***

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 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.

This is the primary industry for 80% of Lamu residents, yet declining marine ecosystems and the controversial Lamu Port-South Sudan Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET), a massive oil pipeline and infrastructure project connecting South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda, have posed serious threats. Daily catches declined from an average of 40 kg to 10kg, and sometimes none at all.

Aswif, a captain in his fifties, says that he has turned to giving dhow (a traditional boat) rides to tourists over recent years although he had been fishing since boyhood. “There are simply no more fish to catch,” he says.

Pollution and the Weight of Extraction

Lamu has been on the frontlines of the global plastic pollution issue: waste management on the island is nearly nonexistent, according to UNESCO, plus heated controversies over oil pipeline developments. Employment rates are dismal, with less than 33% of youths (ages 18-34) working; most work in agriculture, yet the sector has the lowest labor productivity according to the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis.

Across Kenya, settler colonialism continues to haunt the present: low-income locals are systemically marginalized and excluded for the prioritization of upper echelon interests, often with a foreign tilt.

Lamu lacks any form of door-to-door waste collection, unlike other urban areas in Kenya––yet tourists and mainland investors have been found to be significant waste contributors.

Researchers argue that plastic pollution equates to waste colonialism, where capitalist cycles of production and consumption manifest as ecological imperialism, costs that are disproportionately borne by island villagers.

James Waikibia, a Nairobi-based plastic waste campaigner, believes that phrases such as waste colonialism––perhaps holding merit––can be overhyped, used by civil society to look for grants. “It should not detract from the government’s responsibility––their inefficiency and lack of interest in addressing foundational issues” he says.

In the absence of any official system to address the problem, individual action is filling the gap. Earth Love, founded in 2019, is one such attempt. The project emerged from local frustration with Lamu’s worsening waste crisis and the absence of public infrastructure, offering a space where people can work directly with the land.

Regeneration in a Ruined Landscape

For 30-year-old Abu Bakar, born and raised in Lamu, the shift began during the pandemic. After years working as a fishing-boat captain, he visited the site and was struck by its unlikely potential. “The place was looking crazy,” he recalls. “You don’t expect a dumping site to be a place where you can plant [fruits and vegetables].” Clearing the land took more than a year. What followed convinced him that restoration—however slow—was possible.

Bakar now works in regenerative agriculture and in the local biochar trade, converting “bones” like coconut shells and tree trunks into carbon-rich material that strengthens soil health. Three years on, he has become a permaculture consultant, despite financial barriers that stopped him from completing his water-engineering diploma. “I’d like to think that I’m someone who is curious and can learn new skills,” he says. “And I hope that through this work others will have the same spirit.”

As residents of Shela, a village nestled on southeastern Lamu, trickle into the organization’s grounds with baskets of waste––at times loaded on the backs of donkeys––the handful of employees begin the sorting process, separating glass bottles from cuttings from palm and banana trees. The former will be repurposed into construction materials or household decor, while the latter will be composted into both dry and wet fertilizers.

Still, progress is fragile. Residents bring glass and green waste for sorting, but long-ingrained habits are hard to shift. “It can feel like we are taking one step forward but two steps back,” he admits. Sometimes garbage bags appear at the shamba’s gate instead of the proper drop-off point. “There is progress, but sometimes I feel depressed,” he says. That same morning, someone had dumped a tractor-load of construction debris on a public footpath. Staring at the mess, Bakar shook his head. “People need to learn that this is not okay–that they shouldn’t treat the land like this.”

At the Roots

Some researchers have dubbed Lamu the cradle of Swahili civilization. Besides its intricate and amalgamated history––trading grounds for the Arabs, Chinese, and Portuguese since the 15th century––it mediated economic and social interactions between the African mainland and Indian Ocean world for nearly 500 years beginning in the 14th century.

To this day, elements of the island’s long, winding history are evident in both its habits and architecture: many of the homes on Shela feature traditional Swahili architecture, constructed from mangrove timber and coral stones, replete with inner courtyards and verandas, decorated with intricately carved wooden doors.

41-year-old Khautar Abdulaziz, a homemaker in Shela, believes that Lamu reflects Kenya’s broader waste problem. Its insularity as a small island exacerbates the far reaches of plastic pollution, which harms everything from fishing to the marine ecosystem altogether.

