Passions Run High in Berlin Over the Gaza War
By Mikaela Stone
Inside a cheerful pink building, the Frieda Women’s Center has hosted support sessions for new mothers suffering postpartum depression and for women harassed by stalkers. It was considered a do-good organization focused on women’s health — nothing that should have aroused political controversy.
But Frieda abruptly shut down in June, when it became yet another unwitting victim of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
After Frieda’s leaders attended a public vigil in April for Palestinian victims, photos of the women wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh headdress appeared in a popular magazine and Frieda’s sponsors, the Youth Welfare Committee (JHA), abruptly pulled its funding. The Berlin district committee wrote in a tersely worded notice that it feared “that the above-mentioned persons were seeking a targeted confrontation with police.”
Frieda’s staff were taken by surprise by the sudden cancellation.
“We are shocked,” the center’s official statement reads. “The responsible district councilor only needs defamatory press reports to end years of cooperation with the youth welfare office, from one day to the next without prior notice.”
Berlin has been riven with such dissension since Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters launched a deadly attack on Israel from the Gaza strip, prompting a response from Israel that has killed an estimated 30,000.
The brutal war in the Gaza Strip has unleashed protests and counter protests around the world. But it is especially fraught in Germany, which is still reckoning with its responsibility for the death of six million Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.
To atone for its past, Germany has adopted a zero -tolerance policy towards anything that could be construed as criticizing Israel. In 2008, Chancellor Angela Merkel tied Germany’s welfare to that of Israel’s as her country’s “staatsraison” — which implies a priority outranking legal or moral concerns. More recently, Germany introduced a new citizenship law that requires applicants to affirm that Israel has a right to exist.
But Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel is increasingly at odds with its professed commitment to human rights and free expression. Nowhere is this clash of values more apparent than in Berlin, a city that prides itself on diversity, boasting a large queer scene and tolerance for diverse ethnic and political opinions. Berlin’s reputation for freedom has led to an influx of artists, intellectuals, and activists from all backgrounds. Now many are questioning whether they still have a home here for these values
Nils Jansen, a prominent legal historian at the WIKO Institute for Advanced Study, considers himself a supporter of Israel, but he has publicly spoken out against censorship of Israel’s critics.
“We know there have been lists with names on it,” Jansen said. The principle of “Staatraison,’” he adds, “is used as a means to stop any critique against Israel…it has stopped inner German discussions concerning the relations of Germans to Israel.”
All over Germany, there have been art exhibits canceled, speakers disinvited, and conferences called off. The musician Laurie Anderson withdrew from a professorship with the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen, Germany, under pressure from university leadership to temper her opinions. Her transgression? Being one of 16,000 signatories to a 2021 open letter denouncing “apartheid” in Israel.
The prominent writer Masha Gessen, who is Jewish, was denied the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought by Germany’s Green Party because of Gessen’s New Yorker Magazine article “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” which referred to the current conflict as the Gaza “ghetto” being liquefied.
As early as last October, more than 120 Jewish writers, academics, journalists, artists, and cultural workers living in Germany, published an open letter in local media, “to condemn a disturbing crackdown on civic life in the wake of this month’s horrifying violence in Israel and Palestine.”
The controversy has permeated every level of society from the arts to sports to education.
Tiergarten Gymnasium, a high school in the center of Berlin, canceled its graduation ceremony in June after some students said they would wear keffiyehs to the ceremony.
“We didn’t want to protest, we just wanted to wear these scarves in silence,” said a high school senior, who asked that her name not be used. “But they thought we were aggressive.”
During this summer’s European Football Championship, organizers strictly banned the display of flags in a cheering section known as the “fan zone” except for those of the countries playing in the matches — a rule designed in part to keep out the Palestinian flag. Israeli flags were also forbidden.
“We had big discussions before the event about people bringing flags into the area,’’ said Petra Neve, a spokeswoman for the fan zone, which was set up near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. “Usually, all the demonstrations against the war take place right here, outside the Reichstag.”
Cecilia Mastrangeli, a literature student, who was camping out in protest in early July near the Free University in western Berlin, complained that police used various legal pretexts to break up the encampments there and at the Reichstag, such as trespassing, protection of the grass lawns, and incitement.
Demonstrators described an eviction there on April 26, as unnecessarily violent. Students complained they were knocked over and pushed into bicycle racks. “One of the other protestors had to be on crutches,’’ Mastrangeli said.
Mastrangeli said that the student protesters are very respectful of both Jewish and Muslim culture. Among their demands is that a building on campus honoring Henry Ford be renamed to distance the university from the auto pioneer’s virulent antisemitism. They suggested as a substitute naming the building for the late Esther Bejarano, a Jewish resistance fighter, Auschwitz survivor and peace activist.
Support for Israel has created an uneasy alliance between Germany’s centrist ruling parties and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD.)
Although widely considered antisemitic, the AfD has called for a ban against the Boycott-Divestment and Sanctions movement, which seeks to punish Israel financially.
