When it comes to authoritarianism, it seems you can always rely on a German state official to go the extra mile. We saw a classic example of that on Tuesday, August 6, as a Berlin magistrate convicted a woman for an imaginary crime.

According to the judge, Birgit Balzer, a German Iranian woman called Ava Moayeri was guilty of “condoning a crime” when she chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in October of last year. As with all the attempts to delegitimize this slogan throughout Europe and North America, Balzer relied on the idea that she can discern a secret meaning behind it that has nothing to do with the words actually used.

The Rule of Vibes

What was the nature of the crime Moayeri was said to have “condoned”? Did she express support for Hamas, which is considered to be a terrorist organization in Germany? No: the slogan does not mention Hamas, or any other Palestinian group. Did she call for Israelis to be killed? No: the slogan says nothing about violence, whether directed against Israeli soldiers or civilians.

Balzer brushed aside previous German court rulings that found the meaning of the slogan to be “ambiguous,” claiming that it unquestionably “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist.” Even if we were to grant the false premise that “denying Israel’s right to exist” is a criminal offense, this argument won’t stand up to scrutiny either.

If a Palestinian state were to be established in the territories Israel has occupied since 1967, it would reach all the way from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. The literal meaning of the slogan does not exclude the “two-state solution” that is supposed to be the position of German foreign policy, at least in theory.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift describes a land where the authorities are obsessed with hunting down supposed traitors. One trick they have for doing so is known as the “anagrammatic method”:

By transposing the letters of the alphabet in any suspected paper, they can lay open the deepest designs of a discontented party. So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, “Our brother Tom has just got the piles,” a skillful decipherer would discover, that the same letters which compose that sentence, may be analysed into the following words, “Resist — a plot is brought home — the tour.” And this is the anagrammatic method.

George Orwell highlighted this passage as an uncanny premonition of twentieth-century totalitarianism. But the anagrammatic method is positively liberal when compared with Balzer’s approach to identifying thought crimes, which is not constrained by the need to reshuffle letters into a semicoherent sentence.

To find a true point of comparison, we have to reach beyond the literary canon to a scene from The Castle, a cult Australian movie. An unsympathetic judge asks a shambolic, disheveled lawyer what particular section of the constitution he is invoking in support of his argument. “There is no one section,” he replies. “It’s just the vibe of the thing.”

Violent Desires

Balzer’s vibe-based approach to the criminalization of speech acts builds on months of effort by politicians and other public figures throughout Europe and North America. The US university administrators who were hauled in for a congressional show trial got themselves in trouble because they were afraid to challenge the absurd claim that “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for genocide.

In Britain, the Conservative home secretary Suella Braverman issued a diktat urging the police “to consider whether chants such as: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ should be understood as an expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world.” Soon afterwards, Braverman was sacked in disgrace after inciting a druggy mob of fascists to attack police officers in London.

Another Tory politician, Robert Jenrick, sought to provide rhetorical cover for the racist thugs who have been terrorizing British Muslims over the past week by endorsing the inflammatory myth of “two-tier policing”:

I thought it was quite wrong that someone could shout “Allahu Akbar” on the streets of London and not be immediately arrested, or project genocidal chants onto Big Ben, and that person not be immediately arrested.

Jenrick rightly faced a backlash for suggesting that a greeting used by Muslims all over the world should be deemed a criminal offense. But the second part of his intervention was equally sinister: it was a clear allusion to the moment earlier this year when activists projected “from the river to the sea” onto the exterior of the British parliament during a protest in solidarity with Gaza.

In Germany itself, interior minister Nancy Faeser claimed that “from the river to the sea” was a Hamas slogan — a demonstrably false statement, since the slogan predates the very existence of Hamas — while justice minister Marco Buschmann suggested that it could be understood as “condoning the killings committed in Israel.” Like Birgit Balzer, Buschmann saw no need to refer to the actual words of the slogan: it’s just the vibe of the thing.

The Sound of Silence

What makes the manufactured controversy about “from the river to the sea” especially repugnant is the context in which it is unfolding. The critics of the slogan don’t actually take issue with what it says — they take issue with what it doesn’t say. But they would never dream of applying the same methodology to catchphrases about “Israel’s right to defend itself” or “Israel’s right to exist” that are never far from the lips of its supporters.

“From the river to the sea” does not spell out explicitly what the future status of the Israeli Jewish population is to be in the context of a free Palestine. This is not at all surprising, since it is a slogan rather than a detailed manifesto or the text of a peace agreement.

The wording of the slogan allows for the partition of historic Palestine into two states, or for the creation of a single democratic state based on equality for all those who live there. The idea that it necessarily implies the killing or forced expulsion of all Israeli Jews is plainly false and relies on the crudely racist view of Palestinians as a people motivated by insatiable bloodlust.

On the other side of the discursive barricades, the phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself” does not say what methods of “self-defense” are legitimate for Israel to use. Its close cousin, “Israel’s right to exist,” does not say what form a Palestinian state should assume alongside Israel, or even whether there should be a Palestinian state at all.

At this moment in time, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that anyone who talks about “Israel’s right to defend itself” condones the mass murder of Palestinian civilians, since that is the way in which the slogan has typically been used by government officials in Europe and the United States over the last ten months. There is far more basis for that hostile interpretation than there is for the delegitimization of “from the river to the sea.”

But the idea that any public figure would be prosecuted for speaking about “Israel’s right to defend itself” in the context of a genocidal massacre is plainly absurd. There have been far more explicit declarations of support for violence against Palestinian civilians over the last ten months without any political consequences for those making them, let alone legal repercussions.

Despicable Demands

Birgit Balzer’s ruling comes shortly after the Israeli parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject the formation of a Palestinian state under any circumstances. That obdurate denial of Palestine’s right to exist, the settled consensus of the Israeli political class, is enforced by the region’s most powerful military machine. It is the reality that Palestinians experience every day of their lives.

The ruling also comes after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed the obvious fact that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is a permanent exercise in colonization that has imposed a system of racial apartheid from the river to the sea. The response of German chancellor Olaf Scholz was to pretend that he agreed with the ICJ while categorically opposing any sanctions on illegal West Bank settlements:

A government under my leadership will not support a boycott of goods, services, and commodities from Israel. In fairness, I find such demands despicable.

Scholz’s remarks only make sense if he considers the settlements to be an integral part of the Israeli state, which of course they are. Scholz also insisted that his state would continue to supply weapons to the Israeli armed forces as they transform Gaza into a charnel house.

Balzer claimed that her ruling was necessary to ensure that German Jews feel “safe and comfortable” in the country. In reality, its only purpose was to shield war criminals and their enablers, allowing them to feel “safe and comfortable” in the knowledge that they can get away with murder while the state polices the language of their critics.

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