When Berliner Tobias Hauch looked around the Brandenburg Gate on Sunday, what he saw was not a crowd but a disappointment.
Two weeks after the Hamas terror attacks on Israel, Sunday’s pro-Israel demo “against terror and anti-Semitism” drew a much smaller crowd on a sunny autumn afternoon than an anti-vaccine gathering had done in the same place three years ago.
Organisers claimed 25,000 came; police said less than half that. For Mr Hauch, the numbers revealed much about his country’s conflicted response to the October 7th attacks.
“I’ve had the full programme of ‘never again’ in school and the rest, so it was a given I would be here today, but I’m disappointed not more people feel the same,” said Mr Hauch, who works in Berlin’s thriving start-up scene. “My sector’s firms are always quick to support Black Lives Matter or queer rights or whatever but most have so far been silent on Israel.”
As Sunday’s demo got under way, following days of anti-Semitic incidents around the German capital, an onstage organiser described the gathering as a pushback “against the tortuous silence in Berlin”.
“It is a crime that you cannot mourn lost Jewish lives in Berlin without becoming a target oneself,” she said.
German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier didn’t mince his words, calling it a “disgrace that in Germany of all places” Jewish children were afraid to go to school and the adjacent memorial to the murdered Jews Europe had been fenced off.
“Anti-Semitism is the red line in Germany, we cannot tolerate it from the right, the left, old anti-Semitism or new anti-Semitism,” he said. “We say to the people of Israel: we stand at your side, your pain is our pain.”
Eight decades after Nazi Germany organised the mass murder of six million European Jews, many German Jews now speak of betrayal.
“After 9/11 there was such empathy and shock, I remember even the Berlin U-Bahn standing still for five minutes,” said Rebekah, holding an Israeli flag. “This time the reaction has been so strange, so without empathy.”
On Saturday, a largely peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration of up to 5,000 people marched through Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood in a sea of Palestinian flags and chants of “freedom for Palestine” and “stop the genocide”. Police pulled from the demonstration a loudspeaker truck for “anti-Israeli chants and remarks glorifying violence”.
Berlin police, who issue demonstration permits, are facing criticism for banning many pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including one at the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday, for fear of violence or illegal behaviour by participants.
“Such bans only strengthen those who want aggro and then the news can say, ‘Oh look, the Arabs are rioting again’,” said Ms Guia Princigalli, participating in a small demonstration outside Berlin’s foreign ministry. “For people who want to protest peacefully there is no place in this city. is not freedom of speech. I’m sorry but this is a disgrace for Germany.”
Amid an increasingly heated atmosphere – on the streets and on social media – there has been a striking silence from Berlin’s usually vocal cultural scene.
The About Blank techno club, one of the few to show solidarity with Israel, now finds itself a target of online hate and boycotts by anti-Israel groups.
[ Thousands march through Dublin in support of Palestine amid conflict in GazaOpens in new window ]
About Blank team member Sulu Martini attributed the silence to cultural institutions’ largely leftist sympathies and the pro-Palestine line of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
“There is a yearning in parts of the club scene for simple bogeymen and simple world views,” said Mr Martini to the Tagesspiegel newspaper. “We have queers who imagine themselves in an alliance with the Palestinians ... not realising that in Gaza there is little room for queer self-realisation.
