Germany and the Palestinians - Berlin dispatch

In 2011 I was living in Cairo. On January 19th of that year, I received a text message from an activist I knew inviting me to a protest the following morning—anti-regime demonstrations were already underway in Tunis and people were paying attention. Access to the Tunisian embassy near where I lived in Zamalek, the acacia and banyan island that sits languorously in the Nile, was already heavily restricted by the Egyptian police. Protesters organized in Tahrir instead, a plaza near the Egyptian Museum.

That day was a memorable one for me—I filmed as protestors beat back a bewildered and demoralized police force, even as the army sat on the sidelines. Days later I watched as flames devoured the National Democratic Party’s headquarters, and as the Mogamma, the colossal administrative building in the heart of the square, belched fire.

I was often in Tahrir to visit the Goethe Institute, a German state foundation housed in a 1920s villa fifty meters from the square. The Institute’s mission is to promote German language and culture, but I mostly squatted for the free wifi and the library-like environment, reprieve from Cairo’s diesel grind.

I wasn’t the only one. Soon after the revolution began, Egyptian activists began to gather at the villa. A twenty-seven year old Egyptian woman created the “Tahrir Lounge” there, a space for critical conversations about democracy and the nature of the change Egyptian society would undergo. Staff from the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives visited from Germany—their experience in managing the aftermath of a state terror regime was thought to be useful.

In retrospect, the period during and just after the Egyptian revolution marked the height of the Arab world’s regard for Germany. The country’s cultural ambassadors, arrayed across the Middle East at various Goethe Institutes, but also at the political foundations, like the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Beirut, had largely succeeded in depicting their country as economically successful, democratic and open, with a clear commitment to rules and the law. Germany was orderly and rich, supportive of the rights of minorities and unembarrassed by the catastrophic War on Iraq—Gerhard Schröeder, along with Jacques Chirac, appeared prescient, restrained and statesmanlike when contrasted with George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

The impression turned out to be naïve, mistaken, a product of marketing that could not withstand the reality of the Syrian civil war and the genocide in Palestine, the twin solvents of the second and third decades of an overripe century.

The war in Syria produced one of the largest refugee crises of the modern era. More than thirteen million people were displaced by that conflict—six million of them sought refuge abroad, and many of them wound up in Germany—close to a million people. Their presence brought the latent nativism that exists in every country to the surface, where its broad resonance took on a uniquely German flavor after 2015. That was the year Angela Merkel faced criticism for her stilted, awkward exchange with a young Palestinian-Lebanese girl, explaining that “some [refugees] will have to go home.” She patted the little girl on the back.

The genocide in Palestine has allowed a second unmasking. The anti-immigrant fervor that gripped Germany in 2015 primed elites within that society for what would come—their decisions are interpretable within the context of a resurgent right, the AFD in Germany.

The past two years have heralded a new understanding of history, of its undeniable continuities and dependencies. The hostility to Palestinian rights and solidarity, the total repression of speech opposed to the genocide, the statements issued by leaders in Berlin at all levels of government and state institutions, has caused me to wonder: What is the basis for the anti-Palestinian currents within that society?

Here was something more than an impassive commitment to American “leadership” on all matters. Or Holocaust guilt. The zealotry seemed born of an unrequited feeling, the quiver of a perception of a personal offence.

In August, I traveled to Berlin, not as a dispassionate observer, but as someone with a premise, and a question.

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Germany’s role in the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza was not foretold, but neither was it unexpected. In the past one-hundred-and-twenty years, German elites have given support to or orchestrated exterminations targeting the Herero and Nama in Namibia, the Jews, Sinti and Roma in Europe, and the Palestinians in Palestine. Each instance of mass murder is unique, but the German knack for showing up, with apparent enthusiasm—like Annalena Baerbock, who stated that “civilian sites could lose their protected status” —requires some explanation.

A. Dirk Moses notes the “authoritarian tendencies in Germans’ personality structures” and highlights the “coldness” —here he is quoting philosopher Theodor Adorno—that gives shape to German elites’ responsibility for the Holocaust. Jurgen Habermas, has claimed unique status for German crimes during World War II, incomparable to German crimes that preceded the war, or indeed, to any other genocide.

