 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome. I'm Merron Khalili, we are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe, and this is another live discussion with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas. You won't hear anywhere else. We are now entering the fifth week of the Israeli government's onslaught in Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas attack of October the 7th. 10,300 men, women and children in Gaza have been killed so far and the number of innocent victims grows by the day. But in this discussion, our third in a row on the topic of Israel-Palestine, we're going to shift our focus a bit to look at the dangerous repercussions for people outside the Middle East and specifically in Europe, where we're seeing an appalling surge of anti-Semitic incidents, a Jewish cemetery set on fire in Austria, attacks on synagogues in Spain, houses marked with the Star of David in France. According to some statistics, discrimination against Jews in Europe is reaching levels unseen in decades. Politicians and commentators, though, seem to be stoking the fires against Muslims, like German Vice Chancellor Robert Harbeck, who described pro-Palestine rallies as Islamist and suggested that anti-Semitism is intrinsic to Muslim communities. At the same time, his colleagues in the German government and in capitals across Europe are busy cracking down on public solidarity with the Palestinian cause, banning protests, cancelling Palestine-related events and threatening legal action against those who resist. All this creates a climate that challenges Europe's commitment to free speech while further inflaming tensions. Is this pull towards extremist behavior, the new normal, as we're now more than ever, immersed in the full horrors of distant conflicts via our smartphones? Or is it symptomatic of something deeper and more disturbing among European people? Is the establishment fumbling its response to push back against this polarization, or is it stoking it? What might this all mean for European politics and the wider Middle Eastern context? And, of course, what can we all do about it? Our panel, including our own Yanis Faroukakis and our crew of activists and thinkers and doers, policy people, campaigning people, are here to dig into these questions. And you, you out there, if you've got thoughts, comments, rants, anything you want to say, things that occur to you that you just need to get out and please put them in the YouTube chat and we'll put them to our panel. And today, I'm very, very happy to present a very special guest that we've got. A surprise last-minute guest, but a very valuable voice. It's Iris Hefetz. She's an Israeli Jew based in Berlin. She's a board member of Jewish Voice for Peace in Germany. That's a leading Jewish group campaigning against Israel's human rights violations and one that's become very prominent in the last few weeks. And just a few weeks ago, Iris was taken into custody by police for the crime of standing in a square in Berlin, holding a sign that says, as a Jew and as an Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza. She's a psychoanalyst as well, and she joins us now. Iris, you've heard my intro. Please set the scene for us. Tell us, what are you seeing in Berlin and how has all this been for you since October 7th? So is yours. Thank you for the invitation. Well, what we see in Berlin is not new, but of course it gains new intensity. It was already like that, 2009. Germany started cancelling and not only Palestinian, which is obvious that they don't even let them speak so they are not really cancelled. But it was the first time that German institutions, also like Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, cancelled Jewish people who are descendants of Holocaust survivors. Until now it was actually a kind of taboo to do something like that. But on that year, Ilan Pappe who's an Israeli historian based in Essex today, he immigrated from Israel, Norman Finkelstein and Haio Maier who was himself a Holocaust survivor, not even second generation, they were all cancelled because they are critical of Israel. That was one year after Angela Merkel said it, said in Israeli parliament in the Knesset that the security of Germany, of Israel, sorry, is part of Germany's Staatsrezone. That means the reason of the state in Germany. This is something which is not democratic. It was not decided in any legal institute in Germany, but it became like many other declarations, a soft law, what we call. So it is very problematic because it's actually, it's not a law. It's something very right, undefined and under this vague definition, one can do everything. Which is the case now in Germany. So during the years there were many cancellations and in addition, resolutions like the BDS, the anti-BDS resolution of Germany which is against the constitution. It is a resolution exactly because it's against the German constitution which is actually a good one. But in order to bypass the constitution, they decided to have a resolution knowing that it's illegal what they are doing, all parliament members. And it was a decision that was supported by members of the right wing parties, the AFD, which is the kind of acceptable Nazi party in Germany to the left in Germany. And they all agreed on debt in a non-democratical way. Under this resolution, which became a soft law, they could cancel and also watch people. So they started really a mechanistic campaign against everyone who is not only supporting BDS, but as a friend of someone who supports BDS or whatever. So they try actually to control the voices, the critical voices that are criticizing the Israeli American policy, actually. It's not about Israel. And this was also the case in the support of the war in the Ukraine. The atmosphere in Germany became much more totalitarian. So if someone said maybe we should talk with Russia or have diplomatic relations, I mean, talks about it, he was already or she was already a traitor. And this tendency became more and more strong so that they really started and created atmosphere of fear in the press, which was really cleansed from Arab journalists or journalists who are saying something critical about Israel. So many are saying, I know that what Israel is doing is an apartheid. It's quite clear. I'm not going to risk my career for that. Israel is not that important for me. So I keep quiet on the matter. And also in the culture scene, they really try to control this scene when it got out of control. Like in the document for example, suddenly came people from the global south and the decision came long before