The people who have a first-hand understanding of authoritarianism and the people who cherish democratic freedoms most are people who have a history of being on the receiving end of political violence. There are many people in Germany today with that background.

—Emily Dische-Becker, in conversation with Eyal Weizman and George Prochnik, Granta 165

The answer is so difficult
that the question has been evaded
hundreds upon hundreds of times . . .

—Yash Malviya, song lyric from “Dabe pairon se ujala aa raha hai”

I.

Outside the cafe, the streets are snow and ice. Nadine comes in, late as usual, bundled up. I get up to hug her. As we hug, then pull away, something strange happens. We draw back together instead, holding each other closer, longer. We begin to groan, laughing and groaning, a low, guttural uhhh: the Arabic expression of pain. Apart from running into each other at several of the demonstrations, we haven’t seen each other these past two months, since the world shifted on its axis. When we finally let go, we laugh that we don’t need to sit down and talk: we can just hold each other for two hours, then go home. We are only half-joking. Our eyes are awash in tears.

~

I have been wanting to write about Berlin for a long time. This is not the essay I thought I would write. If I had written this essay less than a year ago, in the early fall of 2023, it would’ve started elsewhere. Perhaps with how I came to be in this city, and my growing questions and doubts about being here—questions that have now come to a head.

~

What came before Berlin? A childhood in Kuwait. My parents, a journalist and a doctor, had moved there from Egypt in pursuit of better work opportunities. My sister and I were raised in a country where two-thirds of the population came from elsewhere and were only there temporarily. We went to an international school with children from forty-something different countries. My best friends were Mexican-Australian, Indian, British-Kuwaiti, Egyptian; my teachers from the U.K.; the flatbread my father brought home every Friday after prayers, warm and studded with bubbles, was from an Iranian bakery down the road.

I went to Egypt for university, then I started to move. Much of the past twenty years have been spent in motion. I’ve lived and spent time in different parts of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. One of the great and unusual gifts of my life is the ease I often feel in places where I’ve just arrived—and the way I seem to meet strangers everywhere with whom I immediately feel at home. A sense of belonging to the world.

~

I’ve written a lot about Egypt: my nemesis. This place that I returned to throughout my adult life as often as I was driven away. I’ve written about the 2011 uprising and the brutal years that followed: the revolution that made and unmade us.

After the revolution, my movement changed. I think, in retrospect, that I was no longer content to just drink in the world. In 2014, in the wake of the military takeover that rendered our dream of revolution stillborn, I moved to Istanbul. I found myself there in the aftermath of another uprising: the Gezi movement. I was to meet many people whose questions about life—about self and society, about power, purpose, and meaning—seemed to mirror mine.

In the years that followed, I found myself moving away from cities and participating in different projects and rural communities in Turkey, Greece, Mexico, the U.S. The revolution gave me a glimpse into what collective power means, into what community and shared purpose might mean, beyond the autopilot of our days; it left me with a deep rejection of the way things are, a pressing sense of responsibility towards others and the world. A turning towards what else could be. In retrospect, I was looking for a home, and I knew that I would only find it among people who were finding different ways to engage with life and with the natural world, to live and work and be together, beyond the systems that have subjugated us all.

  
II.

In 2019, I had an eight-month fellowship at an artists’ residency in the south of Germany, and it was during this time that I realized just how many of my friends and loved ones—people from different times and places in my life—were now gathered in Berlin. Two close German friends that I had made on the road—one at an ashram in India, another while hitchhiking around Lebanon—were Berliners. I also knew many people in the arts, and from alternative projects around the world. My sister and her partner were now living in Berlin, too, along with a large and ever-growing Egyptian, Syrian, and Arab diaspora. It was a city that I had been visiting for years, a place where I was constantly running into people and felt I could be friends with many more.

I had been exploring life in different rural communities over the past years and no longer wanted to live in a city. But I also realized, with the situation in Egypt in slow collapse, that I needed a safe and stable base. I needed to find a place where I could apply for a longer residence permit, where I was “allowed” to stay—no easy feat for someone with an Egyptian passport. Compared to some of the megacities I had lived in—Cairo, Istanbul, Hanoi—Berlin felt much more gentle, a small town. I liked the abundance of green spaces, the lakes and little canals, the Kiez life; the loveliness of the Altbau flats, the quietness of the courtyards; the generally alternative, left-leaning, anti-establishment mood; the diversity, the relative affordability, the rough-around-the-edges, come-as-you-are feel of the city.

