UN advocate for Palestine reminds Germany of fascism and Nazi legacy

A viral video that has been doing the rounds since earlier this week showed one of many police crackdowns against pro-Palestine demonstrators in Berlin, Germany, with a woman seemingly smacked in the face three times by police personnel till she was led away with blood streaming down from her broken nose.

It provoked a warning and a reminder to Germany of its history as a Nazi state from the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese.

In a post on X, Albanese — herself Italian, thus from a nation that she noted carries a legacy of fascism alongside Spain, she wrote — "As an Italian, as a European, I remind my German friends: you produced Nazism... It already brought Europe to ruins once."

Amplifying a resharing of the videographed incident by Pulitzer-winning Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha (who also founded the Edward Said Library), Albanese urged German citizens: “You are responsible for what happens in your country. CHECK YOUR POLICE. [emphasis hers] Things are spiralling out of control.”

From the start of the current war on Palestine since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack, Germany has been one of Israel’s most vocal and staunch supporters, defending its ‘right to exist’ and its ‘right to self-defence’.

Even when the enormity of the genocide in Gaza began to sway it in May 2025, it still refused in June to recognise the state of Palestine — which many European and other world powers are finally moving to do this year (India was one of the earliest). Meaning, for Germany, Palestine has no right to self-defence or protection from occupation, because it is not in itself a nation!

Yet even Germany, in the face of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s latest onslaught on the ‘Palestinian territory’ — as Germans and Israelis see it — has finally suspended military exports earlier in August.

That hasn’t meant a rollback of domestic clampdowns on pro-Palestine sentiment and articulation though. Not even despite, since April 2024, facing a case in the ICJ (International Court of Justice) for aiding and abetting Israel’s Gaza genocide — which began with its ‘third-party intervention’ on behalf of the Netanyahu-led nation created in the aftermath of the Holocaust to ‘bring home’ the Jews of Europe who were (understandably) feeling rather unsafe even after the fall of Hitler’s Nazi Germany in World War II.

Germany had promised “never again” — and has ostensibly been bending over backwards to side with Israel in a fit of historic, continent-sized guilt, and in the face of mounting criticism and evidence out of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of war crimes to keep that vow.

Critics, of course, point out that in supporting Israel, it is equally in danger of breaking that promise — by not just allowing but actively enabling another genocide, a new Holocaust with Palestinians for the target instead of Jews/Israelis.

Laws against anti-semitism in Germany have seen academics and artists cancelled, slogans such as 'from the river to the sea' outlawed. Even as thousands of German citizens have marched in support of Gazans as early as October 2023, in December of the same year, the European nation declared that applicants for German citizenship must mandatorily be pro-Israel.