***

Watch the Video

The post Video: Steps appeared first on Untold.

***

For decades, and particularly over the past two years, analyses of Western mainstream media coverage have highlighted a predominance of Israeli narratives. This pattern appears in the decontextualisation of events and in language choices that shape perceptions of Palestinians, like using passive language when describing their death, as Palestinians merely “die” as if by accident and unrelated to the violence that kills them.

In another example, Palestinian children are sometimes referred to as ‘people under 18’ rather than as children, which might not reflect their actual vulnerability in their childhood. This type of reporting can reflect a broader political framing, captured in the concept of ‘unchilding’, developed by Palestinian scholar from Haifa, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian as she describes how Israel’s military regime strips Palestinian children of their childhood.

“Unchilding” is the eviction of children from childhood for political goals, removing them from the realm of childhood, positioning them as threats to be controlled, criminalised, or eliminated, thus enabling and justifying violence and oppression against them. 

For almost two years of intense Israeli attacks on Gaza, the mainstream media have focused on the general human toll of Palestinian lives without depth. Coverage diverts attention to political actors, while the daily suffering of millions of Palestinians receives limited attention. Palestinians are reduced to numbers, erased of names and faces, and historical context is systematically ignored, with the occupation, apartheid, and foundational trauma of the Nakba absent from the coverage.  

This article seeks to examine how Palestinians have used social media as a tool of activism to document realities on the ground and challenge dominant media narratives. It also explores the systematic digital censorship they face, the infrastructure behind that suppression, and the pressing questions for the future of Palestine’s digital memory.

Digital Censorship: “We Went Back a Million Steps”

Social media has the potential to be a powerful tool for empowerment and resistance. challenging biased narratives about Palestinians in Western mainstream news outlets; however, it still faces systematic censorship, especially when it comes to Palestinian voices and content.

In a conversation with Jalal Abu Khater, Advocacy Director at the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media-7amleh, he explains how, during Israel’s 2021 invasion of the Palestinian city of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and the brutal war against Gaza, Palestinians witnessed a collective power that manifested in a wave of social media activism, which began on TikTok, where videos documenting scenes of resilience and solidarity went viral. This TikTok wave revealed the power of digital platforms to amplify the voice of Palestinians and reclaim the Palestinian narrative.

This momentum was quickly followed by increased censorship and suppression, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, where Palestinian content was consistently hidden, deleted, or shadow banned. Palestinians living in the 1948 territories also faced arrests, intimidation, and surveillance by Israeli forces, with task forces targeting those who used social media to speak out. 

A report published by 7amleh examines the impact of biometric monitoring and digital surveillance in Jerusalem through interviews with Palestinian Jerusalemites. Those interviewed reported that Israeli CCTV and digital surveillance increased following the violence in April and May of 2021. This intensified monitoring has severely undermined Palestinians’ civil and political rights, restricting their movement, violating their privacy, and limiting their freedom of expression both online and offline.

Describing the current state of censorship, Abu Khater says, “We went back a million steps.” Since October 7, efforts to restrain censorship of pro-Palestinian content have seen a sharp decline, despite prior pressure on large digital companies and their pledges not to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Meta platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, have reimposed restrictive practices, monitoring and suppressing pro-Palestinian content, with content being systematically removed, shadow banned, or hidden, even when it included common language such as the word “Palestine”. 

Palestinians living within the 1948 territories face a multilayered form of censorship that includes a lack of digital safety, intensified surveillance, and systematic intimidation. There are Israeli task forces dedicated to monitoring and targeting those who use social media to speak out, leading to arrests, threats, and ongoing harassment.

In contrast, as Abu Khater explains, hate speech in Hebrew, often targeted at Palestinians, continued to spread almost freely without any significant censorship. On March 12, 2025, 7amleh released its annual report, Racism and Incitement 2024, documenting an alarming increase in digital hate speech and incitement against Palestinians, particularly on X (previously Twitter) and Facebook. According to the findings, 12,482,041 pieces of content in Hebrew, identified as violent or hateful, were documented throughout 2024, demonstrating the increasing use of digital spaces as tools for hostility and incitement.

Recent reports by DropSite News have confirmed long-standing concerns raised by 7amleh indicating a high rate of content removal requests from Israeli authorities and a corresponding suppression of pro-Palestinian content on Meta platforms. Leaked internal data reveals that since October 7, 2023, Meta has complied with 94% of Israeli government takedown requests, leading to over 90,000 removals and the suppression of tens of millions more through automated systems. 

With social media having the potential to be a tool for empowerment and resistance, in reality it still faces coordinated attempts to silence Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, which is alarming. However, many Pro-Palestinian social media users have found creative ways to bypass censorship, which was intensified when speaking politics, often by tricking the algorithm with coded language by swapping letters for numbers and symbols, like “G@za” or “P@l3st1ne”, or by mixing English with Arabic letters, while many use other symbols and emojis like the watermelon emoji, which has become a global symbol of Palestinian solidarity. 

