This article is part of the dossier “What is to be Done?“, edited by Himmat Zoubi and Diana Abbani. The dossier, explores the role of academic, artistic, activist, and media practices amid ongoing genocide and the possibilities for action, solidarity, and resistance in Germany and beyond.
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It is a cold, rainy day, and I am hurrying over to a bus station next to the university campus where I teach to reach Berlin’s Central Train Station on time. Luckily, the bus station is close by, and after two minutes of walking, I arrive. Suddenly, a vehicle stops abruptly in front of the station.
It appears as if the van is out of fuel; it is not the city bus, but a private cleaning company service van. A man steps out in a hurry. It is unusual for a vehicle to park at a bus stop. Its unusualness and unexpectedness caught those waiting for the bus off guard, including me. The driver sharply diagnoses the station’s glass panes, turns his head up towards the time screen, and then adjusts his neck and head posture to check the ceiling as if he is looking for someone or something specific dangling from it.
It turns out that he is looking for pro-Palestinian stickers and posters. The unexpected action made me wonder why someone would want to make sure to remove Palestinian posters and erase their traces.
Graffiti writing and stickering as a game of (in)visibility
Authorities’ removing graffiti, stickers and other related forms of self- and collective expression is no exception in street art politics. It is a game, as graffiti writers and muralists describe it, where what is written, pasted or stencilled on the wall is ephemeral. If not the authorities, then ‘ordinary people’ would tear their opponents’ stickers off or cover their graffiti writings by spraying or splashing paint or stickering over them, crossing them out, adding a word or a symbol to alter the meaning to their favour.
For instance, many Israel supporters add “from Hamas” to “Free Palestine” [Fig. 3], or draw a ‘triangle’ on top of an already painted ‘flipped triangle’ to form the Star of David instead of Hamas’ inverted red triangle (IRT) icon.
Palestine supporters might also put a stickered watermelon over the word “Fuck”, leaving only “Hamas,” or merging the Star of David into the Swastika to create a parallel between Zionism and Nazism – a design of the Lebanese typographer Pascal Zoghbi.
Zoghbi’s design is widely seen in Germany through the murals of Musa La Rage . This process of removal, covering, editing, and commenting on each other—especially on the Palestinian side, whose voice is contested in Germany—reflects broader issues of visibility and grievability. These scriptural and visual acts serve as crucial diaries for understanding resistance and solidarity at a time when pro-Palestinian voices are not only underrepresented in German and Western European media and art galleries, but also suppressed on social media by pro-Israel actors. This includes Instagram “civil watch” accounts dedicated to pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian graffiti in Berlin, whose users even tag Interpol in the comment sections of Palestinian posts.
These practices take particularity in Germany, especially in Berlin, where we see that street forms of solidarity with Palestine are not only removed by pro-Israel supporters but also by the German police, whose brutality goes beyond the dimensions of legality.
How can we understand this act of contracting a worker to “clean the station”? How does this “cleaning process” relate to Germany’s stance on Palestinian solidarity against the Israeli occupation?
Since 2008, Germany has declared unconditional support for Israel as part of its Staatsräson (the Reason of State). This political philosophy is based on the promise of “Nie Wieder” (Never Again) to address and honour the cultural memory of the six million European Jews who were killed during the Holocaust by the Nazis.
Accordingly, any debate about Jewish people, Israel and Zionism must go through this canon.
Resisting the guilt and extending griveability
Nevertheless, Palestinian street solidarity resists this reasoning. Aesthetically, the place chosen for stickers, graffiti writing, and painting is not solely a matter of visibility – a spot visible to people as they stand (bus station), enter (public toilet) or walk from one point to another, and preferably higher so that Israel supporters and the police do not remove it– but also of meaningfulness [Fig. 4].
For instance, many posters were hung on the East Side Gallery Wall from the river’s side (home to a few graffiti pieces and white canvases), while the names (and stickers) of Gaza and Palestine are displayed on the other side of the wall, facing the street (home to commissioned murals exhibited for tourists). Graffiti of “Free Gaza” can also be seen on the Berliner Mauer at Bernauer Straße, where parts of the separating wall are still standing with memorials, notices, looped short videos of patrolling soldiers, and pictures of the people who were killed by GDR guards while escaping from East to West Germany.
