By Miriam Waldvogel
10/14/25
My first pro-Palestine protest in Berlin was even smaller than the puny demonstrations I’ve seen at Princeton.
I decided on a whim with Alex, Raphi, and Siyeon to forgo most of the German Historical Museum visit in favor of a protest in Urbanhafen, which we had seen advertised online. After seeing videos of huge pro-Palestine protests in Berlin over the weekend, we all assumed it would be standard fare: a big crowd of people, keffiyehs and flags, chants. But what we found was not at all expected.
It was so small we almost missed it: half a dozen people on the bank of the Landwehr Kanal standing around inflatable boats. They would have looked like everyday boaters except for their keffiyehs and a sign or two propped up against a tree. Lilith Kocharyan, one of the organizers, told us that they were going to paddle down the canal in solidarity with the various flotillas that have attempted to bring aid to Gaza in the past couple weeks.
Lilith describes herself as an “unapologetically feminist lgbtq ally environmentalist berlin-addict” in her Facebook bio. She had organized around Armenian communities in Berlin, running a tech company that helped Armenia-based startups break into the German market, ranging from UI/UX to computer vision to blockchain platforms. Lilith’s activism pivoted to Palestine after Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
Today, there were about a half dozen protesters, with four boats and signs. And, it turns out, something had already gone wrong: the person who was supposed to bring the pumps hadn’t showed.
We ambled away for a few minutes, and by the time we came back they had sprung into action, pumping up the boats and affixing their banners and signs to their watercrafts’ fronts and backs. I noticed a police boat parked on the other side of the canal, and soon after a smaller inflatable raft with three police officers drifted by. We wondered if the activists were taking a risk by boating down the canal. But Lilith assured us that, in fact, the water police in Berlin were quite friendly and willing to let them be.
As we talked with Lilith and the other protesters, I was surprised by the cultural and regulatory differences with demonstrations in the U.S. In Germany, it’s illegal to say “from the river to the sea” because it was ruled by a court that the phrase calls for the erasure of Israel. One of the protesters had previously been arrested for saying something like “from all the rivers to all the seas,” Lilith told us.
The police were surprisingly relaxed. If you tried the equivalent in the U.S., it’s likely they would immediately demand your boating license and then make it a huge problem when you didn’t comply, because all you wanted to do was float a small rubber boat down a river.