this heavy repression started. Then they started to go and examine every work really like in a totalitarian regime and said that it's anti-Semitic and therefore it cannot be shown. And now anti-Semitism is of course the cover story. And Germany is a very big worldwide exporter. Manage also to export the idea that they are taking care of the Jews and never again on all that stuff. But actually they are splitting. And when I say they, I mean the institutions like the politicians, like the president of Germany, they are splitting between minorities. They are splitting between Jews. So there are the good Jews which are the organized Jews in Germany that are supported by the government and the bad Jews like us, for example. Now one has to understand in Germany there are practically no Jews. In that sense that we are talking about 200,000 Jews in Germany. It's nothing. It has, I mean no electoral power, no political power, no economical power. It has a, I mean the Jews in Germany has a symbolic meaning. They are used or abused I would say by the German policy and politics in order to suppress actually Muslims and other people of color. And in order to enforce an anti-migration politic and a right-wing politics. So the Jews in the organized community which is less than half of the Jews in Germany are supported by the government and cooperate with them in this right-wing anti-Muslim Oh, we lost you a little bit there Iris. Sorry, we didn't get that last bit because of the, can you repeat that last part? Just anti-Muslim, you were saying, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So it's an anti-Muslim politics. And I said that most of these Jews are older than 60 years. So it's not that this community has a future. They came from former Soviet Union. There is a younger community mainly made of Israelis, American Jews, Jews from the UK which did not really experience oppression in their lens. And they are much more, they are taking more part in the resistance. Now, parallel to that, what Havek said, it's a splitting between Muslims. So they are the good Muslims and the bad Muslims. The good ones that there are ones who obey the constitution of Germany. And the bad ones, they are all the migrants, Arabs, whatever who do not do that. Now, we have to remember that the German politicians themselves are acting anti-Semitically in that sense that, for example, when the attack on Israel was on the 7th of October, Steinmeier, the president, went to a synagogue in Berlin and held a speech in solidarity with Israel. Now, if any Palestinian would dare to demonstrate in a place called synagogue place because a thousand years ago there was an old synagogue there, he would be accused in anti-Semitism because it identifies Jews and Israel. But the president can do that or the politician can limit, of course, the human rights and free speech in Germany. But then they called the bad Muslims or all the Muslims to do the same like they are barbaric and they don't know how to do that. So during this time attack, I mean, it's already started some years ago that since rooms were canceled and we were not able to gather because of this anti-Semitic resolution, the main gathering or a place was the streets. And on the streets, there was really a big party because all the people from Global South were there with Palestine, which is a threat, of course, to German white hegemony. And they start to forbid it. But first of all, they started a campaign saying that there are anti-Semitic issues there or calls. Maybe they were here and there. Some of them were also invented. But if the right wing is going in the streets or the right wing is in the parliament, they don't even need the streets. So they are Nazis in the parliament, they are allowed to do that. So they started this campaign and afterward they started to forbid this demonstration, saying that it's anti-Semitic and therefore free of speech is not protecting them. So now when we had this attack on Israel by Hamas, they forbid all pro-Palestinian assemblies. So the Jewish voice of this wanted to have a demonstration in Kreuzberg, which is a neighborhood in Berlin and it was forbidden. So I consulted two friends of mine who are a law professional and I asked them whether I can stand alone with a sign. And they told me, yes, according to the constitution it is protected, it's not an assembly. So I did it and I choose Neukölln for that. That's a place where I work and this is the place where many Palestinian live. In Berlin there is the biggest in Germany, the biggest Palestinian community in the diaspora in Europe. And they were really oppressed. Children were, I mean, it looked like pictures that I know from the West Bank where policemen are arresting children, for example, hitting Palestinians for, or not even Palestinians, anyone who wore a warfare was suspected to be a terrorist. So it is declared as war on terror and under that you can do everything. So, and it is propagated in the German media as a place which is dangerous for Jews. Now we have to remember that in the last 15 years many Israelis moved to Berlin and especially to Neukölln because it reminds them the Mediterranean flair of Israel and most Israelis live in Prenzlaubert, that's one neighborhood in Neukölln. So it's not that they were really suffering from that Israelis, they choose to live there. And I decided to stand there and to say also that as an Israeli, as a Jew, I mean to say, to show that I am such one and I wanted to show that not on Jews, all Jews things the same, like the German government would like to portray. And I wanted to do it also in Neukölln, in order also to see for myself how is it, but I wasn't able, the policeman came directly to me and they told me that it's forbidden to do what I'm doing. I started to argue with them, I told them how the constitution is. All the time people came and started to photograph all that and I was insisting on my right. Of course I know I'm privileged, I'm Israeli, I'm a Jew, I'm a woman, I'm an old woman with white hair, if I would be a young Arab looking male, I would be beaten. And people standing to me, young Arabic looking men who stood next to me were beaten if they had the kafia or a Palestinian flag. And so at some point they saw that I was insisting on that. So they took me in custody to the police car. And they took also my ID, they told me that it's forbidden to have pro-plastinian demonstrations there. So I told them that it's a pro-Israeli one. My family lives there. I think it's the end of Israel also now actually because Israel is maneuvering itself to a dead end. And I'm worried also