Seeing Gaza Through The Eyes of Palestinians

In Gaza, Palestinians have used platforms like Instagram and TikTok to document the destruction, hunger, and loss, exposing atrocities that might otherwise be buried beneath the headlines. At the same time, they shared moments of resilience, community, and fleeting joy, putting a human face to statistics and reminding the world that behind every number is a life. 

Fatima Hassouna, a photographer and storyteller, once wrote on her social media: “If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just breaking news or a number in a group; I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.”

Tragically, in April 2025, Fatima and ten family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their home in northern Gaza.

Since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, many Palestinian voices on social media have gained hundreds of thousands of followers, building strong connections with audiences worldwide. One powerful example is Bisan Owda, whose videos provide firsthand accounts from Gaza and have become a key source of information for international audiences. As one of the key voices recording this genocide, Bisan won the News and Documentary Emmy Awards for her work, which became a symbol of activism and survival. In her own words, Bisan highlights how, despite attempts to silence Palestinians, those telling their own stories can now reach the world through multiple means of broadcasting.

Other content creators, such as ten-year-old Renad Atallah, offered a different glimpse into life under siege and war. Renad, who dreams of becoming a professional chef, shares videos of herself preparing “donated” food outside her family’s tent. Despite the brutal conditions around her, she smiles as she demonstrates how to cook her favorite dishes with the limited ingredients available.

On another front, journalists and citizen journalists are on-the-ground witnesses who have taken it upon themselves to document the horrors of genocide as it unfolds. Through their lenses, they are archiving, documenting truth, exposing injustice, and demanding that the world bear witness.

This is not an attempt to romanticize the tragedy or soften the brutality of war. Rather, it is a reflection on the complexity and depth of Palestinian life, shared by Palestinians themselves, on their own terms. While mainstream media often frames Palestinians through the lens of “conflict” and “complexity”, Palestinians on social media show themselves simply and powerfully: raw, unfiltered, and undeniably human. They are not statistics. They are not political talking points. They are simply humans! 

Over the past two years, despite the systemic censorship, these digital spaces have made Palestinians more visible, creating a sense of collective intimacy and shared burden that connects people worldwide in solidarity with Palestine. Social media has become a platform for real-time updates and human connection, driving global empathy and fueling activism that has translated into boycott campaigns, student encampments across the United States, and calls for justice, an end to violence, and long-term structural change. Much of this momentum has been driven by Gen Z.

In his study “Connecting the Dots: How Gen-Z Is Re-establishing the True Story of Palestine”, scholar Mohamed Buheji explains how Gen-Z, the primary social media audience, is reshaping the narrative. For many in this generation, the Palestinian cause is inseparable from wider global justice struggles—from anti-apartheid South Africa and Black Lives Matter to Indigenous rights movements. Those who stand with Palestine often see it as part of a larger fight for self-determination, liberation, and human rights.

With this framing, the Palestinian cause becomes what African-American activist Angela Davis once described as a “moral litmus test for the world.” This perspective helps global audiences recognize familiar patterns and situates Palestine within a broader moral and political struggle for justice. Solidarity with Palestinians is not symbolic or exceptional; it is solidarity against recurring systems, structures, and histories of oppression. What happened to Indigenous peoples in North America centuries ago, through war, forced displacement, disease, cultural erasure, and genocide, should never happen again. Today, it is the Palestinians who face these same attempts at erasure.

Palestine’s Digital Memory… What next?

As time passes, a persistent question remains: what comes next? Hundreds of pieces of digital content from Palestine are scattered across online platforms, vulnerable to deletion, distortion, or disappearance. How do we preserve this archive? How do we protect it, organize it, and ensure it grows rather than fades?

Preserving this digital history is a collective responsibility. It requires coordinated efforts to build an organized online archive supported by libraries, universities, research centers, and institutions committed to documenting war crimes and historical memory. Each piece of content must be catalogued with intention so that the documentation of war, survival, and daily life under occupation remains accessible and meaningful.

These digital records are a form of witness, echoing Fatima Hassouna’s call for a “loud death”. A story that should not be buried by time or place. By preserving and sharing these experiences, we honor those who lived through this moment and ensure their stories are not lost but remembered, seen, and acted upon.

The post “If I Die. I Want a Loud Death”: Reclaiming The Palestinian Narrative Through Social Media appeared first on Untold.

***

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.

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.

The post Palestine on Berlin’s Walls: Street Art, Censorship, and the Politics of Solidarity in Germany appeared first on Untold.

***

In moments of massacre, a journalist’s duty is tested against its most basic promises: to witness, to record, to tell the truth. For Palestinian reporters, that truth is more than a collection of facts—it is a fight for survival, a defense of identity, and a refusal to be erased.

Out of Gaza, they insist on reporting from inside the suffering, in the language, rhythm, and imagery of the community enduring it. Media here is not simply a channel of information; it is a weapon of presence, an existential act that resists both annihilation and erasure. 

Where dominant media theories speak of objectivity, balance, or representation, Gaza speaks of continuance. Every report, every image, every voice transmitted under siege becomes a refusal to disappear.

