Silenced: Palestinian Families in Berlin Navigating Increased Censorship and Surveillance

Abstract

The 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s ensuing assault in Gaza caused immense public upheaval in Berlin, home of Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora. This article shows how Palestinian families intergenerationally navigate the ensuing losses, protests and school unrests, which took place not just in response to the devastation in Gaza and the West Bank, but also to Germany’s unwavering support for Israel, while suppressing pro-Palestinian voices. For the families, this intensification of the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict deepened a state of chronic crises based on traumas, longstanding insecurity and increasing xenophobia in Germany. Drawing from 11 years of ethnographic research in Berlin–Neukölln, I show how events since 7 October drastically changed the neighborhood’s ethos, forcing a communal front of silence. The silence was a reaction to fears of being misrepresented in the media and threats of deportation and school expulsions. Examining prevailing sociopolitical influences, and what happens within families and between generations, I illustrate how families became more insular in their mourning and grief yet found ways to navigate their political views intergenerationally. My argument scrutinizes sociopolitical processes leading to increased polarization and highlights the importance of schools as safe spaces for identity formation and contemplation.

1. Introduction

This article explores how the violent attack on 7 October 2023 by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the retaliation by Israel with genocidal proportions on Palestinians has deepened chronic crises and darkened perspectives on the present and future for Palestinian families in Germany. Crises are discussed in the plural and considered chronic because Palestinians have faced ongoing legal obstacles and structural social and family challenges amid marginalization, not just since their arrival in Germany but ever since the Nakba (Arabic for “the catastrophe”), the 1948 creation of Israel as a nation-state (Ghadban 2008). The 2023 escalation of the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Taraki 2006) can thereby be seen as an intensification of uncertainty and unpredictability rather than a truly novel process (Kleist and Jansen 2016; Vigh 2008). While Germany has provided relative physical safety, this article shows how Germany’s ban on pro-Palestinian displays and messages further isolated Berlin’s large Palestinian and Arab diasporas and increasingly silenced their already insecure, marginalized network of families. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research, this exploration aims to contextualize and humanize Palestinians in Germany at a time when the media is increasingly presenting Palestinians and, more broadly, Arabs and Muslims as “others” (e.g., Bock and Macdonald 2019; Lewicki and Shooman 2022); as a “riot of foreignness” (Nutt 2023); as the source of imported antisemitism (Özyürek 2023); and in the words of some government leaders, as “not a part of Germany” (e.g., Der Spiegel 2023a). Relatedly, I argue that Germany’s approach leaves Palestinians feeling like they are without emotions; like their lives and experiences can be negated and easily forgotten; and that they themselves can be easily deported from the country.

To contextualize Palestinian voices within Germany’s current sociopolitical climate, I focused on the family, generational relationships and tactics for self-protection amid constant negotiation with that climate. As Taraki (2006, p. xxiii) maintains in her work with Palestinians, the family has long been hailed in the literature as a “shock absorber”, providing sustenance and resilience in the face of many adversities for its members; what’s more, “the family is the first order group where the imagination is elaborated, sensibilities sharpened, dispositions acquired, and horizons established”. For this study, I first examined how Palestinians experienced Germany’s sociopolitical climate and what influenced their actions and reactions. The voices of those who work most closely with the youth and families proved equally insightful as they shed another light on the families’ experiences and a population currently afraid to speak out. Second, I explored how families navigated Germany’s legal ban and social taboo on public pro-Palestinian support. Third, I investigated how the school environment impacted young Palestinians’ understanding of their positioning in Germany and how those impacts influenced intergenerational relations and future perspectives.

Young people draw their identities and beliefs not just from their families but also from their environments. Therefore, the family is not an isolated unit but rather influenced by location, social standing and the sociopolitical environment it is immersed in (Taraki 2006). How young and old identify with the Palestinian cause will vary accordingly. Mason (2007) argues that how Palestinians experience their connection to Palestine and the Palestinian cause differs intergenerationally, hinging on the number of generations since the Nakba. Varying experiences of dispossession and the politicized nature of exile across and between countries have produced each generation’s unique means of maintaining relationships with the homeland, creating “contrapuntal notions of identity and belonging” (Mason 2007, p. 272). Building on Mason, I argue that the host country’s reception of the Palestinian cause and Palestinian refugees has shaped generational identities and relationships not just vis-à-vis Palestine but vis-à-vis Germany, too. The Palestinian cause and identity are more than a matter of attachment or identification with place; they are “about a visceral identification with suffering and injustice occurring within and across a particular place” (Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017, p. 745). Over the years, the Palestinian cause has, thus, grown to have much greater meaning for not only Palestinians but also Muslims worldwide, who have embraced it as a symbol in their fight against discrimination and injustices toward Muslims in the West (Eksner 2015).

This article does not set out to detail events on or following October 7th, nor the history of the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which many other sources have covered (e.g., Fraihat and Hedaya 2024). Instead, my aim is to trace how frustrations, disappointment and anger are intergenerationally felt and shared, as well as to understand how these experiences have been intensified yet simultaneously confined within the family unit because of Germany’s protest bans and zero pro-Palestinian tolerance in schools. I will first outline how the mechanism of silencing has already been covered, especially with respect to Palestinians, and then explore the experiences of Palestinian families in Berlin, including the sociopolitical circumstances that have affected their reception. This will be followed by an analysis of key events related to 7 October, which have reverberated in the media and, as a result, within families. The sections after that will illuminate why families have been silenced and what effect this has on individuals and the school environments. As a whole, my aim is to show how 7 October and its ensuing events have huddled generations together in a fearful existence within Germany and German institutions, albeit in differing ways. While parents have become mostly frightened and cowering under a fraught reception in Germany, their children’s frustrations and pains have been aggravated by feelings of misrepresentation and voicelessness in German society.