about my family, my friends who live there. I see how fascist the state of Israel is becoming under this war on terror. And at some point there were sympathetic with me, the two policemen that were there, one took my ID, came back and told me that he's actually sorry, I'm right. At some point I told them, okay, you see, I mean, all the people left, you can let me go. It's actually, it's not about forbidden or not forbidden. You just wanted to take me out of the street. And they let me go. They told me that they did it for my security and I still argue they say, I mean, if they think that it's not secure for me, their task is to take care that it will be secure and not to avoid me from fulfilling my basic human rights. They escort me to a corner of the place. They said they don't, hey, I cannot stand in the middle. I can stand, which was actually a better place where they show me where I can stand. And there I stood something like two hours. And I must say that was one of the most empowering moments in my life. Afterwards, I told another activist in our organization. She told me, Iris, why didn't you tell me before? Because I really, I got so much, I mean, people were either indifferent or I got really so much love. People came, hugged me. They wanted to have selfies with me. They brought me a cup of coffee. They really talked with me. And they said, I mean, also, you know, a white German man that told me that he's so thankful because he's married to an Egyptian woman and she's not daring to get out of home these days. I mean, to be a Muslim now in Germany is horrible. To be a Palestinian, it's a disaster now, really. I mean, they are the Jews now in Berlin. And the Germans are trying to create a perverse, I would say, a narrative in which the Jews are the victims. All Jews, not the Israelis. And they try to portray it as what Hamas did as something anti-Semitic, which is, of course, not anti-Semitic. It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It is, of course, anti-Israeli. What can one expect? But it's not anti-Semitic. Yeah, this is it. Iris, thank you so much for that. Insightful, illuminating and infuriating account of what's happening there and full solidarity with you. Thank you so much for letting us in on that. Yanis, Thor is yours. Well, Iris, thank you for me as well, on behalf of everyone. It's magnificent to have you in our midst and to really live with you. The moments of personal and collective emancipation that you created by means of your lone demonstration in the middle of that square, which then was shifted by the police to the side, but without succeeding in lessening its impact. You mentioned Angela Merkel's famous speech, the proclamation that the raison d'etre of the Federal Republic is the defense of Israel. Now, if she had said that the raison d'etre of the Federal Republic of the post-war German state, was to make sure that no Jew ever fears, ever lives in fear again, not even for one second of anti-Semitic attacks, attacks to her person, his person, simply because he or she happens to be a Jew. I would have applauded because I think that this is a collective duty. We all have, especially Europeans, because anti-Semitism is a European construction, for centuries. We have a very long and sorted history as Europeans of anti-Semitism. It's not magic. It's not a mystery. We know why it happened. Allow me very briefly to share with you, maybe I'm wrong, but my Marxist take on the causes of anti-Semitism, it has to do with the fact that here you have, firstly, I mean, in every community, if you're another, a different person or persons, they are always going to become magnets, magnetizing towards them discrimination. We see this in schools, left-handed children are usually the buttocks jokes and they get bullied by kids who consider them to be strange because they're right with their left hand. So otherness, difference always attracts discrimination. But in the case of the Jews in particular, especially after your expulsion from Spain and the diaspora across Europe from Ukraine to Constantinople, to the Saloniki, to all the way to Scotland, there was something else, that was a feudal society. And the Jews were not allowed to be either lords or peasants. You could not be aristocrats, you could not be landowners in a feudal regime which relied on land as a factor of production which empowered its owners. And you couldn't even be peasants. You couldn't belong to the land. So you were others. So you had to, your nation called what you might race, nation, group, ethnic community, you had to be on the sidelines by definition. And therefore commerce. If you don't have access to the land, either as a landlord or as a peasant, you've got to do commerce, but it's buying and selling stuff. And part of buying and selling means lending and borrowing. And it so happened that Europe at the time had exactly the same dogmatic rejection of interest payments as the Muslim religion has, or supposedly has today. The Christians and the Muslims are exactly the same in the sense of a dogma against interest, lending on interest. That's why Shilok in the Merchant of Venus was a Jew because he was the only one in Venice who could actually lend charging an interest. And when capitalism started growing, nothing to do with the Jews, growing in Amsterdam and in England as it is out of the enclosures and so on, those who happened and they were not just Jews, they were Armenians and they were Greeks as well. Others who had been expelled from their land, like Armenians were expelled from their land, like the Greeks occupied by the Ottoman Empire, the Greeks were in Odessa, they were in Romania, they were in Venice. And so the Greeks, the Jews and the Armenians and others like that, they happened to be in control of commerce as commerce was taking off. So as the substantial proportion of the Greeks, the Armenians and the Jews became rich as a result of the takeoff of capitalism. And therefore, because the Jews were many, many more compared to the Armenians and the Greeks in the diaspora was much larger of the Jews. And also you didn't have the prohibition of an interest bearing loans. You acquired the unique historical experience of being despised both as rich and as that poor in the Saloniki, which was one of the largest Jewish cities until the Nazis eradicated the Jews in the Saloniki with some connivance by the local Greek bourgeoisie. I must say that. You had the rich Jews controlling industry, controlling commerce and the proletariat were Jewish as well. The first socialist communist newspaper in Greece was created by Jews in the Saloniki. The