This insistence is ultimately about asserting the right to be part of history. Erasure works not only by destroying bodies but also by silencing their testimonies, removing them from the archive of humanity. Journalism interrupts this project: it names the dead, describes the destruction, and records the moment in its raw immediacy. 

Unlike academic writing, which reflects later, or poetry, which translates pain into metaphor, journalism insists on the now. It bears witness in real time, staking a claim that Palestinians are not just remembered retroactively but are present actors in history as it unfolds.

But this raises a harder question: Has Palestinian media truly confronted the racist images projected onto it by Israeli and Western narratives? To answer, we have to unpack four archetypes the “other” imposes on Palestinians—and how local media has fought to dismantle them.

The Palestinian Who Doesn’t Exist

In Zionist logic, the Palestinian is not just different—they are a threat to existence itself.

This is the “zone of nonbeing” described by Frantz Fanon: a place where you are denied recognition and subjectivity. You are there, but not seen.

In most Western newsrooms, this plays out in language. Israeli deaths are attributed, Hamas is named, October 7 is invoked. Palestinian deaths are passive: “were killed,” “were found under rubble.” No one is named as the killer.

Local news challenged this by naming the dead, one by one. Projects like Gaza Martyrs List, Eyes on Palestine, and countless grassroots Instagram accounts have made it a mission to name every person killed, attach their photograph, and tell their story.

Instead of “50 Palestinians killed,” you get Omar, 12, who loved drawing birds; Rasha, 33, was a nurse who refused to leave her patients. This is a direct counter to the grammar of erasure—turning “were killed” into “was killed by Israeli airstrikes.”

The “Savage” Palestinian

Israeli leaders didn’t just frame the 2023–2024 war as a military campaign. They called it a war between “civilization” and “barbarism.”

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant spoke of Palestinians as  human animals”. President Isaac Herzog declared, “It’s not just Hamas, it’s an entire nation.”

This is an old colonial language with a modern coat of paint. In the 19th century, Europe used it to justify empire. Today, Israel uses it to position itself as the West’s “front line” against the barbaric other.

Just as crucially, journalists insisted on telling the mundane stories of life in captivity: weddings that went ahead despite airstrikes, children playing football in alleyways, families baking bread on open fires when ovens had no power. Coverage of these everyday scenes was not sentimental filler—it was a political act, a declaration that people insist on living even under conditions designed to make life impossible.

Barbarism thrives on erasing intellectual and artistic output. In response, cultural reporters and independent platforms such as We Are Not Numbers, Gaza Poets Society, and Palestine Writes amplified poetry, music, and visual art created during the war.

Broadcasting a rap performance from a refugee camp or publishing a painting made from the dust of bombed homes directly confronts the idea that Palestinians exist outside “civilization.” It asserts: our art exists, even when you try to erase us.

Palestinian media went further. Through stories of weddings celebrated amid airstrikes, children improvising games in rubble, families sharing bread baked on open fires, journalists revealed the values holding Palestinian society together. 

These accounts describe not only survival but a cultural world built on solidarity, hospitality, love of land, and devotion to family. Palestinians shape their own narratives. constructing a vision of civilization anchored in care, dignity, and communal resilience.

The Palestinian Who Must Be Killed!

In the Israeli imagination, Gaza is not a home. It is a target zone.

Over and over, the strip, just 360 square kilometers with over two million people, has been painted as a weapons island, a place where life itself is suspect. Israeli officials describe it like a scene from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: militants lurking like the Nautilus submarine, striking from hidden bases.

This is more than a metaphor. Scholars call it a “moral geography”: remapping a place so killing its people feels not like a crime, but a necessity. Gaza becomes what Achille Mbembe calls a “death-world”—a space where living conditions are so unbearable they mimic death itself.

Under this lens, there are no civilians. Not the journalists, not the children, not the elderly. Homes become launchpads, mosques become armories, kindergartens become cover for rockets.

In contrast, Palestinian media have worked to move beyond partisan and sectarian divides. This shift did not begin with the genocide but had already taken shape in earlier wars and uprisings, when reporters recognized that partisan coverage risked fragmenting the very people they sought to defend. During those moments, destruction and loss transcended faction: a bombed school was not Hamas’s or Fatah’s, but Palestinian. 

Journalists, whether tied to official outlets, party-affiliated platforms, or working independently, shared a common task: to document daily life under siege, to challenge a narrative that stripped Gazans of their humanity, and to portray Palestinians not as seekers of death but as people determined to live until their last breath.

The Palestinian Body as Target

Palestinians know that sexual violence is not an accident of war, it is a tool of domination. Israeli television has aired confessions defending rape as a form of “pressure” on the enemy.

The killing of Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, a renowned surgeon, is one of the most brutal examples. He was raped and beaten to death in Israeli custody. His attackers were released. Israel’s national security minister called them “heroes”. This statement comes from an incident covered by Middle East Eye, where Itamar Ben-Gvir publicly defended settlers suspected of killing a Palestinian.

Western media barely touched the story. When CNN reported his death, it left out the rape entirely—even though UN investigators had evidence. Yet Israeli claims of “mass rape” by Hamas, unsupported by UN findings, were repeated by U.S. and European leaders without question.

