This past Saturday, a significant demonstration for Internationalist Queer Pride in Berlin was met with a brutal police crackdown, highlighting a disturbing shift in the city’s approach to protests advocating for Palestinian solidarity.
Heavily armed officers unleashed violence upon anticapitalist pride demonstrators, resorting to punching, shoving, and making arrests, a stark departure from previous years where police seemed more reluctant to escalate tensions in a city known for its official support of gay rights.
The aggression occurred amidst an increasingly authoritarian governmental climate where democratic freedoms are being systematically curtailed under the guise of suppressing Palestine solidarity, exemplified by the bizarre notion that even a pink triangle, a symbol of remembrance and resistance forced upon gay men in concentration camps, could be deemed a banned marker of a terrorist organization.
In stark contrast to the violence, Berlin’s right-wing mayor, Kai Wegner, attended the mainstream Christopher Street Day (CSD) just kilometers away, asserting that the rainbow flag “belongs in the center of our society,” while major corporations like Vattenfall, Siemens, and Mercedes-Benz, often silent on queer liberation except during July, sponsored floats.
The irony deepened with the presence of political parties that deport queer refugees and voted against marriage equality, exposing a performative celebration of queer rights that often serves to “pinkwash” less progressive policies and associations, including a group whose banner read “Homos Jews Women” yet paradoxically supports Israel’s far-right government.
Meanwhile, the Internationalist Queer Pride (IQP), organized predominantly by Black, Asian, and Latino immigrants, embarked on a slow, powerful march through Berlin’s immigrant neighborhoods where the Palestinian diaspora is concentrated, garnering unexpected solidarity from older Palestinians despite media narratives suggesting otherwise.
This peaceful procession, however, was repeatedly assaulted by heavily armed police, leading to its dissolution before reaching its intended destination, underscoring the systemic nature of the repression; remarkably, even pro-government media inadvertently revealed the truth by publishing images of black-uniformed police officers in front of rainbow flags while reporting on “right-wing extremists” threatening CSD.
The chasm between the two events was palpable: CSD functioned largely as a celebration of privileges granted to wealthy white gay cis-men, whereas IQP emerged as a potent display of solidarity among diverse oppressed communities, with sex workers, disabled activists, and Jewish Queers for Palestine uniting in chants of “None of us are free until all of us are free.”
Further strengthening this message, a Red-Pink Bloc, composed of revolutionary socialist groups, explicitly linked class struggle with queer liberation, echoing the sentiment that “queerphobia divides us, and strikes unite us!” a powerful call for collective action against systemic oppression.
