Axel Springer Participated in the Shooting
The role of German establishment media and government in the state-sanctioned police violence towards Palestinian refugees
“We are not the whipping boys of crazy radicals”
Mika Beuster, Chairman of the German Federation of Journalists (DJV)
In the final hours of 2023, the city of Berlin was rocked with the sound of explosions as hundreds of Palestinian solidarity protesters walked down Kottbusser Tor on Sylvester (new years eye). The crowd marched together in the bitter cold of a north German winter - the diaspora Palestinian community, immigrants, exiles and German citizens - all were watched through the tinted windows of riot vans and in the shadows of the buildings. They never listened, but you could always see two eyes inside a police balaclava.
The demonstration reached the S-Bahn station and then stopped abruptly as the sound of an air-raid siren played out across the streets. The protesters ducked under the threat of incoming bombs that threatened to tear apart human flesh but of course there were no fighter jets - only the explosion of fireworks in the sky as the city sunk into it’s usual drunken pyrotechnic stupor. Under the gaze of the Berlin police however, the protesters had staged a ‘die-in’ to illustrate the reality of living under the constant threat of mutilation or annihilation from above.
“These are harsh dangerous times… Neither of us wants to see this conflict last a moment longer than necessary,” both the UK and German foreign secretaries announced weeks before in the Sunday Times,(archive) “only extremists like Hamas want us stuck in an endless cycle of violence, sacrificing more lives for their fanatic ideology…”
“Let us imagine, that we did press Israel to cease all military operations forthwith. Would Hamas stop firing it’s rockets?” the axis of Anglo-Saxon arms dealers ask as they argue the case for genocide; “would it’s murderous ideology change?” By the end of 2023, Germany had approved over €326 million in arms exports licences to Israel. In addition, according to Amnesty International, the German police had arrested over 850 Palestinian solidarity protesters.
Nancy Faeser, Federal Minister of the Interior, declared a number of slogans related to the Palestinian solidarity ‘illegal’ under the same laws used in the past against the far-right and fascists in Germany. To say ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ is now regarded as ‘circulation of symbols of unconstitutional & terror organisations’, and punishable with years in prison and a fine.
The Federal Ministry of Justice formally accepted Faeser’s decree and attributed the slogan directly to the political group Hamas. This gave the legal framework for widespread state-sanctioned police violence, documented by activist groups like Palästina Spricht - Palestine Speaks. Over 2024 in particular, they have documented police violence at multiple demonstrations and sent complaints to the police on the use of brutal force, in particular, against youth Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
“A 13-year-old boy was surrounded by several police officers, was beaten on the back, taken away in a headlock and violently taken into custody.”
“A 15-year-old youth from Gaza was violently pushed to the ground by police officers,” Palästina Spricht reported. “One officer punching him several times, even though the youth was restrained,” dragging the Palestinian away to a riot van, where he reports being beaten inside by the police. At another protest in Steglitz, the police were so violent towards protesters that an emergency tent had to be set up by the Fire Department to treat the wounded.
A twenty-year-old man was struck by police officers to the ground and hit his head. As he got up, the police pushed him again, this time the young man hit his spine on a concrete object in the street. He was taken to hospital unconscious with a bruised skull and lumbar spine. The police were documented using Quartz sand gloves to punch people to the ground, covering their nose, eyes and mouth and dragging them by the feet, or hitting them in the head with the side of their helmets.
Children as young as seven-years-old were taken into custody by German police.
The media remained silent on violence towards protesters, a tradition older than the unified state of Germany, and more often that not represented the police themselves as the victims of violence. “It’s bad enough,” Mika Beuster, Chairman of the German Federation of Journalists (DJV) complained, “when stones and bottles are thrown at police officers.” Then, associating right wing fascism to Palestinian solidarity, he said “first there were violent right-wing extremists, now there are extremist pro-Palestinian activists.”
We’re Shuddering!
“We are not the whipping boys of crazy radicals,” Beuster announced, as he claimed that fifty members of the press in Germany had been attacked by Palestinian solidarity protesters. Without citing the ‘journalist organization’ that collected these assaults, the DJV gave the example of an unspecified act of anti-Semitic graffiti at the Berlin Taggespiegal HQ.