2. Silencing

“Suffering is a core element in the modern history of the Palestinian people; and… this suffering has been silenced by an exceptional concatenation of forces”. (Sayigh 2015, p. 1)

This quote comes from the introduction to Sayigh’s (2015) paper called “Silenced Suffering”, which traces external and internal forces that have silenced Palestinians for over a century. She argues that the silencing has a long history, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, whereby the British government announced its support for a national home in Palestine for Jewish people while simultaneously negating the existence and equal footing of indigenous Palestinians. The 1948 Nakba thereafter served as a “silencing machine” by dividing and sending Palestinians into various host states as “disenfranchised refugees” or “second class citizens” (ibid., 5). In the aftermath, histories were repressed by obstructing the recording of personal stories and omitting Palestinian national history from school curricula. This was both locally and globally reinforced by the media and academia through biased coverage that neglected the expulsions and subsequent suffering to instead focus on Israel’s self-representation. As Sayigh points out, the Nakba is notably excluded from the trauma genre in the academic literature that otherwise addresses monumental national catastrophes. Berger and Jabr (2020) also document the pervasive silencing of Palestinians in mental health organizations. External silencing mechanisms by Israel include surveillance, censorship and terrorism, alongside the erasure of Palestinian habitation, history and archeology (Sayigh 2015).

While Sayigh discusses internal silencing through cultural deprivation, political repression and resistance movements that negate the significance of teaching and researching Palestinian history and culture, she does not focus on silencing that occurs between generations within families and communities. The “conspiracy of silence” has been an influential term in psychology for understanding the intergenerational transmission of trauma. When silenced traumas and parental denial are passed down along with misplaced emotions, family communication becomes self-protective when confronted with awareness of the trauma; what is more, children tend to take on roles such as healers, victims and saviors, consequently burdening family relationships (Weingarten 2004). Inherited silencing and intergenerational trauma have been well documented for Palestinians in Gaza, as well as in the diaspora (e.g., Dalgaard et al. 2019; Veronese et al. 2023; Kublitz 2015; Aranki 2022). Extensive trauma and disrupted communication and trust within a population can also affect inter-community relations and cause a torn social fabric (Dickson-Gomez 2002) and can be linked to individual and group identities. Thereby, “when one generation fails to restore social and political equality, this failure forms the next generations legacy” (Weingarten 2004, p. 52). This “exceptional concatenation of forces” (Sayigh 2015, p. 1) has led to generations of Palestinians experiencing the phenomenon of silencing. As the next sections will show, silencing extends to the German context with an equally complex set of forces from multiple external sources, such as politics and the media, but also within the communities and families themselves.

3. Situating Longitudinal Ethnographic Research in Berlin

The arguments presented here are based on my 11 years of longitudinal research in the Neukölln district of Berlin. My intense 19-month phase of ethnography took place between 2013 and 2015, with regular return visits ever since. The foundational research I undertook focused on sociopolitical forces that prevented the children of migrants from escaping social vulnerabilities, such as social marginalization, low levels of education and poverty across generations (Tize 2022). Through conducting over 90 interviews and participant observation in schools, communities and family settings, I analyzed how youth socially navigated (Vigh 2006) their surroundings and the obstacles they faced. Specifically, the research revealed the roles that citizenship status, rising xenophobia and the media played in the struggle of students and their families to feel they belong in Germany. This article builds on those findings and reflects how, once again, significant global events have ignited anger and disillusionment yet also feelings of solidarity and insularity within families and the greater diaspora.

This article diverges from the approach of my intensive research phase by drawing on established long-term relationships with my participants outside of school environments. While I returned annually since 2015 (with the exception of the COVID lockdown in 2020/2021), my focus is on events and research data gathered in the form of ethnographic observations and interviews since 7 October 2023. To better protect my interlocutors, who were willing to share their stories on this highly contested topic, I refer to those working closely with Palestinian–Lebanese youth and families as “local experts” without reference to their professions. In total, I interviewed three families and six local experts about what they experienced and observed before and after 7 October, as well as how they perceived the protests, media reactions and their future perspectives in Neukölln and Germany as a whole. While I do believe I got great depth through interviewing local experts alongside families, the fear of speaking out has made the pool of informants smaller than originally intended and might present itself as a limitation to the study. This research was paralleled with my analysis of media on Palestinians in Germany before and after 7 October. My longitudinal focus enabled contextualization and an understanding of changes in personal agency over time (Tomanović 2018).

In sum, the ethnographic approach sought to capture a multitude of voices and experiences in participants’ everyday lives. Written consent was sought from all participants, and research permission was granted by the University of Amsterdam (2013-SSC-3092). All names and identifying information have been changed to protect the participants.

