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American violence

The two killings that catalyzed far-right rage


12/09/2025

Please note that many of the linked X (Twitter) posts and threads contain graphic depictions of violence.

Before his appearance at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was doing what he always used to do: stoking the fire of the culture-war moral panic of the day. First, he shared a still from a CCTV footage of a young white woman sitting in a bus, looking up with a terrified glance at a Black man moments before being murdered. His caption: “America will never be the same.” A few hours later, he tweeted again, laying out his program: “it’s 100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska.”

The latter was his last tweet. A few hours later, he was shot by a sniper while speaking to a crowd of students, the first event in his planned “Prove Me Wrong” tour. Everyone with an internet connection has, by now, heard about his assassination and seen the pictures or the reactions. Which is quite normal–Kirk was a prominent conservative public figure in the US, what one may call a MAGA ideologue.

What is perhaps not so normal is that everyone who is connected, willingly or unwillingly, to the right-wing news and media ecosystem has also heard about the murder of Iryna Zarutska. Homicide rates in the US have been decreasing since the height of the pandemic, but they are still extremely high in international comparison. There were 17,000 homicides reported in 2024, and even if the figure for 2025 will probably be lower, it will still be high. Each of these deaths is, of course, a tragedy. Only some of them are, as Kirk said, politicized.

And this is the case with Iryna Zarutska, whose image has filled the internet. After Kirk’s death, far-right influencers started sharing Zarutska’s photo next to his, with ominous messages:

Each of these tweets, and tens of thousands of others, is an encapsulation of current American politics: an appeal to righteousness and victimhood that defines an in-group and an out-group and transmits an increasingly explicit threat towards the latter.

Innocence

The protection of white women from men of color, especially Black men, by white men is one of the founding myths of American history and national identity. It reached its pinnacle with the thousands of gruesome lynchings justified through flimsy accusations of sexual violence, or more often simply perceived inappropriate behavior toward a white woman. Later, when George H. W. Bush used the picture of Willie Horton in his campaign, he made it clear what values he was running on: the role of the president is to protect white Americans from racialized threats. Trump made it similarly clear long before he was anywhere near the White House, when he called for the death of the “Central Park Five.”

Like many other aspects of American white supremacism, MAGA did not invent the demonization of Black men and the victimization of white women. It simply made them explicit again in Trump’s second term. When a young Ukrainian woman who fled the Russian invasion was killed in North Carolina by a Black man with a history of arrests and mental issues, and all was caught on camera, it was the perfect case to be mobilized for propaganda.

Major conservative names wasted no time in weaponizing the murder to raise hell about how unsafe it is to just exist in US cities because of liberal policies–despite the decrease in the number of homicides. Kirk himself tweeted Zarutska’s name 11 times in three days before his death, and the issue was quickly taken up all over the X cesspool and in conservative media. It helped that the murder took place on a bus: using public transport occupies a special place in the American right-wing imagination as a practice that puts white lives in danger every day through exposure, as Elon Musk put it, to “a bunch of random strangers.”

It also helped that Zarutska was Ukrainian. One can say with certainty, without falling into the liberal habit of externalizing America’s problems to Putin, that MAGA and a lot of the American new right have Russian sympathies. The same people, however, including Kirk, were quick to abuse the tragedy of a young woman who flees a war zone only to be murdered in an American city.

A young white woman, of course. In the Western imagination, Eastern Europe is a repository of a still innocent whiteness, one that has not been touched by wokeness and therefore is a model to be followed. Online discourses about Zarutska played this up. When the pictures of Zarutska used were not taken from the video of her murder, they were selfies or studio photos juxtaposed with her murderer’s mugshot, creating a literal contrast between white innocence and Black threat.

Responsibility

Even this innocence, however, had its limits. Some online users chose to focus not on Zarutska’s selfies, but on a picture taken in her bedroom that also shows a Black Lives Matter poster. The posters took her from an innocent victim to a naive one, or even to a complicit liberal who contributed to her own murder. This simple, private gesture of sympathy with a movement for racial justice made Zarutska an endorser of crime who got hoisted by her own petard.