Israeli outlets have broadcast detainees stripped, beaten, branded with slogans—humiliation turned into a public spectacle. The dead are often displayed in ways that feed voyeurism or pity, stripping them of individuality and agency. Palestinian media countered with a different image: freed prisoners smiling, standing tall, reclaiming their dignity.

In this way, Palestinian witnessing is distinct: it refuses voyeurism, refuses pity, and insists on agency. The camera becomes a tool not just for documentation, but for affirming life and reimagining presence under conditions designed to erase it.

Rethinking Journalism in Palestine

The idea of “neutral journalism” itself can be a colonial myth. Framed as objective, it pretends to stand above power, yet it often serves to conceal it. In Eurocentric media traditions, neutrality is a claim about detachment, but it implicitly enforces the status quo: whose lives matter, whose deaths are acceptable, whose suffering is worthy of attention.

In Gaza, claiming neutrality often means accepting the logic of extermination, documenting destruction without naming responsibility, and treating systematic erasure as inevitable.

This approach transforms journalism from a passive record into an active claim: Palestinians are present, they endure, and they continue to act even under conditions designed to render them invisible. It is not about “balancing” perspectives, but about confronting power and asserting reality. Neutrality here is a luxury the world cannot afford; truth-telling becomes the instrument of survival, resistance, and historical inscription.

To report from Palestine is to confront not just the violence of bombs, but the violence of words, frames, and silences. Local media has made its choice: to reject the image imposed by the “other,” and to tell the truth of a people who refuse to disappear.

The journalism Palestinians aspire to thrives: a media that protects against erasure, cultivates civic and cultural memory, and affirms the right to presence, agency, and joy. It is a journalism that does not merely survive violence but insists on a future where life, creativity, and humanity flourish despite all attempts at annihilation.

The post How Palestinian Journalists Are Reclaiming Their Story and Resisting Erasure  appeared first on Untold.

***

In November 2023, I was—among several other demonstrators—arrested by the Berlin police at an anti-colonial protest in front of the Federal Foreign Office for carrying the flag of Palestine. 

One officer stated, “Palestine has nothing to do with colonialism,” while another added, “It’s forbidden to show the Swastika too,” equating the flag of an oppressed people with a Nazi symbol. 

The consequence of my arrest was a fine; nothing in comparison to what M., a Syrian refugee arrested for the same charge, had to fear. For him the act of resistance could cost him his asylum status and even lead to deportation from Germany. 

As a Swiss-German citizen straddling a colonial family history in Palestine and a Nazi heritage, I was stunned by the blatant lies of the policemen. To say that Palestine has nothing to do with colonialism contradicts my own family history, and to equate the flag of Palestine with the Swastika portrays the victims of settler-colonialism as Nazi sympathizers. 

This is a false narrative perpetuated by German media who claimed that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.” This gaslighting and victim-perpetrator reversal serves a purpose: to deflect from Germany’s responsibility for both the Holocaust and its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. This historical revisionism also erases Christian evangelical support for the Zionist project, which claims to speak for all Jews, while its lobby targets anti-Zionist Jews and others who oppose the colonization of Palestine.

While Germany presents its Staatsräson (reason of state)—unconditional support for Israel—as a moral duty resulting from the Holocaust, German arms manufacturers like Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp increased their profits through their sales to Israel dramatically. Global investors, hedge funds and pension funds hold significant stakes in these companies. 

Germany is Israel’s second-largest supplier of weapons, following the U.S.; the taxes it collects from the booming arms industries surely don’t follow any ethics but a capitalistic logic. 

German Staatsräson: Not a Moral Question

In summer 2025 the German Secret Service Report labeled the internationally successful and growing BDS-movement an extremist force, in the same breath as Palestine Speaks and Jewish Voice for Just Peace—two political groups engaged in anti-Zionist grassroot activism. By comparing the boycott of Israeli products with the Nazi boycott of Jews in the Second World War, the German parliament projects its guilt onto Palestinians.

Currently, two legally non-binding resolutions operate here to silence dissent from people who stand for Palestinians’ rights. The anti-BDS resolution aims to criminalise the call for boycott, sanctions, and divestment of companies and institutions that are complicit. It targets Palestine solidarity and cancels decolonial voices. 

The second tool is the IHRA resolution that weaponizes antisemitism to conflate anti-zionism and critique of the Israeli state with Jew-hatred. Both frameworks breach several articles of Germany’s constitution such as the freedom of expression, arts, information, science, and assembly, negating basic democratic equality before the law.

The effect of both these resolutions on the official discourse in Germany is striking, as many curators, art spaces, and universities are implementing them.

Following such doctrines is more often a result of ignorance or the fear to be excluded from one’s peers, than an actual conviction. In all of the cancellations that I have experienced in the past two years as an artist, the reason was always the same: fear of backlash. Not one institution actually believed that I was wrong with my critical views. But they are inconvenient for the capital.

