#please excuse any typos I cant edit this rn

[the-light-of-stars]

Multiple palestinian, jewish, german and international leftist organisations, among them members of the BDS movement and Jewish Voice for a Just Peace, have been organising an event for the discussion and education on matters of palestinian liberation and human rights under the title 'Palestine Congress'.

German politicians and media have been repeatedly calling this event things like "terror event" or "event to spread 'imported antisemitism'" (a racist term common in the current german discussion referring to the idea that antisemitism in germany stems from and is being spread by immigrants and not from ethnically german citizens) and have been calling for a boycott and ban of the event and repercussions against its participants, and have already enacted repercussions against jewish organisations like Jewish Voice in the name of supposedly 'fighting antisemitism' , an argument the german government and media keep bringing up as a moral pretense to justify their continued support of Israel as their second biggest supplier of weapons, and which in the past months and years has lead to the arrests of many protestors, a very large part of them jewish.

"Broad resistance against 'Palestine Congress'"

A broad alliance [of people] from politics and civil society has called for a protest against the 'Palestine Congress' that is supposed to happen in Berlin at the end of the week.

"Berlin must not become the center of terror glorification", emphasized the alliance and explicitly referred to an appeal by the youth organisations of the political parties Grüne [greens/progressives], SPD [social democrats], FDP [liberals] and CDU [conservatives] as well as the youth forum of the German-Israeli-Society (DIG) and the Jewish Student Union Germany.

Famous supporters of the alliance are among others the parliament members Alexander Throm (CDU), Wolfgang Kubicki (FDP), Kevin Kühnert (SPD), Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP) and the former Berlin senator of culture Klaus Lederer (Linke [the left]).

This sentiment and call for protest was shared by the president of the Central Council of Jewish People in Germany who was quoted on the organisation's twitter account:

" Dr. Schuster regarding the planned Palestine Congress in Berlin: 'This event is a parade of anti-zionism and very certainly will not find any answers for the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza. On the contrary: Those who disregard the terror of Hamas and with it also the murderous strategy of the organisation against its own civilian population discredit themselves."

This of course is referring to the popular (in german media and politics) talking point that the deaths and otherwise suffering of civilians in Gaza was not caused by Israel but by palestinians themselves, specifically this argument states that Israel is only defending itself and is intentionally being tricked or forced into killing and starving civilians and breaking human rights conventions by Hamas as some sort of palestinian strategy to discredit the israeli government and that it is not doing this out of its own volition, and that the Gazan civilian populace acts as 'shields' for Hamas that Israel is forced to attack against its will for the sake of self defence.

German media and politicians love calling Israel the victim and treating palestinians as both the perpetrators and collateral damage , at most offering a fake 'oh the situation for the civilians is not good' while cutting off aid to Palestine and increasing weapons sales to Israel.

Of note for this particular situation:

The Palestine Congress is organised by multiple palestinian, jewish, german and international leftist organisations, among them also the jewish organisation Jewish Voice for a Just Peace.

Just recently a german state bank had frozen the organisation's bank account, thus freezing thousands of euros the organisation had meant to use as funding for the Congress. The bank also had demanded a detailed list of all of the organisation's members, including data such as their names and home adresses.

"The repression of the german state against the Palestine solidarity movement are escalating daily, they range from prohibition of demonstrations to police raids, and now the bank account of a jewish organisation was frozen in the name of fighting antisemitism - by the Berlin Sparkasse, a financial institution under public law." , said Wieland Hoban, chairperson of 'Jewish Voice' to jW on wednesday.

The unconditional support of Israel, that may be sold as a moral imperative but that serves real political purposes, leads to a 'dehumanisation of palestinians' and a declaration of war against everyone who calls for equality and freedom for them. "Who thinks they're ensuring jewish safety by doing this is gravely mistaken." so Hoban."