"This is no longer my country"

Of the approximately 200,000 people of Palestinian origin living in Germany, around 40,000 live in Berlin, more than in any other European city. Many have been German citizens for a long time, working in hospitals and schools, in skilled and unskilled professions. Some came to Germany to study, and others as stateless refugees, often via the GDR. 

As different as their biographies are, since the Hamas attack on 7 October and the resulting war on Gaza, the shared experience of being Palestinian has united them more than ever. This is due in no small part to the fact that German solidarity with Israel and the victims of the attack has gone hand in hand with anti-Palestinian resentment. 

When migrants of Arab origin handed out sweets in Berlin's Neukölln neighbourhood to celebrate the murderous attack on Israel, it provoked legitimate outrage. But all too easily, Palestinians in general were accused of sympathising with Hamas and were denied the right to protest against the war, death and starvation in Gaza. 

„Germany has become foreign to me“

Mohamed Ibrahim (54), development consultant

“In the past”, says Mohamed Ibrahim, “I would have introduced myself as German-Palestinian. Now, I prefer to leave out the ‘German.’” The 54-year-old Ibrahim, who has an athletic figure and short stubbly hair, is a prime example of successful integration. He forged his own path in Germany as a young refugee. Today, alongside his career, he gives workshops once or twice a month, on knowledge transfer and changing perspectives on conflict in the Middle East. 

Ibrahim’s parents fled their home village on the Sea of Galilee, in what is now Israel, first to Lebanon and then to West Berlin (via the GDR) in 1974 with the young Mohamed and his three siblings. 

For 16 years, the six of them lived in a refugee home with shared toilets and a communal kitchen. Ibrahim remembers discussions on politics and Palestine, their lost homeland, when his father, a barber, would cut men’s hair every Sunday. “I was all ears,” he recalls. He often wondered, “How did this conflict actually start? Why did Jews immigrate to Palestine?” 

His thirst for knowledge was insatiable. One of the few from the home he grew up in to complete secondary school, Ibrahim studied politics at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin, specialising in international relations. He learnt about the history of Judaism, the Holocaust, and Germany’s culture of remembrance. On visits to Israel and Palestine, he also formed an impression of the conflict in the Middle East. 

Ibrahim eventually became a workshop facilitator, visiting schools in so-called “flashpoint” neighbourhoods across Berlin with his Jewish friend Shemi. The two now work with mixed groups of Jewish and Muslim students, which Ibrahim finds particularly exciting. “We are interested in talking about the ‘elephant in the room’” he says. Their focus is the Islamophobic and anti-Semitic prejudices the two groups hold about each other. 

Ibrahim’s friendship with Shemi has been stronger than ever since that dark Saturday in October 2023. They are united by fear for the future of their children. “I often thought I couldn't do it anymore, Shemi gave me a lot of strength.” 

But Germany has become foreign to Ibrahim. “Forbidding us from showing solidarity with the victims in Gaza leaves us Palestinians no room to breathe.” He is far from resigned to that reality. He has organised vigils, negotiated with police officers and discussed how to prevent failures in integration with politicians like Gregor Gysi and Michel Friedman. Regardless, he can’t shake the feeling: “This is no longer my country.” He adds cautiously, “I hope that I’m wrong.” 

“I consume news like air”

Qassem Massri (39), pediatrician

Qassem Massri wanted to spend his summer holiday in Gaza. His experience as a senior doctor in the pediatric intensive care unit of a Berlin hospital could have saved many lives there. Medical care in Gaza is in a disastrous condition. Most of the hospitals have been destroyed and there are shortages of medicines and staff. 

Massri’s curly hair gives him the look of someone who would be good with children. He has already volunteered several times for missions in Gaza. Most recently, in April, he spent 15 days there with a team of doctors, assessing the situation and helping where he could. At that time, entry was still possible from Egypt to Gaza via Rafah, before Israel’s army captured the crossing point in May. 

Rafah is now closed and humanitarian organisations can only cross the border from Israel, for which they need a green light from the military administrative authority COGAT. Massri was given the thumbs down after a long back and forth exchange. 

In the end, only five of the total 25 doctors from the US aid organisation Rahma were allowed to enter the country. The remaining 20, including Massri, were not allowed because of their Palestinian origin. “That’s a racist policy,” says Massri. Imagine someone with Jewish roots being excluded, “what an outcry there would be!” 

Massri comes from the north of Gaza. He came to Berlin to study at the age of 19. Five  siblings were already living in Germany; the rest of his extended family stayed in Gaza. Since the outbreak of war, he has been living in constant fear for them. 

Massri says that 13 relatives died in only one airstrike, and several cousins in different attacks. His parents and three sisters have survived so far but have had to flee several times. “I consume news like air,” he says. “The last twelve months has been the worst time of my life.” 

