The Left Berlin News & Comment

This is the archive template

Category: Articles

“Documenting resistance to Israeli colonial rule is the core of our work”

Interview with Ahmad Al-Bazz from Activestills Photography Collective Interview, exhibiting from 13th December in Berlin


12/12/2025

Hi Ahmad, thanks for talking to us. Could you start by introducing yourself?

My name is Ahmad Al-Bazz. I’m an independent journalist and photographer based in Nablus City in the area of Palestine called the West Bank. I’ve been a member of the Activestills Photography Collective since 2012.

For people who don’t know Activestills, can you say a little bit about their work?

Activestills is a collective of documentary photographers that was created in 2005, twenty years ago. It has Palestinian members, international members, and those with Israeli citizenship who acknowledge themselves as being part of the settler society.

Activestills came to life when photographers first met in a village of the West Bank called Bilin during the weekly protests against the construction of the Israeli separation wall. They decided to use photography as a medium for political change. This was even before the era of Facebook and Twitter.

They wanted to express their political stance through photography. It started in a tiny village, but it has expanded to include almost everywhere in the area known today as Palestine/Israel.

So it’s not just the West Bank?

Yes, we have members who are in Gaza, the West Bank, and the territory of 1948 Palestine/Israel. It’s completely voluntary. People are committed. They go to the field almost every week.

You’re based in Nablus. For the past two years, we’ve been hearing lots about Gaza but much less about the West Bank

As we are speaking right now, in December 2025, the city of Nablus is a bit quieter than two years ago. This is because the little armed group known as the Lion’s Den, which was formed a couple of years ago  in the city, is almost under control. It was semi-dismantled by both Israel and the PA (Palestinian Authority).

The raids are still happening almost every night, but they are limited to specific neighbourhoods where the Israeli military wants to do specific operations. But they move freely when they come. They enter the old town with undercover units. It is an easy task for them nowadays to enter and leave the city whenever they want.

Nablus and Hebron have the worst restriction of movement, because military gates around Nablus, for example, are always with soldiers checking cars. But there is a kind of a normal life in the daytime.

The district including the villages around Nablus is where the Israeli military has direct control. Israeli settlers live in the district, but not inside the city. This means trouble every single day. West Bank settlers have been increasing their attacks on villagers.

It reached a peak during the olive harvest season. It’s just these local stories here and there in every village where there is an expansion of a settlement. There’s some harassment, some tensions where the Israeli military is building walls. Every day there’s something. Since October 2023, Israeli settlers have completely displaced at least 44 Palestinian little villages in the West Bank, many of which are in Nablus.

What is the audience of Activestills?

Activestills made the decision to publish in English, because we believe this is the international language that will get you the biggest audience. After 20 years, we’re reaching people who are interested in the Palestinian-Israeli question. We also tried to caption some of our work in Arabic and Hebrew, so we get more local views, but we stopped temporarily because of capacity issues.

Is it mainly people who support you or are you also getting pictures to people who disagree with you politically?

We are mainly followed by people on the Palestinian side. Maybe that is natural because the collective has a political stance which attracts those who like that position, and who trust us enough to see more. Those who disagree with us may just follow for the sake of writing provocative opinions in the comments.

Activestills has an exhibition containing some of your works that is coming to Berlin. It was previously in Finland. How did that go?

Finland was in May this year. We have a member who is part-time in Helsinki, who said that there was a good number for such a small city. It’s not Berlin, it’s Helsinki. It also got some media coverage. The assessment was that because of what was happening in Gaza, people were more ready to go to a gallery and check out the photographs. It is also the 20-year anniversary of the collective.

In Berlin, it’s almost the same exhibition, with some little updates from May to December. Some stuff happened in the country. But it’s the same concept and the same theme.

The title of the exhibition is Documenting life, death and resistance in Palestine. What unites these different aspects of the exhibition?

Simply, this is life in Palestine. Our photographers do not approach Palestinians only as victims. Even some activist groups around the world deal with Palestinians by seeing them as victims. Maybe this is a safe, humanitarian point of view.

But Activestills started in a village where there were protests every week. People were clashing with the military, throwing stones. Documenting resistance to Israeli colonial rule is the core of our work. The exhibition is trying to show what’s happening in Gaza now—but also what has happened in the past two decades when the collective has been active.

Many people got introduced to the Palestinian question after October 7. They think it’s a state of war, and once there is no war, everything is kind of fine. We wanted to show them the accumulations that led to this, and to show that this two-year escalation is just part of what’s happening there.

