Berlin has Broken its Promise
Berlin is a city that has promised freedom and rights, but to those protesting genocide in Gaza, the city has betrayed its promise. A personal account of what it feels like to protest in Berlin.
I recently published an abridged version of this article on dis:orient on what it’s like to protest in Berlin. It contains many of my reflections about what it takes and what we’ve come to expect with a German translation.
It was the first protest I could attend. I finally arrive to my home city after some travels. I had seen the videos before, the police attacking and arresting minors, one of my friend ploughed down to the ground by the police for no apparent reason. Certain areas were littered with informants and police in uniform. My friend, Nadine, who had attended the protests, had likened the dark scenes to the days of authoritarian secret police. There was tension in the air. Protests and protestors had been targeted by the government, and the word on street was that basic rights and freedoms were infringed upon casually.
I wait outside the gathering spot. I need to be prepared. I wait for others who will join in this dangerous endeavor. After all, how can we stay silent as these atrocities happen around us? I ask to borrow a marker to write the name of a lawyer on my arm and see other strangers doing the same. We are prepared to be arrested, beaten and shut down.
The city I refer to is not Cairo or Moscow but Berlin, a city that had betrayed its promise of freedom of expression and due process. A city that has enticed many from all over the world with the sweet bait of progressive values, only to trap its inhabitants in a web of racism, bigotry and defamation. The date of that protests was October 21, 2023.
From the river to the sea, we demand equality
It was scary to join a protest in Berlin since October 7. I was anxious about violence and arrests, and I remembered feeling this way before joining some of the protests in Egypt in 2011. But by then, enough time had passed, enough children had been killed and enough dehumanizing statements had been issued for us to recognize we were witnessing a textbook case of genocide, long before the International Court of Justice would rule that it was plausible.
This protest, after dark days of brutal repression, had a huge turnout with many white faces, possibly protecting the colored skins who showed up to the protest. We found solace in one another, we were not so few, we were not isolated, there were many of us who possessed some humanity and were willing to take to the streets and express their rejection of genocide and Germany’s staunch support of it while denying its plausibility.
During my first protest, the German police banned the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” It was entirely incomprehensible and paradoxical that the actual mass slaughter of innocent civilians is being tolerated and fueled by German weapons but that a chant for liberation was declared genocidal.
I suggested later after the protest that next time we use the chant “From the river to the sea, we demand equality” instead. Naively, I was trying to take their objections seriously and clarifying the message. A demonstrator carrying a sign with the modified slogan was arrested on November 4th, 2023 and others again later in other protests. This absurdity was shocking at first. But now, we have come to expect it from Germany’s institutions.
The game is rigged
The flawed reporting and the abysmal standard of many editorial offices covering any topic related to Palestine is shocking. Most German media outlets report in a constantly reductive manner: the protests are antisemitic and those who are protesting genocide are glorifying terrorism. No matter how scared a pro-Palestinian person is, their fears don’t make it to the general discourse. It is constantly reported that Jews are getting more afraid, but a great many Jewish people with have joined the protests with explicit placards against genocide, asking not to kill in their name.
Still it feels like media and the government would sooner accuse a Jew of anti-Semitism than accept that their support of genocide has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. It is well known that the Axel Springer group has a historical closeness to Israel, which has found its way into the publisher's statute. Bild, B.Z. and Welt in particular, which belong to Springer, did not report fairly on the protests, denigrating them as “Jew-haters”. It’s not just Axel Springer, the same is true for many of the major media outlets too. It seems there is always an angle that manipulates the German public, whose fear of sliding into antisemitism arguably contributes to not adequately combating antisemitism. For example, the fact that Springer often takes up and reinforces right-wing topics, especially with Bild, casts doubt on their supposed fight against antisemitism.
Universities are no longer spaces of open debates
The fact that many pro-Palestine or anti-genocide events are registered as antisemitic incidents also creates a distorted picture of the situation in Germany. According to the monitoring group RIAS, one fifth of the newly registered rise in antisemitic incidents are related to “anti-Israel activism”. However, 84 percent of antisemitic crimes are committed by the far right.
