Two weeks before I met her at a protest in Berlin, Kübra Çinar was on her knees, hands cuffed behind her back and forehead pinned to the earth at the Ashdod port in Israel. She and over 400 other activists had just been intercepted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after six weeks aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla en route to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. Until the moment of interception, only 70 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza, the crew-members believed they would reach their destination.
“We were so close,” said Çinar. “Even after the boat got intercepted, we still had hope that we were going to break the siege.”
Sitting with Çinar outside a Berlin coffee shop with the dusk air biting our noses, it felt like a part of her was still on the boat, believing in the failed mission. A fierce hope burned in her warm brown eyes, which were framed by round glasses. Apart from the keffiyeh wrapped around her shoulders, though, I couldn’t have picked the 30-year-old Çinar out of a crowd of Berlin millennials. Her long hair was drawn back in a tight ponytail, her attire casual and monochrome. She told me that before becoming a full-time activist, she worked in finance.
“But I quit my job. Well, actually, I got fired during the mission. So I’m unemployed now,” she explained. “But it doesn’t matter to me. I’m not the only one.”
Çinar often speaks like this, deflecting questions about herself to speak of the many. When the pro-Palestine movement spread across Germany in 2023, converging on Berlin, she saw it as her responsibility to call attention to the suffering in Gaza, especially as a German citizen. Çinar is of Turkish descent, but was born and raised in Berlin. She is deeply critical of Germany. “I never felt like a German,” she said. “It’s like this country never denazified.”
Over the past two years, the pro-Palestine movement has become the center of Çinar’s life. She started attending protests soon after the Israel-Hamas war began and quickly became a leader. She has adopted the habits of the movement, referring to the IDF as the “IOF” (Israeli Occupational Forces) and constantly bringing the focus of our conversation back to Gaza.
For this level of involvement, Çinar and her friends in the movement have been targeted by the Berlin police. One friend, Aala, who asked to go by her first name, has been particularly impacted. The 20-year-old Aala is a refugee from Syria who fled from Damascus to Germany with her family eight years ago. She still lives at home with her parents, who are originally from the Golan Heights. She says that the police have frequently come to her house looking for her.
“They come and they ring,” she explained. “They ask, ‘Is Aala here?’” Once, they gave her father a letter banning her from participating in protests for a week. Of course, Aala did not listen. “I would never sign it,” she says. “I know my rights.”
According to Çinar and Aala, the police know both of them by name and focus on them at protests to make an example of them. Aala recalls an instance when the German police removed her hijab and refused to return it to her for 20 minutes. That night, she was held in jail for saying “from the river to the sea,” which is an illegal chant in Germany.
“It’s actually really easy to be a terrorist in Germany,” Aala joked, bitterly. “It’s enough when you wear a keffiyeh. It’s enough when you’re Arab. You don’t need to say anything.”
On top of the frequent harassment, activists are beginning to feel that their protests are futile. Even as public sentiment in Germany has soared in support of Palestinian liberation, little has changed on a policy level. The demands of halting arms exports to Israel, recognizing Palestine as a state, and ensuring accountability for those who have committed atrocity crimes, have not been met. Germany is clinging to its longstanding commitment to support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
“I was tired of the activism in Berlin. We have been fighting for two years, and nothing has changed,” Çinar explained.
Already craving change when a member of the flotilla steering committee reached out to her and invited her to join the mission, Çinar did not hesitate to accept. “As a German citizen, I feel responsible to do more than I did in the last three years, because my government is complicit. Despite the cruel past of German history, Germany is still positioning itself on the wrong side of history,” she said.
The GSF mission included 44 vessels bearing 500 volunteers, activists, and lawmakers, representing at least 43 countries. The boats carried symbolic, though still meaningful, amounts of humanitarian cargo for the region’s starved population.
In August, Çinar found herself on the Alma, the lead ship of the GSF, which departed from the port of Spain and began making its way across the Mediterranean in late August. On the boat, a white vessel bedazzled with Palestinian flags, she found community and passionate individuals who shared her views. She enjoyed cooking meals and getting to know her shipmates, including Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. A video on Instagram shows Çinar sitting on the sunny deck beside her shipmate Tadhg Hickey. “She is the purest, most dedicated activist I think I’ve ever met in my life,” Hickey says of Çinar in the video.
Çinar also faced hardships on the Alma, ranging from the storms which might hit any fleet of boats sailing across the world to multiple drone attacks. On Sept. 9, the Alma was attacked by a drone containing an incendiary device and was damaged by the fire. The crew extinguished the flames quickly and no one was injured.
Then, on October 1 at 8pm, the Alma was intercepted by the IDF. Soldiers boarded the boat and began arresting its members on the deck. Çinar described the interception as the “worst part” of the mission, recalling the moment when Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir confronted the crew in person.
“He just showed up,” Çinar recalled. She described Ben Gvir gathering the activists together and trying to “make his one man show” by accusing them of being “baby-killers.” He had promised to treat the flotilla crew as terrorists. When taken captive, Çinar thought he intended to follow through.
For the next six days, Çinar and the others were held in the Ktz’iot prison in the Negev desert. For the first 50 hours, according to Çinar, they were not given food, and fresh water was withheld for the duration of their captivity. Instead, Çinar and her compatriots drank toilet water. The men were separated from the women, and some were isolated for hours or days at a time, according to Çinar. “When we got food, we got bad food,” she said. “They treated us like animals.”
She remembers eggs which the guards threw into the cells after holding them in the sun for several days, and she cannot forget their lingering smell. She also recalls being given carrots filled with maggots. “Most of us didn’t eat anything,” she said.
On the 6th of October, the crew was released, and the next day, Çinar returned to Germany. “The six days were really hard for all of us, but it was also a reminder of reality,” Cinar said.
The experience made her consider how little she had understood about the Palestinian experience as an outsider. “We think we know the Palestinian struggle, we are saying that we know, but I just realized we didn’t know anything,” she noted. “Being in this prison completely changed my view of how barbaric, how inhuman [the Israeli army] can be.”
Back in Berlin, Çinar is back on the protest scene. After the energetic yet uneventful demonstration near Checkpoint Charlie where I met Çinar, a group of female organizers, including Çinar and Aala, retreated to the tables outside Coffee Fellows. They debriefed the rally while savoring warm coffee and smoking seemingly endless cigarettes.
Nestled among them, Çinar appeared satisfied, but fatigued. She told me that she missed her life on the boat and the security of believing in a specific mission. She now finds it difficult to eat, drink, and sleep, unable to shake the knowledge of the people still in prison. “We do not know how privileged we are,” she said. “Our duty is to use this privilege for those who cannot.”
The activist has been peppered with questions about the flotilla since returning to Germany. But Çinar refuses to remain in what one might expect would be a tempting limelight. “I’m trying to tell people what happened to me. But at the same time, I don’t want people to talk about me, because I am not the mission,” she explained. “I’m nothing. I’m just a human being who did what the government was supposed to do.”