The argument for the inviolability of the Holocaust is ultimately a self-serving one. It places German guilt in a rarefied stratosphere, untouchable by the experiences of others. That allows German moralists, like Habermas, and politicians to say “we can isolate the Nazi period from the rest of our history—so take the Holocaust out of history, take the Nazi period out of history, and we don’t have to see those connections and resonances” as Marianne Hirsch, professor emirata of Holocaust Studies at Columbia University, put it to me.

The attenuated education of German elites combines with self-regard—the word “narcissism” came up in at least half of the two-dozen conversations I had for this essay—has produced a world in which the former co-chair of Die Linke, Martin Schirdewan, spoke at a pro-Israel rally in October 2023, even as it was clear that Israel was committed to mass killing in Gaza. That treatment explains the inability of German elites to truly grapple with the Holocaust of the Herero and Nama, which continues to escape the institutional attention of German memory culture.

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The end of World War II revealed the magnitude of what a criminal orientation and a supremacist mindset could produce. When the mass murder of Jews, Sinti and Roma peoples, gay people and the disabled was uncovered and broadcast to the world, shame and guilt began to set in, where it began to serve as the lodestone for German conceptions of morality. An identity was constructed around a perpetrator wireframe.

Early West German leaders understood that the path back—the rehabilitation of their country, but also their self-image—ran through Tel Aviv. Konrad Adenauer, who served as West Germany’s first Chancellor from 1949 to 1963, stated in 1966, in response to a question about German reparations to Israel, that “the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”

Adenauer and the people who came after him instrumentalized Israel. Reparations to Israel—amounting to more than 8 billion dollars in the 1950s—boosted the industry of the new state in Palestine. For the Germans, the cash transfers meant real value for money. Israel, a potential adversary, was transformed into a giant coin-operated laundromat used to launder the Holocaust. In German, the idiom describing the phenomenon is Persilschein, which means a clean bill of health. Persil is a brand of laundry detergent.

Daniel Marwecki relates the critical history in his book, Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding. But while the instrumentalization of Israel by state actors served a critical function, it failed to meet the needs of a demoralized public, yearning for a break with the past.

Starting in the 1990s “we tell [ourselves] very self-serving moral tales of this relationship” with Israel, Marwecki explained to me.

“We, Germany as a nation, have turned to Israel out of moral reasons, of repentance.” Jewish Israelis, who are permanent victims, have greeted German contrition with grace, “which is a miracle… the miracle of reconciliation.”

“That’s the discourse. It’s ritualistic,” he said.

Marwecki’s analysis distinguishes between state-to-state interactions, and the domestic debate about the Holocaust and memory culture—the cultural practice of commemorating victims and recording Nazi crimes—which developed in its wake. The grassroots memory effort by some in Germany reflected a true feeling of contrition. The student protestors who took to the streets in 1968 were aggrieved both by the war in Vietnam and the incomplete reckoning with Nazism.

The Cold War, which commenced almost immediately after the end of the Second World War carried the logic of statism, a ring of containment, for the West. It therefore proved essential to the Federal Republic’s effort to rejoin the community of nations. For containment to work, the West German state could not be permitted to fail, and so many of the existing institutions and their staff were preserved, but repackaged. As a result, the Federal Republic was built in part through the work of Nazi loyalists, many of whom retained their positions of authority after the end of the war.

“The state was so thoroughly Nazified that it was impossible and impractical to de-Nazify if you wished to keep Germany” as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, Marwecki explained.

The scale of the whitewashing is illustrated by numbers. While up to a million Germans are believed to have participated directly in the Nazi genocides, fewer than 7,000 were convicted of any crimes. The majority of those, about 5,000 people, received light sentences of two years or less.

The experience in East Germany was different. The country, which was firmly within the Soviet orbit, never formally established ties with Israel and was aligned with the Arab states, like Egypt. Leaders of the German Democratic Republic interpreted Zionist efforts in Palestine as existing within the context of a Western imperialism. If those currents continue to exist within Germany, there is little evidence for them in the institutions that give force to the modern state.

Instead, West Germany emerged hegemonic after reunification. And the question of what happened to the Nazis, where they lived, the children they fostered and the latent continuities they nurtured, takes on heightened importance in light of Germany’s support to Israel. Chancellor Merz’s grandfather was a Nazi, a fact Merz has sought to downplay.

When I asked Nahed Samour, a Palestinian-German legal scholar, about German elites’ support to Israel, she explained that “Zionism is a star of German colonialism—Zionism is German, or German-speaking.”

