Germany has joined other nation-states – such as the US and Greece – in the repression via deportation of political action against their respective governments’ ongoing material and ideological facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The specificity of the German situation lies in its intensifying use of Staatsräson, being Germany’s “reason” or guiding principle of state, which was first yoked to Israel’s continued existence by Angela Merkel in 2008. In October 2023, then-chancellor Olaf Scholz recommitted Germany to propping up the genocidal capabilities of Israel, pledging in the Bundestag that ‘Israel’s security is German Staatsräson’. So far, Staatsräson has largely been used to control public space administratively, for instance by unlawfully freezing all new and existing asylum-seeker applications from Gaza in October 2023, or by threatening funding contracts for public cultural and academic institutions. The use of Staatsräson to deport four activists, scheduled for 21 April, 2025, signifies yet another authoritarian shift in Germany’s brazenly accelerated declarations of its own fascism.

On 1 April, 2025, to coincide with the publication of an article detailing the deportation measures brought by the German state against them, Kasia Wlaszczyk, Shane O’Brien, Roberta Murray, and Cooper Longbottom released a statement via 3ezwa, a self-organised group that provides legal support for people in Germany facing repressive targeting by the state for their commitment to the Palestinian cause. They write: ‘[W]e are four activists […] facing deportation from Germany, ordered to leave by April 21, 2025. For the sole reason of protesting Germany’s complicity with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Berlin’s Senatsverwaltung für Inneres und Sport (SenInnSport) has ordered our expulsion, arbitrarily accusing us of “antisemitism” and supporting “terrorist organisations” referring to Haraket-a-Muqawameh al-Islamiyyeh (Islamic Resistance Movement) or Hamas, as well as “its front organisations in Germany and Europe”. Not one of us has a criminal record.’

As three EU citizens and one US citizen (who is on a student visa) living in Berlin they add to the growing numbers of targeted deportations in Germany – comprising overwhelmingly of Palestinian residents thus far – many of whom have been disappeared off the streets. In the case of the EU comrades specifically, to whom freedom of movement applies, in order to be lawfully deported when no crime has been committed the government needs to show their presence in Germany raises serious public policy or public security considerations, as per Article 28 of the Citizens Directive. To circumvent the extrajudicial nature of the deportations they are being expedited under German migration law – which does not require a criminal conviction for deportation – including its recent Repatriation Improvement Act, designed to speed up repatriations and deportations in general. The allegations against the four are false and distorted, made possible by the practice of justifying arrest internally to the police itself. For instance, verbally insulting a police officer is illegal in Germany: one of the four is accused of calling a cop “fascist”, which is the only charge detailed in all four deportation orders, but was acquitted due to contradictory police witness statements that were found to be ‘not sufficiently credible’. The Repatriation Improvement Act has also contributed to the constellation of increased devolved power to police, empowering local police authorities to search the accommodations and phones of people with insecure residential status even where they have not committed any offence. 

Distorted charges are not the point, however, as if it would be legitimate to rip people from their life and communities even if the allegations were true. Rather, in this deliberate morass of sensed anti-Israeli and hence anti-Germanic “threats”, the deportation orders tie public safety and public policy to a justified withdrawal of the right to freedom of movement. To focus again on the deportation of EU comrades is not, of course, to lament some kind of erosion of the fragile principles underpinning the European project or to argue that they have suffered a special injustice. Rather, it is to make even more apparent the escalating entwinement of Germany’s anxious solidarity (financially, militaristically, politically, morally, materially) with Israel, Staatsräson and the legal articulation of public policy in general. Three of the deportation letters cite Staatsräson to emphasise their proportionality in overriding the right to free movement. Over the past year and a half, German liberals have set about to reassure people that Staatsräson is something more like a vague “belief” as opposed to a constitutional injunction that could override individual rights; these deportations, however, show that when it comes to Israel it is becoming more like legally enshrined public policy. It remains to be seen if this might be the deportation orders’ downfall, as German legal experts are still insistent that Staatsräson has no legally binding effects, and so being invoked as a principle for deportation would be ‘impermissible under constitutional law’. 

These measures represent yet another intensification of the legal interface between Germany’s perverted Holocaust memory culture and its capacities as a police state, motivated by anti-Arab racism and a deeply anti-migrant culture. As for the police: I watched the arrest of one of the activists at a demonstration on New Year’s Eve, which can only be described as more than targeted. He was standing in the middle of the crowd at the stationary demo speaking with another friend, and behind him, a short line of polizei signalled his whereabouts and quickly pushed their way through to snatch him from behind whilst his back was still turned. The standard arrest is for one polizei to grab the person’s face with their hand, depriving them of their senses, whilst the others drag them off or to the ground. He had no idea the arrest was coming or why he was being snatched, and it happened, presumably, to create a situation in which the polizei could add some tangibility to his deportation, given the overly capacious remit for criminally assaulting an officer. I am only recounting this here as a placeholder for the complete absence of legal observing or copwatch practices at Palestine demos in Germany, aborted by the immense brutality of the German police forces that hospitalise protestors (mainly Arab comrades) under ever-new, self-mandated grounds, such as the outlawing of the phrase “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” or the banning of the use of the Arabic and Irish language at demonstrations. (To this end, to support the crucial work 3ezwa is doing in Germany, see this link.)

With the deadline set for 21 April, the four deportation orders include an additional clause which stipulates that the deportations will not be suspended due to an active appeal process, which has already begun. Two of the activists are trans and come from countries – the US and Poland – that are hostile to trans people. I mean this in explicitly legal terms for the US, too, given the barrage of anti-trans bills that have passed since Trump’s Executive Order 14168 was issued in January. For both Germany and the US, the playing out of repressive public policy through administrative channels seems to no longer satisfy the political priorities of their governments, with both making distinct moves towards a potentially new (nationalistic) legal regime. This is not the first time Germany has acted on the basis of Staatsräson in a legal setting: in 2021, Germany challenged the International Criminal Court’s right to investigate war crimes committed by Israel in the occupied territories, which was rejected by the ICC. By tying Staatsräson to German migration law in these seemingly unlawful deportation orders, which have already been exacted upon numerous Arab residents in Germany, the question has been raised of to what extent a national rule of law will continue to be set against supranational legal institutions, in order to cultivate the intra-national symbiosis between Germany and Israel and the habitus for German state fascism. 

Rosie Woodhouse is a PhD candidate in Law at the University of Warwick.

Co-posted with Legal Form Blog.