History will be the judge
An opening statement to the Berlin criminal court, August 3rd, 2020
In the last time I stood here, the prosecution has reproached us for “opening a tribunal against Israel”.
I agree.
This is exactly what we did, and this is what dozens of protestors outside of the courthouse are doing as we speak.
In fact, I am happy to use my privileges to be standing here again for the crime of resisting the criminal apartheid state of Israel. What we are experiencing pales in comparison to the decades of extraordinary resilience and historical strength that lies in the anti-colonial struggle that Palestinians have been willing and able to endure such suffering for so long.
The fact the oppressive German authorities insist on prosecuting us for disrupting a talk by a war criminal reveals how fearful they are from civil resistance and dissidents who take a clear stand against a race state whose very structure constitutes a crime against humanity.
and just like it stood on the side of the white masters in South Africa, Germany today too stands on the side of the oppressors only to furnish its image. But this too shall not stand, for only those who take criminality seriously wherever it occurs, only those who renounce all forms of supremacy and racism, including German “Herrenvolk democracy” Zionist ethnic-supremacy, only they could be truly liberated from their dark past.
It is never too late to transition from Zionism to humanism.
And while I’m being held accused of fictitious crimes because I protested against a criminal who carries direct responsibility for the slaughtering of more than 550 children in Gaza in 2014 and actively defended the shooting of unarmed civilians, I accuse the state of Israel in committing the kind of evident, systemic and abominable crimes to which every individual has not only the right but moral and legal duty to demand to put an end to.
And I refer the court to the Rome statue where the crime of apartheid, defined as “inhuman acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group with the intention of maintaining that regime” — and constitutes a crime against humanity.
[It is therefore that] If I happened to break one of your rules, I was happy to do so, only to upkeep a far more superior law.
If you choose to utilize justice as a tool of political prosecution against citizens, you would side with Thrasymachus the Sophist who has argued to Socrates that the Justice is essentially what in the benefit of the strong. Historical experience, however, has proven that only societies that had morals and virtue on their side, not military or material power, have eventually prevailed.
Outside of the courthouse protesters are holding the images of Nelson Mandela, of Sophie Scholl and Razan al-Najjar, who was murdered at the Gaza ghetto fence by the Israeli military forces.
History will be the judge.
