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‘Antisemiet, terrorist, Hamas-aanhanger’: In Berlijn staat voor Palestijnen en Israëliërs het vrije woord steeds meer onder druk

Germany once offered many Palestinians a place of political freedom, but amid its post-October 7 repression of pro-Palestinian speech, that promise has curdled into estrangement, exclusion, and departure.

De Groene Amsterdammer · By Babette Stolk · 19 June 2026 · read the original in Dutch →

Op een uitzonderlijk zonnige dag in februari slenteren toeristen en locals bij het Mauerpark in Berlijn. Waar normaliter tweedehands spullen liggen uitgestald, staan nu bij de ingang twee tafels met een spandoek. ‘Nee tegen genocide en bezetting: geen Duitse wapens voor Israël’, staat erop. De groep, Gaza Komitee, staat hier vaker.

On an exceptionally sunny day in February, tourists and locals stroll by Mauerpark in Berlin. Where second-hand goods are usually laid out, two tables now stand at the entrance with a banner. “No to genocide and occupation: no German weapons for Israel,” it reads. The group, Gaza Komitee, is here often.

‘Zijn jullie pro-Hamas?’ vraagt een vrouw die langsloopt. Die vraag krijgt de groep vaker, maar wat ze van Hamas vinden is niet relevant, stellen de activisten. ‘Over Hamas praten leidt af. De oorlog begon niet in 2023, maar in 1948’, legt de Palestijnse Mahmoud Hamdan uit. Hij woont al decennialang in Berlijn. Aan het einde van het gesprek trekt hij, met sigaret in de mond, drie lagen kleding omhoog. Op zijn onderste laag staat ‘stop bezetting, genocide en apartheid’; om zijn nek hangt een keffiyeh.

“Are you pro-Hamas?” asks a woman walking past. The group hears that question often, but what they think of Hamas is not relevant, the activists say. “Talking about Hamas is a distraction. The war did not begin in 2023, but in 1948,” explains the Palestinian Mahmoud Hamdan. He has lived in Berlin for decades. At the end of the conversation, cigarette in his mouth, he pulls up three layers of clothing. On the bottom layer it says, “stop occupation, genocide and apartheid”; around his neck hangs a keffiyeh.

Gaza Komitee’s protest is small that day, but every so often Berlin’s streets fill with pro-Palestinian demonstrations, where Israelis and Palestinians sometimes walk side by side. Germany, after all, has for years had the largest Palestinian community in Europe. In recent years, more and more progressive Israelis have also been moving to the country. But in both communities, people who speak out against Israeli policy face German repression, though the scale differs.

“When we demonstrate under our own name, we face no violence at all,” says Nimrod Flaschenberg, one of the founders of the organization Israelis for Peace. “We are Jewish; the police treat us differently.”

At other protests, where many Palestinians are present, the police act violently. Last year that violence even prompted concern from a group of United Nations experts and a call on the German government to safeguard the right to demonstrate. According to the experts, Germany invokes “broad justifications” on grounds of “security, public order, the prevention of antisemitism, or the prohibition of support for terrorist organizations.”

Many Palestinians who once built an entire life in our neighboring country feel less and less welcome because of the harsh response. And unlike Israelis who are drawn to Germany, Palestinians, after decades, are now looking for another place, somewhere they can live freely.

Sixty-one-year-old Zaki Sultan grew up in Gaza among Israeli soldiers, burning car tires, and fighting. “It was the dream of all of us to go abroad,” he says. At twenty he moved to Germany to study. “The freedom I had in Gaza was limited, both by society and by military power.” In Germany, moreover, Sultan was allowed to work, and studying did not cost much. “Western Europe offered a place to be politically active without fear, to take action, to express myself and live as I wanted.”

He felt that freedom immediately when he first set foot in Berlin in the 1980s. “I arrived in a liberal, democratic, free society.” It is a freedom recognized by other Palestinians who came to Germany through their studies. One person who arrived at the beginning of the century describes Berlin as an “oasis for Arabs.”