Compare this with the discourse surrounding Kirk’s death. After the news broke, many referred back to his infamous claim that “it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Kirk’s literal acceptance of gun deaths certainly implicates him in the circumstances of his own death, the argument goes–a logic stronger than Zarutska’s complicity due to a BLM poster. According to conservative vox populi, however, such an argument is “disgusting” and “mentally disturbed.”

His unqualified support for the Second Amendment is just one of the many, many repulsive views that Kirk held and proselytized. His whole career, public persona, and political appeal were built on speaking supposed truth to supposed power, often in people’s faces. As the founder of Turning Point USA, Kirk was the quintessential debate-me bro, who made a living out of owning libs.

Should being a conservative gadfly get you killed? It should not, regardless of precedent. But, despite his image as a paragon of measured debate across party lines, Kirk was a purveyor of violence. His views were not only broadcasted to the public, but influenced and legitimized the MAGA program, justifying the abuse against and deaths of Black Americans, of women, of Palestinians. This should surely feature in the political reactions to his killing.

For some, on the left, it did, and they refused to refrain from speaking ill of the dead. But the majority of mainstream reactions, from Obama to Starmer, ignored his opinions and political role. Even those who were not beholden to propriety by political offices rushed to remember Kirk fondly. Ezra Klein, the envisioner of abundance, called Kirk’s vitirolic attacks on all vulnerable categories of Americans “the right way” to do politics. Klein and Kirk were simply “on different sides of most political arguments.” Jacobin also quickly published an article presenting Kirk “steering clear of cheap gotchas” as an invitation to open discussion.

But while liberals and some leftists buy into the virtue of politely debating calls to violence and threats to millions of people, Kirk’s comrades continue to simply act on them. Donald Trump also eulogized Kirk’s commitment to “open” and “good-faith debate.” But he quickly moved on to blaming his murder on those who compared Kirk “to Nazis,” and his diatribe against political violence contained the threat that the “administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity.” For Trump, debate has limits: each and every one of those who criticized the fascist politics espoused by Kirk is responsible for his death.

Revenge

We can be sure that Trump means it. His second term has so far been marked by lifting the veil of liberal civility and soft power that has covered US violence so far. Trump mocks and directly threatens those who are against him, while Democratic lawmakers are (also) murdered. Trans people are demonized, pushed out, and soon might be even left without the right to bear arms, at the mercy of the state. Deportations are taking place en masse, without the flimsiest excuses or minimal plans, and Trump uses the specter of urban crime to bring the National Guard to D.C. and to threaten Chicago with “Chipocalypse.”

In other words, the violence is already here, and it comes from Kirk’s side. While the US is aiding the genocide in Gaza and bombing foreign boats, ICE has become a domestic goon squad, getting closer to receiving a carte blanche to arrest whoever they want in American cities. And the violence is not only perpetuated by the state. American streets become more and more dangerous for anyone who might be perceived as an immigrant, threatened with “arrests” by thugs posing as federal agents.

The two killings made the calls to violence even more strident. Posting a picture of Zarutska, JD Vance, like many other right-wingers, referred to Daniel Penny, the man who killed a supposedly threatening homeless Black man in a New York City subway train. And while the Wall Street Journal hurried to publish claims that the assassin’s bullets were “engraved with transgender, antifascist ideology,” whatever that means, Deputy Secretary of State Cristopher Landau threatened to deport foreigners found “praising, rationalizing, or making light” of Kirk’s assassination. 

The fascistic blurring of the lines between vigilantism and state violence makes it obvious: when right-wingers on the internet say that they have been radicalized, that they are angry, that they are at war, we should believe them. Zarutska’s murder is being weaponized by the far-right against racialized threats. Kirk’s assassination is being weaponized against political opponents, understood in the broadest sense. American violence now has an added justification. As if it needed it. 

This might end with a bang or with a whimper, but what is clearly not happening is a debate. It does not matter how the left reacts to the killings, and it will not matter what political orientation Kirk’s assassin has. The two murders have already taken their place in the existing narratives and justifications of violence. The American right has used them to reinforce the divide between friends and enemies and to remind the latter that they are under threat.