Her statement went beyond the fact that Der Judenstaat is a German-language text first published in Leipzig and Vienna. The pamphlet is a product of its time, as much as anything can be. It adapts to Völkisch arguments, that the Germans are a people and Jews, Roma and others among them alien, by adopting its basic premises: First, that the Völk exists, and second that the people, as such, require territory, land, to thrive. The theme of national rebirth, and the essential belief in racial superiority which confers moral right upon the colonists and sanctions their activities, feature heavily in Zionist thought as well. Before it could be made to bloom, Palestine was made a desert.

Consequently, when German elites look to Israel, they see something of themselves, something they recognize in their colonial history, and express affinity for.

But primed does not necessarily mean committed. Samour took care to emphasize the contingencies at work. She noted that if Biden had put an end to the genocide, Germany would likely have followed. And that the behavior of German elites in the world before 2023 suggested an outward orientation, a true belief in institutionalism and their place within it.

Before October 2023, Germany’s leaders “wanted a seat as part of the Security UN Security Council; they’re the biggest financial supporters of the International Criminal court,” Samour said.

But once the play was called—by Biden or Netanyahu—German politicians, journalists and others showcased their order of operations. The country’s leaders attempted to impede the work of the ICC after the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were issued, and they were aided by German-language media. After all the effort, the resources and money, the state put into the ICC, once Israel seemed to need it, they “undermined the legitimacy” of the court, as Samour stated.

But the skein linking Hitler, Adenauer, Ben Gurion, Merz and Netanyahu—the manifold strands which are weaved into a single thread, goes beyond the ideological or the abstract, or even the material support in the 1950s onwards. Israel cannot exist without the Holocaust—the Nakba is a German legacy, one that the country’s elites work hard to ignore, or disclaim.

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Two years ago, the perception that Germany represented the best example of amends-making—healing after atrocity—seemed justified. German memory culture, as it is called, presented as an honest effort to contend with past crimes. The earnestness with which that country’s politicians and cultural elites presented their legacy to the world sometimes bordered on the maudlin, perhaps because German “memory culture is motivated by guilt,” as Marianne Hirsch said to me.

If outside observers were surprised by the country’s leaders’ embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in 2023 and beyond, Palestinians in Germany were not. The community, which is the largest population of Palestinians in Europe, has been the target of racism and state repression for decades.

Palestinians first began to emigrate to West Germany from the refugee camps of Lebanon in the 1960s, primarily to obtain an education. The Lebanese civil war precipitated a new mass migration in the 1970s and 1980s—many Palestinians from the camps there fled to Germany, and other countries, like Sweden. The third wave of Palestinian migration to Germany occurred through the Syrian civil war, as noted earlier. The researcher Monica Khadour estimates that more than seventy percent of Palestinians in Germany came from camps in Lebanon. Just under two-thirds of them have attained German citizenship, and they occupy a wide range of professional and service jobs. Many of them have become fully integrated, and anecdotally, rates of intermarriage seem high.

Yet often their aspect, whatever their professional attainment, is of marginal people. As one Palestinian-German told me, “if you’re Palestinian and you grew up in Germany, your entire body language, the way you walk” is as though you’re trying to avoid being noticed. Part of the reason goes to the legacy of Munich, when Palestinian militants took members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage in the German city in the hopes of effecting a hostage exchange. Eleven Israelis and five Palestinians died in the ensuing firefight with German police, and more than 300 Palestinians were expelled from the country in the aftermath. Palestinians, and their cause, came to be regarded as inscrutable, with an orientation towards terrorism. Then too, the Palestinian story of dispossession is overwhelmed in Germany by the monolegacy of the Holocaust.

Nadim Sarrouh’s father traveled to Germany in the 1960s from a Palestinian camp in Lebanon for graduate study. The host of a popular podcast focused on current affairs and politics, Sarrouh explained that “racism was much more out in the open” when he was growing up in the 1980s and 90s. Palestinians were the target, but so too were people of Turkish ancestry.

At that time, and right up until the genocide began,, the topic of Palestine, the people, the culture, the legitimate grievances targeting Zionism and Israel, were largely absent from the public conversation.

And because the federal government in Germany does not recognize Palestinians as such, it is hard to know just how large the community is, but estimates range from one hundred to three hundred thousand people.