Many fear that the campaign against antisemitism is being cynically exploited to crack down on Muslims, the largest immigrant group in Germany. Berlin alone has one of the largest Palestinian populations in a city outside of the Middle East, estimated at 35,000.
Since June, Germany has enacted several measures that could penalize immigrants who speak out about Palestine. The German citizenship test now requires applicants to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. Another new law would subject immigrants to expulsion if they engage in social media activity that “glorifies and approves of terrorist crimes.”
Already, Germany has seen marked increases in attacks against both Jews and Muslims.
Samuel Salzborn, professor of political science and the contact person of the state of Berlin on Antisemitism, reported 892 cases of antisemitism in 2023 in response to an emailed research query. He went on to write that nearly 580 of those happened after October 7th — a 134 percent increase since 2022.
In April, Deutsche Welle reported 1,270 antisemitic incidents in Berlin in 2023, with 783 events after October 7th. Associated Press in June counted 4,782 incidents since the start of 2023, with 2,787 occurring after October 7th last year — an 83 percent increase.
These statistics include an arson attack against a synagogue and a physical attack on a Jewish student, both in Berlin Mitte, the center of the city. In response, Berlin has increased police presence near synagogues and other Jewish institutions, as well as at rallies. Analysts have pointed out that these statistics make no distinction between actions against Jews and those meant to protest Israel’s policies.
Salzborn does not think the distinction matters. “Antisemitic hatred of Israel is the main driver of current antisemitism,’’ Salzborn said in an email interview with Berlin Beyond Borders.
Nationwide, figures also show that anti-Islamic hate crimes have doubled over the past year.
“If you wear the Palestine flag or a keffiyeh you get called a terrorist,” noted a recent high school graduate who is Palestinian. He chooses to wear the flag anyway and is one of many who feels students face Islamophobia in school.
Mirna Funk, a Berlin-born Jewish author and essayist, says she does not feel protected by the array of new laws designed to prevent antisemitism.
“I don’t think it can be stopped with a governmental decision,” Funk said.
Living in both Berlin and Tel Aviv, Funk feels that the danger of violence in Israel is more straightforward than the danger of antisemitism in Germany. But as an outspoken supporter of Israel, Funks says she is frequently targeted for abuse.
“Of course, right wingers are antisemitic, but I can tell you who sends me death threats and evil messages — and that’s Arabs and Leftists,’’ Funk said.
Funk believes that the current upheaval is part of an ongoing cycle of historic and global antisemitism — targeting and scapegoating Jews — something she covered in her 2021 book Between You and Me.
“This is what society has been doing for 2000 years, maybe even longer. They relieve their inner tensions by killing the Jews. Since ’48 there is something preventing them from killing the Jews, and this is the state of Israel. This is why Israel is hated so much.”
Because Berlin is such a destination point for writers and artists, tensions remain high as artists continut to highlight the issues most important to them, and push controversial subjects into the spotlight. On every street corner one can find graffiti with slogans such as “Free Palestine” and “Stop the Genocide,” are painted.
Emilia Roig, a French political scientist living in Berlin and the daughter of an Algerian Jew, believes that the new German laws are part of a divide and conquer campaign. “The first targets of the far right will be Muslims…. but Jews will be down the line,’’ Roig said.
Many Jewish cultural figures in Berlin have joined the chorus of critics against the war in Gaza, often at their own peril.
Israeli director Yuval Abraham shocked Berlin International Film Festival audiences in an award acceptance speech in February, when he called for a ceasefire and pointed to the inequality between his rights as an Israeli and his co-director Basel Adra’s rights as a Palestinian. German politicians protested his speech, saying it had been antisemitic.
“I don’t know what Germany is trying to do with us,” Abraham told reporters afterwards. “If this is Germany’s way of dealing with its guilt over the Holocaust, they are emptying it of all meaning.”
In a smaller way, Guy Briller, a Jewish Israeli artist working at an open-air Turkish market in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin, devised a clever protest against the war. He is selling Star Wars-themed tote bags and banners that read “Stop Wars” and “Do good. There is no try.”
For those who expect him to behave a certain way because of his background, he has a ready retort: “Who are they to speak to me?” He feels a special responsibility to speak out against Israeli policy. “This war is us [Israelis] and I am broken by that…I live my life very publicly for a free Palestine.”
Meanwhile, the work of the Frieda Women’s Center has not been halted, though the center has been forced to close. Several support groups it created and hosted are continuing, now held in their members’ own private homes.
Individuals uplifting one another and creating community in this way is the exact form of activism political scientist Emilia Roig says she encourages.
“We [activists] must embody the vision we are trying to see fulfilled,” Roig said. “Ask: does it have the potential to transform, or is it just a reaction?”
Mikaela Stone, a graduate of UC Santa Barbara, is a freelance journalist and creative writer from southern California who is reporting from Berlin this summer.