~

I moved officially to Berlin in February 2020—one month before a pandemic would shut down the city and engulf the world. I do not want to belittle the enormous suffering the pandemic caused when I say this, but for me that first year was a time of quiet grace. Unlike many other places, during the lockdown in Berlin, we were not confined to our homes. People took to the parks, sitting apart from one another while reading or playing an instrument or watching their children play or practicing juggling or knitting or doing something else with their hands that, perhaps, they would not have paused and taken the time to do in normal life. I loved the feeling of time and space, of schedules having dissolved, of the soft solace of strangers sitting together and apart. The frenzy of consumption that bothers me so much in cities—cafés and shops and restaurants and supermarkets and bars—had suddenly come to a halt. I would walk for hours, getting to know the city by foot. Over the span of that year, I got to know its parks, to hike in the surrounding forests, to swim in many of its lakes. I swam outdoors throughout the spring and summer, and, as the swimming pools were closed during the lockdown, I continued to swim in the lakes in the fall and winter, discovering a new and previously unimaginable obsession: winter bathing. I learned to ride a bicycle at the age of thirty-six. I finished writing a book that I had been working on for years. I learned about seasons and cycles, including my own. Above all, it was the first time in my adult life that I spent an entire year in one place. I learned to nourish my energy in small and daily ways. It was also the first time I lived with my sister in the same city since we were children, and she and her partner became a refuge for me.

~

But over the years, as life in Berlin started to come back to “normal,” I started to feel a growing sense of isolation. After living in communities, the atomization of life in this city began to feel unnatural. My unease with consumption and overstimulation returned as all the machinery of urban living whirred back to life. I also began to realize that the approach to time in this society was very different from how I conceived of it. There was little space for spontaneity, for listening to life, for savoring the unexpected; time was sliced up, subjected to schedules, compartmentalized into small boxes, each controlled with a pre-made plan.

There was also, of course, the growing commercialization of the city, the rising prices, the enormous housing crisis which made finding a long-term room or apartment a huge task, requiring many months of research and paperwork and applications and visits. I would end up hopping from one sublet to another. Much of what I experienced of the arts felt privileged and pretentious, heavily mediated by grants and institutions. There was a general feeling of having arrived in the city a couple of decades too late.

I still loved the friends I had come to Berlin to be with and the friends that I made in my years of living here, and I appreciated many aspects of life in this city and some of the routines I had created and cherished. But there were other things that were disturbing me, things that I had turned a blind eye to. Living in Germany, I felt like a “foreigner” for the first time in my life. Though I had no trouble understanding German and picked up a lot of vocabulary very quickly, I felt blocked when trying to speak it, cowed and intimidated by the idea of making a mistake, in a way I have not felt with other languages. I also realized that I avoided speaking Arabic when I was out in public, especially when I was alone, on the phone with my parents or friends. And though I felt a sense of safety and ease moving around Berlin, I realized that many encounters with strangers, in particular with Germans beyond a certain age, carried a certain tension, a certain apologetic tiptoeing around, a certain bracing for something—bracing for what? Bracing myself for a response, not uncommon, of impatience or disdain or hostility or outright contempt, a certain exacting, ever-correcting gaze, a feeling of being made to feel inferior, not in one’s rightful place. I realized, though I had an easy rapport with Berlin from the start, there was also an ongoing, unshakeable tension stitched into my body as I moved around the city.

~

After the first year of the pandemic, as the world opened up again, I continued seeking out life beyond cities, exploring different rural communities in Germany and around Europe. Every few months, I would come back to Berlin to rest from all the movement. In August 2023, after a spring and summer full of travels, I came back to Berlin determined to drop into a longer commitment to the city, in order to have the stability I needed to dive into several new writing projects. I found a sublet in Neukölln, in an old, sweet, simple flat with high ceilings and wooden floors, its balcony overlooking a Turkish cafe where old men gathered to play card games, a small Polish bookstore, and a South Asian shop just down the road. It was close to the canal, in a neighborhood I knew intimately and had lived in many times before. August was warm, with days of blessed sunshine, and the warmth lingered on through September. I remember feeling such relief that the summer was not over yet.

  
III.

The war began in October, as light and color started to drain out of Berlin’s skies. My first reaction was one of denial. I wanted to turn away, to continue with my life. I did not follow the news. I remember visiting my sister and her partner one evening and feeling the heaviness in their apartment, their dark blue sofa, the dim lights in their living room—a darkness that had stolen in and changed everything. I did not allow it to touch me yet.

Then I began to follow the news. And a slow, quiet horror began to fill me, to stain everything. I could not move. Days, then weeks, turned to sludge. I was alone in my new apartment. I remember vague thoughts of things to be done, as though to pretend that life was in motion, that a way forward could be found from here. I want to take out the trash. I want to wash my hair. I would manage one or two things, before the day folded in on itself again.

~

I have one sister. But then there is Farah: one of my sister’s oldest and closest friends. We all met during our college days in Cairo, more than twenty years ago. And over the years, Farah has become a close friend of my sister’s partner and of mine as well.

Farah is Palestinian, was born in Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, and spent seven years of her childhood and adolescence in Gaza, before moving to Egypt for university. She is now finishing an MFA in Creative Writing in New York. Two years ago, she wrote an essay called “Bulbul Nests,” about returning to Gaza in 2021, after nine years away.

