Police violence in Berlin on International Day Against Violence Against Women

We conducted an interview with a female protester, Omnia, who was subjected to police violence at a demonstration commemorating the day against violence against women and for a free Palestine in Berlin.

1. What is the historical background of the 25th of November?

The 25th of November is the International Day Against Violence Against Women. It commemorates the assassination of the Mirabal sisters in 1960 by the dictatorship of the Dominican Republic at the time under Rafael Trujilo. The Mirabal sisters were involved in dissident political activities against the Trujilo regime and were subsequently brutally killed. The 25th of November is in itself internationalist, something that the demonstration by the group Alliance of Internationalist Feminists in Berlin clearly drew on as their demonstration put the Palestinian liberation struggle against Zionist settler colonialism at the forefront. It focused on women in anticolonial resistance struggles and criticized the bankruptcy of bourgeois feminism.

So, in its very essence, the day has never been a mere abstract call to end gender-based violence but inherently connected to political struggle.

2. What happened at the demonstration?

There were many migrant women’s organizations at the demonstration, from countries ranging from Turkey to Sudan to South Korea. About two thousand people showed up, many carrying placards ranging from ones: for a woman’s right to choose, for a de-criminalization of abortion, with pictures of imprisoned Palestinian women; many carried Palestinian flags. The police were very hostile from the beginning of the demonstration. We have seen since over one year of ongoing genocide in Gaza that the police react with brute force to protests that show solidarity with Palestine in Berlin.

At this demonstration, of which the absolute majority were women, the police also attacked the demonstration on multiple occasions. Only about 15 minutes after starting to march, the police violently stormed into a part of the demonstration, used pepper spray, and beat up protestors. This went on for the whole demonstration, where every 15-20 minutes, the police allowed us to continue marchin,g then stopped us to beat up and arrest some protestors until finally, after about two and a half hours, hindering the demonstration from continuing to its planned end.

3. Why do the police react to peaceful demonstrations with such force?

This police violence, in the broader context of repressions and criminalization against the pro-Palestine movement in Germany, serves to scare off the over 70% of Germans who say that they are against Germany delivering weapons to Israel. For over 14 months of ongoing genocide, there has been a daily campaign by the ruling political establishment and bourgeois media to defame the pro-Palestine movement as Antisemitic, violent, and Islamist. On an almost weekly basis, there are cases of those who raise their voice against the genocide getting fired and of demonstrators getting beaten up by the police.

These repressions serve to tell the general public, “you may be against the German state’s support for Israel, but look, if you raise your voice, you will be defamed as an Antisemit, you may lose your job, you may have your house raided, and you will, quite literally, be beaten on the street.”
Hence, these repressions against the pro-Palestine movement serve to divide and conquer and to lower the morale of those who continue to demonstrate, in other words, to weaken the movement in general.

4. Were you arrested at the demonstration on the 25th of November?

Yes. About ten police officers came from behind and kidnapped me. They dragged me to a police car, screaming at me the whole time. They put handcuffs on me and led me away, pushing away anyone who tried to help me. I got criminal charges for allegedly shouting forbidden slogans, which I didn’t, but this is a typical way the German police fabricate charges. I got lucky; other friends of mine got pepper spray in their eyes and were severely injured by the police violence. One comrade had to go to the hospital. Over the last months, protestors in Berlin have been arrested for the most ludicrous charges, so my case isn’t unique. There have been people arrested for carrying signs that say “From the Risa (a fried chicken shop) to the Spree (river in Berlin). Or for merely having a sticker that shows solidarity with Palestine.

These developments are disturbing and show authoritarian developments of the state. They serve to intimidate pro-Palestine activists and instill them with fear of collectively organizing.

At this demonstration specifically the German police showed that on the day against violence against women, they perpetuate violence against women. None of the bourgeois media reported on this, instead they claimed that the violence came from the female protestors, which is absurd.

5. What is the situation of violence against women in Germany?

In 2023, there were 331 cases of femicides in Germany and over 167,000 cases of domestic violence. Over 12,000 women were dangerously injured by their partners or ex-partners. Violence against women is institutionalized in Germany, as it is in other capitalist countries. Infrastructure for the safety of women is severely underfunded in Germany. This includes the underfunding of women‘s shelters, which means that there are thousands of women in Germany who need women’s safe houses and have nowhere to go to escape domestic violence. Simultaneously, the ruling government has still not disposed of §218, a law that criminalizes abortions, which is scandalous.

6. Why are institutions for the safety of women underfunded?

It’s pretty simple: You can’t detach these issues of austerity measures on women’s shelters from Germany‘s militarization. Germany’s Greens foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, went on TV a couple of weeks ago and admitted that the government is underfunding public infrastructure because they need money for militarization. Billions of funds that should be going into public infrastructure, among them women’s shelters but also schools or public transportation, are being used for Germany’s extensive military spending in the context of the Nato 2% goal and the war in Gaza and Ukraine.

