From April 12 to 14, the German capital Berlin is set to host the much awaited Palestine Congress. Modelled after London’s renowned Palestine Expo and the annual Marxism Festival at which Palestine solidarity is a key constituent, the roster of planned speakers at the first event of this kind in Germany includes former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, US-Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat and the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah, to name but a few.

As "Israel's" war of extermination in Gaza has passed the six-month mark with a Palestinian death toll of over 33,000, most of them women and children, Germany, which continues to be an unapologetic ally in this ongoing settler colonial slaughter of eschatological proportions, is doing everything it can to get the event cancelled.

Organised by Palestinian and Jewish activists alike, the three-day event under the banner “We accuse!”, which will feature keynote speeches, panels and workshops designed to formulate what the organisers call “practical steps for actions” against "Israel's" apartheid, genocide, and German complicity, is facing a slew of reactionary measures by the increasingly belligerent German establishment. These tactics are well in line with the unprecedented rise of state-sponsored, anti- Palestinian repression in the country following October 7, most notably in Berlin which is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora.

Local politicians and the pro-genocide consensus media have openly been slandering the event as anti-Semitic, the unimaginative and desperate go-to of those trying to defend "Israel's" indefensible, decades-long history of systematic human rights abuses in Palestine, from the Nakba in 1948 to the current genocide in Gaza.

Anti-Palestinian hit pieces in self-described liberal and even left-wing legacy outlets are doing their best to defame the congress and get it cancelled, with the notoriously pro-Zionist Der Tagesspiegel publishing mendacious, over-the-top headlines such as “Anti-Semites of the world want to assemble in Berlin: authorities considering a ban on the congress of Israel haters,” and the once respected taz going even as far as character assassinating individual speakers, such as renowned British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah who the “ignorarrogant” author of a particularly vile, anti-Palestinian propaganda piece titled “No forum for hatred” refers to as someone who “disseminated the anti-Semitic narrative of a child-murdering Israel.”

Astoundingly, "Israel's" killing of over 14,000 Palestinian children since October 7 according to UNICEF, a number that is not even disputed in conservative Israeli media, does not allow for the apartheid entity to be called out as a child-killer in genocide-denying Germany, a country which continues to go against the grain of truth-based discourse and global opinion in its shameful and utterly unsuccessful efforts at spinning "Israel's" psychopathic savagery as civilised behaviour.

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According to anti-Zionist group Jüdische Stimme, one of the main organisers of the Palestine Congress, these attempts to cancel the event are futile because the entities involved in hosting the event are “independent of politics.” Meaning: Germany's pro-Zionist minions in government and the media can cry “Antisemitism!” until they are blue in their faces (which are already war-painted in the genocidal blue and white of their beloved apartheid “state”), they will not be successful, as they continue to fight a losing battle on the German propaganda front of "Israel's" War on Gaza, aided and abetted by German weaponry to the tune of 326.5 million Euros in 2023, according to the latest figures published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

That is not to say that the pro-genocide German establishment has stopped trying. On the contrary, it has turned to more creative means at its cancel-cultural disposal after the bluntness of public defamation yielded little success: on April 25, Berliner Sparkasse, the city-state’s largest bank in terms of customer numbers, froze the account of Jüdische Stimme which was being used for congress-related ticket sales, giving the group an ultimatum of eleven days to submit requested documents, among others a list of the names and addresses of all its members.

“Why should this information be important to the Berliner Sparkasse?” asked Jüdische Stimme in a press release addressing the issue, going on to say that such a request was more akin to the behaviour of “an intelligence service or the police, who have been politically persecuting us as a Jewish organisation for some time” than that of a financial institution. The fact that Germany’s anti-Palestinian racism is increasingly targeting Jews wholly upends the self-congratulatory image projection of a country that prides itself on having learned from its anti-Semitic history and claims to do everything to protect the lives of its roughly 90,000 Jewish citizens.

Jüdische Stimme is no stranger to this economic form of political persecution: in 2019, its then account with a different bank was closed due to pressure from the Central Council of Jews in Germany (ZdJ), an influential pro-"Israel" lobby group with a particularly nasty anti-Palestinian bias, the organisation’s website to this day displaying an unapologetic “We stand with Israel” banner, even after tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli regime and more than one million people in Gaza could face famine by mid-July, according to an IPC report.

It is no coincidence that 2019 was also the year Germany’s federal parliament passed its non-binding anti-BDS resolution in a dangerous weaponisation of antisemitism, and which has since then become the de-facto law of the land, under which anti-Palestinian repression by the state and the media is being justified, with a disproportionate escalation in quantity and quality since Oct 7.

The blocking of Jüdische Stimme’s funds has not been the only arrow in the quiver of Germany’s economic war on Palestine solidarity: a planned crowdfunding event in support of the congress was cancelled last week because the host venue pulled out at the last minute, citing pressure from German authorities.

Despite these setbacks, the organisers of Germany’s first Palestine Congress remain defiant that the event will go ahead as planned. “The Palestine Congress will take place despite this criminalization!” they write in a press statement, going on to issue the following rallying cry: “Together, from April 12-14, we will denounce the German government for its complicity in the genocide in Gaza, as well as for its racism and restriction of democratic rights at home.”

As the date of the much awaited event nears, one can only hope that they end up being right.