Al Mayadeen English

  • Ar
  • Es
  • x
Al Mayadeen English

Slogan

  • News
    • Politics
    • Economy
    • Sports
    • Arts&Culture
    • Health
    • Miscellaneous
    • Technology
    • Environment
  • Articles
    • Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Blog
    • Features
  • Videos
    • NewsFeed
    • Video Features
    • Explainers
    • TV
    • Digital Series
  • Infographs
  • In Pictures
  • • LIVE
News
  • Politics
  • Economy
  • Sports
  • Arts&Culture
  • Health
  • Miscellaneous
  • Technology
  • Environment
Articles
  • Opinion
  • Analysis
  • Blog
  • Features
Videos
  • NewsFeed
  • Video Features
  • Explainers
  • TV
  • Digital Series
Infographs
In Pictures
  • Africa
  • Asia
  • Asia-Pacific
  • Europe
  • Latin America
  • MENA
  • Palestine
  • US & Canada
BREAKING
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent: An Israeli raid targeted the outskirts of the town of al-Qatrani, Jezzine District
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent: Israeli warplanes launch a raid targeting the vicinity of the Burguz area
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in southern Lebanon: An Israeli airstrike targeted the outskirts of Jbaa in the Iqlim al-Tuffah region
Al Mayadeen’s correspondent in southern Lebanon: An Israeli airstrike targeted the outskirts of the town of Ansar
Al Mayadeen's correspondent in southern Lebanon: Israeli warplanes launched a series of airstrikes on the al-Mahmoudiyah area
New York Times: Trump plans to meet with Putin as soon as next week
Al Mayadeen's correspondent: Israeli drones repeatedly strike the area targeted by Israeli warplanes in the town of Deir Saryan, preventing ambulance crews from advancing to the scene
Al Mayadeen's correspondent: Israeli warplanes launch a series of raids targeting the outskirts of the town of Deir Saryan
Reuters: 5 soldiers injured by gunfire in shooting at Fort Stewart US military base in Georgia
Trump order imposes additional 25% tariff on goods from India

How Germany is coercing immigrants into normalising 'Israel'

  • Timo Al-Farooq Timo Al-Farooq
  • Source: Al Mayadeen English
  • 6 Aug 2025 14:59
  • 1 Shares
5 Min Read

Timo al-Farooq discusses how Germany is coercing immigrants to pledge loyalty to "Israel" as a condition for citizenship, weaponizing migration law to suppress dissent and normalize the occupation.

Listen
  • x
  • Following October 7, 2023, the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is Germany immediately began cracking down on Palestine advocacy in an hitherto unprecedented manner. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)
    Following October 7, 2023, the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is Germany immediately began cracking down on Palestine advocacy in an hitherto unprecedented manner. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

With a prerequisite residency period of five years, Germany boasts one of the fastest pathways to EU citizenship. But what seems like a gracious timeline comes at a high moral price, depending on where in Germany you live.

In June, Brandenburg, which surrounds the capital Berlin, became the second state in Germany after neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt to make it mandatory for citizenship applicants to recognise "the security and right to exist of the state of Israel", as the state capital Potsdam’s oath of loyalty form phrases it.

Yes, the same "Israel" that came into existence by ethnically cleansing 750,000 Indigenous Palestinians from their land, is responsible for the longest-running military occupation in modern history, and for the past 21 months has been waging a genocidal war of unvarnished savagery on Gaza, where an entire civilian population is also deliberately being starved to death since March.

"To say that our country is turning into a banana republic with its pro-Israel fanaticism would be a trivialisation of this insanity," commented Tarek Baé, a German journalist and content creator of Arab descent, on Germany’s latest ploy to silence dissent in the service of a foreign, rogue entity.

Signing over one’s conscience

Brandenburg's governing centrist Social Democrats (SPD) pressed ahead with the controversial move with neither knowledge nor consent of their left-wing coalition partner, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which lambasted the SPD’s solo run as "a direct attack on the heart of our democracy."

The "Israel" caveat to the state’s naturalisation process now requires applicants who wish to become German citizens to sign over their conscience, with the text of the pre-formulated pledge exhibiting the boilerplate false equivalencies inherent to Western Palestine/"Israel" discourse.

Predictably, the form follows the oppressive practice of equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It also posits that two supremacist wrongs, Nazism and the Zionism, make a right when it says that Germany’s "national socialist genocide" against European Jews justifies its "special and close relationship with Israel," the rationale behind Germany’s infamous Staatsräson.

"Israel's" "repressive hybrid regime of settler colonialism, occupation and apartheid" and "Zionism’s urge to Judaize Palestine", to quote from Israeli activist scholar Jeff Halper’s book Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine, is not mentioned, of course.