“In the past, older people managed solid waste by burying it, burning it, or reusing items like clay pots and baskets,” explains Abdulaziz. “In recent years, things have changed because of the increase in plastic and other non-bio degradable materials. Now, [the volume of] waste has grown, and managing it has become much harder.”

Bakar hopes that through his work with the community, he can share a sense of self-resilience with other Lamu residents, such as growing their own food rather than importing everything at a marked-up cost from the Kenyan mainland. “I don’t want to be the only person who knows this,” Bakar emphasizes. “My goal is to spread this knowledge.”

Colonial Legacies, Plastic Economies

Abdulaziz sees a more rooted cause to Lamu’s current waste dilemma. “I believe the source of the waste problem is mainly the increase in plastic use, population growth, and poor waste disposal practices,” she says. Furthermore, increasing numbers of tourists, with the infrastructure and businesses to accommodate them are overloading inadequate waste management systems.

To Waikibia, the plastic pollution campaigner, a root cause is misplaced priorities–the national focus is on building roads and large-scale foreign investments. “The government has failed to invest in modern infrastructure to recycling companies by cutting down on taxes, educating the public about littering, or the dangers that come with the toxic chemical fumes from burning waste.”

He refers to the plastic bag ban that was enacted in 2017: “Everyone was proud of it, there was a sense of moving in a positive direction.” While this proved that things can be done, plastic is everywhere, in everything––it all needs to be managed better.”

In villages such as Shela, high poverty levels mean that residents buy food and household items in small quantities packaged in plastic sachets. And when it comes to waste disposal, it’s out of sight, out of mind.

“In Lamu, they are not even dumpsites––just open places where people throw their trash. When the rains come, or the wind blows, it goes everywhere––but that’s where we need intervention and sensitization––understanding that these are all actions that will come back to bite us,” Waikibia explains. “You see waste leaking into the environment because it’s not a priority.”

The post “No More Fish to Catch”: A Kenyan Island’s Fight Against Plastic Pollution and the Burden of Colonialism appeared first on Untold.

For much of teta’s life, she covered her hair with a headscarf, mostly white in color, beige, but also black after the death of her husband and then son. She preserved it underneath the colorful soft fabric because hair is sacred and needs to be protected.

When I was little, my grandmother’s hair had already begun its transformation—streaked with white, though sometimes, she coaxed it back to brown with henna before she moved to modern dyes, leaving the roots pale and the ends burning copper in the sun. 

Like many Palestinian women before her, she washed it with olive oil soap, worked warm oil through it with her fingers. And despite the wildness of her hair, it was always soft, almost as soft as the creases in her palms. She braided it back before heading to the land, her hands busy with watering the soil beneath her, planting another pomegranate tree, or plunging them into soapy water, scrubbing clothes clean. 

She smelled of home, of earth, of olive trees and time.

Inherited Threads

My mother, aunts, and older cousins inherited traces of her stubborn hair, echoes of its texture, but never quite the same. There was always something missing, something altered—until me. I believe I was her 18th grandchild, the first she wanted named after her. But it didn’t happen. Her name, Sadika, was deemed too heavy, too old-fashioned, and was set aside by my sister. 

Yet she lived on in me—in my despise of tomatoes, in my grumpiness, and indeed, in my curls. In the way I carried them, untamed and bold. A crown I had to learn to control, but never to diminish.

The knowledge of tending to hair was passed down, from my grandmother to my mother, and from my mother to me—an act of love, nourishment, and quiet resilience. My mother carried the ritual forward—scrubbing my scalp with steady hands, cultivating strength and growth. After washing, she worked olive oil into my scalp with tenderness and patience. As she braided my hair each morning before school, I felt the comfort and power of womanhood flowing through her touch. 

When my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, her hair began to change. When I was diagnosed with a desmoid tumor in 2020, mine did too. Her curls loosened; mine abandoned me altogether. At one point, we found ourselves on the same hormonal drug—tamoxifen. 

I was a fraction of her age, yet walking a path that mirrored hers. She recovered, though her hair thinned and turned completely white. I would look at her and think: At least one of us is still holding onto the curls. That, of course, until mine slowly grew back in 2021.

We were bound by more than blood. By loss. By renewal. 

