An anti-Israel camp at a Holocaust deportation site is a disgrace

Right across from the Dammtor train station in the center of Hamburg in Germany, the Moorweide park is currently occupied by an anti-Israel camp calling itself “Bridges of Resistance”. Inside this camp, rhetoric is used that questions Israel’s right to exist and fuels hatred against Jews.

To understand the profound offense of this scene, one must understand the ground these tents are pitched on. Beginning in October 1941, the Nazi regime used this exact site to systematically round up Hamburg’s Jewish population. The former Logenhaus at Moorweidenstraße 36 served as the collection point. From this open space, roughly 6,000 Jews, Sinti, and Roma were processed, stripped of their dignity, and marched to the Hannoverschen Bahnhof, destined for ghettos and extermination camps. The Moorweide is the ground where the city’s population watched their neighbors being taken away – a place where the society of Hamburg remained silent and failed completely.

To allow an anti-Israel camp on this specific soil is unacceptable; it constitutes a cynical mockery of the victims of the Shoah.

Yet, an administrative blind spot allows it to happen. Currently, only the northwestern tip of the park is officially designated as the “Square of the Jewish Deportees”. The rest of the Moorweide is legally treated as a standard public recreational area. The Hamburg police and assembly authorities initially recognized the moral hazard of the current camp and attempted to relocate it to a nearby park. The organizers immediately sued. Because the vast majority of the Moorweide lacks formal legal protection as a memorial site, the administrative courts ruled that freedom of assembly must prevail. The judges concluded that even if organizers hold extremist views, the camp cannot be preemptively banned without concrete evidence of immediate crimes.

We are witnessing the deliberate weaponization of a zoning loophole. The organizers are not here by accident. The group “Thawra Hamburg,” which is heavily involved in the camp, is monitored by the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution. When Thawra withdrew its lawsuit against this observation in March 2026, the administrative court explicitly noted the group’s support for military actions by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. As Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor urgently highlighted in a letter to the first mayor of Hamburg, the camp’s spokesman, Nikodem Kaddoura, founded Thawra, publicly celebrates Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, and calls for the “killing of colonialists”. During a recent counter-demonstration, a camp member was documented shouting “Go take a shower!” at a pro-Israel attendee – a thinly veiled, abhorrent reference to the gas chambers.

The impact on Jewish life is devastating. These events generate severe insecurity, concrete feelings of being threatened, and an environment of open hatred on the streets. A 2024 dark field study on antisemitism, commissioned by the Hamburg Senate itself, proves that such camps actively drive Jews out of public life. In an era where the terror threat against Jewish targets is highly real, Jewish citizens fear leaving their homes when such gatherings take place just hundreds of meters from the center of Jewish life in the city. 

The response to this crisis cannot be a shrug of the shoulders and a reference to administrative court decisions. The courts rule based on the legal definitions provided by the city. It is up to the political leadership to change those definitions.

Political leaders must act immediately to recognize the entire Moorweide as a permanently protected memorial site. The German Assembly Act provides the exact mechanism needed to restrict or prohibit political gatherings at sites of outstanding historical significance related to the victims of National Socialism. This standard has already been applied successfully to the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial. The Moorweide, the staging ground for the deportations, demands the exact same legal status. Granting the entire Moorweide protected memorial status would give authorities the firm legal foundation required to ban such camps categorically. It removes the burden of predicting immediate criminal acts and instead establishes a baseline of human dignity and historical respect.

Freedom of assembly is a core democratic right. However, especially at historically highly sensitive locations, it requires careful, substantive balancing that does justice to the dignity of the victims. Protecting the Moorweide does not silence pro-Palestinian voices in Germany. But it firmly establishes that the assembly ground of the Holocaust cannot be hijacked for anti-Zionist agitation. Closing this loophole is an administrative necessity and a profound moral obligation. If “Never Again” is to be more than just a convenient slogan, political leaders must secure the Moorweide once and for all.

Below is a television report from the German broadcaster SAT.1 (in German):