After years in which Germany has increasingly narrowed the space for Palestine solidarity, the state’s intense clampdown on freedom of expression in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s ensuing assault on the Gaza Strip will have surprised few observers. Still, the frenzy surrounding the country’s prestigious Berlinale international film festival in late February took the absurdity of Germany’s fanatical pro-Israelism to new levels.
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham — who are Palestinian and Israeli respectively, and both longtime writers for +972 Magazine and Local Call — were censoriously smeared by German politicians after their film, “No Other Land,” won the Best Documentary Award and the Audience Favorite Documentary Award at the festival. The activists, who are two of the four co-directors and subjects of the film, used their acceptance speeches as a platform to challenge Israel’s violent oppression of Palestinians and Germany’s complicity in the war on Gaza.
In response to Adra and Abraham’s words, which circulated widely on social media, Berlin’s mayor Kai Wegner, from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), tarred them for spouting “intolerable relativization” and “antisemitism.” Germany’s Culture Minister Claudia Roth insisted that she had only clapped for “the Jewish Israeli … who spoke out in favor of a political solution and a peaceful coexistence in the region” — but apparently not his Palestinian colleague, who spoke out in favor of the same thing. This selective applause was all the more bizarre given that Abraham’s speech was specifically critical about the differential treatment to which he and Adra are subjected under Israel’s apartheid system.