Greek communist party was established by Jews in the Saloniki and they were opposed to whom? To their Jewish masters. So the idea of a unified community is preposterous. Right? And what we have today is the German state siding with one side of the Jewish community against the other. Yet again, of course, a development of this. So anti-Semitism goes a long way back. Pogroms in Ukraine, pogroms in Poland, pogroms everywhere of the Jews. Every time there was a crisis of capitalism, the Jews who were identified with capitalism simply because they were occupying that nook and cranny of the social economy, which was connected to capital and commerce and banking, they were eradicated. You suffered a sequence of pogroms from us Europeans from our established ruling classes across Europe. And that culminated eventually to the Holocaust, which I maintain is a unique evil in the history of genocides. There have been many genocides. Holocaust, the Holocaust is uniquely evil in my view. I do not relativize the Holocaust. It cannot be compared to any other genocides, the Algerians, the Kurds, the Greeks, the Armenians, of the Cambodians by Pol Pot. And the reason why I think that the Holocaust was a uniquely evil event is because the objective was to eradicate every Jew. It was not to take their land, to take their property, to dry them out, to ethnically cleanse them. So for instance, you know, the French committed major atrocities had concentration camps in Algeria, but they didn't want to kill every Algerian there was. They just wanted to subjugate the Algerian resistance if they could get rid of them. So the Turks wanted to get rid of the Armenians. They didn't want to kill, they killed a lot of Armenians. So there was a genocide of Armenians, but the objective was not to collect every single Armenian in a concentration extermination camp and kill them. That was uniquely Holocaust related. So I'm saying that because it's important to make this point because as I said before, had Angela Merkel said that our objective should be as a German state, Greek state, Italian state, American state, Chinese state, to make sure that no Jew ever feels the fear of anti-Semitism. That is something even if Angela Merkel hadn't said it, which she didn't say actually, we should say it, and we do say it. And here in DiEM25, we proclaim this very proud. But the state of Israel is not exactly the same thing as the Jewish people. And we know that because here we have Eris, but we can think of Hannah Arendt, we can think of Albert Einstein, we can think of all the socialist left-wing Jews who were against the idea of a Zionist Jewish state, a state in Palestine cleansed of the local population who were against the Teranulius story. Teranulius, the empty land, the slogan, a land without the people, for a people without the land is genocidal. I mean, the British used it in Australia. When Captain Cook arrived in Australia on behalf of the British Crown to claim Australia, he declared it a Teranulius, a land without the people. Why? To kill five million aborigines. This is precisely what a land without the people, for a people without the land meant in Palestine. And David Ben-Gurion has clearly said that in books, in articles, we came here to take their land, not to exterminate them, but to push them off, ethnically to cleanse them. And of course, this is going to be kickback. So I just wanted to establish that antisemitism is a unique evil because we Europeans have created centuries of the most systematic and uniquely evil campaign against the people, the Jewish people. But there is a history, it's not in a vacuum. As the Secretary General of the United Nations would have said about Gaza, it's not even in a vacuum. There is a story about feudalism, about capitalism, about banking, about commerce. There is a story about the rise of Nazism. If the Jews were not the target, somebody else would have been the target because Nazism was a historical necessity for the crisis of German industrial capital. And now what we have is a situational weapon. Many good people in German feel that if they support BDS, a movement that I'm very close to and I'm declaring it for the record, which says boycott Israel, divest from Israel, sanction Israel until there is the end of the apartheid system there and let no one challenge that it is an apartheid system when the former Mossad director calls it an apartheid system, when the former, as you said, it is ministers of foreign affairs and ambassadors of the Israeli state saying what we have been doing here is practicing apartheid. Let us not have a debate about whether it's apartheid. If it works like apartheid, smells like apartheid, talks like apartheid, it is apartheid. Given that this is the situation now in the land of Palestine, you have this apartheid, it is understandable that one on the one hand, the Palestinians have to join BDS and call for a boycott, divestment and sanctions because the alternative is what? To take up the guns and plant bombs. So those who condemn Hamas for using violence, they have to ask themselves a question, what alternative do the people of Palestine have as a weapon if they don't have actual weapons? Boycotting, boycotting apartheid, is not what we did with South Africa and a small parenthesis here. I was part of the student movement in the late 1970s and late 1980s in England against apartheid. The same people who today are arresting you, it is. They are challenging us as being on the wrong side of history because we're not supporting Israel and therefore we are bedfellows of terrorists in Israel or in Palestine. They were the same ones who back in 1978-79 called Nelson Mandela terrorists and accused us of being absolutely on the wrong side of history and supporting terrorists in South Africa, black terrorism. That's what they were saying. But at the same time I understand and relatively apolitical, a historical German young person who is told that the Nazis were posting outside the shops of Jews in Berlin, in Leipzig, wherever. They were posting those horrible, horrible posts saying, don't buy from the Jews. And they think, oh my God, they are asking me to boycott the Jews. I'm not going to do that. What is essential for us is to educate the good people of Germany that Israel is not the same thing as the Jewish people. Now, I believe I have the right to say that because I'm 63 years old. I spend all my life, all my life, as long as I remember since I was 12, opposing the Greek government and the policies of the Greek state. I was not anti-Greek, believe me. As a patriot, I felt I had the obligation to oppose my state, to