By having a ceasefire, things are not going to be normal again because there is still the daily life of being under Israeli colonial rule in the West Bank, in Gaza and in 1948 Palestine/Israel.

What has changed as a result of the quote-unquote “ceasefire”?

According to our photographers in Gaza, air strikes and bombings are still happening—but at a different frequency. Around 320 people have been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire in October. This shows that the Israeli military is still operating, but they have more specific targets. It’s not the same scale.

Gaza is now divided into two parts. In one part, there is direct control. In the other, they just use air strikes. There are no troops working on the ground. It looks like this is the new style of post war, but we don’t know if this is permanent or just a transitional period.

People are still suffering. Housing units are severely damaged. People are living in tents. Our photographers are still doing the same work. Maybe they have a little bit more freedom to move, but they are still photographing this life of displacement with hardships.

Have you noticed any change in the West Bank?

No. The ceasefire in Gaza does not mean anything in the West Bank. Honestly, there is zero difference between one day before the ceasefire and one day after.

What is the role of photography in the Palestinian struggle? As I understand it, you see yourself more as an activist than a humanitarian.

Some of us see ourselves as activist photographers, some as biased journalists. There are different models. Photography is our tool with which we approach the political question of the country where we live. We aim to highlight what’s happening here. Some people will become aware of what’s happening here. Maybe they will feel attached, or mobilize. We don’t know.

To be honest, there is this sense of disappointment from our profession after the war because we feel that everything is over-documented in the country where we live, and maybe we are privileged compared to other areas where there are conflicts and wars and colonialism. Everything is well-documented, but there is so little change.

Many photographers, including those in Gaza, started developing negative feelings about their profession. They are asking: What else do we need to show for the world to react? What frame did we not have in the last two years? Because everything happened, even things that they never imagined they would photograph in their life because the model of Gaza was too extreme.

At the same time, we realised that this is an emotional moment for photographers who have been working for a while. But our work is kind of cumulative. We never managed to assess what impact we are leaving on people who are seeing our photographs. Political or media work is very long term. You just spread your messages, hoping for people to receive them.

Directly before this interview, I was at a new film about journalists in Gaza and you could sense      a similar conversation going on. It’s not that the world doesn’t know what’s happening in Palestine, but the bombing continues. What motivates you to carry on?

There is nothing else you can do. At university, I dedicated most of my life to media/photography/documentaries. Either you stop or you continue. When I give myself a positive chance to check the impact of my work, by talking to people who have seen it, it gives you that fuel again to continue.

I like what I do and I want to continue until the last day of my life. I should not evaluate it by the impact of the next morning. It’s a very long-term process. It’s part of the struggle, which has been going on for over a hundred years. We have to keep trying. Sometimes, this is the point of our entire life.

Why should people go to the exhibition? What will they get from it?

If you come to the exhibition in Berlin, you will get to see photographs taken by independent photographers on the ground who have their political stance and are delivering their message to you without any censorship by the media agency they are working for. You will get to see photographs from almost everywhere in Palestine/Israel. At the exhibition, people have the chance to chat with some of the photographers involved.

You will also get an idea of how Gaza is just a little part of what’s happening in the entire country. Palestinians in the country live under one system. It may be different in different territories. But Gaza is not the entire question of Palestine, although many people around the world know Gaza only.

I want to highlight that territorially Gaza is just 1% of the area of Palestine/Israel, especially when it comes to the media in Germany, who show a war between two conflicting parties—they depict it as terrorists fighting with a democratic state.

Will you be there yourself?

I’ll be there both for the exhibition and for the launch of my first photo book. The publisher is also coming, and we will have an event for the book on the 14th December. That’s also important for me on a personal level.

Tell us about the book.

It is called The Erasure of Palestine, and it’s the outcome of a three-year photographic trip that I did around the country, especially in the part that was occupied in 1948. This is the main body of the Israeli state today.

I went around dozens of these depopulated villages and neighbourhoods of the cities where Israel was established after displacing their residents. It includes Yafa—which is Tel Aviv today—Haifa, the villages around Yafa, the villages in the North, and the villages around Gaza. I wanted to highlight that displacement and the displacement that is happening now. And by now I mean 2022, 2023, 2024.

I was documenting the past and the present at the same time, to try and show that this is an ongoing process that has never stopped. I was arguing that if you want to understand the West Bank and Gaza, you need to start at least from 1948.

