By Rachael Shapiro*
August 2, 2025
This week, I faced trial for opposing genocide, Zionism, and for challenging Germany’s unconditional support for Israel. The state prosecuting me may have legal authority, but its moral authority has collapsed as it again participates in a genocide.
On Wednesday, July 30, I stood trial in a German court for my opposition to genocide, Zionism and for challenging Germany’s “reason of state,” which sets forth its unconditional military, ideological, and financial support for the fascist, apartheid ethnostate of Israel.
I was brought on three accusations: 1) assaulting a police officer at a Palestine solidarity protest, whereby my wife was attacked, beaten and choked by cops; 2) using a sign of an “unconstitutional” or “terrorist” organization – in reference to the German state’s proscription of Hamas as a terrorist group – by posting a song on Instagram with the words “from the river to the sea” in the lyrics, and 3) responding with “insult” to an anonymous Instagram account that had messaged me to harass me for being “antisemitic.”
As these charges are all, superficially, almost incomprehensibly steeped in hypocrisy and cruelty, what is more interesting to highlight are the deeper political dynamics at play.
The German state whitewashes and exploits its actual history of genocidal antisemitism to uphold German economic and geopolitical interests, while dictating that the revival of “Jewish life in Germany” relies on arming an apartheid ethnostate while it commits genocide. In being anti-Zionist and Jewish, I am dragged through both social and legal channels for supposedly calling for the hypothetical extermination of a people (Jews, of which I am one) by protesting the ongoing, actual extermination of another people (the Palestinians) being committed by the people (Zionist Jews) who claim to be the target of the hypothetical extermination. While abominable and absurd, this is entirely unsurprising. I have spent years being mocked and literally spat at by German police, passersby, government officials and civilians, who have even gone so far as to ridicule my relatives who were murdered, for expressing anti-Zionist politics as a Jew.
To misuse the German history of genocidal antisemitism against the people speaking out against today’s genocide is a perverted disgrace. A Jewish descendant of those murdered by Nazis, I am being labeled antisemitic for speaking out against the mass murder, the genocide of Palestinians.
Our community of Palestinians, Muslims, Arabs, anti-Zionist Jews, and many others, are also often smeared and doxxed for being “Israel-haters.” Even responding to this feels exceedingly ridiculous, but I’ll grit my teeth long enough to write: What a pathetic insult and what a perfectly apt descriptor. Of course I hate Israel. Anyone who does not “hate” Israel represents a staggering and bewildering failure of the human condition.
The attempt of the German State to silence and criminalize those opposing genocide is a haunting repeat of history. To then misuse the German history of genocidal antisemitism against the people speaking out against today’s genocide is a perverted disgrace. A Jewish descendant of those murdered by Nazis, I am being labeled antisemitic for speaking out against the mass murder, the genocide of Palestinians. I am being called a hateful criminal by a state that weaponizes my Jewish identity and the genocide my family survived at its hands to justify committing these new genocidal atrocities today.
As of this moment, Israel has imposed a siege and famine over 2 million people in the Gaza strip. Markets are bare, and the ribs of survivors protrude — those who’ve managed to live through relentless Israeli bombardment, drone surveillance, and forced starvation over the past 22 months. This is not a humanitarian crisis; it is a calculated extermination. It is the final stage of the final solution, which has been carried out since Zionism was formally founded by the openly racist, antisemitic Theodor Herzl in c. 1896, and has continued by design to the apex of cruelty and devastation in this moment.
It is impossible not to see the piles of the bodies of those starved in Nazi concentration camps in the image of those starving in Gaza. German-born Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer said, during his Never Again for Anyone tour in 2010 and 2011, that the siege happening then in Gaza was “slow-motion genocide” and drew out the parallels between the crescendo of genocide from slow-motion into a final solution. He called for the world to stop it before it became the “final solution” that we now see.
Zionism is a fascist, settler-colonial ideology characterized by Jewish supremacy. Zionist Jewish settlers, Christian Zionists, and all supporters of Zionism (especially the Western governments that fund it) enable and enforce not just the theft of Palestinians’ land, but control over the very foundations of life in Gaza, the West Bank, and all of occupied Palestine. This spans from water to food to electricity, to the literal death traps and concentration camps disguised as food aid sites.
Naming this as what it is, is not just a right, but an obligation. Anyone who claims or stands behind Zionism immediately outs themselves as a subscriber to a racist and fascist system, and an apologist of apartheid and genocide. To punish those, including Jewish people, who stand against the abomination of Zionism, which manifests in the holocaust of Palestinians, lays bare this complete moral failure. It is also a mockery, a twist of the knife, a desecration of the memory of my family members who were murdered or survived the Nazi genocide. And it is a deep dishonor to all survivors, victims and groups targeted by the many other genocides perpetrated by the German state.
Looking back on the history of Judaism as an anti-Zionist Jew is a mixed bag of rage, disgust, grief and bewilderment. Before the Zionist entity dictated that Jewish values entail committing genocide and enforcing racial domination on a population, the sanctity of human life was, historically, a pillar of Jewish tradition, religion, and practice.
In stark contrast to the atrocities and war crimes upon which “Israel” proudly stamps the star of David, my Jewish heritage has always shaped my commitment to the principle of standing with the oppressed, and never the oppressor, in the words of Marek Edelman, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This regard for human life and defense of the oppressed is not conditional: it is a worldview, a pledge to all of mankind, a deeply-rooted orientation in the world. Every human, regardless of political context, belief, race or religion, has the fundamental right to live in dignity and freedom – in this case, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
There is only one manifestation of “never again for anyone,” which is the end to Israel’s more than 77-year long final solution for the Palestinian people, a project in which Germany is an active collaborator.