Living Memory

On 8 April 2024, as a great total solar eclipse darkened the sky and Ramadan neared its end, Teta, who had been bedbound for some time, took her final breath. When she passed, my father’s voice on the phone was heavy, my mother’s cries trailing behind him. I ran my fingers through my curls, tracing their shape, feeling her there in every strand.

There are a thousand ways to remember her, a thousand stories I could tell, but my hair will always be ours alone. A thread spun through generations, a gift from the women before me. It is wild, fearless, unapologetic—stubborn and beautiful, just like her.

Palestinian women have always braided their hair in devotion and defiance. They have combed olive oil through the strands, just as they have tended their trees—both symbols of resilience, of roots that refuse to be displaced. Hair loss comes with autumn, like leaves surrendering to the wind. Even as a child, I noticed how much more hair I shed in the fall, a quiet reminder that I am part of nature, that the weak strands must fall away to make room for stronger ones. 

In the spring, cutting the ends is essential, like pruning branches so they may bloom again. Every February, we would trim our hair, trusting that it would grow back healthier, fuller—another lesson in patience and renewal.

Resistance, Return

However, right now, as I write this piece, I am once again losing my hair from chemotherapy. This time, my Teta is not here to witness it. She is not here to brush her hands over my head, to whisper prayers, to remind me that what falls will grow again. She has passed, and with her, the stories she carried, her braid falling down her head, her wrinkly hands and face, and the quiet strength of a woman who lived, endured, and gave.

I refuse to believe she’s completely gone. I carry her story now. Every curl that grows back is a verse, every strand a memory woven into my being. I carry her with me, in my hair, in my roots, in the land that shaped us both, and in the soil in which her body currently inhabits. But my grandmother’s loss was not just personal—it was woven into a greater history of displacement.

Like countless Palestinian women, my grandmother carried both personal and collective grief. She was fourteen when her family was forced to flee their home in the village of El-Mzer’a during the Nakba of 1948. They walked for days, searching for refuge after their land was taken and their village destroyed. She witnessed a world she once knew crumble before her eyes–the orange orchards, the narrow pathways of her village, and the old structures. Today, only one remains: a Roman mausoleum, later converted to a mosque dedicated to Al-Nabi Yahya (John the Baptist).

But even after all that devastation, teta held onto traditions—farming, embroidery, and careful rituals of hair and skin care. These were not just acts of survival but acts of defiance, of persistence, of love.

Occupation, like cancer, has robbed us of our identity, land, and parts of ourselves. But we persevere. We persist, filled with resilience, finding other parts of ourselves connecting us to our land, heritage, bodies, and ancestors.

My hair will return, stronger than ever—a promise to my grandmother, to the women before her, and those yet to come.

Allah yerhamik ya Teta.

The post Teta’s Hair: A Story of Palestinian Women’s Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal appeared first on Untold.

Questioning her grandfather’s fascist photo archive, Laura Fiorio, in her project My Fascist Grandpa, focuses on Italy’s fascist and colonial history through the lens of shared family histories. Her grandfather was an avowed fascist who participated in the colonial mission, scarcely remembered today, in what is now Ethiopia. 

Based on photos from private archives, the project My Fascist Grandpa aims to transfer individual stories and memories – often forgotten or taboo – out of the private realm and into the public space in order to provoke critical reflection. To this end, Fiorio used conventional archival techniques to symbolically gather photography, mementos and letters into archival crates and then projected them onto the facades of fascist architecture in a collage-like intervention that defamiliarizes these objects and uncovers the difficult heritage hidden behind modernist architecture.

Through her work, she was introduced  to Maaza Mengiste, who also conducted archival work in Italy. Mengiste visited numerous colonial archives, found memorabilia at flea markets and increasingly came across accounts of women in the Ethiopian army who resisted the colonial land grab by Italian occupying forces – a phenomenon almost entirely absent within memorial culture. She also discovered evidence of this in her own family, as her great grandmother fought in the Ethiopian army. Mengiste’s novel The Shadow King, highly praised internationally, revolves precisely around this narrative.  

WK: Let’s talk about Italy’s fascist history, and a chapter of it which is fairly unknown even to an Italian audience, let alone a European one – the colonial war in Ethiopia. Laura, can you give us some insight into your work “My Fascist Grandpa,” which is part of ECCHR’s Annual report 2022?