You need to understand why Gaza became a strip of refugees where 80% of the population are displaced people from where Tel Aviv and Israeli settlements are located today. This includes the areas where the Palestinian fighters attacked on October 7.

The book could be used as a POV lens to understand Gaza and what’s happening there. You can never start from 2023 or 2007. You need to understand the dynamic there, between the two sides of the fence of Gaza, the colonized and the colonizer.

And copies of the book will be available at the exhibition and at the launch meeting?

Copies will be available and some photographs from the book will be in one corner. The structures that remain in these towns and cities are quite shocking. Many people who only focus on the West Bank and Gaza will be shocked when they see a Palestinian mosque in today’s Tel Aviv. Many people ask me: Why is there a mosque in central Tel Aviv?

Then you tell them that 98% of the Palestinian Arab population of Yafa and its surroundings – which is today’s Tel Aviv – were displaced. And they ask you: Where did they go? And you say, mostly to refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and that’s how Gaza was shaped.

This period of the Palestinian-Israeli question is being neglected on purpose. I think I know the reasons behind that, and that’s what I wanted to highlight in my book. And now, because of what’s happening in Gaza, I’m using that book to try and understand Gaza.

And the displacement of Yafa is still continuing through gentrification and “restoration” of buildings.

It’s still going on because those Palestinians who stayed in Yafa—and we are talking about under 3,000 Palestinians from 120,000,under 2%—were put in ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. And now, after 77 years of that displacement, Israel is coming to the owners and telling them that they are living in public housing and they need to leave for development projects.

People who understand the policy in question know that the core of this is displacement. Israel is just approaching Palestinians to relocate them using different pretexts. But they all lead to the same results—moving them to the smallest piece of land and giving the rest to Israeli settlers.

The Yafa people of Gaza used to live in Jabalia refugee camp. They had the Yafa neighbourhood. And that entire refugee camp was erased. You can see nothing of it today. That’s why people don’t connect. They don’t understand that those in Gaza are the owners of the land of parts of today’s Tel Aviv. They have been pressured and squeezed in that ghetto called Gaza Strip since 1948.

This is what we try as photographers to highlight, by showing what’s happening in Yafa, in Gaza, and in the West Bank, and sometimes in the diaspora camps in Lebanon and Jordan. We try to put it that way, visually.The Activestills exhibitionDocumenting life, death and resistance in Palestineruns from Saturday, 13th December until Saturday 14th February at Villa Heike, Freienwalderstraße 17. On Sunday 14th December at 7pm, Ahmad will be presenting his book The Erasure of Palestine, also at Villa Heike.

Photo Gallery – The Left Berlin End of Year Party 2025

5th December, Linienstraße 206


11/12/2025

12 December 2019: The CAA-NRC fiasco in India

This week in working class history


10/12/2025

In this week in 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed through both houses of the Indian Parliament amidst strong backlash in the capital, New Delhi. Taken together with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), the Act is widely seen as a direct contravention of the “secular” ideals laid out in the Indian Constitution, as it makes it particularly difficult for Muslim refugees and asylum seekers to obtain Indian citizenship.

The bill was announced in August 2019 alongside the infamous abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A, which had previously accorded special domicile powers to Kashmir, a region militarily occupied by the Indian state since independence. The events of August 2019 acted as a lightning rod for Hindutva rhetoric to be put into legislative action by the ruling BJP, which had once again secured a parliamentary majority only a few months earlier.

The CAA guarantees citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh if they arrived in India by 2014, with eligible minorities limited to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians. The deliberate omission of Muslims—who constitute the majority of refugees arriving from these countries—marks the first time religion was explicitly used as a criterion for Indian citizenship. The codified discrimination becomes clearer when considered alongside the NRC: a project the government still intends to implement. The NRC would centrally filter out undocumented residents, and since no single document (not even a passport) definitively proves Indian citizenship, applying the CAA to NRC “defaulters” would theoretically result in a disproportionate expulsion of underprivileged Muslims.

The CAA and the proposed NRC sparked a wave of protests across India, with New Delhi at the forefront. The protests were led by students and the working class. A significant face of the Delhi protests were Muslim women from Shaheen Bagh, who were relentlessly maligned by the media and the government, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. State repression followed swiftly, manifesting in internet shutdowns, army deployment, university raids, arrests—and ultimately contributing to the North-East Delhi riots of February 2020. The protests were unfortunately curtailed in March 2020 as COVID-19 restrictions came into force, but their spirit shook the state.

A nationwide NRC is yet to be conducted, and if it ever is, it will surely be met with mass resistance.

