I am a Jewish pro-Palestine solidarity activist originally from the New York area and now based in Berlin. My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor from Cologne who fled to the United States during the Second World War at the age of 16. Her parents and much of her family were murdered during the Holocaust. I came “back” to Germany about five years ago, a decision born largely out of the desire for intergenerational healing for me and for my grandmother, who was alive at the time. I learned German and was able to speak to her in her native language in the last few years of her life. I told her stories about living in Germany, she met some of my friends and she was grateful for the ways in which the country and its people had apparently evolved and atoned for their ugly history.

I am glad she died before I had the opportunity to recognise what a naive, idealistic delusion this was.

In the past few years as I have educated myself, become active in the movement for Palestinian liberation and extracted myself from the extreme Zionist conditioning and brainwashing baked into the fabric of my upbringing, my appreciation for German “Erinnerungskultur” (“memory culture”) has steeply devolved into the realisation that the entire concept is pure, empty, self-congratulatory propaganda. It is grounded in the intentional, racist displacement of anti-Semitism and responsibility for the Holocaust from the Germans who perpetuated it to the Arabs, Muslims and, above all, the Palestinians, who they now demonise and scapegoat as a deflection and distraction.

A documentary from 1985, Ma’loul Celebrates Its Destruction, provides an account of the destruction of entire villages during the 1948 Nakba. In it, an interviewer says to a Palestinian man who was displaced: “But they killed six million Jews.” His rightful response is, “Did I kill them? Those who killed them must be held accountable. I haven’t hurt a fly.” The fact that a truth this fundamental has been so deeply buried in the language of “complexity” and “conflict” is a testament to the commitment and breadth of the imperialist narrative disseminated by Israel, the US and Germany (and the West in general). Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of all anti-Semitic incidents in Germany are attributable to the far-right despite the media’s rampant efforts to ignore statistics, skew the reality of the violence and racism directed at Palestinians, and disguise the true apathy towards the so-called “fight against anti-Semitism”.

While actual incidents of anti-Semitism go largely unpunished, those of us standing in solidarity with Palestine are accustomed to brutal, state-sanctioned violence, repression and surveillance from police and the German government in response to peaceful protests and boycotts. This has intensified massively since the genocide in Gaza began in October, regularly under the guise of accusations of anti-Semitism and “Judenhass” (“hatred of Jews”). We are accordingly committed to remaining loud and visible, including through our refusal to be excluded from the fight against rising fascism and the extreme-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD).

On February 3, I attended an anti-AfD demonstration in Berlin as part of the pro-Palestinian bloc with the revolutionary Marxist group Sozialismus von Unten (“Socialism from Below”), in which I am an active........

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