What it means to live as an Arab in Germany today

What does it mean to live as an Arab in Germany today?

Since October 7, 2023, we have watched as the country around us embarked on a process of authoritarian restructuring touching every aspect of life. The report “Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Germany,” which I co-authored, divides this repression into five spheres: the legal, the state, the discursive, the cultural and civic, and the educational.

I’ve lived in Germany most of my life, my family returning to my mother’s home town when I was a child. As an adult, I moved to the capital Berlin after a year in a tiny town in Eastern Germany ripe with post-reunification resentment that found its outlet in hatred towards refugees. I bounced around various places in Europe and spend time in Lebanon and Palestine whenever I can, but I keep returning to Berlin. For better or worse, I am German, but I was never fully permitted to be, “fault” of my Lebanese heritage. 

So what does it mean to live as an Arab in Germany today? 

The most striking feature is the constant, persistent cognitive dissonance. Germany prides itself in having overcome its genocidal past, but we see every day that this is an abject lie made to distract from the violence of its present.

In the last two years, Arabs in Germany have watched laws being changed to better surveil, harass, and criminalize us. Phrases such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” were declared symbols of Hamas and are used as justifications for violent arrests. Berlin alone is investigating 10,000 court cases related to Palestine solidarity protesters.

New police laws with expanded police powers have been introduced in multiple federal states. As described in Palestinian-German legal scholar Nahed Samour’s excellent essay, “The Arab in the Law of Berlin, or: ‘How does it feel to be a problem?’” the Berlin police specifically invented a category of crime just to criminalize Arabs. Now, the city’s large Arab population – the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe, plus lots of Syrians, Lebanese, and other Arab nationalities – is facing a new police law that allows police to covertly break into apartments and install surveillance technology. All of this is done under the guise of needing to “protect against terrorism.”

In Berlin, the police have received carte blanche by politicians and civil society to brutalize Palestine solidarity protesters as much as they please, beating, choking, kicking, mass-surveilling, arresting, and imprisoning. The more Arab and more masculine you look, the more the black-clad fists of the ever-present riot cops are attracted to your face, stomach, or balls.

Being Arab in Germany means you get very familiar with its laws, the things you can and cannot demand; it means becoming comfortable arguing with cops even in front of an audience; but still knowing that none of that helps because in the end, their fists rule, not your so-called rights.

Within the educational sector, new doctrines have been instated that ensure that students follow the “right” version of history, or face everything from failing grades to police intervention. My university, the University of Arts Berlin, had the questionable fame of being the first to facilitate a public smear campaign against its students for protesting the Israeli genocide in November 2023. The university kept statements of solidarity with Israeli victims on its main website, while offering no support whatsoever to Palestinian and Lebanese students affected by the ongoing aggressions. 

Last summer, a Palestinian friend’s son was told that he would have to write his final exam, the paper that his school graduation hinged upon, about October 7 – but it had to be from a Zionist perspective. Any historical context, or any sympathy with Palestinians, would garner a failing grade, the teacher declared. The parents of the class, which contained multiple Palestinian and Lebanese children as well as Turkish and German kids who disagreed with the teacher forcing this political stand on them, sought an emergency meeting with the principal and managed to change the subject of the exam.   

The grassroots initiative “Archive of Silence” has documented over 200 cases of silencing Palestine solidarity content within education, the arts, and the broader cultural scene. But there has been barely an outcry, no matter how many corruption scandals around projects geared towards “combating antisemitism” come to light. Every school director and university professor will tell you how much he (usually he) values academic freedom, and yet, any state-critical discussion of Israel and even any mention of Palestine is the end of that. 

The art scene, where dissent should find its most protected stage, has long since run out of Arabs to cancel. Museum directors talk about artistic freedom while their staff censors the word genocide.

I am a playwright, poet, and writer. The theater is my home, but in Germany it’s no longer my sanctuary.

My debut play, Baba Dein Herz (Baba Your Heart), is a deeply political yet personal tri-lingual play about the realities of women in the West Bank, commissioned and created with the Ara Ara Collective, who I met while working in Ashtar Theatre Ramallah. In September 2023, multiple German theaters expressed their interest and even offered funding opportunities. After October 7, all of these offers vanished, replaced by rejection and silence. We ended up showing the play on a small stage in Austria, because there was not a single theater in Germany that would show it.   

Being Arab in Germany means you have to risk your station again and again, battling the German practice of don’t ask questions, forever promised follow-ups and investigations and betterment in the future, but that future never arrives. It means shrinking and not even noticing that you are becoming smaller.

Every single one of my Arab friends jokes about leaving. Some legally can’t – a refugee friend longs to return home, preferring to be trans in Jordan because “in our lands, we’re not Ausländers” (foreigners), but as a refugee, even a short visit would endanger her asylum status and possibly lead to deportation, which could prohibit her from entering most of Europe for years. Others have already left.

Palestinian-German academic Anna Younes, who was the target of a humiliating and deeply racist dossier on her created by two state-funded “anti-antisemitism” organizations, talks about how, as scapegoats, we are both hyper-visible and invisible. Everyone is talking about us, but barely anyone bothers to talk to us. The discourse has persistently shifted so that new threats are invented, and old problems blamed every day on “the antisemites,” “the foreigners,” “the refugees,” and “the Muslims” – and ask any German, the picture they will conjure under those phrases is inevitably an Arab.

We are watching anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism being constructed in real time. Whether riots on New Year’s Eve, antisemitic crimes (which remain firmly the forte of the right), or the dissolution of the very fabric of society – where there is a German, there is a way to blame Arabs. 

We increasingly live in a parallel society almost exclusively made up of migrants, Arabs, and anti-Zionist Jews, together with the small contingents of the German population that doesn’t ignore with knuckle-headed blindness the horrors raining down upon our countries. On many days, I speak English more than German.

Secretly, when you can drag out the opinions from Germans in private, they will begrudgingly admit that yes, it’s horrific what’s happening, it’s unconscionable, the humanitarian situation, but – but – but. There always is a but that will allow them to stay silent in public on what they might admit in private. I have broken into tears when Germans unexpectedly showed sympathy for the Palestinian situation, because part of me is always braced for the racism to show its face. 

“I haven’t even been arrested that often,” I tell my friends, only to count the incidents off and realize that my “not that often” amounts to more times than I can remember. 

We live here in the relative comfort of the Global North while having to contend with the fact that this country produces a large amount of the weapons used to destroy entire countries. 

Being Arab in Germany entails a deep, desperate alienation and a burning rage at a society that continues on as if the violence weren’t happening. It means our bare existence has been made political, and I, for one, am tired of being the scapegoat.