Right at the start of Berlin’s Sonnenallee, where the boulevard meets Hermannplatz square in the district of Neukölln, somebody has spray-painted a slogan in Arabic beneath the window of a pharmacy. "Glory to the resistance in Gaza," it reads in black paint. Next to it, in neon green: "Al-Quds Brigades," the name of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad. The terror organization is thought to have joined Hamas in the attack on Israel last weekend.

A couple of meters further on, two Arab men in a mobile phone shop are sitting behind the counter and staring into their smartphones. One of them is watching a video posted by an Arab TikTok user. The video claims that anyone found by German police to be in possession of a Palestinian flag will lose their German citizenship, the salesman says. That’s not true, of course, but he considers the information about German laws from an Arab-speaking social media channel to be trustworthy. And he’s angry about it. For him, it is yet further proof for how unfairly Palestinians are treated in Germany. For Israelis, he says, there are no such penalties.

In the next mobile phone shop, just a few steps down the road, a recording of the Koran is playing over the sound system. There are two photos on the wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and one of Yasser Arafat, the late leader of the Fatah Party, who died in 2004. The party is the strongest faction within the Palestinian Liberation Organization and in the past carried out numerous terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. For Hamas, Arafat is a traitor because he demonstrated openness to the peace process with Israel in the 1990s. Today, Hamas is in firm control of the Gaza Strip, while the Fatah Party reigns supreme in the West Bank.

Abu K., the store owner, comes out of the back room. "I hate Hamas," he says, adding that he rejects violence against civilians no matter where it comes from. Germany, he says, is a good country because there is freedom of opinion. But that’s all he has to say and is unwilling to engage in conversation about the subject at hand. One of his customers, though, has more to say. He doesn’t want to give his name, asking that he be identified with an M., like Mohammad. A Palestinian from Lebanon, his head is shaved and his full beard is neatly trimmed. Dangling from his neck is a map of Palestine, with no mention of Israel.

M. says he thinks Hamas is "bad." "I am against the killing of innocent people," he says. But: "What Hamas did is an understandable reaction to decades of oppression by the Israelis." He says he doesn’t read German media because he doesn’t think they're independent. He points to his mobile phone to show how he gets his information: a WhatsApp group called "Refugee Camp in Lebanon." Members of the group post reports or videos they find interesting. M.’s friend, who is leaning against the wall by the door, holds up his phone, which shows dozens of photos of children. They are victims, he says, killed by the "Zionists" – he calls them "martyrs." "The Germans never report about them," he claims.

Hamas as a Normal Political Party?

"Will you finally stop! I’ve had enough," Abu K. calls from the backroom. "You're young. Go to the disco. You don’t have to talk about politics." He asks us to leave.

Outside the door, two men have taken a seat at a wooden table. One of them, a 30-year-old who fled Lebanon and whose grandparents are Palestinians, is willing to speak openly. But like the others, he isn't prepared to give his name. "Write Mohammad," he says. "That’s the name of the prophet." Aside from Abu K., all the men we spoke with in reporting this story were either named Mohammad or wanted to be called by that name.

What is Mohammad’s position on Hamas? He falls silent. "Turn off the recorder," he says. Once he is certain that it’s off, he says: "In Germany, there are also different political parties. That’s how it is in Palestine too." When asked if he seriously thinks that Hamas is a normal political party like the Christian Democrats or Social Democrats in Germany, he nods. Mohammad surely has heard that 260 young men and women were murdered at a music festival in Israel? "That’s not exactly what happened," he responds. Hamas was only trying to take hostages, he claims. "We are Muslims. Our religion requires us to treat hostages well." He claims to have seen a video in which Hamas fighters were protecting two Jewish women from a hail of bullets by pulling them behind a car.

It is hardly possible that Mohammad hasn’t heard that innocent civilians were killed in the attack. Photos of the dead bodies have also been broadcast on Arab-language channels. Does he feel sorry for the victims, many of whom were his age? Mohammad doesn’t answer before letting out a laugh and looking imploringly at his friend. "Just say that you think it’s terrible when innocent people die," his friend tells him with a grin.

Like so many in the Middle East, the two likely grew up in surroundings where Israelis were not considered people worthy of sympathy, but simply as "dirty swine" or dangerous "Zionists." That worldview does not seem to have been changed by the years they have spent in Germany.

The Victim Narrative

On a street corner not far from Abu K.’s phone shop, somebody has daubed "Death to Israel" on the wall of a building. A short walk down Sonnenallee from there brings you to a shop for evening gowns. On the walls hang red-and-black lingerie covered with sequins and fringed with feathers, along with transparent nightshirts. In the back, there is a section for wedding gowns. Nour, a woman with fake eyelashes, a white headscarf and a long, beige woolen is sitting on a stool waiting for customers. With her is a friend named Mira and Mira’s 16-year-old daughter Seba, though it seems likely that those aren’t their real names.

"I am boiling inside," says the saleswoman. "It is unbelievable how many innocent children and Palestinians are currently dying. In reaction to the attack by Hamas, Israel has sealed off the Gaza Strip, there is hardly any food and water, and no electricity. Countless Palestinian civilians have been killed by the air strikes in the last several days."

Nour primarily reads reports about the situation in Gaza on TikTok. She, too, is of the opinion that German media outlets cannot be trusted. Her friend Mira admits openly: "I support Hamas." She ignores the question about the terrorists’ victims in Israel and asks a question of her own: "Where was the support for us when the Israelis massacred the Palestinians? They’ve done that often." And there it is again, the victim narrative that is used to justify even the most horrific terror attacks. It is widespread on Berlin’s Sonnenallee, fed by a never-ending stream of Fake News and distorted facts on TikTok, Instagram and other such channels.

But what does Seba think, the 16-year-old girl with Palestinian roots who fled to Germany from Syria with her family six years ago and now attends school in Berlin? Seba has never been to the Palestinian Territories herself. "I actually don’t like Hamas," she says, "but what they did is just a reaction to what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians for the last 75 years." She says that they also discussed the war in school. "One teacher wanted to speak with me about it, but I know that it’s a waste of time. Germans can't understand the situation in Palestine." What is the situation? "It’s like someone just coming into your house and saying: OK, this is mine now. You can’t accept that."

Evening has arrived. It’s now 5:30 p.m. on Sonnenallee and a number of people have gathered near the Risa Chicken fast food chain. Despite the prohibition against demonstrations, a few young men have unfurled Palestinian flags. A rally had initially been planned for 4 p.m., but officials banned it due to security concerns. Protests have taken place in other German cities as well, but Neukölln is home to a particularly large number of Palestinians and the district has landed in the headlines several times in recent years because of open displays of anti-Semitism during protest events.

Rising Anger on Hermannplatz

Masked police officers lead two of the demonstrators away as several youth film the scene with their phones. Anger among the anti-Israeli crowd is intense. "It’s unbelievable that people aren’t even allowed to show their solidarity for Palestine," says Mohammad, a 25-year-old university student from Syria. He finds the degree to which Germans take sides and their lack of interest in Palestinian suffering to be intolerable.

Mohammad says that he fled to Germany seven years ago and is now studying pharmaceutical medicine in Berlin. His German is almost accent-free. Did he not realize when he came that Germany has a special responsibility for Israel stemming from the Nazis’ murder of 6 million Jews?

"I was 17 when I arrived," Mohammad says. "I didn’t know anything." He says he has begun having serious doubts as to whether he can continue living in a country like Germany in the long term. "I no longer feel comfortable here."

It's just a small sample of randomly encountered people on the street. But on this Wednesday moderate voices are hard to find here on Sonnenallee.