oppose my government when my government was doing the wrong thing for the Greeks, for the Turks, for the Cypriots, for the Roma, for whoever. So let's, especially left-wing people, members of the Green Party in Germany, you have no right to identify the Israeli state, especially the apartheid state, with the Jewish people that is a major upfront to the Jewish people. It is a kind of anti-Semitism to do this. You have no right as a white, German middle-class person to tell to 80s habits that she has no right to support the Palestinians' struggle for life, not even liberty, for life. That that's a kind of anti-Semitism. We've seen it in the United States, we've seen how the deeply anti-Semitic, evangelical ultra-rights suddenly had a flip. It's like they pushed a switch and they became completely Zionist. And instead of hating the Jews, they turned into full-on Islamophobia and adopting the ultra-fascist Zionist narrative as their own. The good people of Germany, middle-class people who do not like Trump, who do not like the supporters of Trump, should think twice about completely associating with this evangelical anti-Semites who suddenly turned their anti-Semitism into a rabid Islamophobia. And finally, allow me to repeat a question, which I am actually two questions, which I'm putting out to our friends in Germany. Friends who think, understand them, they will mean. They think that centuries of pogroms and the Holocaust against the Jews makes it incumbent upon them to defend Israel, come what may, at all costs, whatever Israel does. I understand, but the question for them is this. How far must Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians proceed before the utterly justified collective guilt over the Holocaust no longer prevents you as from confronting Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? That is the question. To put it a bit more bluntly, does anyone think that our guilt over the Holocaust can be washed clean with Palestinian blood and how much blood does it take? 10,000 people, 100,000 people. And when does the Palestinian blood stop working as a cleanser of our European guilt for the Holocaust, for the pogroms? And this last question is this. They keep talking about Hamas again and again and again. Now, who made Hamas strong and powerful? Netanyahu, before him Ariel Shiran. It was the ultra-right of the Israeli establishment that wanted to kill off any peace, any two-state solution. This humiliated and destroyed the any authority that the Palestinian authority had. And effectively, and we also have very strong evidence and I dare anyone to challenge me on this that Israeli state officials actually gave money to Hamas for many, many years and they came out and they actually admitted to this. But the question is this, having put the context on the table. What if Hamas didn't exist? What would happen? What if the Palestinians had actually laid down their weapons and recognized Israel? You don't need to imagine what would happen. Just look at the West Bank because this is the situation in the West Bank. The Palestinian authority had laid down its arms. It is collaborating with Israel, maybe too much. And they are pursuing a peaceful solution. And what happens? Pogroms of Palestinians by the settlers with the help and support of the Israeli army. The steady ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. So let's be very clear about that. I'm going back to the beginning. If one Jew is threatened by anti-Semitism, we're there, we'll wear the start of David proudly and we will be there on their side supporting. But the state of Israel is not threatened at the moment. Hamas is not much for the state of Israel. They kill people, there's no doubt about it. They carry out their own atrocities. But they are not a threat to the nuclear armed, utterly weaponized state of Israel, which is a successful state economically. It has the most advanced and capable army in the whole region. There is no threat to Israel. Would the Hamas leadership get rid of the Jews from the river to the sea? Yes, they would, but they can't. This is a theoretical discussion at the moment. It is a theoretical discussion. Netanyahu, Sharon before him and his whole cabinet, who are the equivalent of Hamas, but they are in control of an almighty, extremely powerful ironclad nuclear armed state, are interested in ethnic cleansing from the river to the sea. Our objective must be to have equal political and civil liberties for everybody who lives from the river to the sea. Thank you. Thank you for that, Yanis. Iris, I would like to bring you back in briefly, if I may, just respond to some of the points that Yanis made, because I'm also aware that you will have to leave us soon and we'll be able to stay for the full hour. So, I'm sorry, I didn't, I missed it. No, I was just saying, I'd like to bring you back just briefly to respond to Yanis. And then we've got some other speakers coming up after because I know that you have to leave soon. Go on. Okay, okay. Yeah, I would just like to say something about Germany. I think it's very important what you said, Yanis, because you talked about politics. In Germany, they try to avoid talking about politics. They are talking about mythology, also Israel. And that enables them to do politics, which is a right-wing politics. All these talks about antisemitism and extermination and Holocaust again and all that we have, I mean, reality is like that. The Zionist project had failed. According to the Zionist project, it should be a safe home for Jews. Now, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews in the world. The probability to die because one is Jew is the highest by far in Israel. So it's not working. It's not the project for Jews. It's project for evangelical in the USA. Now, I think that Israel is threatened but not from the outside. The problem in Israel is that the society inside Israel is really splitted. Israel is now, I don't know how much is known about it, but the Israeli government is now giving weapon to the people. Now, Israel is already a land with a lot of weapon. Already, we have more than half a million settlers who have weapon. Now they give more. Also, the people that lives in nuclear Israel, kind of. And on the 7th of October, Israel was a failed state. So it was because the soldiers didn't come to the places that were attacked. It took 10 hours. There was a lot of friendly fire and so-called parents brought their children, their sons, the soldiers. They brought them to the bases. I see Facebook post of people writing, my friends are going to the army. I need five helms. Where can I find