These official walls are for ‘learning’ about a dark part of German history as well as grieving the bodies and souls of those who passed away by seeing their pictures, reading their names and watching videos of East German Wall guards patrolling [Fig. 5].
Spraying Palestine or Gaza on the Berlin Wall challenges the scholarship that (Western) history has ended with the fall of the German wall, and it places Palestine alongside Germany’s own history of separation, remembrance and guilt.
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History continues in Palestine. The graffiti of Palestine on the Wall memorial shows a parallel present-day Palestinian reality, which tourists would neither find informative signs on nor see in the various museums dedicated to human suffering and wall separation. Similar writing can also be found on parts of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamerplatz, where someone wrote “Palästina” twice below the metal sign of information, entitled “Dennkmal Mauer – The Wall as a Monument,” making the wall not solely a historical landmark of the past, but also a symbol of the actual wall of apartheid built by Israel in Palestine [Fig. 6].
These graffiti on the Wall of Berlin, and memorial sites extend “grievability” to Palestinians at a time when Israel has made trauma a weapon of war and while coverage of the Palestinian genocide in mainstream Western media coverage has been tightly policed and increasingly racialised.
The police as the new church
Pro-Palestinian expressions are often interpreted as antisemitic, pro-Hamas and terrorist, or at least aggressive. Germany’s practice of accusing Palestine supporters of antisemitism is a political move. Germany has long tried to de-Nazify its image to the world by organising the World Cup of 2006 and introducing the Erinnerungskultur (Culture of Remembrance) to address the Holocaust and the inhumane and unjustifiable killing of the Jewish population.
This culture of remembrance and political policy to acknowledge what the Nazis did to the Jews translates into the state’s reason as a guarantor of Jewish safety in Occupied Palestine (and elsewhere). This policy of guilt and remembrance has implicitly made the Palestinian statehood and right to return for refugees against the guilty German project of self-cleansing.
This double standard does not solely appear in the brutal police intervention, defamatory anti-Muslim and anti-Arab speech in newspapers (labelling pro-Palestinian students “Jewish haters” (Juden-Hasser), cancelling artists and the removal of solidarity aesthetics, but also shows in the reinterpretation of solidarity expressions in order to whitewash their Nazi legacy.
As an example, the debate on the use of the inverted red triangle by Palestinian supporters was triggered by local media and politicians, referring to the symbol as a “Nazi reference.” Also, a doctoral student who was holding a poster reading “NEVER AGAIN” was arrested by thirteen police officers and had their poster confiscated, accusing the student of another “Again,” a reference to Nazi-camps and the “extermination” of Jewish people [Fig. 7].
Another colleague had notified the student that the police might have a Nazi-focused interpretation based on reading the Palestinian Question through anti-Semitic German history. To avoid that, the student added “never again for everyone” in the margin of the poster. However, the police refused to accept any interpretation other than their own.
Policing aesthetics and criminalising symbols
What role do aesthetics play in a German context characterised by official support to Israel, its Staatsräson and Nie Wieder? How do the aesthetic forms of solidarity with Palestine interplay with Germany’s history and denounce its complicity with genocide? In other words, how does ‘wall washing’ relate to ‘self-cleansing’ and ‘whitewashing’?
Most police “interpretation” of pro-Palestinian signs do not happen on site, for it is already based on a textbook against anti-Semitic symbols and signs, titled “Leitfaden Zum Erkennen Antisemitischer Straftaten” (Guide to recognising antisemitic crimes) [1]. Among the many Palestinian signs, the textbook considers anti-Semitic, the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions), Handhala (signifier of Palestinian personhood, displacement and exiled childhood), the key (the right to return), and Palestinian visual symbols of solidarity and resistance are put in a booklet next to fascist and Nazi signs.
Each symbol has a small text ideologically changing its meaning to make it “anti-Jew.” For instance, for Handhala, the textbook reads that this icon is “a comic book character meant to symbolise the supposedly defenceless Palestinians. [Instead,] The comics advocate violent action against Israel.”
