Germany Tried to Silence Me, a UN Official, for Talking About Israel’s Genocidal War in Gaza
Francesca Albanese on her five-day trip that exposed Germany's harsh deviation from democratic values and shrinking landscape for freedom of expression.
I was in Germany for only a few days last month, and as I told one event I spoke at, I had never felt such a sense of lacking oxygen as I did there.
I was in the country to give a number of lectures and participate in several debates in my official capacity as the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. While I was aware of the challenges of discussing Palestine/Israel in Germany, I was expecting it to be not unlike my last visit in May 2024, when I – then the main UN voice denouncing Israel’s genocide in Gaza – met with dozens of think tanks and civil society representatives eager to discuss my work. But instead, my five-day visit descended into a chaotic trip full of harassment, cancellations, attacks on organizers, changing venues, and even threats of arrest over my comments.
While my work has remained largely unchanged, in less than a year, the space for debate in Germany had dramatically diminished. What I witnessed was a harsh deviation from democratic values and a troubling shrinking landscape for freedom of expression and other fundamental rights.
Germany’s Tightening Grip
As soon as I arrived on Feb. 15, it was clear that pro-Israel groups, Israeli and German officials, and even some media outlets didn’t want me there. They applied relentless pressure on the academics, organizations, and groups hosting my lectures and debates to cancel them. The first to yield, sadly, were the once-thought bastions of academic freedom, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Munich) and Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin). Both canceled my scheduled lectures, inferring or citing “security concerns,” which sounded preposterous in a country that had just secured the smooth arrival, stay, and departure of global heads of state for the Munich Security Conference. In Berlin, I was scheduled to speak with professor Eyal Weizman, founder and director of the organization Forensic Architecture. Given our respective work on Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, Eyal and I planned to shed light on the “conditions of life calculated to destroy” that Israel’s military operations and overall policies have created in Gaza, through forensic and legal lenses, respectively.
The cancellation of university lectures due to political pressure paints a grim picture of the state of academic freedom, which should make any German nervous, if not worried. But it was the climate of harassment and intimidation against anyone who attempted to preserve the events that truly exposed Germany’s tightening grip on fundamental freedoms.
On the morning of one such event in Berlin, the venue was vandalized, with repugnant and derogatory slogans plastered across its walls. Against such a backdrop, police intimidation became a persistent motif. During events that went ahead – such as those courageously rescheduled at the headquarters of the Junge Welt newspaper and the bUm cultural and event center – riot police maintained a heavy presence; at Berlin University, police officers stormed the premises where students had gathered to watch on screen the long-anticipated conference featuring Eyal and me.
Ahead of my Berlin appearance at an event hosted by DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), I was warned of potential arrest by authorities, on the basis of spurious allegations of incitement for language deemed "potentially criminal" under German law allegedly aiming to combat antisemitism (which in fact only shields Israel from scrutiny). This claim stemmed from my use of the phrase "From the River to the Sea" in reference to the geographic scope of the land under Israeli control, where millions of Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid – especially those living under military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory – are denied their fundamental rights and freedoms; and reference to “genocides” in a settler colonial context, including Germany’s genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia. This language, according to some pundits and officials, “trivializes the Holocaust” and may offend, or even endanger, the State of Israel.
The UN’s timely intervention, reminding German authorities of my diplomatic status and immunity, seemed to have helped avert the threat of arrest. Yet, even when the events proceeded, the heavy police presence in full tactical gear inside and around each venue created an unwarranted feeling of suffocation. This dystopian reality was epitomized by police officers at one point sending warnings to the moderator at one event, concerned over the content and terminology used by the five panelists (again, “From the River to the Sea”).
The irrational fear of open dialogue, literally policed by the police, represents a terrifying descent into a newly normalized state of affairs, which has permeated many strata of German society. The tension I encountered among German activists and intellectuals was also palpable behind closed doors; gatherings took place under the Chatham House Rule (participants are allowed to use the information shared at the event but cannot publicly reveal the identities or affiliation of speakers and others in attendance), dominated by a sense of secrecy that belied the uncontroversial nature of our discussions.