Institutional efforts to eliminate Palestine solidarity preceded October 2023. A 2019 resolution passed by the Bundestag “condemning the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and cutting off funding to any organizations that ‘actively support’ the BDS movement.” Lawmakers compared the movement, which seeks equal rights in Palestine-Israel, as antisemitic, likening the call for Palestinian rights to Nazi-era propaganda.

Anna-Esther Yunus, a Palestinian-German scholar notes that “Germany claims to exist to fight anti-Semitism, the state’s “‘raison d’état’, as declared by Merkel in 2018.” Therefore, “earning one’s ticket to speak in the German public as a respected voice is based on one’s acceptance of anti-Palestinian public discourse” which is enshrined in institutions like the Bundestag.

Since October 2023, the repression has been widespread. Rallies and marches that have expressed support for the Palestinians have been banned. Protestors have been brutalized, and Arabic-language speech has been prohibited at demonstrations. The slogan, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free,” has been criminalized and demonstrators have been arrested, brutalized for chanting the proscribed language.

A court ruling that chanting the slogan was not actually proscribed by law has been ignored by the police. As Nathaniel Flakin writes, “the court decisions have had no noticeable impact on Berlin police, who continue meting out unhinged violence against peaceful protestors.”

The European Legal Support Center was established in 2019 to provide legal support to anyone who is targeted for Palestine Solidarity work. The organization which operates in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands launched a database in May tracking instances of repression targeting Palestine Solidarity across Germany. To date, it has recorded nearly eight hundred instances of state repression.

Sophia Hoffinger, a researcher who tracks instances of anti-Palestinian repression in Germany for ELSC explained that, “the checks and balances that are supposed to keep a liberal democracy intact are not really working when it comes to Palestine solidarity.”

One entry reads, “Police charged protester with incitement for sign reading ‘Did we learn nothing out of the Holocaust?’” Another says, “Police raided home of Palestine solidarity activist in Berlin”, and “Police raided Palestine-related student-staff meeting at Technical University of Munich.”

If state organs are weaponized in Germany to target Palestine speech, there has been a striking absence of resistance among civil society organizations. Human rights and legal groups have taken the lead in opposing the genocide in the US, France, Italy and Spain—yet their counterparts are noticeably quiet in Germany.

Layla Katterman, a Palestinian-German project manager at ELSC, noted that the federal government’s institutional support to many non-profits may help explain why. “A lot of international organizations that usually do human rights work, when it comes to Palestine, they’re scared to do so, because they fear losing their own funding.”

Individual activists and academics have been targeted. Yunus herself was the victim of a secretive campaign organized by two state-funded organizations which operate under the umbrella organization, Society for a Democratic Culture in Berlin. She was surveilled and a secret dossier was compiled documenting her alleged support for BDS, which is a proscribed position in Germany. RIAS Berlin and MBR—the two Zionist organizations which amassed the information in the file—then lobbied organizers of a panel focused on “strategies against right-wing extremism in Germany” to rescind Yunus’s invitation to participate, which they did.

And then there’s the fraught issue of German citizenship, where a commitment to Zionism acts as prerequisite. Heba Tabakhi, a Palestinian academic from Hebron told me that she “when I applied for citizenship I had to sign a document stating that I’m not against Israel or antisemitic.” And when she signed a petition calling for a ceasefire she was singled out in Bild, an Axel Springer tabloid which, as the journalist Hanno Hauenstein has documented, has worked to produce propaganda for the Netanyahu government.

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I first came across stumble stones years ago, in Raymond Chandler’s 1942 novel, The High Window. Philip Marlowe, a hardboiled investigator, walks past “stumble stones” as he’s making his way through a new client’s garden. The language is symbolic, and it’s used to presage the difficult relationship Marlowe would have with the widow who hired him.

In Nazi Germany, stumble stones carried a related meaning. Antisemites, upon tripping on a cobblestone, were known to say, “A Jew is buried here.” There’s an intimation: the foreigner—the Jew and the migrant—can be said to have caused the hazard. They impede progress, or prevent the story from unfolding correctly.

Today, the Stolpersteine, artifacts of memory culture, are everywhere in Berlin. The small cubes, made to resemble cobblestones bearing a brass plate, are installed on curbs and sidewalks in Germany and beyond. What started as a grassroots effort to honor the victims of the Nazis by memorializing them in the last places they voluntarily lived is now, in places, a state-sanctioned project extending across thirty-one countries. Each stone is inscribed with a name, the victim’s dates of birth and death, or deportation to a concentration camp or elsewhere.