There are still words

A tribute to Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq


10/09/2025

Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq is writer in Gaza who, like everyone else in the strip, is being tormented by the ongoing genocide. This essay is a tribute to him. It is a meditation on the use of words—in literature alongside as other forms—in conditions as catastrophic as in Gaza. It is also an exercise of generating hope and reigning in the agony and the despair that the genocide creates.

I first encountered Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq, a 35-year-old writer from Khan-Younis, in October 2024 at the Palestinian liberatory bookfair in Frankfurt am Main on a screen in a pre-recorded interview. The interview was conducted in Arabic by a Palestinian diasporic activist named Batool. I followed it through the English subtitles.

The conversation starts with Batool expressing an insecurity: “I stayed up all night to figure out how to start the conversation. I thought I should ask, ‘How are you?’ But it is not even appropriate to ask someone in Gaza such a question.” Mohamed responds: “I totally understand this confusion. This confusion also exists among us, for the people experiencing the war here, inside Gaza. We don’t even know how to ask each other, ‘How are you doing?’” He then affirms that he is very glad about the ability to have a conversation.

The conversation that follows is indeed one of the most remarkable ones that I have witnessed. It moves swiftly between practical considerations of survival in the genocide and theoretical discussions of literature, consciousness and pain. Mohamed explains that his mission is to write stories of the everyday struggles of the people. His writing is “biased towards the people and their daily suffering, their relationships and the meanings they create…Their life, their concerns, their thoughts and fears”. He clarifies that this bias includes himself, as he is also part of the people, their suffering, their fear. The stories are full of important details that are important to the stories’ protagonists. He argues that such stories are no less significant in conveying the truth of what is happening than the aggregate summaries and news reports.

A great example of his literature is his short story Burning Books in Gaza, which was published in The Berlin Review in December 2024 in English and German. It is a bitter but sweet story about a father in hunger-ridden Gaza who, having managed to secure a bag of flour, contemplates burning a few of his treasured books to make fire in a clay oven to bake bread, because there are no other means by which to do so. He finally decides against it and, despite many odds, he finds some cardboard to make fire. The story has a happy ending, in the limited and grim scope that one day’s struggle to provide food for a family is successful.

The grimness of this story’s happy ending is haunted by later texts that Mohamed wrote when Israel’s starvation efforts had taken even fuller force. He published the following on July 24, 2025 as an update on his GoFundMe page:

Hunger is not simply the absence of food. It is a brutal sensation that gnaws at the body slowly, consuming the soul as it does the flesh. It begins as a small emptiness in the stomach—a fleeting cramp one can tolerate—but gradually, it transforms into an inner beast that growls in the chest and pounds mercilessly at the walls of the stomach. In the long hours of hunger, the stomach begins to contract, curling in on itself. A constant wave of nausea sets in, accompanied by a dull, heavy pain that pulls at you from the inside. Your head spins, your limbs tremble, and everything around you becomes dull, distant, and unimportant. Thoughts blur together. Concentration becomes a lost luxury. Hunger is not a single pain—it is a chain of suffering: headaches, dizziness, loss of speech, mood swings, and then emotional numbness. You feel your body betray you, abandoning you piece by piece, while your heart swings between fear for your loved ones and the helplessness of not being able to give them what they need. It is a slow death. There is no blood, no noise—but it is devastating. Heavy. It feels as though you are being erased from life in silence, left only to gaze into the faces of your hungry children, unable to break this deadly stillness. Hunger is not just deprivation—it is the stripping away of dignity, the unraveling of a person from within. Nothing lays you bare like hunger does.

What cruelty to inflict this to someone on purpose. What cruelty upon cruelty upon cruelty with yet no end in sight!

In his interview with Batool, Mohamed explains that writing the stories of the everyday struggles is important because it gives form to the loss, the emotions and the sufferings of the people.

Why is focusing on the numerical facts a bad thing? Because it can also be transmitted to the consciousness of the people of Gaza. And that’s what’s even more painful than the meaning of the numbers. My biggest concern is that the Gazans also listen to the news, just like you all. Imagine, when 30 people get murdered in a day, we say: “Thank God, today there are practically no martyrs, that’s nothing.” And that is disastrous and outrageous, and it creeps into people’s consciousness. That’s why it’s crucial that we keep trying to pay attention to these details. To take note of our narrative, to be careful in our dialogue, and how we hold on to our ability to feel the pain, how we process the pain and that the depth of the pain and the successive hits don’t weaken us and make us lose this feeling, because once we do, we lose a crucial feature of our relationship with life. And this loss affects how we express ourselves and intensifies the continuous agony that we experience.