Related News

Brazil will also go to the ICJ against 'Israel's' genocide of Palestine

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is just Biden plus

Unsurprisingly so, as telling the truth about "Israel" would raise uncomfortable questions about why a democratic country like Germany would want to have a "special and close relationship" with such an ostensibly anti-democratic entity in the first place, let alone force prospective Germans to have one too.

Weaponising migration law

Following October 7, 2023, the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is Germany immediately began cracking down on Palestine advocacy in an hitherto unprecedented manner.

By doing so, it used the Hamas-led attacks on thar day as an excuse to do away with basic democratic rights, at long last shedding the snakeskin of play-acted sympathy for the decades-long plight of the Palestinian people to reveal a deep-seated, racist hatred of them.

Last month, a coalition of prominent Palestine solidarity groups released a landmark report which meticulously details Germany’s expedited metamorphosis from a democracy to "one of the most repressive EU states in relation to Palestine advocacy."

Among the wide array of authoritarian measures, the report highlights Germany’s "use of migration law as a punitive stick" against "non-citizens involved in Palestine activism." In this context, the weaponisation of naturalisation law against long-term immigrants has emerged as a creative way to coerce a significant demographic bloc of racialised people into normalising the Zionist project.

Brandenburg’s controversial move is already having an undesirable bandwagon effect in Berlin, home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe and Germany’s epicentre of police brutality against anti-genocide protesters.

Kai Wegner, the city’s Zionist mayor, has voiced strong sympathies for adding a pro-"Israel" Nibelungentreue to citizenship applications in Berlin. He has repeatedly defamed peaceful anti-war protests as violent and antisemitic and spread mendacious copaganda that paints lawless hooligans in uniform who treat Palestine solidarity rallies as beat 'em up video games as victims.

State-sponsored blackmail

Compulsory oaths of loyalty, however controversial the practice, are nothing new in the context of citizenship applications in Western democracies. But they normally require the applicant to profess fealty to the country whose citizenship they wish to acquire.

Extorting signed pledges of allegiance to a third-party entity, particularly one whose "most cruel and machiavellian scheme to kill, with total impunity" has turned Gaza into "a graveyard of children and starving people", to quote UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, is an unprecedented anomaly and further cements Germany’s deplorable outlier status even among "Israel’s" most devoted allies.

As a result of Germany’s latest instance of state-sponsored blackmail in the service of legitimising "Israel", citizenship applicants in Brandenburg will now be forced to make a Sophie’s-choice-like decision between their moral integrity and the secure legal status, political rights, and global mobility that a German nationality provides.

This dehumanising sadism reflects Germany’s overall post-October 7 authoritarianism which is leaving principled people trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place: either speak out against genocide and risk being brutalised by the police, persecuted by the legal system or fired from your job, or be silent and forced to live with the corrosive effects of a guilty conscience.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • war on Gaza
  • Palestine
  • Normalization with Israel
  • Israel
  • Germany
Timo Al-Farooq

Timo Al-Farooq

Freelance journalist and political commentator with a B.A. in Asian and African Studies.

War on Gaza

War on Gaza

Most Read

All
Given ample indications Epstein was collating sexual blackmail material on powerful figures for intelligence agencies, comments made by Mirage's cofounder to Ynet take on a chilling character. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Zionist spies innovate AI sexual blackmail tech

  • Analysis
  • 27 Jul 2025
Georges Ibrahim Abdallah: Lebanon’s lion roars the truth

Georges Ibrahim Abdallah: Lebanon’s lion roars the truth

  • Opinion
  • 31 Jul 2025
What is the current state of Resistance forces, after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, the collapse of independent Syria and the ongoing attacks on Lebanon and Iran? (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

Regional Resistance after the Gaza Genocide

  • Analysis
  • 25 Jul 2025
A free Palestine will not be born from a verdict at The Hague or a UN resolution. It will be born from this recognition: Karitha/genocide is not only pain, but seed. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Beyond genocide: Karitha is the truth the West cannot judge

  • Opinion
  • 24 Jul 2025

Coverage

All
War on Iran

More from this writer

All
Portugal is no longer immune to far-right politics

Portugal is no longer immune to far-right politics

How Germany continues to manufacture consent for genocide

How Germany continues to manufacture consent for genocide

Trump’s threats and the dangers of national outrage in Canada (Illustrated by Zeinab al-Hajj for Al Mayadeen English)

Trump’s threats and the dangers of national outrage in Canada

Not only has Germany not learned from its Nazi and bellicose history, it is actively falsifying it by infringing upon long-standing traditions of memory culture. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Batoul Chamas)

Nothing learned, nothing gained, Germany is at it again

Al Mayadeen English

Al Mayadeen is an Arab Independent Media Satellite Channel.

All Rights Reserved

  • x
  • Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Authors
Android
iOS