LF: The research started with a site in Sicily, built in the fascist period by the Entity of Colonization of the Sicilian Latifundium, as that territory was considered backwards and in need of modernization. It’s important to recognize that the colonial past linked to these heritage sites is not critically discussed, not only in Italian territory, but also abroad. There is a collective amnesia about the occupation of “Italian Africa” – as it was called – while  the role of Italy in colonial history is always minimized, if not denied.

Some years ago, I found pictures from my grandfather who was in the fascist army during the occupation of Ethiopia. You can see him with his comrades, in tourist-like pictures, smiling in groups or with local people in an innocent way while they were indeed colonizing the territory. What I decided to do was to make these pictures public, projecting them onto those architectures. Local people involved in the project also brought in some of their own material, and we did some workshops around these images, discussing what is to be done with this difficult visual, as well as monumental, heritage. Painting, cutting or other kinds of collective interventions were symbolic actions that we engaged, in order to add a layer to this shared debate and to draw out these invisibilized narratives. 

WK: Maaza, you were born in Ethiopia in 1971, just a few years before the overthrow of the emperor Haile Selassie, who had ruled Ethiopia for more than 40 years, including the colonial period. And what happened then was actually not particularly a liberation, but a so-called Marxist-backed revolution in 1974 that brought a wave of repression with a very brutal regime, which also forced your family to leave the country. At some point, you started researching your own history. 

MM: In one way, I’ve always known about the history of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and the war, and then the eventual victory over the fascist army. When I was thinking about writing a book, I thought this was a story that I wanted to tell because it felt like such a simple story of good versus evil. At the time, I wasn’t writing. I had never written a book. So, I think The Shadow King was many years in development even before I started writing it. And then, when I started really doing this research, I lived in Rome, and I was looking through fascist archives. I had already written my first book by that time, and I thought I knew the story that I wanted to tell. But the more I researched this history, the more complicated it became.

Laura spoke about photographs, and when I lived in Rome, I started thinking about the ways that family photographs could offer another kind of history that the archives were not telling me, partly because these photographs, taken by soldiers on the ground with their own personal cameras, did not have to go through censorship the same way that newspaper accounts or actual official documents were censored by the fascists. So, I started trying to find all of these personal photographs, and this completely changed my understanding of this war.

WK:  In a way, it seems like it was an unwritten history. Why was there not more artistic or historical work, for example, from the Ethiopian side. The Italian side did what all the other colonial powers in Europe did: they tried to blank out this part of the history. How do you explain that?

MM: I think that Ethiopians after this war were documenting the war in their own way. There were no cameras. Ethiopians didn’t have cameras when they were fighting in the hills the way the Italians did. But after the war in Addis Ababa and across Ethiopia, there were photo studios that were set up by Greeks, by Armenians, by Ethiopians, by Eritreans. They were using the skills that they had often observed with the Italians or within other communities. They were starting to get access to cameras and also to what they could not photograph during the war. They started recreating and reenacting scenes in photo studios. They would take their old uniforms or their horse, if they had a horse, and they would stand in front of the camera in these studios, and that would represent their time in the war. There were songs that were created that would commemorate certain battles and certain fighters. There were books that were written and some autobiographies about their time, people’s time in war. I think your question to me is why? Why were some of these things never talked about? A lot of it has to do, I think, with Haile Selassie, who came back from the war. 

WK: In 1941.

MM: 1941, and he told everyone: “We are going to forget and forgive what happened. Your Italian brothers,” there were many of them that chose to stay in Ethiopia rather than go back to Italy, “They will become part of our family. They will be in our community. The one who did something wrong was Mussolini.” So, there was no reckoning with what happened, no reckoning with war crimes. And if you have 40 years of this and then a revolution comes in 1974 and people have never had an opportunity to talk about the trauma of 1935 to 1941, to talk about what actually happened and what people were capable of. 

WK: You write about a part of the story you described in your own words as “no one ever talked about the women.” And so, you focus very much on the role of the women in that war. 

MM: In my research through photographs, however, I started discovering photographs of women in military uniforms in the Ethiopian army with their rifles. I started reading small accounts in soldiers’ diaries of women in the field when they were fighting. And I started thinking: no one ever told me this. There is an entire history here. Of course, they would have been in the war if they could. I know that if they were close enough to follow an army and collect the dead, they were close enough to be hit by bullets. Why wouldn’t they arm themselves in turn? And that really changed the direction of my novel. And then, the real detective work began by trying to piece together testimonials if I could find them, family memories from people that I knew, but also this archival research where the stories were not always apparent. But if I looked deep enough, I recognized that some of these women that I saw in the images were definitely soldiers.