These ideas influenced me in how I spoke and wrote about the genocide. They affirmed and developed my belief that writing stories, crafting speeches, and ordinary acts of speaking truthfully to one another are important forms of struggle against the numbness, the isolation and the disablement of agonizing despair.

It took me six months to have the good sense to let Mohamed know what his interview meant to me. Through his GoFundMe page, I found a way to contact him. Contrary to all the false whispers (“I cannot fathom what he is living through, so what could I have to say to him?” and “He is an accomplished writer, I am a Nobody from the audience, so what could I have to say to him?”), he responded with happiness, gratitude and a memory from Berlin. He had visited Berlin in September 2022, and getting mail from Berlin brought back the memory of this visit. An invitation and acceptance of a friendship ensued and materialized in an ongoing e-mail exchange.

Mohamed wrote to me in August 2025: “There is one thing I’m still holding on to: the ability to write. I believe it’s the only existential reason I have — to keep writing, and to give this hard, painful story to the world and to the generations yet to c ome.” I told him how generous I found his concerns for the world and for generations yet to come. I added that I understood that this generosity is bound up with this thing called hope. Mohamed replied: “Yes—writing is my lifeline. It gives me hope and turns the struggle into something with meaning. Writing explains the pain and helps me understand what I am living.”

At the end of August, I was slouching on the couch, phone in hand, and began to write an e-mail to Mohamed. But my mind was blank when I tried to think of something to write that would be even in the slightest bit comforting. So I read through Mohamed’s old messages and looked at his pictures from his visit to Berlin again. I noticed that in his picture in front of the Reichstag, he is standing just at the place where Palestine protest camps have set up tents. I shared this observation with him. The next day I read his reply:

Reading your message brought back my memories from about three years ago, in those places and in the moment when the photo was taken. It was a moment of wonder, and maybe also shock, for a young man leaving Gaza for the first time after thirty years of never going out, to see the big open world full of colors.

I remember I was amazed, happy, and afraid at the same time. Now, as I read your words, I don’t think it is just a coincidence that today there is solidarity and human action in the same place where I once stood.

Now I am in the peak of despair, searching again for a place, while options are disappearing and the geography becomes narrower day by day.

This essay is for you, dear Mohamed. May your imagination be nourished when you experience that there are more readers here in Berlin and elsewhere who engage with your stories. May this essay prepare a welcoming community for your next visit. May the truthfulness and the clarity of your words embolden and inspire those here who fight for Germany to finally quit arming and otherwise bolstering  Israel. And if some of the readers of this article can support Mohamed and his family financially, this would be highly appreciated too.

Red Flag:  No, East Germany wasn’t socialist—and neither is “democratic socialism”

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin critiques controversial statement by Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek


A mural depicting a socialist utopia: two smiling people with symbols of science and advancement swirling around them.

Heidi Reichinnek of Die Linke is more popular among people under 45 than chancellor Friedrich Merz. Admittedly, that’s a low bar to clear—but the 37-year-old politician with the Rosa Luxemburg tattoo, co-chair of the Left Party’s parliamentary group, rocks Tiktok with passionate speeches against the Far Right.

What kind of system does she want? In an interview with Stern magazine, she was asked about the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany, and answered:  “What we had in the GDR wasn’t socialism. At least not the kind my party envisions.”

Every single right-wing influencer in Germany responded:  socialism can only mean a repressive dictatorship. Following a famous method, let’s define what socialism is not, in order to figure out what it is. 

Definitely not socialism

Reichinnek says she is for “democratic socialism.” She calls that a “utopia” (literally:  a non-place), but a “first step” would be “to bring public services back into public ownership,” including “housing, transportation, health care, and education,” alongside a “redistribution of wealth.” She does not mention what any further steps would be, but she explicitly rejects “nationalizing everything.”