it? And this is a combination of neoliberal politics which Netanyahu is forcing because Netanyahu is a person who got a full bright stipendium in the USA that's a special stipendium you get in the USA in order to study there. He was in MIT to study the Chicago school ideas. And you're not allowed to stay in the USA. So the US Americans are building their own people and send them to the world. And he has good connection with conservatives. And the neoliberal idea of we are not storing everything because we are working only according to the needs now. This is what they did also as for the army, as for food. So hospitals were without food on that day. The state was collapsing and the civil society took the tasks of the state. So I think also for this discussion it's important to see how neoliberal policy is corrupting a place and it caused actually a total collapse in the end when the state is needed. So, and this is the threat for the Israeli state. This destructive power within the Jewish society and the racism against Palestinians who live also in Israel, they are physicians. They have other roles as pharmacists. They are not going to work now because they are afraid. They are attacked. They are being bashed. They are suspended from work for posting two years ago and citation from the Quran about peace. They are considered to be Islamist. So I think it's important also to understand that the German support of Israel is actually a support of a state that becomes more and more right-wing and fascist and neoliberal. Thank you for that. A couple of questions from the chat. Vision Plus asks if the move to authoritarianism is a sign of failure. What is the alternative vision which recalibrates the narrative in favor of civility and decency? What chance do we have when fascism has more firepower? There are lots of questions on BDS, including a comment from Dave that when Desmond Tutu calls your country apartheid, the argument is pretty much over and subversively, Cyril asks us if we can please comment on Bernie Sanders' proposed pause, humanitarian pause. And then he says presumably a return to the slaughter idea. So please tackle these comments and questions in your forthcoming contributions. David, the floor is yours. David Castro, based in Brussels, go for it. Thank you, Mehran. Well, Iris and Yannis, Iris, sorry. And Yannis, before they did an excellent job of deconstructing the mainstream narrative and said it better than I could ever say and I agree with what they have said. So I wanted to focus a little bit more on the matter of hate speech and free speech specifically. It's my personal view, so this is not necessarily DM's view or anything like that, but for me, the way to properly combat hate speech is not through the cancellation of speech or the forms of expression. Human beings are rational beings, but we don't always think or behave rationally, do you? We need people to be able to speak freely or democracy means nothing. I come from a country where people weren't even able to associate with one another for being from the left. A country like many of yours in their darkest hour, whose fascist governments literally track and trace dissidents the old school way and imprisoned them or murdered them in cold blood. The moment you surrender to authoritarianism by limiting the spectrum of acceptable opinion is the moment you admit that democracy doesn't matter because different countries have different legal definitions of hate speech which are then used to punish some viewpoints, but not others. Every time you propose to violate the speech of someone else, you're putting a target on your back. To whom do you delegate the authority to judge what constitutes harmful speech or a harmful speaker or to predict the negative outcomes sufficiently in advance to avert them? Who would you entrust with this responsibility? To whom would you assign the role of gatekeeper over speech, meta, Google, X, our governments? If you allow the state to ban hateful views, then whoever's in control of the state can simply arbitrarily declare any of you that don't like to be hateful. There are much better ways to deal with hate speech such as through education and by promoting counter messages. But let's be honest, it will never be fixed through legal means. You have cases like Florida Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, which I guess most of you have heard about, who recently announced that you would be running for president in the upcoming election in the US. He's made it illegal to teach authentic American history. Essentially, you have to teach history that glorifies the United States of America. In democracies, you deal with hate speech with free speech. You don't deal with it by saying what you said cannot be said. So therefore you are not human and we cannot, we can do to you whatever we like because telling someone that is the same as dehumanizing them and we all know what happens when people are dehumanized. Just look at the Palestinians and the way that successive Israeli governments have been silencing them literally by making sure they do not ever have their own state. Look at the reaction in the West with governments choosing to showcase one flag like the European Commission did here in Brussels and never the other. Look at the reaction in Berlin and elsewhere where protesters, many of whom Jewish, including Eris who was here with us today were banned for protesting and others attacked by police. Now, look, let me say this. Attacks against Jews are a problem. Attacks against Muslims are a problem. Any kind of hate speech against any group of people or individuals is a problem. But when we criticize, for example, the policies of a country like Saudi Arabia, we're not being Islamophobic. And when we criticize the policies of a country like Israel, we're not being anti-Semitic. Personally, look, I'm an atheist. I think most of you know that. I don't believe in a God. I think we're all grains of sand in this infinitude of time and space, which we barely understand, such is our insignificance in the greater context of the universe. But while I truly respect people who believe, no matter the scripture and God, what matters for me is that public policy is not affected by it and that our freedoms are respected equally for everyone. But religion really is just a pretext for those in positions of power to play politics, to play power games. This is about power and corruption. This is about US and European geopolitical interests standing in the way of what should be a peaceful coexistence. This is about a history of occupation which inevitably would lead