Germany’s Bundesrat, the upper house of parliament, backed a bill to criminalize the denial of Israel’s right to exist on Friday, a motion that constitutional experts said could jeopardize freedom of expression.
According to the bill, anyone denying Israel’s right to exist or calling for its abolition would be punished with a prison sentence of up to five years under the regulation. The bill will be examined by the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, after its summer recess.
I don’t know what “Israel’s right to exist” means. Like, I believe that Israel should exist as a secular, democratic country with fully equal rights for all people regardless of their ethnicity or religion, with the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return, with reparations for the victims of genocide and apartheid, with full accountability for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, and with a national project overseen by the international community that will effect the deep institutional and educational deradicalization of the population, including a complete political and institutional repudiation of all kind of jewish-supremacist forms of zionism, as well as a German-style Erinnerungskultur, and by having as its Staatsräson a commitment to the defence and security of Palestine. Is it jail for me in the Bundesrepublik or not?
Yes, jail for you. German law is about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (and everything that comes with that which they don’t speak about and ignore).