Evangelical Dogma: An Ideology of Belonging and Exclusion

The hypocritical attitude and moral superiority of German politicians reminds me of evangelicals who pretend to uphold ethical, universal values and speak of God’s “unconditional love for everyone” while excluding queer people and non-Christians. Only those who devote their life to Jesus are able to access that love; queer people must undergo conversion therapy or exorcism to prove their faith in a system that negates their sexuality or gender. These methods often lead queer teens to self-harm or suicide. 

According to evangelicals’ belief, other cultures with their own spiritual traditions cannot access God’s “unconditional love”, reserved for born-again Christians alone. For centuries, European missionaries spread their racist and anti-LGBTQ+ ideas to other continents, laying the ideological ground for domination, so that imperialists could extract resources from land and indigenous people, and funnel the profits back to Europe. 

The connection between missionary work and colonialism is not mentioned in their Bible courses, of course, but it lives on until today. 

I grew up in the 1990s in Switzerland in an evangelical congregation where my family history was kept from me. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were missionaries in historical Palestine. At the dinner table, I overheard conversations about Israel, terrorism, and Jesus. 

The message was always the same: “We are the good ones. We love Jews, but they need to be converted to Christianity. Muslims are barbaric. There will never be peace in this world—especially in the ‘Middle East’—unless the entirety of humanity accepts Jesus Christ as its saviour.” 

This rigid doctrine that divides the world in “us” and “them” was celebrated in rituals, prayers, songs, and festivities. But also it was built on the fear of ending up in hell, using guilt and shame as controlling tools. You are born as a sinner; everything unfolds from there. Passing on the gospel to save the world from evil is one of the major principles I was taught to uphold. Spiritual out-of-body experiences of collective practices like worship and prayer were used to substantiate hurtful interpretations of the Bible. 

Evangelicals turn the teachings of Jesus—that are all about love—into a battlefield of spiritual warfare and abuse.

Growing Up in Silence, Secrets and Erasure

It was difficult to see through these dynamics, as the beauty of having faith and a strong sense of belonging was a real experience for me too. But whatever I wanted to critically discuss, in the end the answer always had to come back to reinforce the already existing dogma. It was impossible to question the system in its entirety. 

Doubts were seen as sins, and even if I didn’t express them, God would always be watching and judging. The threat of public punishment such as humiliation and excommunication produced a detachment from my own intuition, self-censorship, and a climate of existential fear and confusion. 

From age 14 to 17 I joined prayer ceremonies to get rid of my queerness, even though I didn’t have any language for it. When I realized that my efforts to fit in would never succeed, I left the congregation and moved to Berlin. In my early 20s, I realized that the same as a queer vocabulary was missing in my upbringing, “Palestine” as a word, and as a reality, had been erased too. 

I was shocked to learn about the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians, and that the Israeli state was established on the ruins of their villages just in 1948—and not in Biblical times. While I started to question my gender identity, I started to look deeper into my family history too.

Colonial Legacies in Palestine: Dispossession of Land and Water

My great-great-grandparents arrived in 1870 in Haifa, Palestine, from Württemberg, South Germany. They were part of the German Templers, a European Christian movement that wanted to “prepare the land” for the Second Coming of Christ. Following a strict and literal interpretation of the Bible, they saw themselves as role models for the indigenous people of Palestine. Described as “Proto-Zionists” by Palestinian historian Mahmoud Yazbak, the German Templers played an essential role in the early colonization of Palestine. 

Travel reports written by Christoph Hoffmann and Georg David Hardegg, the movement’s founders, following their first field trip in 1858 described Bedouin communities as a plague to be expelled from their land. 

When the first German Templers arrived in 1868 in Palestine, they quickly settled near al-Yazaq well in Haifa, restricting access to the previously communal well in order to devalue surrounding agricultural land and push out local farmers. 

The dispossession of land and water, as well as the segregation of the Germans from the local population was following a colonial model. After devaluing the land by cutting its access to water, the Germans bought more parcels for low prices from Palestinian Christian middlemen. 

When the U.S. American colony in Jaffa was abandoned that same year, its original settlers struggling with diseases such as malaria and to acclimate to the local climate, German settlers purchased the few infrastructures that the U.S. Americans left behind, and expanded their colonies from Haifa to Jaffa. 

Evangelical influences from South Germany and Basel manifested through the establishment of the Carmel Mission House in 1904. While some second and third generation settlers became more secular and focused on the material improvement of the German colonies, others joined the Protestant-millenarian “civilizing mission” typical of that time. 

They focused on converting German-speaking Jews, many of whom were fleeing persecution in Europe and carrying Zionist aspirations to build a Jewish state in Palestine. Later, the Carmel Mission hired Arabic-speaking missionaries to also reach out to the majority of local Muslims, imposing their supremacist, and islamophobic ideas on them.

Antisemitism Reframed as Political Weapon

From the 19th century onward, many non-Jewish advocates for Jewish settlements in Palestine were based in the U.S. and Britain, and believed in Christian Restorationism; an ideology tightly connected to colonial desires around Palestine and the theological root of Christian Zionism. 

