It was the third month of Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza, just before the Christmas break in 2023, when my daughter Lelia came home one day and mentioned an unhappy confrontation with one of the directors of her school, the Freie Waldorfschule Berlin Mitte.

Seeing that there was a poster in the school’s entry supporting Ukraine, she and a friend thought it would be a good idea to put up something similar in support of the Palestinians. However, the director whom Lelia and her friend Gwen approached didn’t find their suggestion palatable. When they observed that Israel had killed many civilians in Gaza, the director became annoyed and took umbrage, saying that the number of deaths was unreliable, and the count was much less than reported. 

Lelia and Gwen came away from the meeting wondering how many Palestinian deaths were necessary before some empathy and representation could be afforded. To their way of understanding, given Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, a show of solidarity with the Palestinians, alongside support for Ukraine, seemed not only appropriate but urgently necessary – as it still is, after now 20 months of the ongoing genocide (as I write in June 2025).

In respect to the symptomatic, somewhat pathological German support for Israel, this incident is rather telling. While in Germany, it is thoroughly uncontroversial to actively champion Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in February 2022, it is quite problematic concerning Palestine. Many commentators will point out that this is due to German history, to the Holocaust in particular. Accordingly, as a condition of reparation, of making amends, support for the state of Israel is unwavering, is in fact doctrilineally inscribed as German Staatsräson – a condition of the German state itself. 

I recall coming across a symbolic expression par excellence of this unwavering commitment. One afternoon, in June 2024, I was returning home to Prenzlauer Berg, riding a bus I normally wouldn’t take, as I had made a rare trip to the west side of the city. The route took the bus along Scheidemannstraße, past the Reichstag, the seat of the federal parliament. To my astonishment, alongside the national and European Union flags, the Israeli flag adorned a mast, fluttering in the wind, right in front of the building’s famous glass dome. 

This gesture can be contrasted to the heavy-handed crackdown on street protests against Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, an intolerance that involves an official silencing of dissent. An example is the treatment of the British-Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu Sittah. Due to give a talk at a conference on Palestine in Berlin in April 2024, the doctor was detained at the airport, interrogated for hours, and prevented from entering the country. Moreover, the Germans invoked a Schengen ban, which prevented him from travelling to, and entering, other European countries. The heavy-handedness — what amounts to a policy of censorship not so much different to the burning of books — extended to a warning that if Abu Sittah participated in the conference through a remote electronic platform he would be fined and criminally charged and potentially jailed for a year.

While the raising of the Israeli flag at the Reichstag is in the main symbolic, the many Stolpersteine embedded in the pavements of Berlin’s streets have a more lively presence, if only because they interrupt one’s gait, causing one to walk around them. These are square brass plates, a bit smaller than CD packages, bearing the names of persecuted Jews, Roma, the disabled, and others deemed troublesome by the Nazis. Many of the victims are Berlin Jews, and besides their names is engraved their dates of birth and death, as well as the place of their deportation. The Stolpersteine are thus individualised, lying in front of the building in which the victim lived. 

When I moved with my family to Berlin in 2007 and first “stumbled” over a Stolperstein (literally, stumbling stone) I was taken aback, wondering why a miniature form of memorial would be placed right under the feet of passersby. But I realised how effective they are, attracting attention because of their peculiarity, rendering memory alive, centred on the place where victims lived, their neighbourhoods, where they did their shopping, went to school, and where they worked. In other words, the brass plates evoke a form of ethical reparation that is less symbolic, more engaged. For a newcomer such as myself, the Stolpersteine not only encouraged me to look further into the recent history of Germany, particularly concerning the Holocaust, but to also be mindful of others who had lived in the neighbourhood that I — the foreigner, coming from elsewhere — came to inhabit.

This mindfulness extends to something like a neighbourhood ethos. Every year, on 9 November, locals light candles and place flowers on the pavement around the Stolpersteine, marking the infamous Kristallnacht of 1938, when the Nazis burned synagogues and rounded up Jews and other undesirables. It is always, I find, a solemn, atmospheric occasion – the candles dotting the pavements, locals expressing a commitment to maintaining memory of the nation’s violent, indeed genocidal, past. Besides presenting a publicly exposed, localised record of those victimised by the Nazis, the Stolpersteine transpire as a mode of mnemonic infrastructure, an ethical mode of maintaining the very livelihood of memory.

Like all school kids, Lelia would have learned quite a bit about the Holocaust, as it is a mandatory component of the curriculum in German history. For related excursions, students are taken to memorials, museums, and sometimes visit former concentration camps. When, in 2021, I took Lelia and one of my sons, Yunis, to Amsterdam for a week’s holiday, she was very keen to visit the Anne Frank museum, which had been the house where Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. I recall that it was very difficult to obtain a ticket, and it was only through our persistent enquiries that we managed to collect one because of a cancellation. Lelia must have been 14 at the time, and went on her own, as Yunis and I waited in a nearby cafe.

I like to think that Lelia’s learning of the Holocaust and persecution of the Jews in Europe has played a positive role in her capacity to maintain empathy as a component of her political sensibility, extending such sentiments to Ukrainians and Palestinians, among others. To my mind, the school director’s shortsighted reaction to Lelia and Gwen’s desire to mount a poster in support of Palestinians served to thwart this capacity, making the girls feel that perhaps an ethical outlook should not play a role in political thought and action. 

After decades of an ongoing program of the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine (the Nakba), Israel’s racist dehumanisation and murder of Palestinians remains palatable for the German government’s blind adherence to its Staatsräson. This blindness involves a seemingly irredeemable incapacity to call out and stop supporting Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In doing so, the German state alienates a youth whose political sensibility incorporates an ethical commitment for a reduction in racism and violence – a youth interested not only in the diary of Anne Frank, but also the voice of Hind Rajab.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.