Red Flag: Kids in Germany strike against conscription

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin looks at school strikes in 90 cities against militarism.


Protest Wehrpflicht

Last Friday, the German Bundestag voted on steps toward reactivating compulsory military service, which has been paused since 2011. A few hours later, young people in 90 German cities went on strike—according to organizers, it was 55,000 total.

Of the 596 “representatives of the people” who voted, 323 said “Ja” to a new draft—despite one recent survey showing 63 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds are opposed. Bourgeois democracy at work!

This is not yet conscription. Starting in 2026, all 18-year-old men will be required to fill out a survey and take a physical exam. They will then be offered enormous benefits to sign up for the Bundeswehr. Starting pay is €2,600 per month—and since soldiers pay lower taxes and insurance contributions, they can take home €2,300 or €2,400. Additional perks include free driving school and free benefits on the train. In vocational programs, in contrast, 18-year-olds often have to survive on just a few hundred euros per month. The German government claims there is no money to pay nurses, day care workers, or bus drivers—but somehow there is limitless money for soldiers.

They hope to expand the army to 270,000 soldiers via voluntary enlistment—and if they fail to reach that number, they can start press-ganging young men. Given the enormous unpopularity of the measure before it’s even started, it likely won’t take long until Zwang (force) is introduced.

Fight for what?

At the demonstrations on Friday, young people were clear: If Merz is so enthusiastic, he can go to the front himself.

One young person got to ask Merz directly on TV: “Why should I fight for a country that  doesn’t give me the feeling that it’s fighting for me?” He mentioned the cancellation of the Kulturpass and rising prices for train travel.

Merz could only offer dumb patriotic clichés: “We are one of the most beautiful countries in the world!” Merz could ask the more than one million people without a home how beautiful Germany seems to them. Even though he seems to believe that there is no homelessness in Germany.

This demand to “serve your country” comes after decades of neoliberalism. A generation of people have been raised with the message that they are on their own. The state doesn’t care if they freeze to death on the street. Yet now they are supposed to sacrifice? For what? In a moment of unintentional comedy, “service” is being pushed by shamelessly corrupt politicians like Jens Spahn, who “serve” only to line their pockets.

If Merz were interested in “defending” young people, he could build affordable housing. The Bundeswehr’s most recent missions included occupying Afghanistan and Mali. Who or what was being protected there? According to disgraced former president Horst Köhler, the German military was protecting “free trade routes.” Köhler had to resign for accidentally telling the truth. 

Into the trenches

When news of Donald Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine leaked, German arms manufacturers and politicians needed a neologism for what they were feeling: Friedensangst or “fear of peace.” A cessation of hostilities would be terrible for Rheinmetall’s profits. European governments have been doing everything they could to prolong the fighting.

Over three quarters of Ukrainians want to see the conflict frozen, according to one poll, and hundreds of thousands of young people are fleeing the country to avoid conscription. But Europe’s imperialist powers are determined to fight to the last Ukrainian. So young men are being kidnapped off the streets and forced into the trenches—even as they see that this is not about protecting their families, but rather about protecting capitalist profits.

To be honest, I was expecting even more kids on the streets last Friday, given the widespread antimilitarist sentiment. But I think lots of young people do not yet believe that the bourgeoisie is serious about waging new wars. It doesn’t help that you have pedantic bootlickers saying: this isn’t yet compulsory military service! Yes, this is just the organizational preparations for conscription.  

The German bourgeoisie has waged two world wars, and they have never paid for their crimes. They are coming for our kids—and we need to help our kids stop them.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

Why won’t my German friends and colleagues speak up against Israel’s war crimes in Gaza?

An outsider’s (perplexed) perspective. The article which the taz never published


09/12/2025

Editor’s Note: In December, 2023, taz was supposed to publish this article by Nadja Vancauwenberghe. Nadja has submitted the article to taz twice. The second time the Berlin editorial board reached out, and expressly asked for it, the journalist even called her to say that they would like to publish it ASAP.

The article was never published. Instead, Nadja received a message saying: “we were agreeing with you on the same points, but we think right now it is not a good move to publish it.” Two years on, it appears that they have still not found the right time.

Although over 80% of Germans have consistently opposed Germany sending weapons to Israel, and increasing numbers of people have demonstrated for Palestine, the press is still playing a craven role. As an attempt to counter this, we are publishing Nadja’s article on theleftberlin.com

As a foreign Berlinerin with 20-plus years’ experience reporting about this city (I founded Exberliner magazine and ran its editorial for 21 years), I’m currently finding Germany increasingly difficult to understand. The German government’s zeal to support Israel “unconditionally” and oppose any ceasefire is one thing. But what is more disturbing: this mind-boggling blanket pro-Israel consensus in society at large, and among my colleagues in the German media.