In reality, Handhala was originally designed by Palestinian caricaturist Naji al-Ali (1938-1987), whom Israel assassinated in London, which the textbook does not mention. As for “Intifada until victory,” it reads that “the first (1987) and second (2000) Intifada were violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel. The slogan heard at anti-Israel demonstrations implies the annihilation of the State of Israel.”
This booklet was published in December 2021, and its captions are the same as those of the police, showing how ideological interpretations are supported and enacted by law against others.
Colourful rage
The Guide to Recognizing Antisemitic Crimes was published in 2021 and does not include the watermelon or the inverted red triangle, which are also treated as antisemitic by German police. Its symbolism, however, was born out of colonial artistic censorship.
Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (b. 1947) explains that the idea of watermelon came from Israeli soldiers, who, in 1981, interrogated Mansour and two of his colleagues about why they were doing political art instead of painting ‘nice women,’ ‘nude figures,’ and ‘nice flowers,’ which they would buy from them, the police added.
“The flag was forbidden, and so were the colours, which is why we, as artists, were not allowed to use these colours. One of our friends, Issam, started arguing with the authority person, asking him what he would do if he made a flower but with those colours. The soldier became angry, saying that ‘even if it is a watermelon, we will take it and confiscate it. Do not do anything in these [red, black and green] colours.’”
On the one hand, the watermelon sign offers a new language of solidarity—one charged with joy rather than with the sorrow of the Nakba and other classical symbols that embody affective sadness. This fruit symbol reflects the spirit of resilience that has accompanied solidarity protests, offering, at the same time, new possibilities to express support in places where the icon of Handhala is considered antisemitic [Fig. 8].
This builds on the existing presence of the watermelon as a summer decorative motif—seen on ice creams, umbrellas, earrings, and many other objects—thereby challenging German censorship of solidarity with Palestine and embodying resistance itself.
On the other hand, the adoption of the inverted red triangle in protests and graffiti around the world, including in Germany, can be interpreted in two different ways.
First, the red triangle serves as a symbol of empowerment and a reclaimed emblem for most Palestinian supporters, who use such symbols to express solidarity and to symbolically challenge Israeli genocide and Western complicity.
Second, when a red triangle is painted on the walls of campuses or newspaper buildings, the authorities experience it as if it were written on their own bodies—turning graffiti into a physical act. If the (German) state uses law and policing to inscribe its power onto pro-Palestinians, by prohibiting some protests, banning the use of Arabic language in demonstrations and using violence against protestors, for example, then marking a “place of meaning” (memorial wall) or “place of authority” (police station)—even by simply writing a word (Free Palestine) or symbol (inverted triangle) of defiance on its walls—becomes, in turn, a way of writing back onto the body of that authority [Fig. 9].
In his book The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, Frank Stern explains how “Germany — striving for sovereignty and integration into the West — was able to instrumentalise philosemitism in its domestic and foreign policy as well as a moral stance against local, deeply rooted antisemitic rightwing extremism.”
On the one hand, Palestinian solidarity bothers Germany because it always makes the state feel guilty twice; Palestinians are paying for what the Germans did to the Jewish people. On the other hand, the visibility of the Palestinian struggle and the existence of the Palestinian people with their claim to land make the post-Holocaust Jewish success incomplete. Therefore, being genocidal and complicit with the extermination of the Palestinians seems to be a ‘moral salvation’ for Israel and Germany.
The elimination of the Palestinian people would make the former’s guilt vanish (or evaporate) and make the Zionist project successful as a story of survival.
In this sense, Sami Khatib reminds us that the pseudo-question “Do you condemn Hamas?” becomes equivalent to “do you support the Western world order, its ruling ideology (Human Rights Discourse), and do you condemn the entire spectrum of Palestinian resistance, from peaceful boycotts to the Hamas attacks of October 7?” In other words, “Palestinians should accept their colonial subjugation, should not resist, and should, ideally, disappear and with them the annoyance of the Palestinian question.”
The aesthetics and writing of remembrance and solidarity of Palestine in Germany demonstrate the limits and double standards of German remembrance culture and solidarity. It shows how condemning genocide and the killing of civilians is manufactured in accordance with ideological motivations to justify one’s own history, where some humans and bodies are seen as not worthy of life because one decides to.