to hate spreading because when there is no respect for life, hate and extremism takes over. And unless we tackle the root causes, it will always be there. So the occupation must end or there shall never be peace. We have to respect the fact, and to accept the fact that some people will unfortunately sometimes say truly nasty things. But if our instinct is to silence them immediately, their hate will only fester and grow and soon enough we'll be living in something much worse than a post-modern 1930s. Because when we think things cannot possibly get any worse, they almost always certainly do. In summary, just to finalize, the freedom of others to express their opinions is inextricably linked to our own. When somebody is censored, it also diminishes our right to listen. Personally, I've never encountered anyone whom I would entrust with the authority to predetermine what I or anyone should be allowed to say or read. When the beacon of hope but discourse and freedom of expression is snuffed out, the resulting darkness is significantly deeper and more enduring. The temptation to censor uncomfortable truths or dissenting voices is inherently strong, which is why the struggle, I think, to uphold the principle of free speech must be vigorously re-engaged by each generation. Thank you. Thank you for that, David. Judith, Judith Meyer, based in Berlin. Thank you. Well, let me play devil's advocate here and say that when someone is killed, our laws don't distinguish whether he was killed by someone's hands, the feet, the knees, or other body parts or weapons attached to those body parts. So I don't think that we should make an exception for the tongue as the only body part that is allowed to kill people. Of course, there has to be like a direct relationship between the speaking and the death, but I do believe that it's possible to draw such a line. Beyond the legal part, I think that it's only a matter of personal and organizational responsibility because at this time especially, where there's so much racist hatred, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic hatred is already spreading like wildfire, I believe that we have a duty to watch our words and to ensure that we do not contribute to stoke the violence against innocent people, especially the violence against people that are already disadvantaged in our societies. For example, we had some anti-capitalist zooms and if someone misunderstood any of my words to mean that billionaires should be killed, I would still not be too worried because billionaires have a lot of personal security more than any head of state and in addition, they have the protection of the state. So it's unlikely that someone confused person could just kill a billionaire because of something I said, but if my words were misunderstood to mean that Muslims or Jews, refugees, trans people, any of the unpopular minorities in Europe should be killed, I'd be devastated because these groups are vulnerable in many European countries. The police is more likely to kill a Muslim or a Jew or a refugee or a trans person, it's more likely to kill them than to prevent the murder. So they don't have anyone, not even the police to protect them from some lunatic who listened to too many hate speeches. And that's why I believe as progressives, we should always be ready to physically defend these groups but also to prevent hatred being stoked against them in the first place and not celebrate it as free speech or someone daring to say something that the rest of us won't say. It frankly scares me that there are public speakers on the left who take pleasure in saying awful things under the protection of free speech just because they disagree with cancel culture. They say the most awful things they can get away with and they enjoy when woke leftists go right in the face. To me, they're sadists and possibly social pass because they enjoy being insensitive and causing pain in a situation that is definitely not consensual. Normal human beings will always try not to hurt others. If someone tells me that this term or the other term hurts them, normal people will not use that term in their presence simply because they don't want to hurt the other person. They don't wait till there's a law or a rule saying they can't use that term. So they never come close to the edge of free speech. So whenever we see someone who enjoys using terms that hurt people or cast himself as a hero for doing so, they should set off all of our alarm bells ringing that we may be dealing with a social path. Thank you. Thank you, Judith. Thanks for playing the devil's advocate position. Very brave in this context. You've certainly animated the chat here. Who is next? Lucas Fabraro, also based in Berlin. I thought you were- Yep. Thanks, Marin. Look, I think when I think about upon this last month, this crazy 30 days that we've been going through, very tragic, very sad 30 days. One of the things that come to mind for me living here in Berlin is that it's probably been a great time to be a mainstream politician, to be a mainstream journalist, to be a mainstream member of a mainstream institution in Germany. Not all of them, but many of them. Because the racism and the slimmophobia that usually no better than to display too evidently, you get a free pass now. It's a free for all. You can say whatever you want. It's open season on Muslims. It's open season on Arab people. So I think they've been having a lot of fun at the end of the day. I've seen the most horrible, horrible opinions expressed in this past month that have absolutely nothing to do with what with anti-Semitism or with what Hamas did a month ago, even though that's what they claim anyway. I've had many moments in which I was questioning my own sanity and the sanity of the place that I live in. Ines' detention, I watched a video when it happened last month was one of those moments. But they happen almost every day. Just the other day, I think yesterday, I saw this journalist, Tobias Hu, a very high profile journalist in Germany, say that a call for a ceasefire is nothing short of anti-Semitism. I mean, it's just, I just wonder, are these people, do they have no shame or do they have no self-awareness? Because it's one of the two. It's somewhere in there. And then also recently, I think just a couple of days ago, I saw this breaking news that I'm not in the pen, I don't remember what she stated exactly, but that she was sort of, it was not to go in the garden, that basically said that she was approaching Israel in order to sort of cleanse herself and her party from their anti-Semitic roots. And that's a beautiful example