It’s not that the debate is polarised, as it is in my native France (where a conservative ex-foreign minister has joined the radical Left to condemn Israel, and toxic domestic politics have hijacked the issue). Here, there’s just NO debate. Friends and colleagues whom I’d usually have an open and rational conversation with — including on the once ‘progressive’ Left — won’t discuss anything past Israel’s  “right to self defence”.

If you dispute the disproportionate way Netanyhu has been retaliating to the October 7th Hamas attacks, or show empathy for the deaths in Gaza — or if you just point to the unsustainability for Israel’s long-term security of a policy based on military violence, they end a conversation that will never happen with an opaque but authoritative: “It’s complicated,” before pleading the amount of historical knowledge one would have to acquire in order to express an informed opinion. “You know, there’s too much context,” concluded my German friend as an explanation for why she wouldn’t dream of joining a pro-cease-fire Demo with her many international and arabic friends.

But how “complicated” is it, really, to acknowledge that killing 18,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including a huge proportion of children and babies, is outrageously wrong and should stop? (In two months, Netanyahu has managed to kill twice as many civilians as Putin did in 22 months, feeding accusations elsewhere in the world about double standards.)

What “context” does one need to oppose the indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, schools and refugee camps, the murder of at least 70 journalists (most recently Al Jazeera reporter Samer Abudaqa) and over 130 UN agencies workers, the blockade of food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance – all acts the UN defines as war crimes and “likely genocide in the making”?

And what “context” did my German friend mean anyway? Could it be Israel’s violation of international law with its settlements in the occupied West Bank and the subsequent desperation of a people living in ghetto-like conditions and subjected to an Apartheid regime on their own land? This is not my opinion, by the way, but the unequivocal verdict of the UN’s rapporteur on Palestine last spring. But what does the UN know? Or Udi Raz, the Jewish tour guide at the Jewish Museum of Berlin, who got fired for using the “A-word” to describe the situation in her native country. She’s from Haifa. But Germany knows better. Here using words such as “genocide”, “ghetto” or “appartheid” is considered surreptitiously “antisemitic”. 

Antisemitism: hidden and everywhere

For the past two months the German media has been filled with articles about antisemitism. Kultursenator Joe Chialo’s resolve to crack down not only on “Jede Form von Antisemitismus” but “jede versteckte Form von Antisemitismus” (“Every form of antisemitism, including hidden forms of antisemitism”) has become the editorial order of the day, no matter how politically slippery the resolve to fight a “hidden” and loosely defined opinion crime. But, dutiful, the German press set itself to track down those hidden “antisemites” and found them everywhere you wouldn’t suspect: in the climate movement, among those art-scene interlopers, and of course all over the left-wing post-colonial and pro-Palestinian demonstrations (filled with violent and dangerous “Islamists”, hence a good reason to ban them or restrict them, which can only backfire considering Berlin has Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora).

Only in Germany could the “serious” media get so worked up about Greta Thunberg’s octopus toy and its “hidden antisemitic message” — and launch a massive character assassination campaign on this former media darling. By German standards, not only are Greta and the UN antisemitic, but also quite a few Jews in town — like the “Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost”. Working with Jewish Israel-critics can even cost you public funding as the Oyoun Cultural Centre found out — all in the name of Germany’s fight against antisemitism.

This has been going hand in hand with editors’ inclination to frame any news item in support of the antisemitism narrative. Recently a survey about intolerance — sexism, homo/transphobia, racism and above all Muslimophobia among Berliners ran in a local daily under the misleading headline “Antisemitism on the rise in Berlin!”, yet the findings showed much lower negative attitudes towards Jews compared to Arabs and Muslims (a staggering 54 percent consider Islam backward and incapable of adapting).

Selective solidarity

In these McCarthyist conditions, exhibiting “solidarity” has become an imperative. Solidarity with Israel and with Jews that is, in shocking disregard of the 18,000 Palestinians who’ve died since October 7. Take the open letter by over 50 of Germany and Austria’s leading filmmakers of the German Film association: published after a full month of bombing of Palestinians in Gaza: it doesn’t include a single compassionate word for the Palestinians. “Not the letter we needed” complained the Jewish film academic Marc Siegel who made a strong case for “those of us (Jews) who view the greatest threat to our security in the stifling of public expression of solidarity with Palestine; the silencing of debate and discussion about the aberrations of German memory culture…”. 