Farah writes about the Rafah border crossing, which separates Egypt from Palestine, being closed off for long stretches of time and then suddenly open for a few urgent, overcrowded days. She writes about the grueling journey from Cairo to the Gaza Strip: a journey that took six hours when she was a college student in Cairo, and which now takes her over twenty hours, lined with humiliating checkpoints along the way. Hours thick with the fear that one of the barricades might suddenly close and she would be stranded in the middle of the desert, unable to make it to the Rafah crossing before it closes again. As she comes closer, she exchanges a flurry of excited messages with her favorite cousin and girlhood friend, Doaa.

She writes about retracing her connection with Gaza after these years of absence. About spending time with her mother, her aunt, her cousin Doaa, and Doaa’s three boys. Walking along the seafront and through the old town, the narrow passageways and the domes of the gold market. About peering inside some of the old houses to see the restoration work, guided by Doaa, an architect with a love for old buildings. She writes about food: about the mana’ish freshly baked by her mother’s upstairs neighbor to welcome her back. About makarona bechamel and stuffed vegetables cooked for her by Doaa. About all the sweet pastries brought over by friends and family members who come to visit her—especially her beloved bulbul nests, a specialty of Gaza: flaky pastry fingers, filled with ground almonds or pistachios, rich with ghee.

While in Gaza, Farah applies for a permit to visit the other half of her family, her father and his extended family, in the West Bank. She writes about having to apply for permission—which may or may not be granted—to go to the other half of her country. One morning, the permit comes through, but it is only valid for one day; she has to leave her mother’s apartment immediately and hurry to Erez Crossing before it closes. She does not even have time to visit her family members for a final hug.

Two weeks later, as Farah leaves Ramallah to head back to Cairo, protests flare up around the country in response to the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, to make way for Jewish settlers. Two weeks after she was hanging out in their living room, her beloved cousin, Doaa, is killed in an Israeli bombardment of Gaza, along with her husband and two of her boys. Only one of her children, Aziz, ten years old, survives.

A few months later, Farah writes this essay. She sends it to me for translation, and I translate it from Arabic to English. But I still had no idea what it meant.

~

The streets where Farah spent her childhood, the streets she wandered through three years ago — what has become of them? The domes of the old town, the market and the passageways, the houses that were being restored. The kunafa shop where she stopped to look at the long orange threads emerging from the dough machine. The store where she thought of buying two gold bracelets. Homes and shops and cafes and schools reduced to rubble. Books and wedding photographs and televisions and toys, knickknacks on windowsills and vases of flowers, dishes in the sink, slippers by the door, ovens where mana’ish were baked, sofas on which children lay, all smitten into ash. Human life reduced to limbs and parts, unidentifiable, in plastic bags, buried in mass graves.

Reduced by whom? Reduced by the people who call other humans “human animals,” and reduced by the people who choose to believe them. Reduced by the people who, for whatever reason, choose to remain silent.

~

Farah is not sleeping, not eating. Farah’s mother is in Gaza, along with her aunt Youssra and many of her family members. On 17 October, Farah writes: “The utmost hope of everyone who has family in Gaza, each day and night, is to receive a text telling us ‘we are still alive.’ We hold onto that, we pray to read the same again in few hours. This is our life these days. This is the only meaning, the only point, and the only hope.”

  
IV.

Farah’s mother, Zainab al-Ghonaimy, begins to send dispatches from Gaza. Zainab is a lawyer and human rights defender, the director of the Center for Women’s Legal Research, Counseling, and Protection in Gaza. Whenever she is able to find enough electricity to charge her phone, she types updates about what she is experiencing; and then she tries for hours, sometimes days, to find a spot where her phone can pick up enough internet signal to send the messages to Farah.

The dispatches become a lifeline between mother and daughter. Farah waits for the messages, edits the Arabic, then sends it to various friends for English translation, before publishing the dispatches in both languages.

Zainab, now seventy years old, writes about ever-present noise and ever-present fear. About skies thick with white phosphorus and smoke, about the stench of burning that never leaves her nostrils. She writes about sleeplessness, a vigilant terror that has set itself so relentlessly into her body that even the sound of a slamming door makes her jump. She writes about being afraid of the night hours that she had once loved, that had once been a refuge, a soft well of solitary quiet at the end of her busy days. Now, her city has been swallowed up by a darkness so total, pierced only by flares dropped by the enemy warplanes to illuminate a target that is about to be bombed.

She writes about the scarcity of water to drink, to bathe; about the dwindling of the most basic necessities: bread, milk for the children. She writes about relatives, neighbors, her city’s people risking their lives to try to find bread, standing in queues for hours at the one bakery that is still operating, only for the bakery and everyone standing in line to be targeted, bombed, and killed—just like a few days earlier at the bakery in the next neighborhood. She writes about every lifeline being ruthlessly identified, homed in on, and destroyed: bakeries, generators, wheat mills, water tanks.