It claimed that the end of times were near and that Palestine needed to be restored before the turn of the century, when they expected the Second Coming of Christ to occur. According to the Biblical prophecy, as many Jews as possible should be in the historical land of Palestine at the point of rapture. 

I remember the many Hebrew songs we sang in my childhood, celebrating Pessah, a Jewish holiday, together with Messianic Jews—Jews who converted to Christian faith. 

Evangelicals often display antisemitic elements in their beliefs, when instrumentalizing Jews for religious ends; same as on a political level the West uses Jews for its imperial expansion. 

I recall how in sermons, a religious and moral superiority towards Judaism was emphasized, while Jewish cultural practices were fetishized. Christian Zionists are known for their “love” for Jews, which in reality is philosemitism, an inverted form of antisemitism. Evangelicals are mostly based in the U.S. but also across Europe, with growing numbers in Latin America—now vastly outnumber the entire Jewish people. 

Germany’s support for Israel is deeply entangled with religiously rooted, colonial, and antisemitic fantasies, as well as contemporary geopolitical interests. It is certainly not motivated by genuine concern for the wellbeing of Jewish people. German media accused anti-zionist Jews multiple times of antisemitism, while simultaneously framing Palestinians as Nazis. 

In this colonial gaze, Palestinians are erased. Language has been weaponized in abusive manners, accusing innocents, while German right-wing politicians express their antisemitic and islamophobic hatred openly and with impunity.

Christian Zionism in Support of Settler-Colonial Imperialism

The first Jewish Zionist leaders looked at the German Templers’ settlements as a blueprint to be emulated. In 1898, one year after the First Zionist World Congress in Basel, Theodor Herzl met German Emperor Wilhelm II in Jerusalem. 

What many don’t know is that William Hechler, a Christian Zionist with roots in South Germany, played a critical role in advocating for the Zionist project and made this connection between Herzl and German leaders possible. Along with German Templer founders Hoffmann and Hardegg, Herzl sought Ottoman support for land acquisition and visited the German colonies to learn from their strategies.

As historian Rashid Khalidi argues, the situation in Palestine is not a conflict between two nations but as a settler-colonial project that started over a century ago backed by the U.S., Britain, and other Western powers. They supported the Zionist project to extend their markets, gain military footholds in the area, and control resources and trade routes. 

The alignment between Christian and Jewish Zionist groups with authoritarian or right-wing governments today reflects broader historical patterns shaped by colonial and imperial dynamics and overlapping interests. Religious narratives always serve to justify taking control over land and people.

German reparation does not account for non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, such as Sinti and Roma people, or for the descendants of the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904. The entire concept of reparation functioned primarily to support Zionism and its project to build a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine—an ideology with Christian theological roots that keeps the colonial violence going and promises more arms trades and profits to the ruling class. 

The dramaturgy and pathos of German politicians in which these reparations are portrayed as a moral reckoning with the past has an almost religious quality to it. 

In the case of my grandfather, who grew up in the German colony in Palestine, joined the Nazis in the Second World War, and later became an evangelical missionary, the storyline becomes quite personal to me. But I can see how this is not so much a story about private coincidences but rather a structural outcome. 

I’m only starting to reckon with my own story and family history, as I try to zoom out and see the bigger picture, raising urgent questions about the decolonization of Palestine. While pushing for accountability and the liberation from Zionism, larger structures of systemic violence become visible and raise awareness about Congo, Sudan, Haiti, and other oppressed people around the globe.

Religious Trauma and Pattern Recognition

As a person on the autism spectrum, my brain is constantly scanning for logic, therefore, cognitive dissonance is difficult for me to endure. I naturally take words very literally, but I have difficulties reading between the lines or recognizing negative intentions. As a result, I am very disturbed by injustice, such as discriminatory behaviours and the abuse of power. 

Meeting Palestinians and anti-zionist Jewish activists made me question the narratives I grew up with on a political level. Their voices have been there for decades speaking out against Zionism and colonial violence in all its forms, including Christian Zionism. The understanding of imperialism and colonialism as superstructures that intersect with the evangelical ideology has helped me in making sense of my experiences, research and observations. 

The reality that unfolded in Germany after October 2023, when I saw Berlin police arrest a 9-year-old Palestinian child, triggered not just disbelief but also clarity. The police violence I saw in Germany reminded me of the military Israeli occupation that I witnessed in the West Bank when I lived there from 2016 to 2017. These systems of oppression seem to be related.

Autism is self-referential and monotropic in the way that knowledge is built; collecting details, and recognizing patterns from a bottom-up rather than a top-down, birdsview perspective. By default, my way of thinking jumps between timelines and geographies in an associative way, looking into similarities and recurring patterns. However, my findings are comparisons; not equations.

Colonial Relationships between Germans and Palestinians

My grandfather, who was born 1915 in Haifa and grew up in the German colony, told me that all colonists were armed, since Palestinians were described as carrying out “raids.” In these stories, they were cast as dangerous outsiders, intruders in their own land. The second colony Waldheim was founded in 1907 on land that was originally called Umm al-Amad, not far from Haifa. 