The relationship between the media and the state, denied by Beuster, is clear in the manufacturing of consent for Israel’s military operations in Gaza. In the case of the Axel Springer media company, silence is enforced within employment contracts signed by journalists demanding an ideological commitment to the state of Israel, NATO and free market capitalism.
Kasem Raad moved from Lebanon to Germany after completing ninth grade, and by the age of twenty he was working as an journalist apprentice at Welt TV, part of the Springer group. After October 7, Axel’s editorial team posted an internal article titled “We stand with Israel” as a kind of ideological guideline for reporting on Gaza. Kasem was not convinced.
As a journalist, he needed to seek clarification and so asked his editors “why does Axel Springer support Israel?” There was no response. Undeterred, he went back to the internal article and hit the comments section, asking the same questions to his colleagues. “Immediately my question got flooded with angry comments and I was called in for an interrogation,” Kasem recalls.
He was reprimanded by his manager, cautioned and then forced to go through ‘training programs.’ Still, Kasem wanted his answer. “I strongly believe in open dialogue,” he wrote on the comments section, “and finding answers, especially at a time when many people lack knowledge about current social issues.” After posting a video that challenged the Israeli narrative of events, including the debunked allegation that Hamas burnt babies alive, his contract was terminated.
“I find the situation really ironic,” Kasem writes. “One of the essentials of Axel Springer are the tenants of freedom and democracy. They should remove this fucking essential from their code of conduct. In my case, they ignored all the essentials, and chose their support of Israel over everything else.”
Outside of the Axel Springer Mitte HQ, hundreds of activists were staging a peaceful sit-in during an event co-hosted by Die Welt and the Jerusalem Post. As a group of German and Nicaraguan lawyers submitted a criminal complaint to the Chancellor and other senior politicians in the SPD-led coalition for “aiding and abetting” in a genocide, the media chose to stand with Israel.
“I gave a brief speech,” Rachael Sharpio reports on the sit-in, “in which I made it clear that the equating of Judaism and Zionism is truly anti-Semitic, not to mention the instrumentation of Jewish identity to justify the occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinians.” The police waited for an hour or so, pointed out Rachael and then started violently attacking the sit-in.
Rachael was sitting with her friends and wife Rebakka when the police came for them. Officers began to choke Rebekka until she couldn’t breathe and then took Rachael away for questioning. They demanded to know why she was in Germany and Rachael replied that her “grandmother was a German-Jewish holocaust survivor and Berlin is my home.”
On Rudi Dutschke Strasse, activists hung a banner that read “Springer participated in the shooting,” pointing to the same use of the incitement of violence by Axel’s publications that lead to the attempted assassination of a left-wing activist by a far-right extremist. Fifty-six years ago, a large demonstration gathered outside of the Axel Springer HQ against this complicity and so in response, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution used agent provocateurs to instigate violence and break up the demonstration.
As protests erupted across Israel in the wake of both the failure and complicity of the government in killing the Israeli hostages held by Hamas, international public support was demanded. Fortunately for the Israeli PM, the Axel Springer far-right Bild tabloid newspaper had managed to get hold of the personal computer of executed senior Hamas leader and negotiator Yahya Sinwar, who had written a document six month earlier where he laid out the entire negotiating strategy of Hamas… allegedly.
“We’re shuddering!” the Bild declares in an ‘exclusive’ exposé. “It is barbaric psychological torture that has only one goal: the relatives of the hostages should be so desperate that they will do anything to free their loved ones. Even if it means going against their own government.” But wait… how did German journalists get into the Gaza Strip? Perhaps the source is the Israeli military?
Military sources have confirmed to the media in Israel that they do possess a document similar to the one published by the Bild, but it was written by a junior operative of Hamas and makes no mention of prolonging negotiations with Israel. “How is it possible that right after the six living hostages came back dead and public outrage grew,” Israeli journalist Schlomo Eldar writes, “a letter was written that answers all of Netanyahu’s problems?”
