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.
Israel has no right to exist. Germany also has no right to exist. No state has an inherent right to exist.
Any right is ultimately a product of consensus. Challenging a right is an expression of dissent, which is itself a human right.
It makes sense for a tolerant society seeking to protect itself to enshrine the rights of humans to exist, so as to avoid the paradox of tolerance. This is the compromise of free speech that must be made to defend it: to treat this consensus as a contract, whereby anyone who rejects it also loses the rights it confers. Likewise, anyone who denies other humans the right to exist must forfeit their own.
What’s more, states are not people, but organisations. Their right to exist is the product of a consensus that this organisation has a sovereign monopoly on the use of force within its territory. But that right is strictly subordinate to the human right to exist and express opinions. It must be open to dissent.
And a state that denies people their right to live (Israel) or to express their dissent (Germany) is in breach of that contract.
Fuck our government. Fuck Merz, fuck the representatives and fuck the voters that enabled this travesty against human rights in general and our constitution in particular.