The German media, which, in his words “solely adopts the Israeli narrative,” has fueled his anger. Demonstration bans and police violence, are “virtually a non-issue" to the media. Massri supports the protests against the war on Gaza, as well as the lawsuit filed by Palestine Speaks against the German government for supplying arms to Israel. 

The phone rings—it's his mother calling from Gaza. The brief exchange is limited to the essentials: “We’re still alive,” she tells him. Massri takes a deep breath. He wants to make one thing clear: he is “ideologically far removed from Hamas,” but he understands them as “a product of occupation and oppression. At the end of the day, I’m able to talk to Hamas people I grew up with.” 

“I get death threats, but you have to stand up to them”

Nadija Samour (37), lawyer 

In Berlin’s left-wing scene, Nadija Samour, a member of a lawyers’ collective based at the Haus der Demokratie (House of Democracy), is a leading voice on the subject of Palestinian protest. “I don’t even manage any other kinds of cases anymore,” says Samour, a petite woman with short hair. She is currently handling 120 cases, some related to the controversial slogan “from the river to the sea”, some to more typical demonstration offences like resisting arrest or trespassing. Many of the charges were accrued during the pro-Palestine protest camps at Berlin universities.

“Charges are levelled at people from all walks of life—Arab, German and Jewish,” reports Samour. In the early days, the police would intervene as soon as they heard the term “genocide” used at demonstrations. Now, they let it pass, especially since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that suspicion of genocide in Gaza was “plausible”. Likewise, the blanket bans on demonstration could not be upheld under German assembly law. 

Samour’s motivation to defend civil rights has a lot to do with her personal history. As a child of Palestinian refugees who came to Berlin via Lebanon in 1979, she often witnessed moments when her “parents were harassed,” she recalls. “I wanted to understand how the system works so that we can protect ourselves against the arbitrary behaviour of state authorities. Lawyer is the profession that is most qualified to do that.” 

The legal landscape Nadija finds herself in is often complex. This is particularly true, she says, in cases related to the “from the river...” slogan, where “there is confusion in the higher administrative courts.” In Mannheim, for example, the slogan was deemed lawful. Elsewhere it has been deemed unconstitutional. The reason given is that it is supposedly a quote from the charter of Hamas, a group that has been banned from operating in Germany since November. Samour finds it “truly absurd” that the legal interpretation only ever refers to the first part of the slogan, “from the river to the sea”. How the sentence continues seems to be irrelevant, even when there are variations—“Palestine will be free” or “peace will make us free”. 

Samour’s campaign has made her friends, but some enemies too. “Sometimes I get death threat,” she says. Her name has also been spray-painted on the sign outside her office. “You have to stand up to that.” 

“All that remains is my anger”

Amina Yunis (62), art teacher*

A small studio on the fifth floor of a historic apartment building in Berlin-Kreuzberg is Amina Yunis’s creative oasis. She’s there when she finds time between her job at a Berlin primary school and her efforts to get her relatives out of Gaza, a task that has turned out to be a “true odyssey”, she admits. 

Yunis is the daughter of a German mother and a Christian-Palestinian father. Both identities are important to her. “I am Palestinian, but also German. I grew up in the generation of atonement”, she says. “Of course I was shocked by the events of 7 October, but I am still angry that the public, including those around me, often only see Palestinians as perpetrators.” She has always tried to “maintain a balance”, like her late father, who “experienced the injustices, but also sought reconciliation.” 

Yunis only really got to know her father when she was a young woman. Her parents parted ways in the 1960s when he went to the USA after studying in Berlin. “I found a big, warm-hearted family there,” she says. Since 7 October, she’s felt more connected to her Palestinian relatives in California, as well as to those in Gaza, who have sought protection from air strikes under a church roof in Gaza City. 

In May, Yunis almost managed to get her 17 relatives out of Gaza. All of them had received visas for countries that were prepared to accept Palestinian Christians from Gaza, she explains. Family and friends had managed to raise €70,000 to buy their departure to Egypt. Thousands managed to escape the hell in Gaza this way. But the day before the planned departure of Yunis’ family, Israel closed the Rafah crossing. 

The next blow came in June, when her elderly aunt died of sepsis because it was impossible to get antibiotics in Gaza. At the next street parade of Grieving Doves, a project initiated by female artists in Berlin to counteract the anonymity of death-toll statistics, Yunis wore a large wing made of strips of fabric bearing the names of Gazan war victims. “For me, it was a way to mourn my aunt,” she says.  

Meanwhile her relatives’ despair has only increased. Israel recently started a pilot project to evacuate a few hundred Palestinians, in return for a declaration of non-return to Gaza. The decision, Yunis fears, could tear her family apart. 

* name changed at the request of Yunis

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