Recently, the Berlin-based Syrian-Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun shared his sadness on how not a single fellow German writer protested the cancellation of his latest book’s release event at the Haus für Poesie. “Only my Jewish friends” showed solidarity, he said. 

Another shocking example was when last Sunday I accompanied a friend to Sunday service in a pretty presbyterian church on the western edge of Berlin; there, a young, friendly minister dedicated his sermon to “victims of war. All  victims of war,” he made the emphasis with cherubic sincerity. “The innocent victims in Ukraine, but let us not forget the Syrian people.” Obviously there were no more topical examples he could come up with. Palestinians were never mentioned.

No dissident Jews allowed

In Germany, Jewish militants from organisations like Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost — who are campaigning together with Palestinians for a cease-fire and a political solution that respects the rights of all peoples living there — are considered ‘antisemitic’ and boycotted by the media.

“They don’t want Jews to criticise Israel,” says Iris Hefets. The Berlin psychotherapist and Israeli Jewish activist was recently disinvited from a debate on Deutschland Rundfunk, “They’re scared of losing their job,” she says about journalists here. “I was interviewed by the media from Korea, France, Greece, all over! Here, we’re boycotted.” Udi Raz met a similar fate: his interview with Zeit never got published. Both get invited to panels and talks all over — not here.

Few local dissident Jewish voices managed to break the silence. The famous US-German author Deborah Feldman did and when she complained that anyone who criticises the German response to the Hamas attack is being silenced and discredited, that is pretty much what happened to her — her voice replaced “by the louder ones of Germans whose Holocaust-guilt complexes cause them to fetishise Jewishness to the point of obsessive-compulsive embodiment.”

Meanwhile the foreign media has started taking notice. Masha Gessen’s takedown on Germany’s memory culture “gone haywire” in The New Yorker in December was read, shared and commented all over. Not by my German colleagues. Or if they did, it was to dismiss.

Zooming out: International Isolation and discredit

This failure of the ‘fourth estate’ in its mission to impartially inform is a danger for a functioning democracy. If we, journalists, aren’t here to do our job — see through the ideological fog and raise the alarm, who will?

Of course there are (few) exceptions. Colleagues like taz’s Daniel Bax have clearly and articulately exposed the reality of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Germany’s guilty support of them. Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Sonja Zekri has cautiously but surely brought up the sore issues and given a platform to those dissentive voices silenced or dismissed in other media (such as Deborah Feldman and Mascha Gessen). But this only reinforces my feeling of perplexity: if they can analyse the situation so well, why aren’t their colleagues able to do the same?

And I wonder: do the Germans read the foreign press? Do they have access to social media, where Israel’s war crimes are broadcasted on a quasi live basis? Do they realise how isolated Germany is in its obstinate support of Israel? What an unpopular minority position when four out of five countries in the world voted in favour of an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the UN General Assembly in November?

While mainstream news outlets from CNN to Al Jazeera, dailies from The New York Times to Ha’aretz report about Israeli’s crimes, the German media’s (self) censorship

is not just unprofessional and damaging for journalism credibility. This inability to see beyond one’s own historical circumstances and to adequately respond to a tragedy in the making ultimately damages Germany’s credibility on the world stage.

At home: a dangerous conflation

Meanwhile, under this blanket ideological conformism, a realignment of alliances is underway: in a staggering reversal of political allegiances and traditions, the far-right has strategically positioned itself as a champion of the Jews, while pro-Palestinian leftists are vilified as supportive of terrorism or antisemites — a well-known trope of the Springer Right that seems to have infected the progressive media. In a country obsessed with the Holocaust, being castigated as “antisemitic” is a sentence to political death. Meanwhile the Alternative for Germany  (AfD) has jumped on the bandwagon as an unconditional champion of Israel — in line with the rest of the German political establishment, including the governing Social Democrats and the Greens. Here, like everywhere in Europe, the populist far-right is buying itself a new respectability over its performative fight against antisemitism. The risk of trivialising antisemitism is real — as Europe as a whole, and this country of all places, seem increasingly happy to adopt the AFD’s notion of “imported antisemitism” to advance an anti-immigrant agenda.

There’s no shortage of eminent voices including among Jewish Holocaust scholars warning us of the dangers of this weaponisation of the Jewish cause; for Israelis and their future; and for our democracies.