From Silence to Resistance: Second-Generation Palestinians in Germany

Abstract

Germany, home to Europe’s largest Palestinian community, excludes Israeli state violence from public discourse. Although the ongoing Nakba—the systematic and continuing forced displacement of Palestinians from historic Palestine—is deeply entangled with the history of German Nazism, it remains unacknowledged within German collective memory. The systematic erasure of the Palestinian experience of violence facilitates the construction of a particular post-Holocaust national identity—one that positions the state and society as having successfully reconciled with its historical guilt, while obscuring its ongoing entanglements in colonial and racialized violence. It delegitimizes Palestinian victimization while suppressing and demonizing Palestinian identity—a form of discursive violence that is increasingly institutionalized by the state. This article argues that the suppression of Palestinian identity and the erasure of experiences of violence have produced conditions of melancholia and double consciousness. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, the article examines how second-generation Palestinians navigate and respond to this structural violence in Germany. As members of the second generation recognize structural racism, they have begun to shed inherited patterns of self-perception shaped by the dominant white Nazi German gaze, reclaim their sense of agency, and reconnect with their Palestinian heritage.