She writes about whole neighborhoods of people being ordered to evacuate, only to be bombed as they do. She writes about whole families being wiped out: generations of children with their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, elders. She writes about being terrified of the rare moments of silence, because it means the troops are being deployed to a new neighborhood.

Zainab writes about having to break the news to a friend of hers that her home has been bombed and twelve members of her family killed; her cousin survived, only to find out that her three-year-old daughter has been killed, that miracle of a child who came to her after six painful years of IVF. She writes about mothers writing their children’s names all over their bodies, on their hands and feet and limbs, so that they can be identified.

She writes about waiting, waiting and waiting, waiting and emptiness. She writes about an overwhelming sense of helplessness. She, who is used to being so autonomous, so capable, constantly in motion, taking action and helping others, has been reduced to being crammed in rooms with many others for weeks on end, unable to move or do or live, just waiting. She writes about trying her best to stay strong to support her loved ones, those on the outside and those inside the hell that has been unleashed on her city.

She writes, also, about dignity, determination, and fierce defiance in the face of it all. I see this in Farah too: her humor and fire and dignity, in the midst of all the brokenness.

One day, Zainab writes, heartbreakingly, that she will have to leave her home. But she has no idea where to go, what to take, how long she will be gone, or even how to leave—as the ground incursion comes closer and the bombardment shows no sign of abating—or whether she will ever be able to return.

For twelve excruciating days, Farah loses contact with her mother. After twelve days, she hears news from a relative in the south that her mother is still alive.

When Zainab is able to contact Farah again, she tells her that they were huddled in one corner of one room, all together, sixteen people, adults and children, for days. The IDF soldiers had entered the neighborhood; the tanks had surrounded the buildings. They were hiding in the dark, unable to move a muscle or make a sound, afraid that if they were found they would be executed on the spot.

  
V.

The horror and heartbreak of witnessing the decimation of Gaza is compounded by another kind of horror unfolding in Germany: the horror of silence. As Germany declares its staunch and unwavering support for Israel, Israeli flags are flown high outside of government buildings and institutions, and the media machine cranks out its elaborate narrative of “self-defense,” any voice calling for a ceasefire is silenced. For the first weeks, all demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians are banned; Palestinian flags and keffiyehs are banned. Palestinians and other Arabs are targeted, harassed, and arrested by the police. In October, German chancellor Olaf Scholz appears on the front cover of Der Spiegel, his face half in shadow, with the headline: “We must finally carry out large-scale deportations.” The accompanying interview warns of rising antisemitism: the excuse that will be used, again and again, to sound the bells of war and to silence anybody who speaks out against it. The interview directly accuses immigrant communities in Germany, in particular Arab communities, declaring a “tougher approach to migrants who overstay their welcome.” Anyone who speaks out against the carnage in Gaza or in solidarity with Palestine is automatically deemed antisemitic, punished and defamed. People are fired from their jobs and face threats to their immigration status. For two weeks, my neighborhood, Neukölln, home to many Arab and Turkish immigrants, feels like it is under police occupation. By November, arms exports from Germany to Israel have increased tenfold compared to the previous year.

~

In the cafe that day, Nadine shows me videos of police violence. She shows me a video, taken on 10 October, of a group of police officers hauling a boy out from inside a restaurant on Sonnenallee, a street in Neukölln known for its Arab-owned establishments. One of the officers grips his arm around the boy’s neck in a chokehold, as bystanders scream. The police officers force the boy down on the ground and handcuff him. One of the officers squats down over the boy, almost sitting on his head, and some twenty other officers in full riot gear surround them, while a woman screams in the background, “He’s a child! He’s a child! He’s nine years old!” The swarm of police officers closes around the boy to shield what is happening from the camera.

In another video, taken at a protest on Potsdamer Platz, a group of police officers in full riot gear home in on an older Arab woman, bespectacled, wearing a light blue headscarf. They grab her and push her around, then fling her violently onto the ground. She lands flat on her back, her head hitting the asphalt with a sickening thud, and she passes out. The police just leave her there and turn away. Some of the other protestors gather around her, crouching down on the ground and cradling her head. No paramedics appear and the protestors call urgently for a doctor amongst them until one is found.

There are many more such videos. Footage of police officers violently beating up protestors, young and old. Footage of police slamming people against cars, pepper-spraying protestors and bystanders, tackling people violently onto the ground, gripping them in a chokehold until they are almost unresponsive.

Nadine shows me a video of German-Israeli activist Iris Hefets being arrested, yet again, at a protest of Jewish cultural workers in Mitte on 10 November. She tells me about watching German police violently arresting, handcuffing, and shoving Jewish protestors to the ground at the 20 May 2023 Nakba Remembrance Day protest in Oranienplatz, pushing their faces down into the earth, one standing with his boot on a Jewish organizer’s head as she lies handcuffed, face down, on the ground. She has seen with her own eyes, she tells me, just how selective the protection of Jewish life in Germany really is.