WK: It was interesting to read in one of your interviews about when you saw a woman in uniform for the first time in a photograph. 

MM: That photograph showed me a history that I had not really been aware of before. It was a woman in uniform with her horse. And I looked at that image. What it told me was, if there was one woman, then there were likely five. And if there were five, there were maybe ten. And if there were ten, there were maybe 50. And I went back through old documents that I had been reading, newspaper articles, and because I saw that photograph, I suddenly realized that I had missed a couple of articles that spoke about women in the Ethiopian army, leading men, leading charges. 

What I realized is that from researching other wars, other liberation movements, reading the testimonies of women in antifascist movements from Spain to Italy around the world, realizing that they fought, and when they came back to camp, they had another battle that they had to fight. And it was often with the men in their own camps. Ethiopia is no different. We’ve known the place of sexual violence in war. It seems to go hand in hand. Whereas war is about being masculine, it is about being aggressive. It’s about surviving. Where does a woman fit into this world? If war makes a man out of you, what does it say about you if a woman is fighting next to you or against you and actually might be doing better? And these were the questions that started to really develop. I think this influenced the direction of The Shadow King, because these women soldiers were having to defend territory, land, but when they went back to camp, they had to defend their bodies as territory. But they were also fighting the Italians who saw them as territory to be conquered.

WK:  Who is supposed to write this forgotten chapter of history, and to whom is your work directed?

MM: Oh, that is a good question. I think the question is who’s in my head – what image – who do I envision? When I was writing The Shadow King, I really envisioned someone quite like me who lived most of their life outside of Ethiopia. I was writing for someone who doesn’t know this history. And for those who are curious about the many, many ways that authoritarian dictatorships can happen. With bullets, but also with photography, for example. I think I was writing for the curious.

LF:  This work is processual and collective, I think it’s for everybody who wants to participate. A lot of silenced histories are collective ones, and it’s worth creating a safe space for them to be told. The project’s focus is the past, but of course it’s to sensitize us to the present, looking also at the current political situation in Italy – the government we have is extremely linked to the fascist ideology. I mean, we can just look at the news a couple of days ago. They literally left 79 people to die not far from the Italian coast. The question is why this is still happening, why these power structures are repeating themselves. I think because the people aren’t able to have a space for counter-narrative to the propaganda. And it’s because of the structural violence we live in, every day – we don’t have time to gather together and care for each other, to share traumas and to look for solutions. Colonialism is not something in the past. It is still in the present, and it’s in the fabric of society. And it belongs to the present extraction and the present violence and what is happening now. It’s not called colonialism because we are told we are living in postcolonial times, but it’s still there in another way, with another name, maybe capitalism, globalization, extractivism or whatever. But that’s just changing the names. The violence and the structures remain the same.

“In 1940 the Italian fascist regime established the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano (Entity of Colonisation of the Sicilian Latifundo), following the model of the Ente di Colonizzazione for Libya, and the colonial architectures in Eritrea and Ethiopia. Territories that for the regime were to be ” drained,” “modernized,” and “repopulated,” as they were considered “empty,” “underdeveloped,” and “backward.”

To this end, the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano inaugurated eight boroughs and as many remained unfinished. Today most of these villages have fallen into ruin.

What does not seem to be in decay in Italy, however, is the persistence of colonial and fascist rhetoric, culture and policies. Despite the fall of fascism following World War II, the de-fascistization of Italy remains a woefully unfinished process. This is one of the reasons why even today Italy has maintained visible architecture, monuments, plaques and a toponymy celebrating the fascist regime.

Moreover, Italy – having lost its colonial possessions during World War II – has never undertaken a real process of decolonization.” (Text extract from “Towards an Entity of Decolonisation” by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (DAAR).

The project “My Fascist Grandpa” is part of a larger collective work and collaboration with Mario Margani, Entity of Decolonisation, DAAS and DAAR and Garage Arts Platform.

The Podcast was produced from ECCHR, in collaboration with Maaza Mengiste.

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