The Index of Repression

The repression of pro-Palestinian solidarity across media, academia, politics, and public life has been a well-documented feature of recent years, in Germany, and across Europe and the US more widely. This repression contributes to the distortion and negation Palestinian identity in media and public discourse, seeking to manufacture consent for the continuation of a decades-long settler colonial project by deterring and silencing international solidarity with the Palestinian people.

This effort has escalated since the start of Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza after October 2023. In Germany, it has taken the form of the suppression of protests, deplatforming of Palestinian voices, and targeting of voices in solidarity with them, including NGOs, activists, students, academics, artists, journalists, politicians, and other public figures.

Importantly, individual instances of repression are commonly argued – in media, politics, and other forms of public discourse – to have occurred in isolated circumstances, and to be justified by those circumstances. The Index of Repression attempts to demonstrate the systematic nature of this censorship.

The Index of Repression is an interactive digital platform which brings together and presents incidents of repression of Palestine solidarity, as collected, researched, and analysed by the European Legal Support Center (ELSC). The project seeks to support legal action, monitoring, reporting, and advocacy.

The Index captures trends across all sectors of society, exposing the diverse mechanisms deployed in this effort, including the criminalisation of individuals within the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as violations of civic freedoms and rights. The Index seeks to evidence the interconnectedness of institutionalised hostility facing Palestinians and their allies.

In its first iteration, the Index presents more than seven hundred incidents in Germany since 2019, affecting thousands of people. Future iterations will include data from other European countries.

For more information on the research methodologies behind the collection and analysis of the data presented in the database, as well as the data definitions used across the project, visit the ‘Methodology’ section in the platform, as well as ELSC’s website.