7. So, what you are saying is that domestic infringements on women’s rights cannot be separated from foreign policy?

Violence against women is, of course, not only a domestic issue. Annalena Baerbock claims to be practicing a “feminist foreign policy” through which she gives her imperialist politics an ideological venire that sounds more friendly. Factually, this “feminist foreign policy” legitimizes the genocide in Gaza and weapons deliveries to Western-backed dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and deals with the Egyptian military dictatorship. Under Germany’s “feminist foreign policy,” women (and men) in Gaza are being slaughtered with German weapons. Women in Gaza do not have access to any of the necessary medical facilities, to say the least.

8. How does this ideological aspect of German imperialism manifest itself?

One just has to look at the last 14 months of bourgeois propaganda on almost every German media outlet to see that one of the key ideological talking points of German imperialism in its support of the genocide in Gaza has been to spew the debunked narrative of “mass rape” by Hamas on the 7th of October. This narrative (although all investigations have shown it to be fabricated) continues to be used by the German ruling class because it feeds so well on a long-existing racist notion of Arab men as misogynistic and rapists. The current racist calls by all parliamentary parties to deport “bad migrants” are based on the profoundly racist narrative that brown-skinned men pose a threat to white German women. Something the AfD has pushed for years and which the Greens up to Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht gleefully jump on.

In sum, the function of this racism against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim men is that the German ruling class can legitimize the genocide against Gaza abroad (in the name of women’s rights) and deport and surveil migrants domestically(in the name of women’s rights).

9. Is this feminist foreign policy something new?

No, it is pretty much an extension of one of the main ideological pillars of Western imperialism, at least since 9/11. Laura Bush, Georg W. Bush’s wife, claimed in 2001 that Afghanistan must be bombed to “save Afghan women.” The images of the torture chambers of Abu Ghuraib, where Iraqi men and women were sexually assaulted and tortured, show us that these Imperialist wars were never about women’s rights or human rights but about geopolitical and economic interests. The decades-long dehumanization of Muslims and Arabs by the Western ruling classes wishes to make Western audiences numb to the suffering of “the other”.

10. Why did the demonstration on the 25th combine the struggle against violence against women with the struggle for a free Palestine?

The demonstration by the Alliance of Internationalist Feminists in Berlin tried to intervene in the debate on violence against women and feminist foreign policy and say that we, as women in Germany, cannot ignore the plight of women in Palestine, who are being bombed with German weapons in the name of “feminism.” The demonstration made clear that they, as women and LGBTQ activists, will not allow the struggle for women’s rights to be instrumentalized to slaughter women in Gaza. The demonstration was a call of “not in our name” towards the ideology of the German ruling class.

The demonstrators also stated that they do not accept this imperialist narrative that delegitimizes the Palestinian resistance. Over 70% of those slaughtered in Gaza are women and children. There have been innumerable cases of proven sexual violence and rape perpetrated by the Israeli military against Palestinian women and men. The case of rape in Sde Teiman prison perpetrated against Gazan men by Israeli military men has been something that the Israeli media even legitimized, going so far as to invite the rapist soldier on talk shows to explain these “counter-terrorism” measures. Gender-based violence in the case of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, as elsewhere, is also systematically geared against colonized Palestinian men.

The German state (and its “feminist foreign policy”) is actively supporting this, as it has given a blank cheque to the Israeli military. Annalena Baerbock recently explained in front of parliament that even civilian infrastructure in Gaza can become legitimate targets of Israeli attacks. Hence, the demonstration tried to show that our struggles in Germany against gender-based violence, be it through the underfunding of women’s safe houses or the criminalization of abortion, are connected to the struggle to end the genocide in Gaza.

11. What should the demands of socialists be in this context?

We as socialists need to focus on what unites us and build broad, united fronts that focus on key issues to mobilize as many people as possible, be it against the genocide in Gaza and in the struggle for women’s rights in Germany and beyond. The genocide in Gaza is still ongoing, and it is necessary for us to collectively find modes of getting out of our isolation, which has mainly objective reasons (of massive repressions and criminalization by the state) but also subjective reasons (be it sectarian splits within the movement on where the Palestinian resistance gets its weapons from or the prevalence of anarchist methods) within the movement that have hindered mass mobilization.

Within the movement against violence against women, we need to clarify that it is not “patriarchy” in the abstract that oppresses women. This is a very important point, and which many groups who draw on feminism get wrong. The problem isn’t men; it’s the capitalist class, regardless if being run by Annalena Baerbock or Olaf Scholz, that institutionalizes and uses sexism to split the working class from organizing collectively.

12. How so?

Capitalist exploitation feeds off of oppression like sexism and racism to divide us and hinder working-class solidarity. We will never be able to get rid of the exploitative bourgeois state if we fall into identity groups that try to dismantle the system alone.

Socialists need to intervene in ongoing struggles and reach more people through their revolutionary propaganda. We need to be part of these struggles to convince people that the capitalist state, which feeds off of sexist oppression, can only be disposed of in a revolutionary manner and for that we need a strong revolutionary-socialist organization. We need to be reliable partners in key struggles and not merely “teachers from the sidelines” who give lessons to movements without being involved. But also simultaneously never sacrifice our organization’s independence and freedom of revolutionary socialist propaganda in any alliance. It is a fine line, and we learn in struggle. Overall, it is our duty in Western countries like Germany to continue the struggle for a free Palestine because a weakening of the pro-genocide ruling class here is a weakening of the ruling class globally.