~

In mid-October, Palestinian author Adania Shibli, who has been living in Berlin for many years, was due to receive the LiBeratur Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when she receives a brief email informing her that she has been disinvited. Cancellations—of events and people—become a daily reality. Anyone speaking out against the atrocities in Gaza is automatically censored, silenced, defunded. The crackdown is widespread and relentless. Archive of Silence, a “crowdsourced archive documenting silenced voices in Germany,” records almost seventy cases of cancellations of Arab as well as international artists, intellectuals, and cultural workers from October to December alone. The list includes so many Jewish artists and scholars that Naomi Klein deadpans on Twitter, “At this rate, Germany is going to run out of Jewish intellectuals to ban,” and Samantha Hill publishes an article in The Guardian entitled, “Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany today.” Even Greta Thurnberg is denounced as a “Jew hater” in the German press after calling for a ceasefire and justice and freedom for Palestinians.

The Neukölln institution Oyoun, a large cultural center run by people of color and centering “decolonial, queer, feminist and migrant perspectives,” has its funding from the Berlin Senate suddenly and completely withdrawn and is told it must vacate its premises within five weeks. The decision came after the center hosted a vigil to mourn the victims of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and of the Hamas attacks: an “evening of mourning and hope” organized by the Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East association.

The Germany Photography Biennale is completely called off because of one of the curators’ social media posts in solidarity with Gaza. The entire curatorial search committee for Documenta 16, one of the biggest events in the global contemporary art scene, steps down after one member is accused of antisemitism for signing a pro-Palestinian petition in India in 2019. In the months that follow, the cancellations continue unabated, including the University of Cologne rescinding Nancy Fraser’s visiting professorship and Laurie Anderson withdrawing from a guest professorship at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen after the university took issue with her 2021 support of a pro-Palestinian statement. “What’s happening in the art world through these series of cancellations,” says artist Candice Breitz in a Washington Post piece, “is almost a purge of anybody who has any kind of empathy for Palestinian civilians.”

And those are just the public incidents. The repression is far more widespread. One of my closest friends loses his job over his social media posts about Gaza. Four separate journalists I know working at Deutsche Welle talk about their shock at discovering the layers of censorship, distortion, and control that shroud the reporting of the unfolding events in Gaza, the viselike editorial grip on what can and cannot be reported, how things are allowed to be framed. Another friend writes with sorrow and fury about the propaganda videos her eleven-year-old daughter is made to watch in school about “the Israel-Hamas war,” videos distributed to schools by the Ministry of Education.

~

In “The Challenge of Defending Memory in Germany,” published in Jewish Currents in July 2022, Joshua Leifer writes: “European guilt for the Holocaust has made impossible any recognition that Israel’s founding resulted in the Palestinian Nakba; the insistence on the exceptionality of one atrocity effaced, in practice, the memory of another atrocity. In the German context, even the mere presence of Palestinians as political actors, testifying as survivors to the destruction of Palestinian society that Israel’s founding entailed, has come to be seen as prima facie antisemitic.”

Berlin is home to around 30,000 Palestinians, one of the largest diaspora communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East. While Germany actively supports, funds, and supplies arms for the mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians and the decimation of Gaza, the Palestinian and Arab communities in Germany, who are experiencing the most acute grief over the carnage, are precisely the ones being demonized and criminalized, their voices summarily silenced. The narrative of “the enemy within,” of antisemitism as an “imported problem,” is whipped up in the media and the public consciousness—while failing to mention that 84% of antisemitic crimes are committed by the German far-right, and while neglecting to place antisemitism within the larger picture of xenophobia that remains deeply embedded in German society. A 400-page 2023 report called “Anti-Muslim Sentiment: Germany takes stock,” ordered by Germany’s federal government, concludes that almost “every second person in Germany has an anti-Islamic attitude” and that “anti-Muslim sentiment is not a marginal phenomenon in society but is widespread in large parts of the German population, remaining at a consistently high level for many years.”

Just as in the Israeli narrative of “self-defense,” where the alleged protection of one group is serving as a pretext for the decimation of another, in Germany, the alleged protection of one group is serving as a pretext for state-sanctioned discrimination and xenophobia, for openly attacking and harming others.

What lessons have really been learned from history?

~

I walk around Berlin, around this city where I have made a home over the past four years—around these streets that just a few weeks ago felt safe, felt familiar. The air now feels unbreathable.

  
VI.

Amid the climate of silencing and repression in Germany, the most heartbreaking thing of all is the conversations I’ve been having with German friends and acquaintances. Most seem wholly unaware of the censorship and cancellations and distortion in the media. My friend L., when I mention the censorship, says, “Oh, really? Is that your perception of it?”

