“We Must Finally Deport on a Grand Scale”: State Violence in Germany in the Context of Israel/ Palestine – Public, Personal and Affective

Over the past 12 months, the German state has aggressively expanded restrictions on expressions of solidarity with Palestine. This ranges from bans on demonstrations in various federal states following 7 October 2023, to the prohibition of wearing kuffiyehs at schools and public places, to banning any language other than German or English at protests, to erecting police check points at the entry of largely immigrant (Arab) neighbourhoods. At the same time, the state has actively encouraged, and participated in, expressions of support for Israel, as well as directly politically and financially supporting the Israeli state. It claims this as its ‘Staatsräson’ (raison d’etat), threatening those that do not conform to this orientation toward Israel with censure and, in the words of chancellor Olaf Scholz, “deportation on a grand scale”. In this political economy of emotions (Ahmed, 2004), the nation is consistently oriented toward a love relationship with Israel (Dochartaigh, 2007). By contrast, migrants and racialised people are seen as threats to public safety and as contagions of antisemitism and become objects of hate – unwanted, unrepresentative, and ejectable, feeding from and into ever-more-popular right wing populist anti-immigrant narratives. Drawing on our own observations as scholars living in Berlin, and an analysis of media and state policy, we describe how through the restriction of basic civic and political rights, the German state constructs migrants and German racial minorities as dangerous ‘others’, the rightful subjects of state control and violence. We then examine the impact of sustained state violence over the last year on migrants’ and racial minorities’ mental health and feeling of (un)belonging and (un)safety: drawing on quantitative survey data and in-depth interviews from an on-going study, we show that migrants and racial minorities living in Berlin experience state power as pervasive, controlling publics, persons, and affective lives.