The experience of walking the path of so many victims was a painful one. For me, it breathed life into a history, a catenated victimhood. Viewing clusters of stones, as when entire families were killed in Auschwitz, could not but bring to mind all the families the Israelis have killed together, all at once in the rubble of Gaza.

The stones did more than provide an emotional valence to the past. Inadvertently perhaps, some of them provided concrete links to Zionism—as with a family whose biographies were related to me by a researcher who studies memory and dehumanization. As she guided me through Mitte, she related how two of the children from a local family fled the Nazis to Palestine in 1936 and 1939.

The children who escaped—the elderly parents were killed by Polish collaborators in Stanislaw in 1942—likely emigrated to Palestine through the Haavara agreement, which was brokered by Zionist groups with the Third Reich. The agreement permitted Jewish Germans to flee to Palestine between 1933 and 1939 with some of their belongings. It is believed that 60,000 Jews escaped the Nazis in this way, providing material support to the Zionist effort when they did.

I later asked one of my Palestinian-German interlocutors, a father, what he would have done in their place, with some much writing on the wall in 1938. He told me he too would have taken refuge anywhere he could. But then he brought up the Armenians, some of whom escaped a genocide to Palestine in 1915 and 1916. They arrived as refugees, not colonists, and were integrated into the Armenian quarters in Jerusalem and Beirut.

The consideration of historical contingencies requires knowledge of history, and fortitude. It is not easy for perpetrators to learn of their responsibility, and to assimilate that knowledge into an understanding of the world, one that impacts behavior. But in Germany, Holocaust education ends with the liberation of the camps. Yet, there are straight lines that run from Holocaust to Nakba, or from Namibia to Gaza.

The inability to diagnose the past leads to some confusing places. In December 2024 Die Linke—literally, “The Left”—expelled Ramsis Kilani, a Palestinian-German activist. The leadership undertook the action because, they said, Kilani brought “the party into disrepute.” In reality, he only opposed Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

If Palestine is Left Politics in much of the West, the topsy-turvy moral incoherence of reunification Germany has meant that the Left in that country has yielded a perplexing agglomeration of leftwing tropes and fascist rage culture. The Antideutsch—as they call themselves—form a sizable but shrinking element among the Left in Germany. They oppose German militarism and imperialism generally. Some of them may express a commitment to “revolutionary Marxism” as Michael Sappir, an anti-Zionist Israeli who was active in left circles in Leipzig and Berlin, explained to me. And yet, they are deeply committed to Israeli militarism and Zionism.

The Antideutsch “have a view that Germans are inherently fascistic,” Sappir explained. They reason that to be genuinely opposed to fascism, they “have to champion the victims of fascism, the Jews.”

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Many of the Palestinian Germans I interviewed were academics or professionals of different kinds. Mostly, their material conditions, class, and education permitted a critical distance from the German project, a self-awareness and confidence that enabled criticism in light of the promise of citizenship in a modern democracy. But many Palestinians in Germany do not share that background. They are refugees, with all the material and social privation implied by the category.

I spent an afternoon seeking out recent Palestinian immigrants from Syria or Lebanon—I wanted to learn about their lives in Germany. I was told that the best place to meet people may be share’ al arab—’Arab street’ in Arabic, “although no one calls it that.” Sonnenallee, which is the actual name of the avenue, runs through the Neukölln neighborhood where many immigrants live and work. Shawarma and falafel restaurants are arrayed up and down the boulevard, where you can get a haircut or smoke sheesheh at a sidewalk cafe.

There, I met a fifty-something Palestinian-Syrian migrant who fled Syria in 2015; he arrived in Berlin after some time in Gaziantep, in Turkey. He worked, but was reluctant to tell me much about his life in Germany. Like almost all the Palestinian-Germans I spoke with, he did not attend demonstrations, explaining that his newly-attained German citizenship may be withdrawn if he did.

When I asked about repression he seemed to become wary of me; it was after he told me that the community felt like it was being monitored. For someone who hasn’t lived in Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon or Egypt, the prospect of a hamfisted surveillance state, mukhabarat transparently posing as something they’re not, may seem far-fetched, the product of an active imagination.