Another friend, J., is one of my oldest and closest in Berlin. We met at an ashram in India twelve years ago, ran away to the beach together, and have been the dearest of friends since. Although she shed a tear the first time we spoke about the situation in early October, and she mentioned how sad she feels it all is, the “generations of trauma on both sides,” she has been strangely absent, almost oblivious, since. Every time I have tried to explain what I have been experiencing—a darkness beyond anything that I have ever felt before; the foundations of my worldview buckling—she expresses surprise that I am so affected by it.

J., a queer feminist activist who calls herself “post-Leftist,” is no stranger at all to strong stances and political action. But it is only in November, after over 10,000 people have already been killed in Gaza and 1.5 million people displaced from their homes, that she begins to float the idea of joining a protest. On a walk along the canal one evening, she asks me, “Are the protests antisemitic?” She is of course against what is happening in Gaza, she finds it horrifying, but she is hesitant in a way that begins, slowly, to shock me. She is full of equivocations, drawing false equivalences, making strange arguments that seem to be echoing some of the justificatory narratives being exhorted in the German media. When I mention the censorship and distortion in the media, she is defensive, saying she is triggered by this idea because it’s an argument commonly used by the conspiracy theorists of the far-right. At some point in the conversation, she makes a strange reference, out of left field, to “Muslim-looking people on Sonnenallee.” When I ask her, gently—our whole conversation has been calm—to try to explore other media sources that are not German, when I wonder aloud, as it suddenly occurs to me, whether she has friends from other places in the world apart from me, she jumps in, “I have Muslim friends.” And I, in my naivete, have no idea why the word “Muslim” has suddenly shown up in this conversation again, for the second time, coming from my close friend J. We had initially met up for a night walk along the canal because she wanted to talk to me about something her babysitter said to her that she was annoyed about. When, at the end of this increasingly bewildering conversation we were having about Gaza, I say teasingly, trying to lighten the mood, “Maybe we should go back to talking about your babysitter—it’s an easier topic,” she says, “Not for me, it isn’t.”

In the days that follow, my mind spins out this conversation again and again. I cycle through feelings of overwhelming sadness, fury, disbelief, and a searing sense of betrayal. After several such conversations with her over the coming weeks, it’s clear that we live in completely different realities. There is a stubborn arrogance, I feel, in the way she defends her (constantly shifting) position. Her focus, it seems to me, is on absolving herself of blame, on denying that there is a harrowing situation of silence and distortion in Germany, rooted in an old and deep conditioning, and that she herself is part of it, rather than truly opening herself up and trying to see these—admittedly frightening—possibilities. Our friendship is broken, and I don’t know if there is any way forward from here.

~

A few weeks later, I’m taking part in a meditation evening in Berlin. There is a “sharing circle” at the end. I don’t usually speak at these things, but this time I find myself speaking to this group of strangers. I talk about how I’ve lived in different places around the world and have always found kindred spirits everywhere. About how I suddenly feel such a visceral sense of estrangement in Germany. To experience, so blatantly, the double standards, to see human life being valued so differently—in a place and by people I had come to trust. It feels as though the world around me has morphed into something unrecognizable and I am struggling to figure out how to relate to it now.

As I’m leaving that evening, someone introduces himself to me as a “regular German” and says he is curious to hear more about my perception of the situation. We speak; we end up speaking for two hours; we are trying to speak from the heart. He is open, curious, trying to listen deeply, as am I. Some of the things I mention seem very new to him, and he admits to being persuaded by several of the things I say. And yet he continues to come back to the narrative of “self-defense,” about Israel “taking out Hamas,” and to talk about the slaughter of thousands of people as though it is incidental. He repeatedly uses the phrase “collateral damage.” I try to explain the bias, distortion, and double standards I see in this narrative, and the profound racism embedded in the willingness of the German public to accept it. When he defends the phrase “collateral damage” yet again, I finally ask, exasperated: if another country were to bomb Berlin and kill tens of thousands of people, including his child and the children of many of his friends, would he think of that as “collateral damage”? He seems shocked by the idea: by the idea that his child, that any German child, could be “collateral damage.”

Towards the end of the conversation, he begins to speak—still very nicely, very earnestly—about how so many people in Germany have a lot of problems with “people from Islamic countries.” That he personally has had a lot of problems with “people from Islamic countries.” I give up at this point, deeply disheartened, and begin to withdraw.

~

I go to a meditation retreat over New Year’s Eve in France, desperate to find some space and silence within myself again. After the elaborate ceremony at midnight, I find myself walking back to my accommodation with another participant who, as it turns out, is German. We realize, after talking for a few minutes, that our paths have crossed before: she attended a reading of mine in Stuttgart in 2019.

She, too, lives in Berlin and works at a cultural institution. When she asks me how I feel about living in Berlin, I say that everything has changed for me lately, and I am still trying to come to terms with it. When I refer to the cancellations and silencing, she says she is surprised; this is only the second time she is hearing anything about that—yesterday another participant in the retreat, from the U.K., mentioned it to her.