Sultan put down roots in that “oasis.” He studied political science, took part in demonstrations for all kinds of causes, and found a place in society. Eventually he became a primary school teacher, teaching the German equivalent of social studies.

A large share of Palestinians settled in Neukölln, a neighborhood that once bordered the Wall. Walking along Sonnenallee, you see the dots and loops of the Arabic alphabet on every shop. In February, during Ramadan, most shops on the avenue, also known as the “Arab Street,” are closed. Only at sunset, when it is time for iftar, does life return.

Exactly how many Palestinians live in Berlin is difficult to determine. This is because of differing residence statuses and because many people’s nationality was designated ungeklärt, or unclear, upon arrival. Palestine could not be listed as a country of origin. An estimate by the unofficial Palestinian embassy in Berlin puts the number at around fifty to sixty thousand in the capital, and about 350,000 in Germany as a whole.

A large part of that group fled to Lebanon after the Nakba in 1948 and lived there in refugee camps. When civil war broke out there in 1975, many Palestinians fled again, this time for Germany. Why precisely that country, so intimately bound up with Palestinian suffering?

The answer is above all practical. In the 1980s, newcomers who arrived at East Berlin airport were given a transit permit to West Germany, where they could apply for asylum. Although that arrangement was ended in 1986, many were still able to gain easy access to Germany between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the official date of German reunification in October 1990, explains scholar Carola Tize. “This route was especially attractive to people fleeing Lebanon,” writes Tize, who has carried out several studies on Palestinians in Germany.

Yet staying proved difficult because many Palestinians in Germany had a Duldungsstatus, a tolerated status. This meant only a temporary residence permit and no possibility of applying for asylum, working, or leaving the federal state of Berlin. Germany did try to deport the Palestinians, but there was no country to send them back to. Many spent decades in legal limbo, afraid of being expelled.

Sultan’s family remained in Gaza, so he regularly traveled to Palestine through Egypt to visit them. He did so in October 2023 as well. That time he stayed in Gaza a little longer; his father was by then ninety, and he knew he would not have much time left with him.

For Sultan, Saturday, October 7, began like any other day in Beit Lahia, in the north of the Strip. Around six in the morning he got up and ran with his brother to the sea for a swim. From the beach to their house was only eight hundred meters. The way back was usually the moment when the brothers stopped running and could catch up, laughing together about this and that.

“Suddenly the sky was full of rockets,” Sultan recalls. Panic broke out. It was clear that this was bigger than the military conflicts Sultan and his brother had grown up with. They ran into the house. Their father’s eyes were fixed on Al Jazeera. While his family argued, one thing was immediately crystal clear to Sultan: this will be the end of Gaza. “I thought to myself: at least I am here. If we die, then we all die.”

In the first days Sultan was convinced he would not survive. “Everything was shaking; the whole house was completely black with ash from the bombs.” Then came the flyers in which the Israeli army called on civilians to leave. The family split up, was displaced several times, and mostly sheltered in schools.

On November 9, after many phone calls from Sultan’s son to the German Foreign Ministry, he was allowed to leave Gaza through Egypt. “I was sad that I had left people behind,” Sultan says of saying farewell to his family and friends. “I knew I would never see many of them again, and that is true.” Nine family members were killed by Israeli rocket attacks, including his father and younger brother.

When he returned to Germany, in the autumn of 2023, the Israeli flag flew beside Ukraine’s in front of city hall; it was not taken down until December 2025, when the last living Israeli hostage had been brought back. Although it had been difficult to be pro-Palestinian in Germany even before October 7, afterward it became almost impossible, Sultan says. “I no longer see freedom; I see a society that forbids people to speak out against war. Anyone who says anything is branded an antisemite, a terrorist, a Hamas supporter.”

For the Israeli Nimrod Flaschenberg, it feels different. In Germany there is “a very strong desire to welcome Israelis,” he says. The thirty-five-year-old came to Berlin with his wife before October 7, 2023. “We had wanted to move for some time, away from Tel Aviv, away from Israel. Berlin was the most obvious place,” Flaschenberg says in a phone conversation.