What Reichinnek is describing is more or less what West German capitalism looked like in the 1970s, before the neoliberal offensive. Prior to the age of privatizations, public services were mostly run by the state. Reichinnek simultaneously defends the Basic Law, which guarantees private property. So even in the golden age of the “social market economy,” the means of production were still monopolized by a handful of Nazi billionaires. 

Just like “democratic socialists” Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other side of the Atlantic, Die Linke envisions “socialism” as capitalism with more protections for workers. The problem is that such a regulated capitalism is inherently precarious—it’s only possible when capitalism is growing and the ruling class is forced to make concessions.

As we’ve seen for the last 50 years, competition between nation-states forces them to claw these concessions back. The only way to win lasting improvements for working people is to break out of this system by expropriating the bourgeoisie. Society’s wealth should be under democratic control—not the exclusive property of a few oligarchs who inherited billions from war criminals. Anything less is not democratic and not socialist. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:

“What was considered equality and democracy until now:  parliaments, national assemblies, equal ballots, was a pack of lies! Full power in the hands of the working masses, as a weapon for smashing capitalism to pieces — this is the only true equality, this is the only true democracy!”

Also not socialism

The GDR, in contrast, did nationalize just about everything. So was it socialist? Also not. Because socialism—which Marx described as a “first” or “lower” phase of communism—is not simply about state ownership. Socialism refers to a society in which the working class holds political power; as workers increasingly administer their own lives and society as a whole, class divisions and the state wither away.

The GDR existed for just over 40 years, and in that time, the state did anything but wither; the Ministry for State Security grew incessantly, and surveilled, harassed, and imprisoned workers and young people they considered to be “enemy-negative forces.” This wasn’t just an insult to human dignity—it was also an enormous waste of resources.

With a planned economy, and without the need to constantly generate profits, the GDR made accomplishments that sound fantastical today. They completely eliminated homelessness and allowed 90 percent of women to join the work force:  the highest rate recorded by any country ever. They came up with innovations like near-unbreakable glasses and hyperefficient prefab concrete housing. Yet a privileged bureaucracy, obsessed with control, produced constant inefficiencies and alienated workers from what was supposed to be “their” system.

In a recent video, the YouTuber Fabian Lehr rebuts Reichinnek and argues that the GDR was socialism, because despite any and all shortcomings, East Germany’s economic base was socialist. The history of German capitalism shows that the very same bourgeoisie can rule via an imperial monarchy, a bourgeois democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a different bourgeois democracy. But this is because capitalism needs a state with a certain autonomy.

Under a planned economy, no division exists between the political and economic spheres. “The economy” does not act like a mythical force hovering above society—it is subject to conscious planning. So decisions about who will produce what for whom are directly political. That’s why it is no secondary question if the working class is directly exercising power or not.

Lehr points to the GDR’s accomplishments, but offers no explanation for why millions of people wanted to leave this supposedly socialist society—or more generally, why productivity growth remained far lower than in the West. As Leon Trotsky argued in the 1930s, socialism must increase human productivity, or it has no historical justification. And one irony seems to escape him:  due to his long association with Trotskyism, comrade Lehr could have easily faced a long prison sentence in the GDR, as did many communists with similarly “problematic” backgrounds. This does not speak for a particularly civilized society. 

Real socialism

Socialism is fundamentally different from both Die Linke’s magically reformed capitalism, but also different from the GDR’s bureaucratically planned economy. A society can only be described as socialist if it meets Marx’s criteria of evolving towards the abolition of classes and the state. It’s a dialectical category defined not by an abstract checklist, but development and contradictions.

A planned economy needs broad, constant democracy to function. There is no other way to accurately judge what producers can do and what consumers need. By suppressing all criticism, Stalinist states like the GDR denied themselves the possibility of good planning.

There is a lot more in Reichinnek’s interview to criticize. As a “small step,” she thinks Die Linke should form coalition governments alongside the SPD and the Greens, “to achieve what is achievable at a given point in time.” In Berlin, we have seen what this looks like:  “left-wing” ministers privatizing public housing, deporting thousands of immigrants, and cutting wages for public sector workers. Small steps indeed! Recently, we saw leading members of Die Linke voting to give €500 billion to the German army.