She says she has a special relationship with the situation because she lived in Israel for several years, and has many friends there. She says she saw the situation up close, and that it is “absolutely an apartheid state.” I am very surprised to be hearing the word “apartheid” from a German person (to quote Susan Neiman from her powerful essay, “Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire” in the 19 October 2023 issue of The New York Review of Books: “In Berlin the word ‘apartheid’ can get you canceled faster than the N-word will get you canceled in New York”). She says that she has been following the BBC and Al-Jazeera for news about Gaza. And yet, in the very next breath, she says that she “cannot be partisan.” She says that Germany has no choice but to do what it’s doing now.

Many friends report having similar conversations with German friends and acquaintances: friends from Sweden and Belgium, from the U.S. and India, from Egypt and Syria, from Hungary and Ireland—some of whom have been in Germany for ten or fifteen years, who have very strong ties with the country—report their shock over the response in Germany, over the repression and cancellations, and especially, over the excuses, over the silence of people they would never have expected to be silent.

On New Year’s Eve in France, I toss and turn all night, unable to sleep, this conversation twisting itself through my body. Again, the incongruence. October 7th was horrific. And what has been happening in Gaza and the West Bank, in Palestine, before and since has been horror upon horror upon horror, with no end in sight. All human life is sacred. The very same people who rightly felt horror and outrage on October 7th are now the ones standing by as an entire society is decimated. What can be more partisan than this?

There is nothing “complicated” or “partisan” about saying no to genocide. To the deliberate mass killing and maiming of tens of thousands of civilians. To the deliberate killing of thousands upon thousands of children. To the displacement of almost two million people. To cutting off food, water, and fuel until the entire population is facing crisis levels of hunger and over one million people are on the brink of famine. To the deliberate siege and bombardment of hospitals, until hospital after hospital is destroyed. To the deliberate destruction of places of worship. To the deliberate destruction of any and all sources of life and sustenance: of bakeries and fishermen’s boats and solar panels and water treatment plants, of agricultural fields and water reservoirs. To the deliberate destruction of schools and universities, of any hint of the future. To the killing of over 150 journalists as they reported on the horror of what they saw before them. To the decimation of an entire society.

There is nothing “complicated” or “partisan” about saying no to this. Those who stand by and watch have already declared their position: their deep conviction that some human lives are far more sacred than others.

In Germany, this glaringly simple truth has become obscured.

To say nothing of the complete erasure of Palestinian history.

  
VII.

On 21 October, at the first pro-Palestinian protest permitted by the German authorities, I turned around and saw my uncle in tears. He was visiting his daughter in Berlin because she had just had a baby. I turned around and saw my youngest uncle, in his early sixties now, tall and mustachioed, with whom I have always maintained an easy, teasing banter, crying as he watched people in Berlin marching and chanting for Palestine. For generations of Arabs, Palestine is an open wound.

I did not realize how isolated I felt, how choked my breath was in my throat, how stoppered my heart, until that first protest, that first march, those first chants with others. I got home, sent pictures of the protest to Farah, and wrote: “Some kind of relief to not be alone with all this, with all this inexpressible anger and grief.”

The following Saturday, at the second protest, I stood on the pavement, looking for my sister and her partner. When I finally spotted her, I saw tears streaming down her cheeks as she held up a handwritten sign. I joined her, and we linked arms as we marched and chanted, and soon, tears were streaming down my cheeks too.

The third protest, bigger than ever before, was through the strange, shuttered streets of the city center, past closed museums and darkened offices. At the fourth protest, the small son of my dear friends A. and Y. is chanting “Free Palestine!,” and it makes me cry and cry.

~

I do not see my extended family often, but I found such solace in having my uncle and aunt visit from Egypt, such comfort and relief in being with them, with my cousin and her new baby, during this time. In spending time with people with whom nothing needed to be defended or explained. People who have been through so much in their own lives, who carry so much of that weight in their bodies, and who know how to go on, how to hold each other and have faith.

I find myself walking around my neighborhood, Neukölln, and looking into the eyes of other people from the Arab world, looking searchingly into their faces, at the circles beneath their eyes, wondering how they are feeling, what they are going through.

I have always held fast to an idea of myself as a wanderer, a-bit-from-everywhere, and had never before identified strongly with being Arab, but I feel it now. I write to my dear friend Gunstein Bakke, a Norwegian writer, about all this, and he tells me about being in Berlin in 2011 when the terrorist attacks by far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik took place in Norway. “That visceral feeling of being Norwegian, of being hurt, of society as a body in more than a metaphorical sense. Also, that feeling of being in a place not for me as others around me clearly didn’t care all that much about what had happened.” He had been planning to buy a flat in Berlin, but this rupture, he says, made him move back to Oslo and settle down there.

~

In the darkness, I reach for the light. The light is other people. Being with friends makes me feel that I’m real again, flesh and blood again, that there is meaning to be found again, or life to be touched, grief to be held, for now. We cook together, sit and talk, huddle together in the dark—the dark of winter in Berlin, and the winter of this time in the world.