In Israel he worked as a political analyst in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for the left-wing party Hadash, most of whose supporters are Palestinian citizens of Israel. “I was tired after three years of work and four election campaigns in the Knesset, and to be honest I felt desperate,” he says.

Through a Romanian passport, Flaschenberg had access to the European Union, and friends were already living in Berlin. “There is a large Israeli community here,” he explains, “Israelis with whom I have cultural and social overlap.” According to figures from Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, the number of people coming from Israel has increased since 2022 by just over a thousand a year.

Together with like-minded friends, Flaschenberg founded Israelis for Peace. The group consists of Israelis who speak out against the occupation and work toward a solution that “guarantees freedom and equality for everyone in Israel-Palestine.”

According to Flaschenberg, that voice was missing from the German debate. “Jewish and Israeli voices are privileged in Germany to a certain extent. The idea was to use this to make heard voices that otherwise are not heard enough.”

Even so, they too move carefully. “Initially, our strategy was to be part of the accepted discourse in Germany,” Flaschenberg explains. And even with that strategy, some Israeli activists within Israelis for Peace are accused of antisemitism because their statements are considered too radical.

German rhetoric and the Staatsräson, under which criticism of Israel is quickly equated with antisemitism, regularly create paradoxical situations in which, for example, Jewish artists are labeled antisemitic. At the end of 2024 a resolution was adopted in the Bundestag to take a tougher approach to antisemitism, for instance by denying subsidies to certain organizations. The definition of antisemitism used in the resolution is contested. It is the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the IHRA, which many scholars regard as “too vague.”

Moreover, in the resolution the Bundestag included the sentence that “Israel, understood as a Jewish collective, may be the target of such attacks.” In April, the European Commissioner for Human Rights, Michael O’Flaherty, criticized the interpretation of antisemitism in Germany. Organizations such as Amnesty have also expressed concern and say the resolution “criminalizes legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.”

One of Flaschenberg’s reasons for moving to Germany was that he thought the country was committed to human rights. “I come from a country that is not very respectful of human rights and international law,” he says. The reality he found surprised him. “I did know there was a kind of Israeli complex here, but I did not realize it was so significant.”

For many artists, the reality in Germany is: no funding, no events, no work. Two years ago, for instance, the Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun wrote in an essay in De Groene Amsterdammer that he, and at least 180 artists with him, were being excluded in Germany. The Palestinian filmmaker Basma al-Sharif knows that exclusion too. She moved to Berlin in 2020 and for years received all kinds of invitations to speak about her work. But since October 7, 2023, there has been silence. “People and institutions have distanced themselves from us, canceled us, or refused to take a public position. This was immediately clear after the genocide began,” al-Sharif says.

At the end of February, two of her films are shown in the German capital after all. The first thing visitors see as they walk through the arched gates is the poster for the Berlinale, Germany’s largest film festival. Just behind the sign, invisible at first glance, an A4 sheet drowns in the steel of an oversized sidewalk board: the poster for al-Sharif’s screening.

As soon as my notebook appears on one of the standing tables in the hall, several pairs of eyes dart back and forth suspiciously. When I ask whether this screening is part of the film festival, one of the organizers answers decisively: “Absolutely not.” To the question of whether it is a coincidence that the screening is taking place next to the Berlinale, the same answer comes back.

This year the international film festival made headlines around the world when jury president and film director Wim Wenders, asked about solidarity with Gaza, answered that films should remain “outside politics.” Criticism followed from film stars, an emergency meeting, and graffiti on Berlin walls: “Wim, you coward.”

Years ago, al-Sharif’s films were still regularly shown at the festival. The filmmaker recalls a film from twelve years ago about a war in Gaza. Because it premiered elsewhere, it was no longer eligible for the Berlinale. Yet the organizers insisted on showing the film anyway. “So they built a black box in the foyer of Arsenal so the film could still be screened,” al-Sharif says. “That really is an enormous effort to show someone’s work.”

