Overall Chronology

Germany is home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe, estimated at 100,000 to 200,000. The actual size of the community is unknown because some Palestinians are registered as having other nationalities or subsumed in the categories “stateless” or “undetermined.”

Palestinians immigrated to Germany in three major waves. In the 1960s and 1970s, immigrants (mostly men) went to Germany to study or to work. In the 1980s, the largest group of Palestinians went to Germany, fleeing the war in Lebanon. In recent years, Palestinians living in Syria again turned to Germany to escape war when their homes in Syrian refugee camps, in which their families had lived since 1948, were destroyed. 

Palestinian Immigration to Germany

In the 1960s, German companies and political decisionmakers recruited workers because the country was experiencing an industrial and economic boom. Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank who had moved to Germany before 1967 to work, study, or gain the knowledge they needed for the liberation movement found that they had become refugees after the June 1967 war; only those who were in the occupied territories at the time of the population census at the outset of Israel’s occupation were considered to have residency rights. For many of the Palestinians in Germany at the time, who had already been displaced as children in 1947–48, this was a second expulsion. Their inability to return was akin to their parents’ experience of expulsion during the Nakba, an experience for which they had often secretly blamed their parents’ generation. Some Palestinians left the occupied territories after 1967 in order to study in Germany, thanks to study abroad programs made available by Israel, and then were denied the right to return when they finished their studies. Those Palestinians stayed in Germany and married German women.

After the hostage-taking of Israeli athletes during the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, hundreds of Palestinians were deported from Germany as a sort of collective punishment, in an act that lacked legal basis. Whole families were separated; men had to leave West Germany even if they were married to German women and had children. Students had to interrupt their studies and leave, and yet they were unable to go home. Small numbers of Palestinians immigrated to East Germany. They tended to be delegates of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), students affiliated with political parties, or disadvantaged students who had received grants from the PLO or socialist parties. Most of them left East Germany as soon as their scholarship ended.

The Palestinians who immigrated to Germany in the 1980s are the descendants of the refugees of 1947–48. They had been born and were living in refugee camps in Lebanon and fled to West Germany to escape the war in Lebanon; they settled mainly in the Berlin districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg. They were not recognized as political refugees because the German government granted political asylum only in cases of demonstrable governmental persecution. The German authorities wanted to send them back, but Lebanon refused to sign the readmission agreement with recourse to their official statelessness. This policy led to the so-called Duldungsstatus (tolerated status), a temporary postponement of their deportation which could be repeatedly renewed, potentially for years. During this time, people with this status were denied the right to education training and work. This discriminatory economic situation drove many into criminality and drug abuse. Duldungsstatus robbed people of the chance to lead a normal life; many lived with their belongings packed in suitcases, because the immigration authorities could appear at their door and force them to leave Germany immediately. In the perception of many, they had swapped a refugee camp in Lebanon for a German one. It was only in 1990 that the Law on Foreign Nationals was revised, giving residency rights to people who had arrived in Germany before 1990.

The Palestinians who fled from war in Syria to Germany had already fled from their homes in Palestine to Syria in during the 1948 Nakba. In Syria, they were granted full rights but could not receive Syrian citizenship. In Germany, they were given the status “undetermined” but had the residency rights and the right to work. The German state was very active in integrating refugees from Syria, because they were usually well educated, in order to boost the German economy and compensate for the shortage of workers in certain sectors such as care services and the hospitality industry.

The Nakba vs the Holocaust

Many Palestinians who immigrated to West Germany in the 1960s were well educated, had professions with high social status, and married German nationals. Nevertheless, the state (and society at large) did not acknowledge that the Palestinian immigrants had experienced expulsion from their homeland by Israel, in some cases more than once. The Nakba, a direct consequence of the Holocaust, is excluded from the German collective memory. In the German worldview, Israel is a safe haven for Jews. The Palestinian experience of violence is not acknowledged; when made visible, it is reflected as something threatening, as something that competes with the Holocaust and contaminates the Jewish experience of violence as well as the German culture of remembrance. The depiction of the Holocaust and the Nakba as antagonistic events makes it difficult to understand the violence against Palestinians as a continuation of European anti-Semitism. This allows Germany to position itself as a nation that has morally rehabilitated itself.

The institutionalized remembering of the Holocaust and forgetting of the Nakba deeply affected first and second generation of Palestinian immigrants in Germany. Much of the trauma experienced by Palestinians in Germany comes from what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, the violence of discourses that normalize and legitimize systemic violence. Symbolic violence justifies the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in various ways: the violent act of expulsion is trivialized, presented as controversial, accidental, self-inflicted, or even annulled. By denying the existence of Palestinians in historical Palestine or their connection to the land, the reality of violence is erased. Palestinians have been, and continue to be, contrasted in ever-new variations as threatening savages, terrorists, Islamist extremists, and anti-Semites, while Israel is seen as part of Christian-Jewish Western culture and its community of values. This regime of representation has gone hand in hand with practices of criminalization such as surveillance, censorship, deportations, bans on assemblies, and the dissolution of student networks, all of which continue to this day.

In summary, the violence experienced by Palestinians in Germany appears to be disciplinary. Palestinians are perceived as people who deserve to suffer violence, and many, especially among the first generation of immigrants, have internalized the violence they experienced as self-inflicted and shameful. This resulted in a fear of visibility and political activism but also in the fear of feeling, let alone expressing, anger and grief, which in turn leads to melancholia, isolation, social death, and suicidal living. For many, the continuation of racializing violence in Western Europe also led to self-negation, which was in stark contrast to the Palestinian liberation movement the first generation had wanted to be part of. Many deny or hide their identity in public to avoid the pain of being socially stigmatized. 

