Josephine Solanki Project Officer

Solidarity under Siege series: Part IVSince 7 October 2023, the German government has increasingly fused migration policy with its political repression of the Palestine solidarity movement. Relying on longstanding Islamophobia and the dangerous narrative of imported antisemitism, this has worked in two mutually reinforcing directions: Residence, asylum and citizenship law are weaponised against a movement in which many people do not hold German nationality, creating a chilling effect far beyond the individuals directly targeted. At the same time, the solidarity movement is cast as violent and inherently antisemitic, which then serves as the pretext for hardening and securitising migration policy. 

Germany presents itself as a defender of human rights, constitutional freedoms, and as committed to protecting the right of diverse political expression. Yet since 7 October 2023, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide have been answered by a sharp escalation of repression across the country. This longread maps the “pillars” of that crackdown: legal changes and criminalisation, protest bans and police violence, cultural censorship and funding cuts, and workplace consequences that turn dissent into a personal risk. Together, these measures illustrate form a repressive infrastructure in Germany which criminalises almost any effective form of solidarity with Palestine and threatens broader civil liberties.

For decades, (West) Germany has cast its support for Israel as supposed proof of its redemption as a post-genocidal state. It has identified the Israeli state as the stand in for Jewish victims of the Holocaust and turned support for Israel into a symbolic substitute for real denazification. The consequence is deep financial, military, political and ideological backing for occupation, apartheid and now the genocide in Gaza. At the same time, a deliberately vague definition of antisemitism increasingly conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism and weaponises accusations against critics of Israel’s actions. In this landscape, Holocaust remembrance no longer signals a duty to oppose oppression everywhere, and Germany’s celebrated memory culture now serves to police Palestinians, Muslims, and Jews who refuse to accept the roles the state assigns them.