‘We protest on walls’: Palestinian political agency in Berlin’s struggle against German state repression

Abstract

Based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines Palestinian political graffiti in Berlin as a visible form of resistance against state repression. It conceptualises this repression as a transnational extension of settler-colonial mechanisms–understood as settler coloniality, following Anna-Esther Younes–and deeply entangled with Germany's anti-Palestinian racism and institutionalised memory politics. This framework legitimises surveillance, censorship, racialized policing, and the deployment of high-tech state power against Palestinian activists. Amid this repressive landscape, political graffiti functions as a counter-public, confronting dominant narratives, resisting structural silencing, and reimagining Berlin's urban surfaces as spaces of response. These visual interventions are not merely symbolic; they provoke ideological opponents, nurture political consciousness, and resist historical erasure. Much of this graffiti is created by recently arrived Palestinian refugees, particularly those affiliated with Samidoun, the now-banned Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. The suppression of political graffiti and the framing of Palestinian activism as ‘new antisemitism’ serve to uphold a colonial hierarchy that systematically delegitimizes Palestinian resistance. While acknowledging the limitations of graffiti as a tool for political change–its vulnerability to erasure, alteration, and smudging–this paper emphasises its role in asserting agency, sustaining transnational anti-colonial solidarity, and exposing the contours of anti-Palestinian racism in Germany.