On October 27, a rainy Friday evening in Berlin, as Israel bombed Gaza with new intensity before the launch of its ground invasion, I arrived at Alexanderplatz for a rally that had already been canceled. “Get walking now,” ordered one police officer in German. “You don’t need to be here,” shouted another in English. A father and daughter walked away from the police. He held her hand. She dragged a sign written in a shaky child’s script. “Ich bin keine Nummer.” I am not a number.

Why did we write this story?

Germany has banned most public gatherings in support of Palestinians. This has sparked a crisis around civil liberties and is prompting the question of who has a right to be part of the public conversation.

The police had called off the rally, “Berlin’s Children for Gaza’s Children,” five hours before it began because of “the imminent danger that at the gathering there will be  inflammatory, antisemitic exclamations; the glorification of violence; [and] statements conveying a willingness to use violence and thereby lead to intimidation and violence.” Since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel, this formulation of alarming possibilities has been used to preemptively ban about half of all planned public protests with presumed Palestinian sympathies.

“It was for dead kids,” I heard one woman say to another, in a kind of disbelief that this could have been objectionable. The rally disbanded peacefully — but at that night’s other canceled protest, a gathering of 100 people outside Berlin’s Reichstag, police deployed pepper spray and forcibly detained 74 people.