They came at 6am, banging on Amira’s apartment door in Berlin as she and her husband, Anwar, slept.
A groggy Anwar opened the door to a hallway crowded with 11 police officers, some bearing semi-automatic weapons.
They pushed their way into the apartment, handing him a search warrant, while Amira panicked and closed the bedroom door. She was trying to dress when two women police officers came in to watch her.
“We didn’t know what was going on,” says Amira (28), a Palestinian American who has lived in Berlin for three years, where she is studying for a master’s degree in science. She and Anwar asked that their real names be withheld.
“In the livingroom they [the police] told us it was because of a ‘river to the sea’ post on social media,” she said. “I was just shocked.”
Anwar (31), aBerlin-born engineer with Palestinian roots, began reading the search warrant and “started laughing”.
“I wasn’t taking the whole matter seriously,” he said.
But Germany very much is. The raid on their home on May 16th was triggered by a line Amira reportedly added to her Facebook profile bio on February 24th: “Pursue your passion & you’ll end up enjoying life ... From the RIVER to the SEA, PALASTINE [sic] will be FREE!!”
In Germany, as elsewhere since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7th, that decades-old expression has found new life, popularity – and notoriety.
Palestinians and their allies say the slogan is a call for peace and equality after decades of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. But many Israelis and Zionist Jews worldwide hear a call for the elimination of their homeland from the map, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river.
Last November, in response to the Hamas attack, Germany passed a law defining the expression “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a hallmark of Hamas, which it classifies as a terrorist organisation. Using the term brings a risk of criminal prosecution, a fine or a prison sentence of up to three years.
Three months after the dawn raid, Amira says she is afraid to be in the flat on her own. In hindsight she is angry: at not having access to a lawyer at 6am; at how, she says, police insisted she must unlock her iPad – still confiscated.
Today her lawyer, Benjamin Düsberg, says he has yet to be informed if, or when, Amira will be prosecuted or fined. “You really have to ask yourself,” he says, “if all of this is worth the effort.”
The effort is clear from Amira’s 75-page case file: full background checks and a covert reconnaissance of the couple’s apartment block, with pictures of their balcony and their doorbell and a list of building exits. The file reveals, too, how the investigation began when a woman in Frankfurt flagged Amira’s Facebook profile with “Hesse against Hate”, a platform operated by the state interior ministry of Hesse.
Platform director Axel Schröder does not want to comment on Amira’s case. He says the work of the platform, which has received 60,000 complaints since going live four years ago, is “always a balancing act”. He is aware of critics who see a new era of digital denunciation, but he points to the many people who see hate speech or incitement online and do nothing.
“Someone might see something they think isn’t right, register it with us, and it will be checked,” he says.
His team passed the complaint against Amira to local prosecutors, who forwarded it on to Berlin. A spokesman for Berlin’s state prosecutor told The Irish Times the flat search last May took place “without any unusual incidents”. A 6am visit is normal, he said, to make sure the person sought is at home. House visits are necessary, he added, to ensure devices sought as evidence are not destroyed or contents erased.
As for the armed officers, the spokesman said they are deployed for “self-protection ... when there are indications that there are weapons in the apartment”. Anwar says he served in the German armed forces and confirmed he has a gun licence and weapons stored safely in the flat.
Their case is just one part of Germany’s controversial response to the October 7th attacks, where the past collides with the present. Berlin is not just where the Holocaust was planned, it is home today to a 300,000-strong Palestinian diaspora community, one of the world’s largest.
Members of that community and their allies say their Gaza solidarity marches and marchers have been targeted and criminalised. Israel-critical artists speak of a crackdown in Germany’s cultural world.
As for the new “river to the sea” ban, neither Germany’s federal interior ministry nor Berlin’s state prosecutor can provide numbers of those facing legal action. So far German courts have delivered contradictory rulings.
In August 2023, before the new law came into effect, a Berlin court ruled that the slogan “expresses the desire for a free Palestine” but “says nothing about how this – politically highly controversial – goal is to be achieved”.
In a change of tone earlier this month, a different Berlin court fined a 22-year-old woman €600 for chanting the slogan at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on October 11th.
The woman insisted she used the slogan as a call for peace and not a show of support for Hamas. The court disagreed. Using the phrase four days after the attacks, it ruled, meant the phrase could only be understood as a denial of Israel’s right to exist and support for the attack.
Nine months on, confusion reigns over how much leeway German judges have – and how much context matters – under the new law when they hear “from the river to the sea” cases.
In May, two courts in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg made opposite rulings on “river to the sea” cases. A month later, the highest administrative court in neighbouring Bavaria ruled the slogan was ambiguous and punishable by law if used in a clear context of support for Hamas. If not, it ruled, the meaning most favourable for the person making the statement must be assumed.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany, the country’s largest such organisation, calls the phrase a “Hamas battle cry” for “the annihilation of Israel and the expulsion and extermination of the Jews living there”.
It has welcomed Germany’s ban but says legislators have an “urgent obligation” to act to end contradictory court rulings.
Many Middle East historians take a different view. Some see “from the river to the sea” as calling for an end to fragmentation of Palestinian lands through Israeli occupation, others as a historical rally cry to push back against foreign rule in postwar decades by Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
US Middle East scholar Elliott Colla, an associate professor at the University of Georgetown, says such slogans “are never statements etched in stone, but rather fragments of an ongoing, contentious debate or conversation”.
For him, Germany’s “from the river to the sea” prosecutions “should be ridiculed for the travesty they are”.
As the Israel-Hamas conflict rages on, Germany’s legal-political-historical battle over “from the river to the sea” is also a culture war.
When it comes to the use of a contested phrase, what counts more: intention or perception? When Amira uses the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, where does Israel exist?
Her answer is quick and instinctive. “Nowhere,” she says. “For me as a Palestinian they don’t have a right to be there, there are too many massacres still going on. What my family has dealt with, and my father ...”
Minutes later she is more reflective, saying she dreams of a state called Palestine where people govern themselves without checkpoints, free from occupations.
“The Jewish people,” she adds, “we live in peace with them.”
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