Jewish Peace Activist: "We've Been Thrown Under A Bus" By Anti-Palestinian Crackdown
The Owen Jones Podcast
Owen Jones
4.4 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Israel's onslaught against Gaza unleashes ever greater horrors, supporters of peace have become increasingly targeted. In Germany, most pro-Palestinian protests have been banned, often using the justification of fighting antisemitism.
I speak to German-Israeli author and Jewish peace activist Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus on Germany's crackdown, the racist implications - and why it doesn't make Jewish people safer.
Here's a letter from Jewish writers, academics, journalists, artists, and cultural workers living in Germany condemning the crackdown: https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/freedom-for-the-one-who-thinks-differently/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello, hello. Thank you for joining me. I'm really, really delighted to be joined by |
| 0:04.1 | Toma Doten-Dreyfus, who is a author and a Jewish activist for peace in Berlin in Germany. |
| 0:12.1 | Toma, I'm really interested to speak to you. Obviously, the horror of the last few weeks, first |
| 0:17.0 | the horror of October 7th, and then what's happened in terms of Israel's horrendous onslaught against |
| 0:22.7 | Gaza, can you just tell me firstly what's happened with protests for peace and opposition to what |
| 0:30.0 | to Israel's onslaught in Gaza in Germany? What's the status? Well, so there is the problem with the |
| 0:37.5 | protest in Berlin or in Germany is that nobody really knows what's going on. A lot of people are |
| 0:44.7 | getting detained for holding a Palestinian flag for wearing a coffee, which are not symbols of |
| 0:52.1 | Hamas, the terror organization, but are symbols of Palestinian identity. It is unclear, a lot of |
| 0:59.2 | demonstrations are being banned, not approved by the police, giving the police the full legitimation to |
| 1:05.0 | disperse them, and there is a strong inconsistency about that. So, for example, |
| 1:13.2 | there is a clear stance of Germany since years for this two-state solution, for example, |
| 1:20.0 | but the Palestinian flag is the flag of one of those two potential states. So, are we against it now? |
| 1:29.4 | So, I think there is a very, very serious crackdown on any solidarity act with the Palestinians with Gaza, |
| 1:41.9 | but I'm more worried about the fact that there is no clear guidelines to that crackdown. |
| 1:50.2 | And I don't trust the, I don't trust policemen on the field, so to say, on the street, |
| 2:02.4 | to do the right thing without any guidelines. So, the vast majority of protests in support of, |
| 2:10.4 | I guess, opposition to the Israel's onslaught on Gaza have been banned by the German authorities, |
| 2:15.6 | but the German state would say, look, the German state was responsible for the greatest crime |
| 2:20.9 | committed against the Jewish people in its history, after 2000 years of persecution in Europe, |
| 2:25.6 | six million Jews murdered two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population, and therefore the German |
| 2:31.1 | state has a responsibility at duty to, as a reparation to Jewish people, to protect |
... |
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