4. Palestinian Families Through Crises and Continuity

The majority of adult and young adult Palestinian refugees in Germany belong to the third or fourth generation since the Nakba and the second or third generation to live in Germany. The majority of Palestinians in Berlin is estimated to originate from the refugee camps in Lebanon, where they fled the major restrictions on work and travel, education and other basic human needs (Khalidi 2010; Allan 2014), alongside the violent effects of the Lebanese Civil War (1978–1990). The number of Palestinians living in Germany remains difficult to estimate because many arrived as stateless or on the passport of their previous host country. Estimates range between 175,000 to 220,000 in Germany and 30,000 to 45,000 in Berlin—which is home to the biggest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. Berlin was a particularly popular destination for young families because of its ease of entry due to a legal loophole after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and before the reunification of Germany in 1990. The easy entry ushered many of the young families into asylum centers in Berlin and, later, rundown low-income West German neighborhoods, such as Neukölln, Kreuzberg and Wedding. Along the Sonnenallee Street and bordering the fallen wall, the inner-city neighborhood of Neukölln became a hub for the Palestinian diaspora to settle, with hopes of overcoming their past struggles and losses. Unfortunately, their troubles were far from over.

Since the 1948 creation of Israel, Palestinians have faced loss of land and possession, persecution and, for many, a longstanding marginalized refugee existence. Those who settled in Germany are no exception. The German asylum system protected them from the threats of the Lebanese Civil War, but it did not erase their memories or traumas nor provide any form of security or means to lead a rewarding life. As Blachnicka-Ciacek (2020) states in her work with Palestinians in Poland and the UK, “time may be experienced differently by migrants and refugees, especially if they have been subjected to violence… violence and suffering, therefore, cannot be treated as events that come to an end, but as ongoing experiences which come part of people’s identities and everyday lives” (p. 5). Nor was Germany’s Holocaust guilt and support of Israel welcoming to or at least acknowledging Palestinian refugees’ existence.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees were placed on Kettenduldung, a temporary status in Germany that suspends deportation usually for a matter of months or, at most, a couple of years. Kettenduldung translates to “chain toleration”, signifying the continual need to renew the status and the associated waves of insecurity. Among my interlocutors, the status often lasted between 6 and 25 years until conditional citizenship was granted, while a few were still counting down their days to become a citizen. Deportation reports for one or several family members came regularly; entire families were in a constant state of insecurity, fearing the police and immigration authority, known as the Ausländerbehörde. For many, their precarious status felt like a “new war in Berlin” (Heyken 2014, p. 89); parents lived with ongoing anxiety, and children often absorbed the distress, dreading the arrival of mail that could signal being kicked out of the country at any time. Aside from the insecurity surrounding their stay, the Kettenduldung status blocked them—in a similar fashion to restrictions placed in Lebanese refugee camps—from working, getting a driver’s license, pursuing higher education and leaving the city state of Berlin. Elsewhere (Tize 2020), I have shown how toleration status has severe effects on families’ and children’s future perspectives and feelings of belonging in Germany, even long after securing residency. The eldest siblings in the family had often experienced the journey to Germany, including the traumas brought on by refugee centers and toleration status uncertainties. Such struggles have unfolded amid persisting insecurity driven by immigration raids and deportation threats, alongside the hostile reception and growing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments in Germany. For my interlocutors, these longstanding processes led to the state of chronic crises, which had become the norm “because it is what is there most” (Vigh 2008, p. 11).

Although changes in citizenship laws have allowed younger generations born in Germany to obtain German citizenship, insecurity and a sense of crisis have prevailed for families because many parents have remained on uncertain statuses. While differing passport opportunities have shifted how older non-citizens and younger citizens navigate systemic structures, citizenship has not diminished attachment or emotional connection to Palestine (Gabiam and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017; Gabiam 2018). Existential threats and collective memory have compelled Palestinians in the diaspora to preserve their history and cultural traditions through remembering and storytelling. Narratives of the Nakba, in particular, along with suffering and trauma, have become the “symbolic linchpin of collective identity and bedrock of nationalism” across generations (Allan 2014, p. 41). Those in refugee settings have notably shaped the ethos of the persevering fight for Palestinian identity (Lindholm Schulz 2003). It is also in exile that Palestinians have forged resistance, revolution and the drive to overcome the notion of the helpless refugee (Allan 2014). Yet, as I will show in the next sections, resistance and resilience in the face of vulnerability remain fragile and fleeting due to legal precarity and ongoing marginalization.

5. Neukölln, the Hotbed of Germany’s Moral Panic

In the weeks after 7 October, Berlin–Neukölln broke into upheaval. Anticipating unrest, an overrepresentation of police force in armored cars and armed with water cannons lined the Sonnenallee. The street has been nicknamed “little Beirut” and “the Gaza Strip” due to the many Palestinians from Lebanese refugee camps who have settled in the area. And it is here where Palestinian and, more widely, Arab conflicts have been acutely felt and publicly expressed.

The police presence was meant to signal a message: public support for the Palestinian cause is not allowed on Berlin’s or Germany’s soil. At the crux of the issue was the increasing international criticism lodged at Germany for holding a double standard. While police forces shut down attempts at public mourning in the form of lighting candles on the Sonnenallee, the local authorities hoisted Israeli flags at the Brandenburger Gate as a display of solidarity with Israel (Andersen 2024; Mishra 2025). The extreme suppression of one side and favoritism of the other amid immense loss and mourning following the Israeli counteroffensive was explosive. For weeks after 7 October, Neukölln and Berlin, as a whole, saw numerous illegal protests that caused conflicts between police and the protesters. To illustrate, a Neukölln demonstration on 18 October resulted in 194 arrests, 274 misdemeanors and criminal charges and 65 injured police officers (Fröhlich et al. 2023). The anticipatory police presence in Neukölln was likened by one of my interlocutors to “preparations for civil war”. One article in the local city newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, referred to Neukölln, despite its two decades of gentrification, by using the outdated term “Brennpunkt” for an inner-city neighborhood; the word translates to “hotbed”, though it literally means “burning point”, evocative of the area’s smoldering social decay.