Rosa Luxemburg, whose face is tattooed on Reichinnek’s arm, rejected the idea that reforms to capitalism were the “first steps” toward socialism:

“[P]eople who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.”

And while Reichinnek emphasizes her goal of joining government coalitions, Rosa Luxemburg took the opposite view:

“[T]he role of [a socialist party] in bourgeois society is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.”

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

11 September 1973: Putsch in Chile—the other 9/11

This week in working class history


In September 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, on the back of a wave of strikes and land occupations. His victory inspired wider social movements: workers took over factories, peasants seized the land, and indigenous Mapuches demanded recognition. This grassroots mobilisation led to the establishment of Cordones Industriales – workers’ councils that coordinated militant action across different factories and workplaces. Allende was pushed into nationalising some industries, including the mines and some banks

In response, US President Nixon ordered a trade embargo. The CIA-backed truck drivers’ union organised strikes that disrupted the delivery of vital goods – though since most drivers owned their own trucks, this was more a bosses’ strike than a genuine workers’ action. In June 1973, a tank regiment surrounded the presidential palace. Allende’s response was to compromise and to attempt to negotiate with the bosses and the military. He agreed not to interfere with Chile’s army or police. In August, he invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet.

In September, the Chilean military, led by Pinochet, staged a coup. Political parties were shut down, and Pinochet’s opponents were rounded up and tortured. 30,000 were killed, including Allende, and more than 3,000 “disappeared”. 12,000 Leftists were rounded up and sent to the national football stadium. One of them was the singer Victor Jara. Before they killed Jara, soldiers pulled his nails out, chopped his hands off, then told him to play his guitar: “Let’s hear you sing Venceremos now.”

Organised and financed by the CIA – which had cabled its Santiago station that “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup” – Pinochet’s regime, working with the “Chicago Boys”, became a testing ground for the monetarist policies later adopted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. This involved privatisation, unemployment, and massive attacks on workers’ rights. Pinochet’s US-backed economic programme was the forerunner to today’s austerity politics.

What are the lessons of Chile? On the one hand, Allende’s fate justifies St-Just’s statement: “Those who make revolutions by halves dig their own graves”. The rich and powerful will not hand over power without a fight. But Chile also showed the power of our side. When the truck owners went on strike, local committees were set up to distribute food and other essential goods. Workers organised production for need not profit. Before it was crushed, the Chilean uprising showed what a better society could look like.

Together for Gaza: Stop the genocide

Why you should join the Zusammen für Gaza demonstration on September 27th


The discourse on Gaza among the political and media elites of this country is finally beginning to shift. Increasing numbers of politicians and journalists are actually starting to use the word “genocide” and calling for an end to all arms shipments to Israel as well as sanctions of some kind. But it seems clear that we need pressure from below to ensure that this shift moves much more quickly and decisively to ensure real action. One of the best ways to do just that is by organizing mass demonstrations. 

Berlin is home to the largest Palestinian community in any city outside the Arab world. At least an estimated 30,000 Palestinians live here, 200,000 in Germany as a whole. Yet it has been incredibly difficult to organize large demonstrations in this city, for several reasons.

The primary reason for this is the outrageous behavior of the police at virtually every single demonstration. Even before 2023, the Berlin police had been notorious for the exceptional brutality against Palestinian protests in particular, with full support of nearly the entire political and media establishment.

Attending a demonstration means risking arbitrary police violence and detainment or arrest, leading to criminal charges. Many Palestinians with an unsure status are understandably not able to risk this, because of the consequences that might have for themselves and their families. There have been several cases of deportations and jobs lost.

The level of violence actually seems to be increasing with each new demonstration: the case of Kitty O’Brien now gone viral is just one of many. This is all compounded by the arbitrary restrictions placed on these demonstrations, which are often stopped by the police up to the point of banning them entirely. But the major reason for the fact that the demonstrations in Berlin and Germany in general have been so tiny has been the failure to mobilize the wider community.