In this spirit, the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” truly encompasses of my worldview, my pledge to all of mankind, and my deeply-rooted orientation in the world. It is a return to the tradition of Judaism which is grounded in commitment to collective liberation and joint struggle, something that, which existed long before Zionism, and, while decimated by it, still clings stubbornly to life.
The call for liberation of the Palestinian people is a demand to stop the siege, genocide, starvation, and terror inflicted upon them for the better part of a century by the apartheid state of Israel. For me, there is no choice other than to fight for full Palestinian liberation, from the river to the sea. There is only one option that honors the murder of my family in the Nazi genocide and pays tribute to the bravery of my grandmother’s cousins, who saved the lives of hundreds during the 1940s as part of the Jewish resistance to the Nazis.
There is only one manifestation of “never again for anyone,” which is the end to Israel’s more than 77-year long final solution for the Palestinian people, a project in which Germany is an active collaborator.
At the sit-in I attended in February 2024 against the bloody propaganda peddled by Axel Springer, which participates in illegal investments in settlements in the West Bank, I was made to watch a policeman choke my wife until the blood drained from her face and she struggled to breathe. She was then accused of assault and resistance in a country whose police force has been under years-long scrutiny by Amnesty International, other human rights organizations and various bodies of the United Nations for widespread excessive brutality, corruption, abduction of minors and removal of freedom of expression and assembly.
In these moments, my line of vision was replaced by a portal of time, melted between today and the 1940s, flooded by fury and the chill of fascism, as I sat on the same ground where my family’s blood is less than a century dry. As my wife was dragged away by her feet by the German cops, I ran after her, screaming in panic, the last thing I saw being her red face with the white-knuckled hands of a German police officer wrapped around her neck. As I tried to reach her, another cop tried to cut me off. I grabbed the cop’s wrist, snapped her arm to her side, and smacked her square in the face.
Thereafter, I was tackled by 4 or 5 officers, pulled out of the demonstration and quickly went into a state of catatonic shock, thinking that the German state could have just killed my wife. We were locked in a police van and thankfully reunited in the next hour or so, then thrown into jail for 6-7 hours and repeatedly denied the opportunity to call a lawyer. (This is, sickeningly, a resoundingly tame breach of German law as far as Berlin is concerned. The Berlin police are a force that enjoys weekly, sometimes daily, savage attacks on demonstrators – as well as the medics who attempt to reach them to provide care – until they are bloodied on the sidewalks or beaten unconscious behind closed van doors for sport.)
I make no apology for the blind rage that consumed me in response to this psychological, generational and institutionalized torment. My and my community’s participation in an act of entirely justified, legitimate civil disobedience should not have been necessary, save for the genocidal complicity of the German state in the extermination campaign in Palestine. I am not sorry for responding with rage to watching and experiencing violent domination by unreconstructed Zionist police officers in the face of the annihilation and slaughter of our siblings in Palestine. Rage is the righteous defense of those left with nothing else to reach for but their own humanity.
I had prepared a statement, on which this article is based, to read at my trial in response to my charges. Before we entered the courtroom, however, my lawyer was told that if we did not drop the appeal against the assault charge, we would lose, the case would be escalated, and the state prosecutor would give me a 6-8 month jail sentence on probation. It was a chilling but predictable piece of strong-arming and bypassing of “due process” — a case outcome that was already decided before I walked in the door, whereby I would have had to pay with my liberty for the right to speak.
Instead, I was forced to accept thousands of euros in fines and a criminal charge. On the same day, a friend of mine was acquitted for chanting the phrase, “From the river to the sea.” She walked out of court to join the rally where we both spoke. Shortly thereafter, five people were violently arrested for chanting the same thing.
Following this experience, I would like to introduce a “charge” of my own: that Germany’s much lauded ‘memory culture’ is not just self-congratulatory propaganda, as I posited in an Al Jazeera Op-Ed last year. It is also among the most brazen, depraved forms of antisemitism that exist in the world today.
It proudly embraces, finances, supports and justifies the war crimes committed by the apartheid state of Israel against the Palestinians, while illegitimately proclaiming them as a Jewish value and violently stifling dissent to those who question this absurdity. It is institutional antisemitism. It is a minimization and relativization of Germany’s history of genocidal antisemitism through the lobbing of false claims of it at those who denounce genocide, in order to protect the German state’s interests in collaborating with Israel.
The fascist ideology of Zionism and the pariah state of Israel are nearing their end. In the face of their death spiral, I hope that Germans will finally recognize the derangement in their serial support for genocide and take steps to rediscover their humanity.
The fascist ideology of Zionism and the pariah state of Israel are nearing their end. In the face of their death spiral, I hope that Germans will finally recognize the derangement in their serial support for genocide and take steps to rediscover their humanity. I hope they find a way to grapple with and truly repent for their hand in the monstrosities inflicted on the Palestinians in the name of the monstrosities they inflicted on us.
The German state prosecuting me may have legal authority, but its moral authority has collapsed entirely. The world over, the German state is viewed with open disgust as it once again participates in a genocide. Germany may be powerful enough to prosecute us, but it will never silence us. It will never defeat my love and solidarity for my fellow humans, and particularly for my fellow humans in Palestine. The people of Palestine are my witnesses, and it is they, not the German state, to whom I answer for my actions.
*Rachael Shapiro is an anti-Zionist Jewish organizer and writer originally from the New York Area and now based in Berlin. A descendant of Holocaust survivors, she is active in the Palestine solidarity movement with the International Jewish Antizionist Network (IJAN).
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