Berlin Lawyer Says Germany Used Deportation Orders to Punish Pro-Palestine Student Activists

Four students faced expulsion from Germany in March 2025. Three were European Union citizens, one was American. None had a criminal conviction. Their offense, according to their attorney, was participating in pro-Palestine campus protest.

Berlin-based lawyer Alexander Gorski represented the group, now known as the "Berlin Four," filing for emergency relief at the Berlin administrative court. He told Democracy Now! the case illustrates how German authorities have reached for immigration law, rather than criminal law alone, to push pro-Palestine voices out of the country.

Gorski has also represented British Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, both denied entry into Germany ahead of a pro-Palestine conference in Berlin. He described the pattern as a conflation of anti-Zionist speech with antisemitism, enforced through visa and residency decisions rather than open debate.

"Germany's guilt regarding the Holocaust has been abused to justify the support of the genocidal war of Israel against the population in Gaza," Gorski said.

The legal doctrine underpinning this approach is Staatsräson, or "reason of state," Germany's postwar commitment to Israel's existence grounded in Holocaust responsibility. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz articulated it directly in 2023.

"Israel's security is part of Germany's raison d'état," Scholz said, adding that Germany's history makes it a "permanent duty" to defend the Israeli state.

Since October 2023, that doctrine has translated into German military aid to Israel alongside what Democracy Now! described as bans and restrictions on pro-Palestine demonstrations, criminalized speech, and intensified surveillance. The program's framing that these measures have produced "thousands of criminal cases and investigations" was stated without documentation in the broadcast and should be read as an unverified figure pending independent confirmation.

Gorski argued that Germany's Holocaust-derived obligation has been narrowed into a political shield rather than a universal principle.

"What we should learn, especially as Germans, from the Holocaust, that 'never again' means never again for anyone," he said.

Gorski's three documented cases, the Berlin Four's expulsion orders and the barred entry of Abu-Sittah and Varoufakis, represent concrete instances where Germany's legal apparatus intersected with pro-Palestine advocacy. The broader scale of prosecutions and investigations across the country remains an area requiring further reporting.