“It was clear to me,” says Schlomo, “that this was a leak from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, which is manipulating the foreign press.” The Bild had forgotten that old Russian proverb of “trust, but verify” and instead knowingly published a lie. In contrast to this debasement of journalism, the German investigative Correctiv spotlighted a meeting held in secret between German fascists and members of the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
A ‘master plan’ was discussed proposing that two million people be forcibly removed from Germany regardless of citizenship. In response to exposure of the meeting, Chancellor Shultz urged for ‘world unity’ and added that “learning about history is more than just lip service.” Yet it is the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD) that deports those already within it’s borders, as well as; revoking residential papers, visas and citizenship for reasons of political expression on Palestine.
Erase the Memory of Her
In October 2024, there was a wave of arrests of Palestinians in Germany, with homes raided and communications equipment seized for the reason of ‘social media use’ - in one case the re-posting of a video where people are chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” - a mirror of Israel’s communications laws known as ‘consumption of terrorist materials.’
“This intimidation,” warns European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), “particularly affects people financially and/or legally at risk in residency status. This is a form of structural racist violence.”
Apart from complicity within the German media for the use of violence towards Palestinian solidarity protesters, including youth refugees from Gaza, there are direct assaults against those identifying themselves as journalists at demonstrations. I first came to the attention of the violent arrest of Ignacio Rosaslanda at the Jabalia Insitute dispersal, or Humbold University occupation, through the writer Wael Eskandar.
As Ignacio was documenting the police dispersal of the occupation, he was beaten and injured while identifying himself as a journalist. After the incident, the police began to propagate the lie that the journalist had used the video telegraphic pole for his mounted camera against a police officer, and, that he provided “resistance” and so had to be placed in restrictive handcuffs.
A video filmed by Ignacio shows that he was assaulted by police while working to document the occupation and as he is on the floor he repeats to police; “I’m a journalist.” Berliner Zeitung (paywall) then published the video, forcing the Berlin police to finally responded over social media that they were unaware that the video journalist - they assaulted - had video evidence of this abuse. It later transpired that in addition, the journalist was denied medical attention from paramedics by police.
From the attempted criminalization of the image of a watermelon to the inverted red triangle, the absurdity of the censorship of Palestinian rights within German society reached new lows in 2025 with the banning of the Arabic and Hebrew languages at Palestinian solidarity demonstrations. At a rally in Wittenbergplatz, Wael spotted the flag of the German police union within a pro-Israel demonstration and a Jewish Israeli within the Palestinian solidarity protest was told by the Berlin police to stop reading, for instance, because the book he had was published in Hebrew.
As Germany sleepwalks back into the uncomfortable reality that the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) will undoubtedly support the far-right AFD as a winning coalition in what could be the last election in Germany, it is clear that the far-right is not ‘rising’ as many commentators in the media like to write, but already deep within powerful institutions that claim dominance over our lives.
‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ is the Germany’s ‘sovereignty of interpretation’ or deutungshoheit, a concept that dictates the language that is acceptable by the state in the understanding of history, including history in the making. In the case of the Palestinians, this is largely led by Israel's interpretation. “Hamas are the new Nazis,” the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu asserted to the German Chancellor Olaf Schultz “…and just as the world united to defeat the Nazis… the world has to stand united behind Israel to defeat Hamas.”
“First, like any other country in the world, Israel has the right to defend itself,” Annalena Baerbock writes together with Lord Cameron, “but, in doing so, it must abide by international humanitarian law.”
For a country with the inclusion of the awareness for the rise of the Nazi movement written into it’s very education system, it would at first glace seem a hypocrisy to defend the indefensible. Yet when we understand that Germany’s allegiance is to the Israel state and not the Jewish people, and, it is actively providing the incoming far-right coalition with the tools for political repression, we have to ask with a fierce honesty: are the words of this Israeli army reservist - broadcast proudly to the world on October 11th 2023 - what we term self-defence?
“Triumph, kill them, leave no-one behind. Erase the memory of her. Delete them, their families, mothers and children. These animals are not allowed to live on.”
Special thanks to the reporting of Wael Eskander as well as Ignacio Rosaslanda, Kasem Raad, Rachael Sharpio and Palästina Spricht, and the photojournalists of Berlin that document police violence at great personal risk.
So depressing. How do people get sucked into being like this?
Thanks for letting us know how things are in Germany, Josie.