of how things work in, not just in Germany, but in Europe or in the West more broadly. No matter where you come from, no matter if you used to hang out with neo-Nazis, no matter if you or your father was a neo-Nazi himself, embrace the state of Israel and everything is forgotten and forgiven. Just like that, you're not, there's not a gram of anti-Semitism in your body or in your mind anymore. And it's tragic. It's horrified and it's also tragic because it's the basis, the very important real fight against real existing anti-Semitism as well. Any functions as a tool to, right now anyway and very often, even before this more recent crisis in the Middle East, to express your Islamophobia, to claim that anti-Semitism is a problem that you're perhaps because it's imported from Muslim countries. So yes, it's been a very surreal time. But I do think that at first, they did it just because they could, but more and more, I feel that they do it out of desperation because they see that people are not buying it. And I think that's very important to keep in mind as well, to maintain our sanity first and foremost, but to also drive home the points that this is an important fight that is being fought right now that we need to be very active on. One of the things that has been helping me recently, believe it or not is I've been spending a lot of time on TikTok and seeing the comments and talking to a lot of younger people in Germany especially. And it makes you hopeful because you see that young people, they are not buying it. They are not buying it at all. You see reports on newspapers that Israel is completely losing the propaganda war. The people that are so good at propaganda that we had to create their own term specifically for their brand of propaganda, they're losing it. And you saw that more than anything, that's sort of the climax of all this was last Saturday when I together with other DM members here in Berlin together with Johannes was here. We took part in what was probably the largest pro-Palestine demonstration in German history. And it was a beautiful moment that obviously the mainstream media tried very, very hard to discredit as much as they could. But anyone who was there and it was tens of thousands of people there, they know what that really was. It was Muslim people, Arab people, Jews, Israelis, German people, everyone marching together under the flag of Palestine to demand an end to this genocide that we're witnessing. So they are desperate. They are losing. They will lose. They know that they will lose. And it's important for us to make sure that that happens and we keep spreading the truth of what's really going on in Gaza, what's going on in the Middle East and fighting off this horrible fiction that anti-Semitism is a problem in Europe that's imported by Muslim people because that's nothing less than hatred. Can I ask you something quickly, Lukas? I know that we're at the top of the hour. We're gonna push on just a little bit longer. But especially since you working comms, do you think that anything's different this time with this latest explosion of Israel-Palestine conflict? Do you think that Israel might actually be losing the propaganda war, that there's been a kind of sea change because that's the kind of analysis I'm hearing in from quite a lot of commentators in some quarters. I just would like to know if you concur. I don't only think that, I'm convinced of it. I truly think that, well, if you talk about the geopolitical situation, it's another matter, although even there, I'm also convinced that things will not be the same. Of course, there is a very tragic scenario in which things will not be the same, which is the scenario in which the people of Gaza are simply ethnic clans or worse. But I think whatever the results, I hope that the result will be much different than this. I think we all do. I do think that things will never be the same. I think things in other places as well, outside of there in Europe will not be the same like in the United States. I think what I just described, that we're seeing in Europe has happened in the United States a lot as well. Young people especially are not, they're disgusted with how the Joe Biden and the Democrats in general have been behaving towards this. Even the more progressive ones, unfortunately progressive ones on paper anyway. And I do think that they're losing their propaganda war. I think that's transparent to see. I think even at the non-social media level, the official level, the propaganda that officials spread in press conferences, some of it is just frankly laughable. It's like they're engaging in some sort of elaborate joke to see what types of outlandish claims that they're able to get state departments official to believe and repeat. And I think that all smells of desperation. They know, they see the data, they know that they're losing their desperate and unfortunately for them, they will lose. Thank you for that analysis. Lucas, Daphne Delcara, who is yours, Turkish based in France. Yeah, I just want to say touch upon two things. Perhaps, and I think one is like the possible poverty of, like the, that is intrinsic into like the more liberal anti... Oh, we lost you, Daphne. Looks like you canceled yourself there. I think Daphne has actually quit. Perhaps he's pressed the wrong button or something. Yeah, unfortunately, I guess we'll have to wait until the next live stream to hear the rest of Daphne's comment if we tackle this again, or otherwise, definitely please join the comments on YouTube and add what you were going to say. On that then, I'm afraid we're going to have to call it a night. We've gone a little bit past the top of the hour, just some very, very quick last minute comments from you guys in the chat. MyOmi reminds us that censorship comes from insecurity. Tim notes that in Germany, this debate that we're having here would probably be considered hate speech. And Gunn says when phrases like ceasefire are so easily transformed into hate speech, then I guess I'm pro hate speech. Okay, thank you very much for watching us tonight, for your contributions to the chat. If you'd like to be more involved, there were some questions in the chat about, is DM involved in politics? Does DM have political parties? Yes, we do have political parties. We'll be running in the next European elections. We've got parties in Greece, in Germany, in Italy and elsewhere. And if you'd like to get more involved, there's one address. It's dm25.org slash join, and you can become a member very, very quickly. So on that, we will leave you. Take care, stay safe, and see you again at the same time.