Palestinian protesters seem to be bearing the brunt of police crackdowns on protests in Germany — “We Jews are just getting arrested, the Palestinians are being beaten,” Hefets says. One example was the brutal arrest of a hijab-wearing protester at a sit-in in Berlin central station this past weekend, which was captured on video and posted to social media channels.

But Hefets believes her group of Jewish activists is also being specifically targeted at demonstrations because of its Jewish identity.

Last week, Jewish Voice’s bank account was frozen ahead of mid-April’s Palastina Kongres (Palestine Congress) — for “regulatory reasons”, according to the state-owned Berliner Sparkasse bank. The group’s account has been frozen before, in 2019, because of its support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

“They [Jewish protesters] get in the way of the narrative of Jews being protected by Germans against Muslims — but when you see Jews marching, then you see it’s not needed,” says Hefets.

Her case was one of the reasons that Germany’s ranking was dropped to “narrowed” in the Civicus Monitor, an annual ranking that measures civic freedoms to protest.

[…]

Palestinian activist Ola Alzayat attended a protest in February and explains that, being pregnant, she took special care to stay out of trouble.

Suddenly, “somebody grabbed my face from behind. I didn’t know what was going on”, she says.

It was the police. In a video of the incident which has been seen by Al Jazeera, a visibly pregnant Alzayat can be seen being dragged away by the neck, with her keffiyeh pulled from her neck to her face. She is screaming: “I’m pregnant, please, please!”

Alzayat says that officers slapped her face when she tried to move, leaving her with bruising. They initially accused her of trying to “prevent an arrest”, later adding another accusation of hitting police officers with a flag, even though she claims not to have even had a flag with her.

She says she was carried by five officers and put into a police car, from which she saw her husband being arrested as well. Though the charge of preventing an arrest was dropped, she says investigations continue over the allegations that she assaulted a police officer.