Brennpunkt Neukölln—that is what it’s come down to again. Barricades are burning, police officers are being attacked and slogans are being chanted. When it comes to expressions of solidarity for Palestine, no one spends much time to question the right to demonstrate. Berlin’s society has become accustomed to othering the Neukölln district. It is seen as a riot of foreignness. (Nutt 2023; own translation)

While these impressions colored the media and fueled the zeitgeist in Germany, for Palestinians, Arabs and pro-Palestinians at large, three significant occurrences shaped a different perspective—one that they brought up in every interview I held since October 7th. Situating the protests and their explosiveness in a different light, my interlocutors found significance not only in the events themselves but also in how they were managed and reported in the media. These insights are at the heart of understanding how Palestinian families coped with the cataclysmic events.

The first occurrence—or really a collection of occurrences—that provides context for the families’ reactions amounted to how attempted expressions of pro-Palestinian support, whether peaceful or not, were thwarted, reported on and/or violently ended by police. The amount of police force used after 7 October during the Neukölln protests was consistently referenced by my interlocutors—whether they were youths, parents or local experts—as excessive and overly violent. For background, Germany had already banned any form of pro-Palestinian protest in 2021 due to fears of antisemitic actions and rhetoric. This drew criticism from human rights watchdog Amnesty International (2024).

Germany’s Holocaust history and Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the public debate on overcoming its troubled past, along with its reconciliation mission and Staatsräson (“reason of state”), have been cited as sources for the denouncement and actual banning of public displays of the Palestinian cause (Fekete 2024; Younes and Al-Taher 2024). A postwar German–Israeli symbiosis (Mishra 2025) was structurally reinforced when then-chancellor Angela Merkel declared in 2008 that Israel’s continuous success and security are part of Germany’s Staatsräson. This effectively rendered any form of criticism of Israel be treated as antisemitic and offensive (Fekete 2024). Germany’s attempt at building a “new Germany” was premised on the commitment to fighting antisemitism and, within that esprit de corps, “the Palestinian became synonymous with ‘Islamist terror’ and ‘Antisemitism’ at a transnational level, often ‘representing’ an ‘irrational’ world at war with the West” (Younes and Al-Taher 2024, p. 398). Özyürek (2023) has argued that while white Christian-born Germans see themselves as having reached redemption from the Holocaust, the problem of rising antisemitism is projected onto a small group of immigrants from the Middle East as “subcontractors of Holocaust guilt”. This shifted blame undermines the fact that 90% of antisemitic crimes are actually carried out by right-wing extremists. As a result, in Germany, especially, Palestinians have since faced multiple forms of censorship, coupled with a growing climate of racism and Islamophobia and disproportionate monitoring and surveillance under state claims of security threats (Atshan and Galor 2020; Fekete 2024).

The second occurrence my interlocutors mentioned was an Instagram post by the organization known as Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. The post showed a man draped in a Palestinian flag handing out candy on the Sonnenallee. It read: “Long live the resistance of the Palestinian people. Distribution of sweets on the Sonnenallee in Berlin to celebrate the victory of resistance” (see Fröhlich et al. 2023). This image became highly controversial, being seen as a celebration of the Hamas attacks. It sparked national outrage and elicited responses of abhorrence from multiple levels to the pro-Palestinian support expressed throughout the country, with Neukölln as the hotbed. For example, politician Roderich Kiesewetter was quoted saying: “a country that caused the Holocaust and has over 6 million Jews on their conscience cannot allow the justification of Palestinian terrorists” (Der Spiegel 2023b). Likewise, Israeli ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor said in a speech at the Brandenburger Gate: “Only a few hundred meters from here, Samidoun is distributing sweets and with that celebrates the public murder of Israeli civilians… now Berlin must wake up so that Samidoun doesn’t turn Berlin into a second Gaza” (ibid.).

While the overwhelming majority of Palestinians in Neukölln had never heard of Samidoun, and the organization’s estimated followers in Berlin totaled just 40 (Schleiermacher and Memarnia 2023), Neukölln’s diaspora became equated with celebrating terror. What is more, showing pro-Palestinian support became equated with supporting Hamas. The consequences of showing any pro-Palestinian support came from the top down. Federal Minister Marco Buschmann was quoted saying: “Whoever celebrates Hamas terror on our streets is not a part of Germany” (Der Spiegel 2023a, p. 24). That position was reiterated by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, insisting that he would “deport people more often and faster” (ibid., p. 17). As such, Palestinians were conflated with Hamas supporters, while their sense of security and already tenuous belonging in Germany became even more threatened, especially among those without secure residency.

The third occurrence that all my interlocutors cited with shock when I spoke to them in the months after was a violent altercation on October 9th between a Neukölln secondary school teacher and a student who was displaying a Palestinian flag on school grounds. The event was investigated and analyzed in detail by Younes and Al-Taher (2024), revealing how stories diverged between teachers, the police and student witnesses on the scene. While I will not go into details here, the point for my interlocutors was that a tweet by the police was uncritically disseminated by the media to frame the student as the attacker instead of highlighting how the teacher used his position of power to threaten the students. Shocked by the events and the violence against their children, parents had come to protest at that school, but rather than being received with support, they were met with police repression on account of terrorism threats. Seemingly motivated by this event gaining wide media coverage, on 13 October 2023, the Berlin Senate for Education, Youth and Family released guidelines on how schools should deal with disruptions to school peace in connection with the terrorist attack on Israel (Günther-Wünsch 2023). The document outlined that any statements expressing approval of the attacks constituted a threat and were to be immediately prohibited, including any chants, statements or visible displays of support, such as pro-Palestine or “free Palestine” stickers, flyers, pins and the Palestinian keffiyeh.

All three of these occurrences made national, if not international, headlines, proving central to what Fekete (2024) called Germany’s “moral panic”. Germany’s large Palestinian diaspora has stood as a moral contradiction to Germany’s extreme allegiance to Israel ever since the Second World War. For my interlocutors, as the following sections will illustrate, the post-October 7th events heightened the palpable tensions and their growing vulnerability in Germany. The incidents, moreover, highlighted how Palestinians and, more widely, Arabs have become increasingly confounded by how to belong in a country that does not want to acknowledge the living and breathing consequences of its government’s unwavering support of Israel while denying them their own emotions, identities and losses. Yet, to understand the perspectives reflected in my research, it is important to grasp who the Palestinians in Neukölln are and which crises have impacted them across the generations. After all, forced migration does not end with arrival; it shapes generational relationships, whether people have personally experienced conflict or loss or were born to those who have (Blachnicka-Ciacek 2020). Only by keeping their past and present circumstances in mind can the families’ perspectives and reactions be understood.

6. Silenced

The police, I guess they were doing the job they were supposed to do, but they were using so much force and arresting people for nothing. We’re being suppressed. They’re not giving us a place to grieve. Why can’t we wear Palestinian flags? It doesn’t mean that people can’t wear LGTBQ symbols, or whatever else there is! They [the Germans] have really taken our freedom from us. (Nadia, 24)

Nadia’s quote serves as a baseline for this section, highlighting my interlocuters’ sense of confusion. They were perplexed by the suppression of their identities and beliefs, as well as the feeling of having their freedom of expression revoked. In other words, they were silenced. The violent suppression of pro-Palestinian protests and statements, whether verbal or visual, had haunting effects. Freedom of speech was no longer a right, and speaking out came with fears of misrepresentation and being misunderstood. The threats of deportation and the legal consequences of speaking out felt especially risky for those who still had family members with insecure statuses. As Fadi, a local expert who worked for over 15 years with the communities, noted that not long after 7 October:

It really seemed like it was from one day to the next, that we were sitting there, and all [the students] were like [puts his hand over his mouth to symbolize muzzling]. “Yeah, sorry,” they said, “we’re not allowed to talk about it anymore”. “Why?” I asked, and then they said it was forbidden by their parents.

Silence quickly blanketed Neukölln, and reporters scouring the streets for quotes and experiences to report on were repeatedly rebuffed. People feared being misrepresented. As Laila, a 29-year-old mother, described: “I was approached on the street by a reporter, and I refused. I’m so scared they’re going to twist my words, and I don’t know in what context they would write it”. Negative experiences in and with the media had taken their toll, and people felt they were not going to let their stories get shared in ways that would only hurt them.

While the silencing effect was nothing new in Neukölln, it became more extreme in 2023. During my research in 2013, I had already noticed the strong tendency to keep problems and perspectives within the family as a way to shield relatives from the immigration authorities and social and child services (Tize and Reis 2019). At the time, there was a clear boundary between what was appropriate to bring up at school and what stayed at home. Yet, students would still openly discuss issues and opinions concerning their identity, experiences of discrimination and political beliefs. This was at least the case until the 2015 terror attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. After the attack, the media frequently took students’ statements, sometimes supporting the attackers, out of context and weaponized Muslim students’ statements as political caricatures (Tize et al. 2020).

Several local experts I interviewed noted the stark difference between how students had begun to act in educational spaces years ago and the extreme turn taken since October 7th. Discussing a Palestinian youth we both knew, Kaya explained it as follows:

Then [in 2015] you still had [youth] like Ibrahim, who would accept you [enough to open up to you]. We still have these characters, but not so strong. I really think it’s the fear of opening up to [local experts], to be totally honest. There is so much hesitation from the family.

During family visits, the youth themselves reported their hesitation to speak out at school. Unlike her elder brother, who said he gained much from discussions around the Palestinian conflict, identities and positioning only a few years earlier, 16-year-old Farah felt she could not express herself freely.

The class is good, but I can’t really speak openly to my teachers there. We’re supposed to debate but I don’t feel like I can really speak my mind. Sometimes I do it anyway. My classmates then say, “You can’t say that here!” even though I know they all agree. But sometimes I just have to.

Her brother then interjected: “Yeah! But you did get in trouble for it every time!” Farah shrugged, seeming to accept that voicing her opinion was more important than any consequences she would face from her teachers. This tension between staying quiet to keep their thoughts to themselves and being triggered to voice their confusions, frustrations and opinions was something students navigated daily in the months after 7 October. Some were more successful than others; sometimes, heated discussions took place at school despite parents’ requests to keep quiet. Who the presiding teacher was and how safe the students felt in that environment had a big impact on how students perceived their positioning in the current political and social upheaval.

Fear of speaking out was not just the experience of youth in the school environment. Majed Abusalama, an academic and activist, wrote a June 2023 op-ed in Al Jazeera titled “Anti-Palestinianism is escalating in Germany”. Originally from Gaza, Abusalama described how speaking about the ethnic cleansing and dispossession of his people led to being immediately shut down.

I was constantly warned to be careful what I was saying because it did not reflect “German values”. I was told that I am an anti-Semite, that I am a terrorist. I tried to make my voice heard on German mainstream media, but to no avail. If I tried to write for an Israeli newspaper, I would have had greater freedom to express myself than I ever did on German media outlets. (Abusalama 2023)

In their interviews with Palestinians in Berlin, Atshan and Galor (2020) similarly found that Palestinians exhibited fears of censorship if they openly spoke about the expulsion from their land. One Palestinian father explained his hesitation by saying that “describing the difficulties of our life as refugees or descendants of refugees would insult the Germans” (ibid., p. 22). Likewise, Al-Taher and Younes (2023) noted in their research among academics that expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments meant facing “everyday realities of intimidation, threats, microaggressions or, most notably, lack of solidarity or support and efforts of silencing” (p. 3). They, along with Dekel and Özyürek (2020) and Younes and Al-Taher (2024), have critically reflected on the list of academics who have been deemed antisemitic and had lectures canceled and lost jobs for their attempts to build bridges or take inclusive approaches. These sentiments have been heightened by global incidents since 7 October, for example, cancellations of Palestinian authors on book tours; British Palestinian surgeon and academic Ghassan Abu-Sitta being denied entry into France at the airport; and the cancellation of lectures by Francesca Albanese, an independent UN ambassador of the Palestinian territories. This growing censorship and its effects were poignantly articulated by Palestinian bookstore owner Fadi Abdelnour in Berlin, who emphasized caution when expressing pro-Palestinian ideas in Germany; navigating Germany as a Palestinian, as he put it, “used to be a labyrinth, and now it’s a minefield” (Bax 2024).

The sudden move by parents to silence their children at school and in public spaces thus emerged from the lived experiences of friends, family and peers in those same schools, public spaces and protests. News spread like wildfire within and between large family networks; the embargo to not talk about experiences or voice opinions, therefore, took effect almost instantly across Berlin’s Palestinian and wider Arab diaspora. Collective experiences were reflected in multiply repeated statements by Palestinian youth and local experts, such as “we [Arabs] all agree here in Neukölln”; “parents and children, they’re all on the same page”; or at school “they’re all pro-Palestine”. These statements referred to shared feelings about the overuse of police force, the lack of freedom to speak up about the Palestinian cause and a general sense of abjection since 7 October. And yet, what was presented to the outside as a unanimous front of silence looked different within the families—where differing understandings of trauma and suffering can create intergenerational shifts and rifts.

7. The Second, Third and Fourth Generations Since the Nakba

“It’s so tragic!” Aisha, mother of 4, rolls her eyes and makes an exhausted expression while she flops down on the couch opposite a massive flat-screen TV showing Al Jazeera images of the destruction in Gaza. First, she points to the images on the TV, her face drops, and then puts her hand on her chest “I’m suffering! It hurts so much!” Her daughter Dalia (17) looks up with slight irritation: “She watches [Al Jazeera news] like 24 h a day!” Aisha looks up, surprised at her daughter’s resistance. “I must”.

For my entire four-hour visit with this family, their TV played scenes of Gaza destruction at an impressive volume, above the chatter and noises of Aisha’s children and grandchildren coming and going. The scenes of devastation were a constant reminder of an alternate reality they had to live through emotionally, as well as of their fortunate circumstances in Germany existing parallel to the suffering of kin in Gaza and the West Bank. While for Aisha, the scenes let her do what she “must”—suffer with other Palestinians—for her children, the stream of images had become too much. The eldest, notably, drew a boundary in her own household—Bayan’s husband could only watch the news without their young children present. For Aisha, this was inconceivable. On hearing Bayan’s decision, her voice became raised and emotional to share a news story of a six-year-old who witnessed her family home’s destruction and loss of family members yet refused to leave Gaza. Aisha exclaimed that this child “has been there and seen it all and she knows where she belongs”! While it may have seemed like Aisha was challenging her daughter’s loyalty, Bayan saw it differently. “My children are socialized otherwise! They are softer and, thankfully, they live here, and they are protected. Later they can make their own choices, but now? It’s too soon”, Bayan explained.

While Aisha had openly shared everything, struggles included, with her children as they came of age, Bayan’s approach was to shield her children from hardships. By ensuring her children “are protected”, she chose a path different than her own while perhaps also creating a different relationship to the suffering of kin, conflict and family suffering. Sharing images of war and destruction can engender anxiety on large scales and be a “self-fueling process” by producing and reinforcing uncertainty and fear (Kleist and Jansen 2016, p. 375). For Bayan and her siblings, the constant waves of suffering of the ebb and flow of Israeli–Palestinian conflicts, alongside their status in Germany, were a shared family experience. By sparing her children from the relentless news, she was opting to create a different relationship with the next generation, as well as to ease the burdens and fears of her young children.

Each generation has a particular set of influences that shapes their attachments and identities. In her work with Palestinians, Kublitz (2016) noted that while a generation of parents were revolutionaries of the war in Lebanon, their children became devout Muslims as a reaction to the discrimination they experienced in Denmark. In line with Mannheim (1952), she argues that generations tend to be produced by the distinctive historical experiences of a particular age cohort while noting that structural continuities exist across generations. All generations came out of structural liminal positions, and their revolutionary and Muslim identities were reactions to similar liminal processes. While the revolutionary identities did not feature in my research (perhaps due to my different focus), strong Muslim and ethnic identities increasingly crosscut the generations as a reaction to social exclusion and their liminal state in Germany (see also Çelik 2015).

A memorable interview I held with a Lebanon refugee camp-raised Palestinian mother of eight children showed the shifting tensions between the generations in a different light. During the interview, we sat on a couch underneath an oversized Palestinian flag that figuratively and physically cast a certain light on the living room. Fragile, the woman sat often holding her stomach as she recounted her struggles with constant deportation orders, something she was only able to stop by repeatedly becoming pregnant in quick succession. For her, Germany was related to pain caused by avoiding and even hiding from authorities. All born in Germany, her children brought a new sense of loss too because the younger ones, all high school-aged, claimed to feel “a bit German”—not just Palestinian. The claim made her feel that her roots and strong sense of identity might be slipping.

For the younger generations, mostly born and raised in Germany, it was common to have shifting identities. Their sense of belonging was based on context and varied between ethnic and/or Muslim identities and sometimes also in terms of degree of Germanness (Tize et al. 2020). While being Palestinian was always a persistent identity, how families coped with this “slipping” of their identification as Palestinians altered strongly between families and depended on where and when the question was investigated. For example, days before starting high school, 13-year-old Esra showed up for our meeting in August 2014 during my early phase of research, wearing a Palestinian flag around her neck. She held it up proudly, recounting glory stories of her elder brothers at Berlin’s protests during a 2014 intensification in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Her brothers publicly standing up for Palestine and their heritage had ignited her Palestinian identity that summer and beyond—previously, she had simply said she was “from Lebanon”.

Research has found that in the face of conflict, ethnic identities tend to strengthen vis-à-vis national identities (Rohner et al. 2013; Nair and Sambanis 2019; Hadzic et al. 2017). These studies, among others (e.g., Çelik 2015), apply to my ethnography of Palestinians and Arabs vis-à-vis German identity. I found that young people formed reactive, oppositional identities in response to their marginalization and suppression. For many, 7 October triggered affiliations with strong ethnic identities—made visible through their WhatsApp and other social media platform profile photos, along with statements such as “Proud Palestinian” to declare their sentiments amidst public suppression.

The influence of news and social media in strengthening ethnic identities also played a part in how people were navigating their experience of the conflicts in Germany and the wider Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Aisha’s need to watch Al Jazeera all day was not unique. Throughout my research, Arab news channels often played in the background, the TV seemingly underpinning a family’s existence in many households. Exposure to news coverage of conflicts often occurred in tandem with sharing clips of violence in Gaza or Berlin’s protests via social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp. How families regulated perceived and analyzed online media had a large influence on how the content was consumed by the younger generations. Digital exposure to violence can contribute to escalating social tensions (David 2014), while for Palestinians, it has also simultaneously constructed narratives and mobilizes resistance (Jha and Chumbow 2024). Having to navigate public bans of pro-Palestinian displays, online images of violence, family discourses about conflict and school environments that forbade discussion of such topics, the younger generations had different concerns than their parents and grandparents, whose existence was characterized by refugee liminality and being betwixt and between “the national order of things” (Malkki 1996).

8. School and Family Tensions

Internal family processes reflected tensions and different understandings of how 7 October and the ensuing events of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict should be conceived. In turn, generations managed their engagement with and feelings in varying ways, as did schools. Roni, a local expert, suggested that the silencing at school raised red flags about society as a whole.

It is so incredibly sad that we, as a society, have managed to have kids think that it is better not to talk about it. Then it is also no surprise that people lose faith in this democracy—and they get beaten by the police on top of it all.

Alongside the family, the school has served as an important place for transmitting information. Being where youth spend most of their waking life, schools can have a tremendous influence on identities and future perspectives (Cemalcilar 2010). Younes and Al-Taher (2024) have argued that state-led school and university education in Germany provide the following:

fundamental avenues for stabilizing efforts of Germany’s state ideology [which] include domination and surveillance of civil society actors deemed “deviant” from said national norm, which takes place via cooperation with the police, and reporting of individuals, students, and pupils (p. 399).

While my research supports such claims, there has been variation in how schools approach the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the effect it can potentially have on its students. Through years of working with Arab students and, specifically, many Palestinians, some secondary schools learned that a hard, intolerant stance toward any pro-Palestinian voices did not foster trust, nor was it beneficial for students or teachers. Based on years of experience working with youth, Michael, like some other local experts, promoted tolerance and listening as a way “to show understanding, also understanding of the absolute limits of what we as Germans with our historical responsibility perceive as correct”. He added: “But without understanding and listening we would get nowhere—and the students, they expected resistance! They were strongly surprised that they didn’t get it here… and that did something with them”.

