While the protests are per se not illegal, the people arrested aren't accused of just protesting, they are accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. The right to free speech isn't as all-encompassing in Germany as it is in the USA, so shouting the wrong slogans can very well get you in trouble.
Also, the right to protest in public only applies to German citizens: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_8.html
Foreigners are usually still free to do it, but they don't have a constitutionally protected right to public protests.
> While the protests are per se not illegal, the people arrested aren't accused of just protesting, they are accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. The right to free speech isn't as all-encompassing in Germany as it is in the USA, so shouting the wrong slogans can very well get you in trouble.
Yes, that's correct. Anyone who protests and grabs the attention of the police is accused of supporting a terrorist organisation. That's why I added the information that although they protest completely legally, they still get arrested and deported. The pretense for the arrest and deportation is that protesting to stop the carpet bombing of Gaza supports Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organisation.
Thousands for weeks on end protested the carpet bombing of Gaza, Germans as well as Foreigners. Many respectable foreign and German organisations invited to participate and organized those protests. And only very few of those protesting were arrested or even investigated.
Those who were usually did something more than protest, like showing support for terrorist organizations like Hamas or ISIS by showing the respective flag, harassing counter-protesters, shouting controversial slogans like "from the river to the sea..." (which is thought to imply destroying Israel and therefore "Volksverhetzung", although I'm not sure if the courts are already through with that one) or just plainly calling for the killing of Jews or the eradication of Israel.
Actually, the police was very patient and tame with those protests, too patient and too tame for the taste of many. A common, not totally unjustified opinion was that if those protests were just Germans protesting about a strictly German issue (like "Stuttgart21" or "Startbahn West" back in the day) and behaving like the pro-Palestine protestors did, there would have been riot police tear-gassing and bludgeoning everyone within half an hour.
Non-citizens in Germany have no free speech rights period. You get banned and deported even for making lectures about unfavorable topics, as it seems.
That's quite different from protesting, since you're not making anyone listen to you. Lecture/conference is an offer, that Germans and others may take out of their own interest to learn about what you have to say.
That also infringes on the German citizens, because you're attempting to limit them from what they may choose to learn.
> Non-citizens in Germany have no free speech rights period. You get banned and deported even for making lectures about unfavorable topics, as it seems.
No, the right to utter your opinion in Germany applies to everyone, not only Germans. The constitution has two categories of people, Germans and Everyone, some rights apply only to Germans, some to Everyone. The right to assembly and public protests is one just for Germans, the right to freely utter your opinion applies to everyone.
However, that right isn't what Americans think when they hear "free speech" (which is why I avoided the term earlier): There are far more limits to it, like the criminalization of giving offense ("Beleidigung"), promoting or misinforming about Nazism and other crimes against humanity ("Volksverhetzung"), deadnaming, speaking ill of foreign heads of state or domestic politicians, and condoning criminal acts. Also, only an opinion is protected, not a statement of fact, no matter if it is right or wrong. For example, a journalist was fined for writing about chancellor Schroeder dying his hair. The court didn't even try to find out if it was right or wrong, it was a statement of fact, so unprotected, and it was offensive to Schroeder, so an offense ("Beleidigung").
So in conclusion you are kind of right in that there is actually no freedom of speech for anyone in Germany, not even Germans, that right simply doesn't exist. Its just that foreigners are treated the same as Germans, there is no difference in rights there.
Several counterexamples recently:
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/video-donald-trump-germany-cr...
22:20 ("social center raid for a progressive resistance flyer") 26:20 ("hate crimes") 30:25 (shutting down a congress) ...
Those are not counterexamples, you are agreeing with me. There is no such thing as free speech in Germany, only some weaker right. There are laws limiting speech, and actually (as that article seems to complain about) they are applied to citizens and non-citizens equally, meaning that even a Jewish citizen of Israel can be deported from Germany for uttering anti-semitic statemens. Everyone arrested should have known about those laws, they have been there since the founding of the modern german state after WW2.
What I don't know about is the turn of things in the US, US laws didn't include those kinds of crimes and used to protect freedom of speech in a far more comprehensive manner. Things seem to have changed there, I don't know.
Btw. my personal opinion is that Germany should have US-like free speech and that the only limits to free speech should be where someone is directly and immediately put in danger of physical harm by it. (e.g. shouting "Jump!" to a suicidal person on a railing, or shouting "Fire!" in a dense crowd)
If Germany keeps finding that Jewish citizens of Israel are being antisemitic and wishing for their own deaths, perhaps it's actually Germany's antisemitism detector that is miscalibrated?
Not many people in Germany dare to bring this up, because suggesting that German's antisemitism detector could be miscalibrated, is, itself, something which Germany detects as antisemitism. Which, if you think for more than five milliseconds, is further evidence that it might be the case.
So in other words,
> Non-citizens in Germany have no free speech rights period. You get banned and deported even for making lectures about unfavorable topics, as it seems.
and neither do citizens, who get fined and imprisoned instead of banned and deported.
Some restrictions on speech are reasonable, including the ones Germany claims to have, but not the ones it actually has.