The Templers bought it “legally” through a Beirut businessman, but such transactions bypassed the local peasants who had long cultivated and depended on the land. Once the deed was signed, the Germans hired a Bedouine guard, armed him with a rifle and used him to scare those same peasants away. 

The family narratives that I grew up with reinforced this colonial perspective: Palestinians appeared not as neighbors, but as a threat or as cheap labor. This perspective erased the reality: families who had cultivated the land for generations were pushed out and replaced. 

One of the leading German settlers put it bluntly: “I pay the Arab 5 piasters a day. And if I work as a European, I have to charge 50 piasters. So I prefer to hire 10 Arabs and have them do the work.” This relationship was fundamentally colonial and exploitative, though in my family’s memory it was often framed as well-meaning and collegial. 

My grandmother remembered that my great-grandfather was paid the same wage as the Palestinian workers because he lacked a formal theological education. His poverty, however, did not erase the fact that he was still embedded in and benefiting from a colonial system that extracted Palestinian labor for its benefit. 

“Every colonist had the right to build a flat for his Arab worker”, my grandfather recalled. “It was usually one big room. Some structures had no light, no water, and no bathroom. But they had an open air bathroom in the bushes.” The laughter that followed such recollections made it clear to me, even as a child, that Palestinians were not seen as full human beings. 

My great-grandfather built a school to missionize the children of Palestinian workers; the church paid for an Arabic-speaking teacher to “educate” and “civilize” them.

Nazism in the German Colonies in Palestine

The NSDAP established its branches in the 1930s in the German colonies across Palestine, turning them into a cohort for Nazi ideology and antisemitism. Heidemarie Wawrzyn highlights that while on average about 5% of Germans abroad joined the NSDAP, whereas in Palestine over 30% of German colonists were participating in activities of the Nazi party. My grandfather said that almost everyone at that time believed in the Nazi ideology, far more than the estimated number.

In the 1930s, unrest between the local population and European Jewish settlers increased. Palestinian workers organized a strike and revolt that was brutally beaten down by the British occupation. German settlers maintained practical relations with both groups; they employed Palestinians as cheap workers, while the goods were sold to Jewish settlers. 

With the outbreak of WWII the German nationals were interned and later deported by the British as war enemies, and sent to Australia or Germany. The British turned Sarona, the former German colony in Jaffa, into a military and police base. After the British withdrawal in December 1947, the Hagana seized the compound and used it as the headquarters of the newly established Israeli Defence Forces in the following year. 

In stark contrast to the mass destruction of Palestinian sites during and after 1948, the houses of German Templers were put under cultural heritage protection and renovated through expensive investment by the Israeli government in the 1990s and 2000s, becoming tourist attractions and shopping malls.

Planting Pine Trees to hide the Ruins of the Nakba

After the Nakba, the ruins of Palestinian homes have been hidden through a large afforestation project by the Jewish National Fund. Planting millions of European pine trees transformed the landscape on an unprecedented scale, with no end in sight, while the indigenous olive trees are being uprooted to this day. 

Going through the family archive I inherited, I come across photos, documents, letters, and maps that describe the environmental and urban developments of Haifa in great detail. As a gardener working for the German mission on Mt. Carmel, my great-grandfather planted European pine trees already during the British Mandate. Like other colonists, he took part in bringing tools and techniques from Europe and implementing the so-called “modernization” on the land with the cheap labor of Palestinians.

When I visited the pine forests on Mt. Carmel—possibly due to my Swiss-German passport—I realized that one of these forests is informally called “Little Switzerland”. The overwriting of landscapes with European identities is a classic colonial tactic to erase Palestinian belonging. 

I wonder if the name had something to do with my great-grandfather’s Swiss roots. His return to Haifa in the early 1950s was possible due to his Swiss citizenship, and a right that was denied to displaced Palestinians. He then worked as a gardener for the Israeli government in a pine tree nursery, contributing to the afforestation that masked Palestinian villages. 

Yet, he also was an evangelical Christian, heavily invested in missionary work. In his memoirs he recalls proudly how he managed to secretly distribute Bibles to Jews, despite his new employer’s prohibition to do so.

When I asked my grandmother how he felt about the displacement and disappearance of over 80% of the Palestinian population in Haifa, she said he probably never really thought about it. The Nakba was never mentioned in our family. I also noticed that not a single name of the Palestinian workers was documented in my great-grandfather’s writings, despite their daily interactions prior to 1948. 

My ancestors spoke fluent Arabic with a typical Haifa accent. However, later generations learned Hebrew instead and sent their kids to Israeli schools—and to the Israeli military. 

They see the genocide in Gaza as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies rather than a continuation of settler-colonialism and an extreme excess of global imperialism. Violence against the colonized is once more justified with the misinterpretation of the Bible, marking who will continue to be erased.

Family Archive: Silence, Gaps and Erasure

Looking at the family archive I inherited, the invisible and the missing parts become ever more noticeable to me. Recently I met a Palestinian protestor in Berlin who told me that their grandfather was working as a child laborer in one of the German colonies. I also learned that the German employers had cut the Palestinian workers’ fingernails to a painful extent, so their fingernails would not harm the fruits when picking them from the trees. 