My friend Alia says she has never understood what solidarity really means—until now. I have been thinking about this too. In this ocean of distortion, where one’s extended family is being pulverized, and power—political power, media power, and military might—is leveraged so monstrously in favor of this happening, there is a feeling of enormous thirst. Thirst for truth. For others who can see, clearly, and who decide to speak out. Every show of solidarity makes me feel that I am not insane, that the truth has not been swallowed up by insurmountable odds. Every show of solidarity—public or private, by strangers or friends, in a public statement or a faraway protest or by someone in my own life or on the streets of Berlin—slakes this thirst a little, shores up my own inner reserves a little more. Perhaps this is why I could not abide the equivocations and confusions of my friend J.’s position—I could no longer abide the lies and distortions that made even her, someone like her, unable to see clearly.

My mother calls me, tells me there is hope, that there is a worldwide movement, that something must break. So much has changed in the way I see the world. For some people, including people I once trusted, friends I once held dear, the genocide of Palestinian civilians is something that—though perhaps sad, perhaps regrettable—is happening far away, on a television screen, to people with whom they cannot really relate. It is too uncomfortable to look at; better to turn away and continue in the comfort of one’s position, one’s life.

For many of us, what is happening is existential. It touches and changes everything in our lives. It holds up, to a glaring and unmistakable light, the power structures of the world, and the lengths to which the centers of hegemonic power are willing to go in order to uphold certain narratives and erase others. It is a symbol of all injustice; it speaks to so many other struggles. And it brings us together.

In moments, I feel something deepening inside me, breaking and deepening, connecting to a vast truth of human suffering, and to a deep silence within and beyond it all.

  
VIII.

I wrote much of this essay at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024. So much has happened since, and is continuing to happen. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Encampments at universities across the United States and Europe. In Gaza, the land invasions continue; the decimation by air continues. The massacres continue, one after the other, including in heavily populated areas of displaced people which had been declared safe zones. And in Germany, police violence is escalating to alarming levels, and consequences are still raining down on anybody who speaks out. And though public opinion may be shifting—at a glacial pace—the resounding silence of German society, by and large, continues.

In December, at the Sophiensæle—a venue for performing arts in Berlin—there was a small public discussion of the situation of censorship and cancellations in the art world. Most of the attendees were international artists and cultural workers. They spoke of fear, of silence and intimidation—and also wondered aloud why there were so few white Germans in the room. Finally, a white German man spoke up, saying he understood now something of what his grandparents must have experienced: he understood now what complicity means.

~

In November, at a festival of literary translation in Berlin, I decided to read five poems by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, who lives in Ramallah. These poems were written twenty years ago in the West Bank; I translated them ten years ago. I had no idea how they would be received in this moment in Berlin. But there was a silence, something stretched taut, as Mahmoud’s words crackled through the room:

My friends, faraway and safe
in their houses and streets
their offices and parks
write to me asking:
Are you still alive?

They don’t reply
when they receive
my cryptic response

A few months ago, I would never have imagined that I would be afraid of the—now very real—consequences of writing an essay about Germany. I would not have imagined that I would be worried about reading the words of a poet at a literary festival in Berlin. A poet who speaks of love, of waiting, of overfull ashtrays and rose petals blooming and falling, of a beach chair that he sets up on his balcony because, years ago, he lost his right to see the sea. Of a child about to be born:

Ali fidgets in your womb. We hover around
the swell of the belly and whisper:
don't come out yet
wait until the soldiers
are done with their mission
until the tank clears out
of the way to milk

~

Perhaps if I had written this essay in the early fall of 2023, I would’ve started it with my daily walk along the canal. I would’ve said: there’s a city that I’ve been trying to make a home. The colors are changing now. Just down the road from my apartment is a stretch of the Landwehr canal: a channel of water, flanked by trees, that connects the upper and lower parts of the Spree river, connects the city from east to west. These days, as I walk along the canal, the path is strewn with yellow leaves, and more flutter down from the sky. I watch the Blässhuhner, so beloved to me: Eurasian coots, with their pip-pip-pipping call and yin-yang colors, black bodies and white beaks, a perfect brushstroke of white on their foreheads. I watch the swans that drift past in twos and threes, that gather in larger numbers further down the canal. On a night walk once, I saw a great gathering of them, perhaps thirty or more, in the Dreiländereck, a triangular expanse of water where the three districts of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Treptow meet. They were sleeping, each a few paces away from the next, their heads tucked into their bodies, their long necks rounded and gleaming in the dark. I watched as a middle-aged man approached the barrier, produced a plastic bag from his backpack, and began to throw broken bits of bread into the water. One by one the swans began to wake, an almost imperceptible transfer of information, a ripple of knowing, and to draw to where the food was falling silently into the water. In the distance, I heard police sirens.