Dubbed the Ulm 5 after the southern German city where the group’s alleged crimes took place, five defendants stand accused of trespassing and property damage.
These are relatively low-level charges, but against a high-value target: the local offices of Israel’s largest arms manufacturer.
In 2024, Elbit Systems posted total revenue of more than $6 billion. Germany and other European countries are among the company’s proud partners and major customers. It’s the kind of collaboration that helps explain why the EU is unlikely to ever suspend its Association Agreement with Israel; both sides have too much to lose.
That the Ulm 5 defendants had the chutzpah to contest this powerful and profitable status quo makes them, in the eyes of state prosecutors, more than mere mischief-makers, but a politically motivated organised crime syndicate.
They are pursuing the case under Section 129 of Germany’s criminal code, which means the state can take extraordinary measures to detain the suspects, try them collectively, and, if convicted, impose harsher sentences.
In turning to this legal mechanism, the prosecution looks to be adopting a juridical corollary to Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine. Yet even a layperson’s reading of the relevant code reveals how flimsy the claim is.
Palestine Action, the protest movement to which the Ulm 5 activists belong, is not criminalised in Germany. If referring to the United Kingdom’s currently unlawful decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, the German prosecution couldn’t even get its criminal code right; terrorism falls under a more specific subsection.
For German officialdom, it’s unironically on-the-nose that this trial is being held in Stammheim, where a case against the Red Army Faction was held a half-century ago.
The framing is clear: Challenges to law and order will be treated the same, regardless of their material differences.
The RAF killed and kidnapped people they opposed politically and ideologically; the Ulm 5 allegedly smashed some computers belonging to a company actively supporting a genocide and other war crimes.
The defence team and legal experts are dismayed by the state’s seemingly disproportionate application of the law. They say it could chill civil disobedience and other forms of protected protest, further curtailing fundamental rights.
That is precisely the point. When state prerogatives are on the line, it should come as little surprise that a system of law and the agents tasked with wielding it are out to prioritise them before democratic order or the public good.
This imperative hardens in the context of Germany’s Staatsräson. In declaring the security of the state of Israel, as it exists, to be in the existential interest of the state of Germany, democratic norms or constitutional accountability go out the window.
Staatsräson is not only undemocratic but pre-democratic. It predates and circumvents the advent of modern constitutional rule of law. Instead, it is the sovereign that gets to decide what rises to the level of “reason of state”—no questions asked.
As an enemy of the state of Israel, Palestine Action becomes an enemy of the state of Germany and of Israel’s other Western allies. It doesn’t pose a threat to public safety but to the security and viability of an imperial logic that sustains global power dynamics.
In this context, the heavy-handedness and selective legality seen in the Ulm 5 case are a feature, not a bug.
The core tension here is that German Staatsräson, monarchial and authoritarian by definition, contravenes the Basic Law, which serves as the country’s ersatz constitution.
Because the Basic Law itself is subordinate to international law, violating international law is unconstitutional in Germany.
Put the two “reasons” together and raison d’état throws raison d’être under the bus, shredding the very document that confers republican sovereignty on Germany’s post-war existence.
This legally defined hierarchy—a rare feature of the Westphalian order of nation-states—creates “rights and duties for the inhabitants” of Germany. In this light, the Ulm 5 is not only defending international law but also upholding Germany’s highest legal ideals.
Inversely, by taking paltry action against Israel’s accelerated genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and its campaign of permanent security elsewhere—in fact, enabling these state crimes and repressing opposition to them—it is the German state undermining its own constitutional order.
Like Staatsräson itself—an ideological doctrine with no basis in law—the coordinated campaign against Palestine solidarity is carried out in a pseudo-legal grey zone.
In 2024, the Bundestag passed a non-binding resolution to “combat Antisemitism” that was little more than silencing criticism of Israel. This followed up its 2019 condemnation—also non-binding—of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Most recently, the German state of Hesse has been considering outlawing the denial of Israel’s “right to exist”, even though this right itself does not exist. If it did, denying Palestine’s “right to exist” would also be illegal.
All of these moves are legally dubious, but that’s irrelevant. Their purpose is not to pass constitutional muster, but to serve as a pretext for cancelling events, banning speech, and repressing protected acts of protest that challenge sovereign authority outside the bounds of democratic order.
Going the non-binding route—a normative suggestion, not a legislative decree—is particularly cynical. You cannot challenge a law that is not a law in the first place; judicial review is moot.
The method of criminalising Palestine solidarity is not happening in a vacuum. Other left-wing activity and climate activists have faced similarly frightful measures.
Palestine is merely the first and biggest target of this perversion of justice. That’s why Palestine is everything.
As the indefatigable civil liberties lawyer Alexander Gorski recently put plainly: Germany, as elsewhere, is undergoing a concerted effort to expand authoritarian norms within a democratic system.
This dovetails with rapid militarisation, migration hysteria, and first-place polling of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD).
We know where this goes because we have seen where this goes.
Writing for Die Weltbühne in 1927, the fearless satirist and journalist Kurt Tucholsky penned an essay titled “German Judges” that eviscerated the hypocrisy and duplicity of Germany’s judiciary.
Tucholsky argued that “there is no such thing as a non-political criminal trial” and Germany lacked a “legal process when it comes to political offences”.
His observation of the “judge’s arrogant tone, the contempt of the defence, the prosecutor’s prima donna pretence” may not rhyme exactly. But in the Stammheim courtroom, they surely echo loudly.
History is banging on the doors of arbitrary justice, which Tucholsky called a “schande”—an obstacle to the “most important goal”: recourse for those without rights.
In Tucholsky’s time, that was Jews and communists. In ours, it is Palestinians and the stateless among us.
In the time to come, who knows. It may be the Ulm 5 today, but the rest of us tomorrow.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
