How Berlin police marked International Women’s Day by beating women who stood up for Palestine
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Timo Al-Farooq
- 26 Mar 2025 14:58
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5 Min Read
The bitter irony of violence against women being perpetrated by an agency tasked with upholding public safety and headed by a woman on a global day dedicated to celebrating women’s rights should not be lost.
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How Berlin police marked International Women’s Day by beating women who stood up for Palestine (Illustrated by Batoul Chamas; Al Mayadeen English)
Police in the German capital, Berlin, have gained a notorious reputation for brutality and abuse of power since Palestine solidarity protests began in reaction to "Israel’s" genocidal war on Gaza, now in its eighteenth month.
This year’s International Women’s Day on March 8 proved no exception to the rule of excessive force used by the uniformed foot-soldiers of institutional policing who routinely attack peaceful anti-genocide rallies in the service of Germany’s extremist pro-"Israel" Staatsräson.
Video footage taken at a protest organised by the Alliance of Internationalist Feminists shows a mob of officers overdressed in ostentatious riot-gear repeatedly punching female participants in the face, head, and back.
In another video, a policeman can be seen violently subduing a woman, forcefully shoving her head between his legs and pressing her face into his genitals.
In a statement posted on Instagram, protest organisers slammed the appalling events that transpired at the Revolutionary March 8 rally as “extreme repression” against “those who resist Germany’s fascist and colonial policies.”
They also describe in graphic detail the multiple instances of sexualised violence they allege police officers to have committed, including deliberately groping the breasts of multiple women.
The bitter irony of violence against women being perpetrated by an agency tasked with upholding public safety and headed by a woman, police president Barbara Slowik, on a global day dedicated to celebrating women’s rights should not be lost.
The unsavory occurrences of March 8 in the German capital also speak volumes about Berlin law enforcement's steadily eroding minimum standard of adherence to constitutionally enshrined rights when it comes to policing pro-Palestine protests.
'Carte blanche' to commit violence
In an interview for Berliner Zeitung, Mohamed Amjahid, a German investigative journalist of Moroccan heritage and bestselling author of a book on police brutality, accused Berlin’s centre-right mayor Kai Wegner of granting police “carte blanche to beat up” peaceful protesters, particularly those engaged in Palestine solidarity and climate activism.
Commenting on the sexual assault allegations against the police on International Women’s Day, he went on to say that sexualised police violence was the order of the day in Germany, instilled in officers as early as during their academy training.
It is worth mentioning that just days later, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories accused the Zionist entity of “genocidal acts” and “systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023.”
In a 49-page report, the title of which includes the chilling words “more than a human can bear," the body concludes that “sexual and gender-based violence…is being perpetrated across the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a strategy of war for Israel to dominate and destroy the Palestinian people.”
The findings also highlight that “forced public stripping and nudity, sexual harassment including threats of rape, as well as sexual assault – comprise part of the Israeli Security Forces’ standard operating procedures toward Palestinians.”
It seems that by allegedly committing acts of gender-based and sexualised violence against women who stand up for Palestine, Berlin police have once again taken a page from the playbook of the self-professed “most moral army in the world.”
On March 18, that “most moral army” ended the two-month-long ceasefire with Hamas by massacring hundreds of Palestinians, most of them women and children, in renewed airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, which was already destroyed beyond recognition by the US-backed Israeli war machine.
'Order without law'
The violent policing of Palestine solidarity in post-October 7 Berlin, home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, also raises the broader question of police accountability.
In August of last year, Amnesty International slammed the Berlin police’s use of excessive force against pro-Palestine protesters, including women and minors, demanding an independent investigation into the officers involved.
Germany remains one of the few Western countries where there is no independent oversight agency that handles public complaints against the police and investigates police misconduct.
In 2018, Amnesty called for the creation of “independent mechanisms of investigation in cases of unlawful police violence in Germany," a plea that successive German governments have chosen to ignore.
In May 2024, abolitionist scholar Vanessa E. Thompson described the increasingly repressive nature of post-October 7 law and order in Germany as “order without law.”
She was speaking at a panel discussion in Berlin on the occasion of the diamond anniversary of the German constitution, entitled “75 years of Basic Law: What is there to celebrate?”
Ten months of systematic police violence in the service of "Israel’s" brutal settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and 21st-century holocaust against its original inhabitants later, the answer remains: nothing.
