We, the undersigned organisations, declare our rejection and outrage at the German state’s consistent repression against Palestinians and Palestine organising in Germany, from the ban of Nakba day demonstrations in 2022 and 2023, the ban of International Palestinian Prisoners Day demonstrations in 2023, the persecution of journalists, youth, and students for their pro-Palestine views and activism, to the recent attempt at revoking the residency of Samidoun Germany coordinator, Zaid Abdulnasser, a Palestinian refugee born in Syria. 

This aggression is aimed at all Palestinian refugees in an attempt to strip them of their right to struggle for their liberation by manoeuvring around the legal system and exploiting their precarious situation to pressure them into silence. It’s an attack not only on the Palestinian and Arab community and supporters of Palestine in Germany, but also on our collective right to political organising. This is also an attack on the Palestinian prisoners' movement by targeting global solidarity with prisoners.

By sponsoring intense state-wide smear campaigns against Palestinians and pro-Palestine organising and using these to justify the repeated bans on events and to demonise Palestinians and Arabs in Germany in general, and in Berlin in particular - home to the largest Palestinian and Arab community in Europe, the German state is desperate in its attempts to hinder Palestinians from organising themselves and preventing them from taking to the streets struggling for their rights.

The state declared that Zaid’s engagement in Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network and the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement is grounds for revoking his residency in “protection of the public interest”. This puts in clear view Germany’s outrageous attempts at repressing the rising support for Palestine in Germany, where increasingly more and more people are aware of and appalled by the crimes of the Israeli occupation as we saw in the popular demonstrations in May 2021, where millions in Germany took to the streets expressing their clear support for Palestine.

We view this as an attack first and foremost on the Palestinian community in Germany and an expression of state-sponsored anti-Palestinian rhetoric and full identification with Israeli colonisation of occupied Palestine. This is particularly important as the vast majority of the Palestinian community in Berlin are refugees denied their right to return to their cities and villages since 1948. Their engagement in the liberation of their land and return to their homes is their natural right and the state’s attempt at repressing them will fail as they have failed for the past 100 years of unyielding Palestinian struggle.

We reject these attacks and declare that our voices will not be silenced. We stand firmly behind the Palestinian refugees in Germany and their right to organise and struggle, and declare our support of all Palestinian prisoners behind Israeli bars, and for the liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. And we declare, clearly and firmly, that this form of state repression will not succeed in silencing our support for the Palestinian people, their resistance and their prisoners’ movement struggle to end colonialism. 

Free all Palestinian prisoners! 

Down with state repression!

Long live international solidarity! 

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!