An Internally Fragmented Community

Violence from the state, coupled with self-isolation and fear, has led to the fragmentation of the Palestinian community in Germany and the absence of Palestinian organizations. After 1967, Palestinian students tried to organize public outreach campaigns for awareness raising, but the events of 1972 brought these initiatives to an end. They attempted to organize themselves again in the late 1980s. Unregistered communities and professional associations were formed in larger cities. Communities had a regional focus and were organized independently of each other. They saw their role primarily in the preservation of Arab-Palestinian culture and identity and organized language courses and cultural events for Palestinians.

Professional associations (e.g., for doctors, pharmacists, architects) were organized nationwide. They maintained close relations with their respective professional organizations in Palestine and saw their role as aiding Palestinians in their homeland. These organizations only became politicized after the Oslo process began. They started public outreach campaigns and began to invite Germans to political events and memorial days, such as Land Day and Nakba Day. In 1986, the German-Palestinian Society was founded, primarily aimed at educating Germans about the question of Palestine. In 2024, around 80 percent of the members are German. All this political work was made considerably more difficult after the German parliament`s decision to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in 2019. Many Palestinians who fled to Germany in the 1980s joined Lebanese organizations, which were often religious and Islamist in orientation, due to the loose structure of Palestinian organizations and the disillusionment caused by Oslo.

The State Demands Allegiance to Israel

In recent years and more intensely after October 2023, the demonization of Palestinian identity has been increasingly institutionalized. In May 2019, the German parliament (Bundestag) passed a resolution condemning the non-violent resistance movement BDS as anti-Semitic. It states that the Bundestag must not give rooms or funding to organizations with ties to BDS, called on constituent states and municipalities to do the same, and made it permissible to censure anyone publicly advocating for Palestinian rights. The Bundestag resolution came on the heels of the European Parliament’s 1 June 2017 resolution on combating anti-Semitism, which calls on European Union member states to adopt the definition of anti-Semitism formulated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Germany went one step further: after 7 October 2023, the Bundestag called on the government to make full solidarity and support for Israel part of the German raison d’état and to protect Jewish life in the country by combatting anti-Semitism in Germany more intensively. Political and media discourse described Israel`s genocidal war against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza as a war against anti-Semitism. In parallel, Arab-Palestinian immigrant communities were represented as an alleged threat to Jewish life in Germany. The Berlin Senate for Education facilitated the censure of expressions of Palestinian identity by publicly declaring them as violent and threatening. In a letter to Berlin school principals, the Senate allowed them to ban symbols allegedly glorifying violence against Israel like the kuffiya or Free Palestine stickers from school grounds allegedly in order to maintain school peace. and school teachers were advised to request police assistance to sanction minors expressing support for Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 or for Palestinian groups considered “terrorist” in general. Furthermore, the Berlin district assembly started distributing the brochure “Myth of Israel 1948” in schools in Neukölln, a Berlin neighborhood with a high number of Palestinian residents. The brochure denies the expulsion of Palestinians from their land in 1947-48, trivializes Israeli settlement construction, and portrays Israel’s critics as anti-Semitic. The brochure is part of a larger project promoting revisionist historiography on the pretense of fighting anti-Semitism. The increased transformation of symbolic into institutional violence resulted not only in state-induced restrictions on Palestinian visibility in public spaces but also in extreme police violence directed even against minors.

On 7 November 2024, the Bundestag passed a resolution “Never Again Is Now: Protecting, Preserving and Strengthening Jewish Life in Germany,” which severely restricts academic freedom. The resolution, widely criticized by constitutional law specialists and others, makes the allocation of public funding in art and science dependent on the adherence to the highly controversial definition of anti-Semitism as speech critical of Israel.

The Palestinian Community’s Response to the Genocide in Gaza

Second-generation Palestinian immigrants are reclaiming the socially discarded identity and history and replacing self-negation with a politics of visibility. For many of them, Israel’s 2014 military offensive on Gaza and the genocide in Gaza (2023-2024) have marked a turning point. The intensified justification of Israeli state violence in German public discourse even while Israel was perpetrating a genocidal war was experienced as a repetition of the collective settler-colonial trauma, mistrust toward the society in which they had grown up, and a sense of alienation.

For Palestinian-Germans, the boundaries between “here”—Germany—and “there”—historical Palestine—are becoming more and more blurred. The first generation of immigrants had previously excused the lack of empathy toward Palestinians as ignorance, but the second generation is more likely to interpret it as anti-Palestinian racism. They are building trans-national solidarities, countering fragmentation, and positioning themselves within a transnational Palestinian diaspora. This intergenerational development has led to a mental and affective repossession of lost experience, belonging, and self-efficacy. Second- and third-generation Palestinian-Germans discover the grief and anger that their parents had been denied and are becoming more visible, showing their Palestinianism in public spaces, and taking to the streets regularly, advocating for the right of Palestinians to freedom and equality. They are organizing themselves in intersectional anti-colonial and anti-racist grassroots movements (Palästina Spricht / Palestine Speaks, Palestinians and Allies, Palästina Kampagne / Palestine Campaign, Ceasefire Action Committee, Student Coalition Berlin, Nidalaat), and are publicly accusing Germany of complicity in genocide. (Germany is second only to the United States in supplying weapons to Israel.) Activists and lawyers from this younger generation of German Palestinians have filed criminal charges against members of the Federal Security Council, which sets arms export policy, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens), for aiding and abetting genocide by authorizing arms exports and suspending payments to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine.