A car riddled with dark holes is parked in the middle of a plaza in Berlin. Smoke billows from its shattered windows, partially obscuring the occupants inside. Out of one hazy window, a hand stretches. Its sleeve is stained with red.
The installation, set up in Alexanderplatz, memorializes Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who the Israeli Defense Forces killed in a car alongside her family. A crowd of onlookers surrounds the car, peering into its shattered windows or reading the plaques that tell Rajab’s story.
Clad in a blue reflective vest and wearing a Palestine-shaped pendant and a black headscarf, Assil El Haj Hussein weaves through the crowd, watching for any disruptors. A 24-year-old student living in Berlin, Assil encounters them often while monitoring vigils as a volunteer for the cultural organization Generation Palestine. “They are waiting for us to be aggressive,” she said. Assil has learned to not take the bait. “I’m not going to put more gas on fire. I’m like, ‘okay, we can talk about it.’”
The skill of communication under pressure is one that Assil has learned from a young age. Growing up as a third-generation Palestinian in a country that views the protection of Israel as its “reason of state,” Assil has navigated an upbringing where expressing her identity could lead to ostracization, but staying silent would mean complicity in the erasure of her culture. That upbringing has taught her to stand her ground. “I’m ready to fight,” she said. “I don’t want to hide anything just so the government or the German people can be comfortable.”
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Assil has had to struggle for her identity to be recognized in a culture that sees Palestinian expression as a threat to Jewish existence. She recalls this struggle beginning in school, where some of her teachers would try to prove to her that Palestine did not exist. “Look, search: where is Palestine?” she recounts one of them saying after displaying a map of the Middle East. “There is no Palestine.”
According to researchers, the silencing of Palestinian identity in schools is common in German classrooms, representing one part of Germany’s complicated relationship with its Palestinian diaspora. The German government believes it has a “special responsibility” for Israel because of Germany’s genocide against European Jews during World War Two. As a result, the protection of Israel is central to the government’s understanding of its purpose.
To carry out this mission, Germany has moved to curtail public expressions of Palestinian solidarity that it considers antisemitic or a threat to the state of Israel. This policy reaches down to the school level. Teachers refuse to acknowledge the existence of Palestine as a nationality or cultural identity, according to Carola Tize, an anthropologist who has studied the Palestinian community in Berlin. The dynamic has only strengthened since October 7, with schools banning keffiyehs and the expression “free Palestine.”
Tize said that Palestinian students like Assil get the message: “They’re raised to know that they’re not wanted.”
Assil has continued to fight for recognition during her masters program in real estate engineering. After October 7, a psychologist offered consultation hours for students affected by the massacre. As Assil found out, the hours were only open to Israeli citizens—and not her or any other Palestinian students grieving over Israel’s violent response. She brought the omission up to the dean, and was shocked by the response. She remembers him telling her, “There are many Palestinians that have the Israeli passport, so we see them as Israeli students.”
Despite a productive back and forth with the dean, the university would not change its policy. Assil told me that she had always tried to have faith in German society’s ability to accept Palestinians into its ranks. But this made her lose that faith altogether.
“If you cannot even recognize my pain,” she said, “then how can I say I’m comfortable here with this country and with this government? How can I say I’m German?”
The answer, Assil has decided, is that she will not call herself German; instead, she refers to herself as a Palestinian who was born in Germany.
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In a rented classroom at the center of Berlin, Assil helped host a seminar with a group of young Palestinian-German children. The children were encouraged to draw Palestinian symbols and stories on sheets of paper and small bags. While they drew and talked, Assil answered questions from the children about how much they could express themselves in public. Her sister pulled her aside and asked if she could wear a set of Palestinian earrings. Assil told her that she had every right to. “Nobody can tell you to take it off,” she recalled saying.
The event was hosted by Generation Palestine, the same cultural organization that hosted the Alexanderplatz vigil. Assil’s mother founded the organization in 2018, for two purposes. First, she intended to provide an alternative form of public Palestinian expression to the more militant protests in the streets. Each week, Generation Palestine installs vigils or public education exhibitions that highlight the victimization of Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. “We want to change the German mindset. We don’t just want to show them we’re Palestinian. No—we want to show them why we are right,” Assil said.
When Jewish Israelis or vocal supporters of Israel come to the vigil and begin to cause a scene, Assil is there to engage with them. She told me proudly of a time when she convinced a man that Palestinian children should not be shot alongside their parents. “I didn’t convince him to say free Palestine, but at the end of the day I worked something up in him,” Assil said. “Maybe in the next conversation he’s having with Zionists he will say, ‘okay, but not the kids.’”
The organization plays a similar educational role within the Palestinian community itself. Tize, the anthropologist, suggested that when communities face discrimination because of their identity, they “cling to that identity even more.” But as younger generations grow up with increasingly distant connections to their homeland, their sense of identity can become indistinct. “They are not educated about their roots. They don’t know the history of their parents,” said Alaa, another Generation Palestine volunteer. “You feel a very big disconnect.”
Generation Palestine’s volunteers hope to prevent that loss in transmission. As Assil put it, the organization teaches young people in the diaspora “how to be a Palestinian.” Assil and her fellow volunteers fill gaps in knowledge among children in their community, teaching them the original names of the places from which their ancestors were displaced. They also teach restless youth how to respond to criticism with evidence, rather than aggression. To Assil, this information will help young people in her community speak up when they face marginalization, rather than staying silent.
Assil plans to take this approach to her future career in building management. After she graduates from her master’s program, she plans to enter a line of work that will allow her to financially support her community in Germany and the broader Palestinian cause. Eventually, Assil aspires to start and lead a real estate engineering company in Germany. She hopes it will become large enough to make her impossible to ignore. “If this company will be successful,” Assil told me, “then they cannot reject me or silence me, because I made something of myself.”
“I’m big now. They cannot shut me up.”
