Covering the annual Nakba Day march in Berlin, she’d asked me if I could answer a few questions about why I was there.
“I’m an Israeli journalist,” I told her in English. “I live in the neighbourhood and thought I’d check it out.”
“How can you stand to be here?” she replied. “The Antisemitism must be unbearable.”
Her camera man pivoted towards me, as though I had something important to say.
“It’s been an uneventful event so far,” I told them. “There are other Jews I know here.”
The interview came to a screeching halt.
I hadn’t given the reporter the answer she expected. Worse, I got the feeling she thought I was naïve, or stupid.
“Thank you for your time,” she said, with a pained look on her face, and moved on in search of other interviewees.
It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered this.
Not long after we’d first moved to Berlin, I was invited to a lunch at a local think tank.
When asked where I was living, I said Neukölln, the heavily Middle Eastern borough, best-known for its hummus bars.
“Just wait until you get robbed by an Arab,” a retired German academic told me. “You’ll move to Prenzlauer Berg. It’s very Jewish.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was incredibly patronising, and racist towards me as much as it was to Arabs.
Recounting the event to my then-boss, a Roman Jew, she said, “Welcome to Germany. They look down on all of us.”
That much I figured out. But I hadn’t realised how much it was mixed up with Germans projecting their own Antisemitism onto Muslims.
It was as though being the least bit proximate to Turks, or Palestinians, is discriminatory.
No wonder the journalist I’d spoken to was so horrified. I’d voluntarily subjected myself to an Arab political event.
I wondered how she would have responded if I’d told her my parents were fluent in Arabic and my paternal grandmother, Turkish.
I couldn’t help but think about these experiences this weekend, as I covered another Nakba Day march, this time, in Torino.
Held in the heavily Middle Eastern neighbourhood of Barriera di Milano, it reminded me a lot of Neukölln, albeit poorer.
Travelling up Corso Giulio Cesare, like the German march I attended ten years to the day, it was an uncontroversial affair.
Italian and Arab women made up the majority of the crowd. I spotted a few yarmulkes, of religious Jewish men, in the mix.
The placards and the chanting was entirely parallel. This was an inclusive leftwing event, in almost every way.
There are those who will point out that such conclusions ignore the fact that all criticism of Israel is Antisemitic.
Any critique of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, including what’s happening in Gaza, will trigger that.
The obvious extremity of what’s taking place there is proof enough of the transparency of such claims.
The genocide is real, as it always has been, and raises legitimate questions about the Israeli state and its politics.
Yet, as the following photos show, that didn’t preclude my ability to cover this march freely and without discrimination.
If only I could meet up with the German journalist again, that I met ten years ago.
I wonder what she’d say about the Torino event, today, in light of the last nineteen months of war.
I imagine it would be a lot harder to criticise.
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Photographs courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
