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A Berlin court has convicted a pro-Palestinian activist of condoning a crime for leading a chant of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a rally in the German capital four days after the Hamas attacks on Israel, in what her defence team called a defeat for free speech.
The presiding judge, Birgit Balzer, ordered 22-year-old German-Iranian national Ava Moayeri to pay a €600 (£515) fine on Tuesday, rejecting her argument that she meant only to express support for “peace and justice” in the Middle East by calling out the phrase on a busy street.
Balzer said she “could not comprehend” the logic of previous German court rulings that determined the saying was “ambiguous”, saying to her it was clear it “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist”.
calling for the destruction of a country is never ok, and is always a problem
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Countries change all the time, it means nothing. Like the other person said, they’re just imaginary lines. USSR was destroyed and nothing happened to the people in it when it happened. Ottoman Empire split up, Germany was split in two, Vietnam was split in half then recombined, Korea split in two, China, all of these things have happened within the lifetime of my parents and my grandparents.
A country is simply a line on a map ruled by a government. They are not infallible beings that we must bow before in reverence.
What sort of person would call for the continuation of say North Korea?
Countries are not just lines on a map. They are people. Calling for their destruction is calling for the death of those people and their culture.
You cannot decide after saying it that calling for the “destruction” of a country means merely changing the borders or system of government. The word implies violence.
Countries are not people. People are people. Comparing genocide and the dissolution of a state apparatus is disingenuous.
Likewise cultures cross national boundaries all the time. Colonial countries are imposed on top of existing cultural groups who rarely if ever fit neatly within a states border.
So by your logic calling for the destruction of Gaza or Palestine should be allowed as non-hate speech as well. Because it’s only referring to “the dissolution of a state apparatus”.
Based on your comments elsewhere, you’d automatically color those as the calls to violence they quite clearly are, yet you’re willing to go to great length to argue that somehow calling for the destruction of Israel isn’t.
thank you!!
Calling for the destruction of a STATE is fine. I for one am glad that the racist state of Rhodesia is no more. I am sure a lot of Czech and Slovakian people are glad to get rid of Czechoslovakia. It’s not the same as calling for the destruction or removal of people.
No reasonable person would hear “destroy Mexico” and think “oh, he must really dislike the government and state of Mexico”. They will automatically assume that you mean to bring about the destruction of Mexico *\including the people who live there*.
if you truly intended to advocate merely for the immediate dissolution of the state, you would have said so.
Free Palestine is not a call for the destruction of Israel. It is a call for a Free Palestine.
Yes.
“From the river to the sea” on the other hand is a call for the destruction of one or the other. Neither is ok.
Free Ireland did not mean the destruction of the Protestants. End to Apartheid South Africa did not mean the destruction of the Afrikaners and the other whites. A free democratic Palestine can and should be the national home for Israelis and Palestinians with equal rights freedoms from the river to the sea.
So for the people who think like you do, it’s an explicit rejection of a two state solution, and publicly declaring that the only path to peace is one state shared by everyone.
I’d like to understand why you think a one state solution is the most viable path to peace?
Honest to god, my ideal peace solution was for a long time the two state solution. But I don’t think that is feasible any more. The Israelis killed that option by installing 700k settlers in the best lands of the place where a Palestinian state could have existed. These people will never vote to leave their homes, and they will never accept to be transferred to palestinian jurisdiction. The Israelis have also completely integrated the economy and the everyday life of the Palestinians in their apartheid system in a way that I just don’t see realistic to untangle. So, at this point, realistically, at best, “two state solution” in practice would mean Bantustans and Reservations. At worst, it is just a stalling tactic of “warfare by negotiation” to eat up the salami while pretending the other side has no interlocutor.
Put simply, the Israelis worked very hard for 30 years to create “facts on the ground”. Those are now just the facts. And Israelis have to reckon with the consequences of the facts they created.
The single democratic state solution on the other hand just cuts the Gordian knot. Human rights for all, a truth and reconciliation process, humanity has done this before. It’s not guaranteed to work, but nothing is, and what’s happening now isn’t working either.
Thank you for explaining your rationale.
I think you are dangerously wrong. How do you suggest to prevent violence? some of the issues you are facing are historically Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem launching terror attacks against settlers living there who purchased the land their grandparents were forced from (the actual situation is even more complicated than this one sentence explanation). Now imagine needing to solve that, but on a very large scale.
If you suddenly grant Palestinians full rights and movement, there is nothing preventing them from launching a genocidal campaign against Jewish Israelis. Hamas, PIJ, and other Palestinian groups have declared they will not stop until all Jews within Israel are dead.
Your rationale for wanting a one state solution is idealistic, but ultimately naive. It fails to capture the complexity of the conflict and serves to further violent interests while screaming their slogan.
Any solution that depends on actually working towards a just peace will sound naive because it is predicated on the belief that the majority of people are basically good and want peace. So any one person or some minority who is crazy and does an evil thing looks like a proof that people are evil and want blood. You are worried for some Israelis in East Jerusalem. In a democratic “Israel and Palestine” state their safety would be as much at peril as the safety of the Gazans a few kilometers down the coast or of the people in the West Bank attacked by settler riots. Peace takes nerves of steel.
But the current situation is also simply untenable in the present and unsustainable in the long term. It just generates intergenerational cycles of violence. The ultimate naivety is believing that these cycles will stop with more of the same. That more violence and more oppression will somehow in the long run assure Jewish safety. It won’t. Never has, never will. Every wall eventually falls. More oppression today means more extreme reaction tomorrow. End the cycle, break the ratchet.
The idealistic solution is practical on the other hand. You’re afraid of what will happen all of a sudden? Fine. Implement it gradually but with clear milestones that the powerful side is accountable for. You have complexities on the ground? Let actually impartial courts deal with those. Make just Law and trust it. You have extremist factions (and it’s definitely not just in the Palestinian side) that threaten the peace consensus? Politically out-manoeuvre them by showing to the mass of people that the moderates are more effective at securing their rights and making improvements to their lives peacefully (instead of constantly using heavy antibacterials and then acting surprised when evolution creates super-bugs).
The only thing that prevents mass violence in the long run is a just peace. It’s hard but there is no other way. Israelis love blaming the Palestinians for rejecting multiple chances. They need to start realizing they in practice resolved the classic Israeli trilemma (Jewish, Large, Democratic, pick two) down to a dilemma by fixing the “Large” variable with the settlements.