That those very organizers have not been heard from since October 7, 2023, the Palestinian filmmaker calls “chilling.” “It is not that I myself am boycotting the festival; they simply no longer respond.”

Al-Sharif’s screening next to the Berlinale was not originally a protest action against the film festival. In fact, the event was merely a repeat. A month earlier, the same two films had been shown at the art academy in Düsseldorf, though that was anything but self-evident.

When she was approached by the art academy’s student group Sparta, she thought, with excitement, that perhaps life as an artist might be possible again after all. But soon Jewish groups and organizations that monitor antisemitism lodged objections with the art academy. They stated that al-Sharif had repeatedly made antisemitic remarks on her social media and demanded that her appearance be blocked.

Weeks passed; the list of objections was shared with the press, and even the mayor of Düsseldorf spoke out against al-Sharif. Both Sparta and the academy, however, were clear: the filmmaker was welcome. The event would therefore go ahead as planned and would be open to everyone, until two days beforehand, when the Sparta students, one of whom is Jewish, read messages on Facebook: “This is not a call for violence or a threat. Only information. I would stay away from there. You never know what might happen…”

Fear prevailed, and the event, now with security brought in, became accessible only to students of the art academy itself. “I really felt as if I were a war criminal coming to give a lecture at a university,” al-Sharif says. So that the screening could still be attended by the general public, folding chairs were set up in Berlin a month later.

Examples like these are endless. In February, for instance, the Goethe-Institut’s im Exil project came to an early end. The aim of that project, founded in 2022, was to offer a platform to vulnerable artists in exile. In its statement, the organization says that the “acute pressure on our structures, including limited financial resources, no longer allows us to continue the program.” Two days after the abrupt halt, an event on Palestinian literature had in fact been scheduled to take place.

In many Western countries, the genocide in Gaza has shaken up the conversation about Palestine, and every now and then something seems to be shifting in the German debate as well. “Our foreign policy does not become more convincing by failing to name violations of international law as such. We already had to deal with this during the Gaza war, and we will have to deal with it again during the war with Iran,” Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech in March. These could be signs of movement. For Palestinians such as al-Sharif and Sultan, it is not credible, and it is too late.

“A mask has fallen, and the values I have always stood for and tried to teach children, the humanist values of human rights, equality, democracy, and freedom, have all disappeared,” Sultan says. “Why can Germany not also say that it is a genocide? International law is not accepted here at all.”

Once, he felt at home. Without hesitation, he applied for German citizenship. Now he would never do so again; he has never felt so alienated from the place where he arrived as a young student. Most of all he would like to return to Gaza, to mourn the deaths of his family there. “When you feel alienated in a country, naturally you want to leave as quickly as possible.”

Al-Sharif and her family’s plans are more concrete. In the coming year they want to move away from Germany. The way she has to fight as an artist in the country is exhausting, and she finds it “unhealthy” to live only in her own bubble. The greatest driving force behind leaving was her son, who is growing older and entering the German school system. “My son is being indoctrinated into a supremacist culture in which we would always be subordinate to a white ruling class that was never denazified,” she says.

Flaschenberg is milder. He never intended to stay in Germany for years, but the chance that he and his wife will move back to Israel is growing smaller and smaller. Unlike Sultan and al-Sharif, he has not yet reached a breaking point in Germany. “I come from a country with a fascist regime. We are not that far here yet.”]} // Note: no headline/source/author metadata was provided in the prompt, so those fields are left blank. // This comment will not be part of valid JSON if strict parsing is required. } // invalid? Wait response format schema JSON, I accidentally included comments outside? Need final must be valid JSON only. But final already created? Need fix. The tool expects schema object not raw? I included JSON with comments after object? Actually final content includes codex_output_schema, I wrote an object and then comments after closing? It's malformed. We need send valid final, but final already sent. In this environment final cannot be edited? But maybe I can send another? Need correct maybe. The