The largest demonstration to date was the United 4 Gaza demonstration in June organized by Abed Hassan and Amin Rjoob with the backing of the heart of the Palestinian movement in Berlin. An estimated 70,000 attended. Even the attendance at successful demonstrations like United 4 Gaza remains ridiculously low in comparison to the demonstrations in New York, London, Madrid, Sydney, or elsewhere around the world. Recently in The Hague, 100,000 people were on the streets demanding an end to the genocide: the equivalent here would be 500,000 people.

It is important to remember that Berlin has seen protests of that size before: Against the Iraq War in 2003, over 500,000 people marched on the streets of Berlin alone, the largest demonstration in the history of the Federal Republic. Considering the polls that suggest a large majority of Germans diverge starkly in their opinions from the genocidal line of the government, it is imperative to find a way to mobilize at least a significant number of them to achieve something comparable to the demonstrations of 2003. 

A major contributing factor that has prevented a mass mobilization similar to that found in other countries was the egregious failure of all human rights groups and the Linke to get behind the demonstrations in the first place. In fact, the German branches of organizations like Fridays for Future and Amnesty International famously distanced themselves from the international organizations for condemning the genocide in Gaza.

This has been changing over the past year: much too late, and not with sufficient soul-searching that should accompany their change of stance. Other NGOs like medico international have, on the other hand, from the very start been supportive of the cause of stopping the genocide and advocating Palestinian liberation, although initially not on the streets. 

Finally—and far too late—several NGOs, including Amnesty International and medico international, and several private individuals organized a rally in February 2025 (For a Just Peace in Palestine and Israel) in front of the Bundeskanzleramt. This was still couched in extremely “moderate” language under the slogan “Ceasefire now.” It was an incredibly frustrating event, organized with minimum Palestinian participation and conflicted with another major demonstration at the same time. The turnout was anything but what it should have been: perhaps rightfully so, since the wording was so drenched in relativizing both-sidesism.

But the situation now is very different. Some of the same individuals, NGOs (including Amnesty and medico), and most importantly the party the Linke have announced a demonstration “Zusammen für Gaza—Stoppt den Genozid” (Together for Gaza—Stop the Genocide). They have been joined by several Palestinian activists and politicians. The demonstration starts at Alexanderplatz on Saturday, September 27th, and leads to the Bundestag, where it will be followed by a rally/concert in the evening.

This time, the tenor is decidedly different. That the word genocide is mentioned at all is already an amazing step forward in the context of this country. The wording of the call to demonstrate has clearly been chosen very carefully to create the broadest possible coalition to exert the most pressure to end the German support for genocide in Gaza, certainly the most pressing issue for activists here at the moment. This is necessary when organizing a large demonstration.

But this time, some things are new. Ramsis Kilani, who is listed first among the list of “initial supporters” published on the protest’s website, eloquently points out in an Instagram reel, that there are many things to criticize here, but the demands also go farther than anything that we’ve seen from this spectrum up to now.

Of course, the core of the movement has demands that go much farther, down to the root of the problem, Zionist settler colonialism. But we should bring this criticism to the demonstration itself. It is precisely what we have been pushing on the streets and in social media that has led these organizations to change their position.

We need to continue that process: and we can do that most effectively by using this opportunity to show our dissent at the demonstration itself, and make the best possible use of the resources they have made available to turn this event into the largest demonstration for Palestine that Germany has ever seen. We are not only calling for a stop to the genocide and German support for it, but also to promote Palestinian liberation. 

So while it is absolutely crucial to continue pushing NGOs, and most importantly the Linke, in the right direction, a boycott of this demonstration—or, worse, a counter demonstration—would only be destructive to the cause we are all fighting for.

Yes, it is incredibly frustrating. The Linke general secretary Janis Ehling recently gave a useless interview, ostensibly in support of the demonstration while undermining it at the same time. Attacks from within the party (like Bodo Ramelow’s insidious interview where he claims that saying that IDF kills kids is equivalent to the myth that “Jews eat children.” More than anything, this interview exposes Ramelow’s own antisemitism). The list goes on.

The failures of some people supporting the demo has made it very difficult to write this article at all. But if we are to have any hope that the movement to stop this genocide will grow and become more effective in this country, it is vital to seize this opportunity and make the demonstration ours. Please go to the website https://www.zusammen-fuer-gaza.de and sign up as a supporter, and of course please attend if you can.