professionals, and ‘having pro-Palestinian sympathies’ and a ‘one-sided, Palestinian perspective’ were deemed sufficient grounds for initiating deportation procedures. The letters they were given contained contradictory statements and misrepresented their views to frame them as ‘extremists’. ‘They confiscated my opinion and projected their own imaginations onto it’, one of them said.29

Another controversial case is that of the Palestinian nurse Bahaar*, whose portrait appears at the beginning of this longread, where the government designated her one-year-old child as a security risk in order to essentially force her to self-deport. The European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), which has taken the case to the constitutional court, commented: ‘The German state systematically exploits residence, asylum and citizenship law to punish already marginalised communities. This must be recognised for what it is: a blatantly racist system with devastating consequences. There is no justification for separating a new-born from his parents, yet to label the child a “security threat” marks a grotesque new low, even by their own oppressive standards’.30 In August 2025, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that Bahaar’s son is allowed to re-enter Germany, allowing the family to finally reunite.31 However, this is just a preliminary decision on the urgent appeal, pending the final decision on whether such separation of parents and children in general constitute a breach of constitutional rights. 

I made a small personal survey and 88% of people with migration background want to leave. Merz [the current German Chancellor] is a disaster. People not affected think as long as the AfD [far-right party] doesn't win everything it's fine, but the shift to the right is happening. And anti-migration policies have an effect on the ground. What does that mean for Muslim-perceived communities? What does the media reporting in Berlin mean for them? Germany has the largest Palestinian community and they are not allowed to criticise Israel, otherwise — according to the resolution — they will be excluded from public life. What happens with these people in five years? My German friends don’t understand that a parallel society is emerging in Germany because migrants feel safer without Germans around them. 

Amir38

The previous examples have shown that, in practice, Germany has already become a two-tier-society in which people who haven’t held a German passport for more than ten years have to think twice about what they say publicly, what they post on social media, which demonstrations they attend, and how they engage politically in general. The fever dream of the AfD is coming closer to reality every day — and all of this is happening without them actually ruling the country. This follows a familiar pattern of the past decade, not just in Germany but elsewhere: Far-right politicians make outrageous demands, there is an outcry largely from the centre-left, and then the centre-right part of the political establishment quietly implements those demands, justified by the refrain that “otherwise the right will be voted in” — and then wonders why people are losing trust in the so-called centre. 
 

At a time where Germany is heading towards an economic crisis and a large share of society is materially worse off due to massive militarisation and irresponsible austerity politics, it is politically useful for the capitalist ruling classes to have workers turn against each other (and in particular against migrants), rather than raising questions about who brought them into this situation. Thus, the narrative of “imported antisemitism,” racist stereotypes about Palestinians, and alleged riots at demonstrations have conveniently been used as the latest pretext to push ever more restrictive immigration law.  This follows more than a decade of such laws and practices that has turned the EU into ‘Fortress Europe’39 and the Mediterranean Sea into what is likely the world’s deadliest border40.

In the wake of 7 October, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck stated that Muslims must ‘clearly distance themselves from antisemitism so as not to undermine their own right to tolerance’.41 The logic of this scapegoating becomes especially clear in the remark cited by The Left Berlin: ‘While this will sound strange to anyone outside Germany, this is what the German bourgeoisie tells working-class immigrants: “Because our grandparents committed genocide, you are now legally required to support the state of Israel’’’.42  The idea that (many) Palestinians “do not belong” in Germany because they are framed as a threat to Jewish life aligns with orientalist, racist allegations that brand Muslims as the ‘Other’, set against the figure of a supposedly tolerant non-Muslim German — from the trope of Muslim men as a danger to women, queer people, or children. It leads to real harm for Muslim (and Muslim-perceived) communities living in Germany. In recent years Islamophobic incidents have reached new heights43, but do not receive the same media and political attention as the steep rise in reported antisemitic incidents. 

What is being rehearsed against Palestinians today can be expanded tomorrow to any (racialised) community the state chooses to cast as suspect. And in light of the massive wave of militarisation of German society, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is also a preparation for war — a rehearsal for cracking down on any significant anti-war movement long before it gains momentum. The German left would be well advised to stop treating this moment as a “Palestinian issue”. Solidarity now is not only about opposing genocide and injustice, but about stopping the normalisation of measures that will soon be used against anyone who refuses the state line.

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This is the fourth longread in a series of five based on the Transnational Institute’s report Solidarity under Siege: Germany’s Repression of the Palestine Movement. The first part can be found here. The report draws on the insights of interviews with seven activists from the Palestinian solidarity movement, including Palestinians and German, Muslim and Jewish people, among other (overlapping) identities, who shared their trust, stories and time with the author. At their request, pseudonyms have been used for some of these activists.