These stories show the reality that is systematically hidden. I wonder about all the other stories that were not documented in any archive and what happened to the 70 Palestinians who worked for my great-grandfather, planting European pine trees on their own land. 

Where did they escape to during the Nakba? Are they also watching the news as these trees, not made for the Mediterranean climate, burn? Are they part of the 70% Palestinian refugees who are trapped in Gaza as Israel bombs and starves them with the complicity of the West?

Palestinians’ rightful demands for freedom, the right of return, and self-determination are systematically erased from the Western consciousness. But the armed resistance on the ground has forced the world to not look away any longer. 

The Palestinian struggle for liberation has ignited a global movement in solidarity with the oppressed people—from Gaza, Congo, and Sudan to Haiti. Imperial and colonial violence repeat in various forms, but follow a similar logic of dehumanization, exploitation, and genocide. 

The agency of colonized people doesn’t rely on the recognition of Western scholars, or state archives. A Palestinian friend told me: “To stand in solidarity with our people, you have to see our struggle through our eyes.” This shift in perspective has reached a large number of students, activists, and critical thinkers in the past two years, who organize to dismantle the settler-colonial Zionist project. 

Palestinians lead this shared struggle with decades of experience, and a deep understanding of the oppressive system.

Choosing to be an Outsider rather than a Bystander

When I left the evangelical congregation I knew that the religious authorities would often punish those who leave. They would withdraw social and financial security, and sometimes hound its former members severely. I moved to Berlin to both escape, and to form a new life in my new-found freedom. It took some time, but eventually I made new friends with those I was taught to fear: queer folks, Palestinians, and many others. 

After 7 October 2023, I felt the same social alienation in Germany when more arrests followed, each one more arbitrary than the other. Once I was accused of incitement to hatred for holding a sign that said “From the river to the sea, we demand equality.” The police said it’s a signifier for terrorism. A few months later, the Landeskriminalamt (State Criminal Police) came to my home to investigate my “crime.” When I asked the officer if he really thinks that demanding equality could be considered hate speech or terrorism, he looked quite embarrassed. After all, he was just doing his job—as were the millions of Germans during the Holocaust. 

The apathy and silence of German civil society is what shocks me much more than any arrest or police violence. Millions act as if what happens in Palestine had nothing to do with them or their tax money. I understand that this isn’t just individual denial or hypocrisy but deeply embedded in the state-led conditioning. I get it. Breaking away from the Zionist ideology surely comes at a cost—but when staying is no option, the price to leave is never too high

Striving Toward Collective Liberation

Germany’s harsh repression against solidarity with Palestine mirrors its unprocessed colonial and Nazi past. Mechanisms of silence, shame, and the projection of guilt onto innocent people repeats over generations and on the institutional level. Just like the religious belief I grew up with supported colonial empires to mobilize masses, suppress opposition, and justify wars, the German Staatsräson serves to manufacture consent for Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and oppression. 

The scope in which to think and ask questions is predefined, same as the evangelical vision of reality is predetermined. It functions to maintain power over the narrative and exclude those who don’t surrender to the self-serving agenda of an unjust system. 

Congolese activists recognize the intersections between their struggle and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and team up with the BDS-movement to share knowledge and expose the exploitative nature of Western domination. When thinking about decolonization, every complicit government and institution needs to be held accountable. 

They will likely blame it on “the Jews” once the Zionist project is no longer profitable; this puts all Jewish people in danger based on their identity—no matter whether they oppose Zionism or not. 

I believe that collective liberation is impossible without dismantling Zionism in all its shades, foremost Christian Zionism. To reject Zionism as a colonial project is not to reject Jewish existence or belonging. On the contrary: it is to refuse the instrumentalization of Jewish trauma and survival for colonial ends. The Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism, published in 2021, offers an alternative framework that distinguishes the legitimate refusal of Zionism from antisemitism—a urgent and necessary step toward building decolonial and intersectional solidarity for all oppressed peoples. 

Decolonization must dismantle Christian and Jewish forms of colonial thought without collapsing them into each other.

Germany’s anti-BDS and IHRA resolutions are not just about targeting freedom of speech. The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions stands for much more than just an opinion; it seeks to hold those companies and institutions accountable who profit from exploitation and mass murder. 

To break with the racist and openly fascist framework of Zionism through boycott, sanctions and disinvestment is an ever more urgent quest in times of genocide. Strikes are a powerful means to withhold labor force and raise collective pressure and awareness, giving power back to the people and holding the higher powers accountable, not alone but with each other—while hoping that the one and only God who cares for humanity, regardless of race and gender, will care for us.  

The Bible says it already: Lucky are those who don’t run after money but care for each other as for oneself. I recently read on Instagram that the opposite of depression is not joy but expression, and I couldn’t agree more. That’s why the voices of the oppressed will never ever be silenced.

The post A Journey through a Swiss-German Family Archive: From Colonial Palestine to Today’s Repression of Solidarity appeared first on Untold.