In Germany, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), is a kind of constitutional police force, whose purpose is to investigate and help prosecute terrorist organisations.
If you read their history, the idea behind the creation of this organisation was to prevent the emergence of the conditions that had led to the loss of the freedoms regained after the end of the Nazi regime.
Now, I don't want to dwell here on the many criticisms made of the way this organisation pursues its aims (e.g. planting undercover informants inside neo-Nazi organisations, thereby effectively funding them); I'll simply report on and comment on the agency's latest controversial decision.
Last week, with the publication of a dossier on the activities of secular pro-Palestine groups, the BfV classified a number of symbols and slogans as hate symbols, extremist, or antisemitic.
Among them, the watermelon — especially when cut into the shape of historic Palestine — and Handala (the character used above all by the BDS movement to represent Palestinian resistance). Among the various slogans are "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free!" and "Baby killer Israel".
Now, the justification given for "From the river to the sea Palestine will be free" is that it is a slogan calling for the destruction of Israel and is therefore antisemitic.
Without going into how this very line of reasoning is itself antisemitic — how the identification of the terrorist organisation recognised as the state of Israel with Judaism, or with Jews as such, is experienced by many Jews (a minority, admittedly) as antisemitic — we can simply note that there are many ways in which the occupation in Palestine could be brought to an end, not all of them violent.
For example, what I personally hope for, when I use that slogan, is a transformation like South Africa's after apartheid: the state of Israel, as a Nazi ethno-supremacist institution, ceases to exist — it changes flag, constitution and name, and becomes the state of Palestine. Israeli Jewish citizens become citizens of the new democratic Palestinian entity, with equal rights and duties. It is the end of a regime, not of a population, and still less of a religion. This is the sense in which "From the river to the sea" can be read (the sense intended by every activist I have ever spoken to), and by deliberately collapsing this distinction the BfV is not fighting antisemitism: it is amplifying it.
Finally, just to note another element of the German institutional psychosis on this subject, the BfV declares that the slogan "Baby Killer Israel" is antisemitic in that it is "based on antisemitic conspiracies and conspiracy theories, invoking the medieval accusations of child murder and ritual human sacrifice levelled at Jews".
Personally, I can find no way to describe this inversion of reality other than as perverse and psychotic. Imputing antisemitic intent to this slogan on the strength of medieval tropes is absurd, given that Israel has killed tens of thousands of children in Palestine since October 2023. Probably hundreds of thousands of children, given that the figures are seriously under-reported (the real death toll from direct and secondary causes being, according to some estimates, including Francesca Albanese's, somewhere around seven hundred thousand).
The Israeli army has burned children alive, decapitated them, shot them with sniper rifles, abducted and raped them; it has vaporised mothers nursing their newborns, wiped out entire families, and starved comparable numbers of the children who survived the genocide either to death or to lasting health damage that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
Israel is an organisation that exterminates children every day, and that has exterminated, maimed, traumatised and orphaned hundreds of thousands of them over the past two and a half years — in Palestine, in Lebanon, in Iran — and shows no sign of wanting to stop.
Calling Israel a state that kills children is not an antisemitic litany: it is an accurate description of what Israel does, every day, with genocidal systematicity. In criminalising that description, the BfV is not defending anyone; it is trying to erase reality.