But not to me. After years living in the Middle East, reporting from each of those countries, I understood my interlocutor’s frame of reference.

He continued to speak, but guardedly.

“Germany has given me everything, all they ask is that I not speak out about Israel,” he explained. The country enabled him to live like a human being—the problem wasn’t the German state—rather, Arabs did not like to work, he said, introducing what seemed like a rightwing trope.

“Is Mohammed bin Salman helping me? Are the Arabs? What have the Arabs done for me?”

His attitude was reflected in another conversation I had that afternoon with a Palestinian migrant from Lebanon. Both men I spoke with refused my requests to record our conversations and neither was willing to provide his full name.

I later recounted the conversations to Nadim Sarrouh, asking him if he thought the sentiment—Germany has done much for us; who are we to complain—was genuine or whether I was being fed a line. He felt the message was real—the vulnerability of new migrants spoke for itself. Indeed, these were the most vulnerable people I met. Their insecurity was palpable.

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In Germany, the will to denial—the absence of what may be termed self-awareness or self knowledge—is impressive. Indications of the continuity between the regime of the second World War, the Third Reich, and existing state institutions abound. Not fossils, but real signs, ones with a pulse and leukocyte metabolism, ready to kettle any virus they encounter.

Soon after I arrived in Berlin, I visited the extravagantly-named Topography of Terror, a history museum sited on the location of the headquarters of the SS and Gestapo; the buildings were destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945.

The exhibitions within the museum have pedagogical value: they describe the rise of the fascist state, and its early and long reliance on the police as a tool of repression, of terror. One photograph from 1937 depicts some members of the graduating class of the Police Institute, which trained a “new generation of leaders for the Gestapo and Criminal Investigation Police.” The caption underneath the picture goes on to explain that “quite a few graduates” had careers in the West German police after 1949.

The historical continuity was on my mind a day later, as I walked to meet a friend for dinner near Humboldt University, in the heart of Berlin not far from Brandenburg Gate. There are various government buildings in the area and evening foot traffic was light, not unlike parts of Washington after hours. A din in the air grew louder as I made my way north on Charlottenstraße and before long I came upon the source. There were three or four police vans with lights flashing, their officers arrayed thickly across a broad swath of the street and sidewalk, looking morose or surly. In all, thirty or forty police officers were there to contain the small protest, no more than two dozen people wearing keffiyehs and holding signs in Hebrew. One person wore a knitted watermelon kippa.

I crossed the street, past the line of police, and began speaking with different people in the demonstration.

I learned that a group of anti-Zionist Israelis and others organize semi-regularly to protest Germany’s participation in the genocide. Palestinians and Arabs organize separately, which is similar to the grassroots organizing landscape in the US. Sa’ed Atshan, a Palestinian-American academic who co-authored The Moral Triangle, a study of Palestinians and Israelis in Berlin with Katharina Galor, explained to me that the communities do not mix very much. “There are anti-Zionist Jews organizing, and Palestinians organizing—here’s some overlap but there’s separateness,” he said.

That evening, the anti-Zionist Israelis had gathered outside the newly-developed, but still un-opened restaurant, Gila and Nancy, an Israeli business owned in part by Shahar Segal. Segal is the former spokesman for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which has facilitated the murder of more than 1,200 Palestinians, many of them children seeking food to ward off starvation, a policy of the Israeli government in Gaza.

Jews are like unicorns in Germany: rare, and beloved in the abstraction with a childlike fervor. What was once state-sanctioned anti-Semitism underwent a metamorphosis in the wake of the Holocaust. What exists today is not so much philosemitism, which would require knowing one or two Jewish people, but Judeofetishism.

The state wears its tinny regard for Jews, particularly Jewish Israelis, prominently. Despite that, the police gathered all the Hebrew-language signs and declared that the protest would be free of signage. I watched as the lead organizer, an Israeli expat named Eliana Ben David, argued for the right to keep the placards. A compromise was agreed: Ben David would translate the signs from Hebrew to German, illustrating to the police that the language was not, in fact, anti-Semitic.

I spoke with Ben David the next day.

“When I was younger I thought there was some kind of German-Israeli connection,” she said. But “I stopped buying into this stuff, memory culture” because of how the state had instrumentalized the memory of the Holocaust.

As an anti-Zionist Jew, “after October 7th, it was very clear that I cannot stay here [in Berlin] because I’m not wanted,” she explained. She quit her job when someone in her office described her as an antisemite.