Some students, as noted earlier by Farah, still felt that some teachers were not open to their opinions. However, some schools’ more tolerant approach—and its positive effect on students, their attitudes and their ability to hear different perspectives—was noticed by local experts who worked with multiple schools. Other schools, like the one where the violent teacher–student altercation took place, had a zero-tolerance policy. This led to what Selma, a local expert, called “Wut im Bauch” (“anger in the belly”), in reference to pent-up rage and frustration without a proper outlet. McDoom (2012) argues that emotions, particularly fear, trigger psychological processes that lead to group polarization. As such, creating fear of speaking out—or entirely denying their ability to speak—leaves youth to contemplate their emotions strictly within like-minded circles. Without the ability to express themselves beyond “Proud Palestinian” on a WhatsApp profile photo, future perspectives grew bleak as students lost motivation to participate in school and afterschool activities.

9. Conclusions: The Greater Consequences of Silencing

For Palestinians, but also more broadly for Arabs and Muslims in the West, 7 October and what followed was an intensification of extant processes. Similar to dynamics in the post-9/11 and post-Charlie Hebdo periods, families’ reactions in the post-7 October wake must be understood against a backdrop of structural violence, marginalization and discrimination (Bertelsen and Zagato 2015). In this buildup of events, each exponentially adding to intensification, the question remains how much more the Palestinian family can serve as a “shock absorber” (Taraki 2006). No family is equal in ability to absorb shocks or make sense of them. In other words, there are limits to the coping mechanisms families can use (Abu Nahleh 2006); how people navigate their physical and social environment is equally important to how they understand and regulate their digital exposure to conflicts.

Generations of Palestinians have learned that they are not wanted or, at best, are being tolerated—for now. That knowledge is passed down through generations, shaping experiences, perspectives, identities and a tenuous sense of belonging. There are no boundaries between political violence that has happened in the past and the contemporary conflicts at home, thereby making these families particularly vulnerable to episodes of distress (Weingarten 2004). Exile, in that sense, can be understood as an ongoing catastrophe without end (Kublitz 2015). While the younger generations are now the first with citizenship in Germany, their parents’ traumatic experiences before and after arrival to the country exacerbate the insecurity and fear caused by Germany’s threats to pro-Palestinian voices. Parents are engaged in transmitting the legacies of conflict and loss yet are also busy anticipating what is to come (Tuyishimire et al. 2024; this issue). Silencing their children is part and parcel of this anticipation, as are fears of consequences and encounters with the police and immigration authorities. This silencing is mirrored not just across Germany but in many other places for Palestinians and Palestinian activists (Di Stefano 2025). That includes Gaza, where critics of Israel and/or Hamas have wished “to become invisible” to protect themselves and their families (El-Youssef 2023, p. 12). While silencing is a strategy that may protect families from external threats, the emotional tension that has built up—due to the lack of proper outlets to discuss and create alternative perspectives—also damages the ability to create positive future perspectives, especially for Palestinians coming of age. Not feeling wanted and not feeling like they can belong precludes them from fostering a healthy relationship with Germany, dimming their futures there (Çelik 2015).

These “exceptional concatenation of forces” (Sayigh 2015, p. 1) of silencing are what binds generations together in feelings of being misunderstood and not wanted. Yet, within families, transmission is rarely linear (Schönpflug 2009), and as we could see in Aisha’s family, there are generational shifts in how information is shared and what children are exposed to. Therefore, the influences outside the home and how children understand their environment outside the family play an important role. Beyond the home, schools and public spaces are where young people carve out their identities and contemplate similarities and differences (Ehrkamp 2008; Cemalcilar 2010), as well as engage in understandings that are different from those of their parents. Turning schools into unwelcome spaces for opinions and political stances weakens their capacity to diffuse extreme viewpoints and to find resolutions and emotional links between groups. In fact, an unsafe school becomes a place to produce and even act on contempt (Wellgraf 2013); it can aggravate “Wut im Bauch” (“anger in the belly”), as enforced silencing can damage fragile identities. Under these circumstances, local experts feel helpless, watching youth struggle and constantly having to regulate between expectations at home, at school and in a society that forbids them from expressing their sense of loss and identity.

Despite such risks, Germany has taken a different approach. In January 2025, a motion in Parliament was passed entitled “Antisemitism and hostility towards Israel in schools and universities: decided actions to secure the discursive space” (Mützenich et al. 2025). The motion is intended to enforce stronger consequences for antisemitism, with the statement: “Never again is now. Antisemitism and hostility towards Israel may have no place in schools and universities” (Mützenich et al. 2025, p. 2). While fighting against antisemitism is necessary and commendable, the motion presents a simplistic view of the social complexities of Germany’s multicultural society. Germany has approximately 250,000 Jewish people (DellaPergola 2021), which is about the same size as the country’s Palestinian population. Both Jews and Palestinians have large communities in Berlin, and both require outlets to communicate and be safe amid Germany’s Holocaust guilt, which coincides with Palestinian’s displacement. While Jews in Germany fear antisemitism in schools and universities, Palestinians and Arabs fear police brutality and legal consequences for speaking about their oppression. The German state has thus implemented a censorship norm that is alienating and castigating a substantial population. Germany’s stance should, therefore, not only be to fight antisemitism in schools and universities but to create opportunities to learn about and from both sides of the conflict, which Germany has itself played a role in creating.