Our fears, our hurts, our opinions mean little – not only to the German media. There is no room for this at educational institutions either. In a meeting I attended with students in German universities protesting the atrocities in Palestine, the students’ stories were consistent across the board: German academia seems to be shutting down the conversation, even in places where knowledge and open debate are heralded through lip service. At the Free University in Berlin, police were allowed on campus to target the occupation of an Auditorium by pro-Palestinian students engaged in conversations around the sensitive matter. However, the accusations by Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger (FDP) that the action at Freie Universität was “Hate against Israel” and “Hamas propaganda” seem even worse to me. She used a tweet by Bild reporter Iman Sefati as a basis for her allegations.
Fighting German Repression
It was two years earlier, on Nakba day, May 15, 2022 when I saw the first signs of Germany willing to break its laws and rationale so casually. The police had banned the protests back then, and passing through a square near my house, I was detained. The police fabricated a story as to why they detained me, but allowed me some ice cream. I had been racially profiled. I wrote about my experience both in English and German as a warning to Germans, who I had thought valued their basic rights and freedoms and would not accept infringing on them lest they devolve into their past. Yet, despite my German friends’ outrage as to what happened with me and many others who had done nothing wrong, Germany seems to have regressed deeper into authoritarianism enacted by government bodies whenever ‘freedom of expression’ had expressed something to their distaste.
Fast forward to today, it feels that protesting in Germany is fighting a giant lying machine, reminiscent of some of the less extreme days of authoritarian Egypt. What is heralded as free speech in German media sounds a lot like propaganda which I’ve learned to identify quickly from my days covering Egypt’s revolution. The biggest propaganda message hammered into to the public’s consciousness is that free speech is protected in Germany even as every pro-Palestinian voice is threatened, silenced and defamed. They simply disappear from the public discourse, as the “Archive of Silence” is documenting on Instagram.
Germany today employs police violence and repression. It has banned Arabic, Hebrew and Irish languages form a sit-in outside the Bundestag before violently dispersing it without real legal basis. It has cancelled conferences, shut down U-Bahn stations, beaten up Jewish protesters and accused them of being Islamists. Germany has become a racist country that has lost all rationale, with a cowardly society that is unable to fight for people’s basic rights irrespective of ideology and ethnicity.
Berlin’s new promise
The systemic erasure of anti-genocide voices is what I’ve come to expect, and yet we carry on. Those who start to see the genocide will not unsee it. As it carries on, there is a mountain of evidence that German taxpayers’ money is being used to bury. As tax payers, we are financing our own erasure.
The limited reaction from German society to the clamping down on freedoms is disappointing. The flawed reporting and the abysmal standard of journalism covering any topic related to Palestine is disappointing. The support of atrocities by Germany through arms sales, rhetoric and institutional repression is disappointing. The censorship of those speaking out against genocide from German institutions, which recently affected many scholars such as Ghassan Hage and the US anthropologist Nancy Fraser, under the guise of fighting racism is disappointing.
In Berlin, a battleground still exists
Protesting a genocide in Germany, particularly for darker-skinned people, means the potential loss of status and livelihood. Protesting is dealing with potential defamation, lies, and propaganda. Yet, here I am on a battleground that I do not have in Cairo, my other city that I call home.
I can still fight the dogmatic myths ingrained in German society that paint Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as infallible. I can fight the myth of equating anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. I can fight the myth that basic rights like freedom of expression and fair judiciary are guaranteed. I can fight the vilification of anti-genocide voices. I can fight to safeguard my morality, my sense of justice and my soul.
After all, there is hope, and we have not yet been defeated. The countless student interventions, fighting off German academic censorship. The relentless protests in the face of brutal police forces and lying politicians. Independent media that portray a fairer picture of the situation in Germany as well akin Palestine. All of this gives me hope.
It is vital that we continue to stand in the face of those who deny and support the genocide. We must fight to awaken our dormant allies who are living in an alternate reality but do not want to be complicit. We must fight to stop the killing of innocents. We have to fight to awaken a nation that seems to be living in an alternate reality. We must fight so that we can still look at ourselves in the mirror and perhaps tell our children one day: “We were not complicit in the genocide, we fought and fought until we ran out of breath. We fought and fought for our souls and yours.”
"Germany today employs police violence and repression. It has banned Arabic, Hebrew and Irish languages form a sit-in outside the Bundestag before violently dispersing it without real legal basis. It has cancelled conferences, shut down U-Bahn stations, beaten up Jewish protesters and accused them of being Islamists. Germany has become a racist country that has lost all rationale, with a cowardly society that is unable to fight for people’s basic rights". 📢🍉♥️