Her experience was echoed by Leen Barghouti, a Palestinian-German woman with a Jerusalem residency card. We spent a morning walking through her neighborhood, where she showed me an abundance of graffiti celebrating Israel and its army, some of it in Hebrew. She also showed me where the words “From the River to the Sea” were painted over after one of her neighbors called the police.

Describing her interactions with many ordinary Germans, she said, “you feel like they might be nice to your face, but they’re calling the police on you.”

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On my last day, I was finally tired of Nazis. I decided to visit the Neue Nationalgalerie with a friend before heading to the airport for a flight back to New York. The museum is housed in an elegant Mies van der Rohe building in the Kulturforum, a city district devoted to the arts. I took time getting through a Yoko Ono retrospective, notable for its “War is Over” messaging, which was counterposed with newspapers from the past two or three decades. The exhibition was made more notable for the jumbo absence warbling at the edge of consciousness. For all its determination, the evocation of the resilient human spirit, the artwork avoided mention of the genocide in Palestine. War is over if you want it—but not this one.

The permanent exhibition carried signage that was perhaps a touch more pedantic than you’d find in a modern art museum in London or New York. Artwork of the two Germanies is arranged thematically and from one decade of the twentieth century to the next. A heroic photograph frames Reunification—the seminal event of modern German history. The accompanying text is dense and here too, the legacy, the continuity, was inescapable.

West German art is repeatedly framed as avant garde, complex, expressing all the ambivalence that attends the proto-consumerism of the post-war years. The West is vibrant, expressive, critical and inquisitive. By contrast, the art of East Germany is propagandistic, tending toward a few reliable, timeworn motifs.

But then we learn, near the end of the permanent exhibition, that “the triumph of abstract art in Western Europe is part of a political strategy on the part of the USA.”

“Its promotion is partly funded by the CIA.”

I continued to read.

“One of the greatest advocates of abstract art as a universal language is the art historian Werner Haftmann… In 1968 Haftmann becomes director of the newly opened Neue Nationalgalerie in West Berlin. Haftmann’s involvement in National Socialist crimes during the Second World War remains unmentioned for decades. His membership in the Nazi party (NSDAP) and his military deployment against the Italian resistance have only recently been scrutinised.”

My time in Berlin was marked by a late-onset heatwave. Ninety-degree weather and a relentless sun contributed to the atmosphere of oppression and closeness. The Nationalgalerie maintains a large outdoor sculpture garden contained in a rectangular space thirty feet or so below street level. From within it, a visitor can look up at the sky, but can exit only by reentering the museum.

The garden is the temporary home to a fog sculpture by artist Fujiko Nakaya. Visitors are invited outdoors on the hour, when the fog show commences. Access to the building is locked for the duration of the exhibition, which entails the extrusion of copious fine mist into the air, where it swirls low to the ground, obscuring the vision and inducing vertigo.

On that day, in the heat, unable to leave if I wanted to, white mist billowing everywhere, I wondered if the artist had made the allusion to the past intentionally.

That a German curator failed to connect the symbolism of a fog sculpture in a pit to the experience of Nazi victims in the gas chambers, in the midst of a genocide abetted by Germany, means something.

The experience reinforced my perception that for Germans, the Holocaust sits on a high shelf in a box, gathering dust. And next to it, Israel. Similarly untouchable, ungrappled with. These are things that happened; we learn about them and go home at the end of each day. We apologized and made restitution, and now we are friends.

But a thorn remains.

I went to Berlin to seek an answer to a question: How to explain Germany’s fervent opposition to Palestinian life? And here, I had the beginnings of an answer.

It was more than the Holocaust, or a tendency to follow American presidents.

The Germans want nothing more than to treat a fog sculpture as just a cigar and not a gas chamber. But they cannot. Because if Israel cannot be said to be a normal place, cannot be truly welcomed as a nation among nations—and the fact of Palestinian existence ensures it cannot—then neither can Germany.

And that’s the basis for the special grudge and brittle fury. The Palestinians are the migrant and the foreigner—they disrupt the story, or obstruct its conclusion. They are the irritant unsettling the last chapter and the miracle of reconciliation.

Because for eighty years the Germans have tripped and stumbled, trying to find a way. And each time, someone or other has remarked, Look, one of them is buried here.