A distinguished Jewish restaurant in Berlin selected to have fun Israel Day with a joke concerning the slaughter of Palestinians
A single, small, low-quality do-it-yourself poster just lately displayed within the heart of Germany’s capital Berlin has precipitated a minor scandal that has gone towards the grain of the nation’s normally unshakable help for Israel whereas the latter is committing genocide.
The essence of the incident is straightforward: in late April, the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (DIG) – “German-Israeli Society” – held one in every of its “Israel Days” in Berlin. In Germany, the DIG is a distinguished and highly effective group. Its essential supply of funding, in line with the nation’s official lobbying register for 2023, is the German state. The latter’s Federal Company for Civic Training – in essence, Germany’s workplace of Centrist ideological orthodoxy and indoctrination – describes it because the nation’s “central group […] the place mates of Israel come collectively in non-partisan cooperation.”
“Israel Day” in Berlin was a largely casual occasion, actually a road occasion with speeches. To make issues much more enjoyable, there was catering by the restaurant Feinberg’s. Specifically, Feinberg’s, specializing in what it calls Israeli delicacies – Palestinians acknowledge many dishes as plagiarized from their custom – supplied a really particular melon smoothie.
The poster promoting the drink confirmed a lion (utilized by Israelis as a nationwide image) carrying an apron emblazoned with the Israeli flag (simply to verify). The lion held two massive glass tumblers, one with items of melon (an already conventional and well-known image of Palestine and its resistance), the opposite with the completed smoothie and a small Israeli flag.
The background consisted of a pile of melons, typically reduce open, many that includes immediately recognizable child faces. The poster’s textual content stated (partly in English and partly in German): “Watermelon meets Zion. Israeli-style watermelon, shredded, mashed, and hacked to items.”
An Israeli restaurant in Berlin gives “Israeli-style blended Watermelon, puréed, and chopped to items” at an Israel foyer occasion with faces on the watermelons. Many are decoding this as a violent fantasy pic.twitter.com/AEHFPmZbBd
— James Jackson (@derJamesJackson) April 27, 2025
The watermelons evoked what is named “Kindchenschema” or “cuteness” (within the scientific sense): an virtually universally acknowledged sample of options that indicators infants and youngsters and – with psychologically regular people – stirring deep hormonal and neurological responses of sympathy and care or no less than restraint.
The message was apparent and under no circumstances humorous: The Israeli “lion” was crushing the Palestinian “watermelons” into an enjoyably refreshing ice-cold and blood-red pulp, accessible with a “shot” of – presumably celebratory – vodka, too. That the faces on the anthropomorphized “melons” had been childlike made all the pieces much more repulsive: clearly, whoever felt this image was a good suggestion shouldn’t be regular sufficient for the Kindchenschema to work on them.
Those that research genocide have lengthy agreed that the deliberate dehumanizing of the victims by propaganda and indoctrination is one in every of its elementary strategies and indicators. Those that fake to fail to acknowledge a textbook case of such dehumanization on this poster are intentionally obtuse.
The poster was, after all, an unmistakable allusion to Israel’s ongoing mixed genocide–ethnic cleaning operation, with its essential (although not sole) goal the Palestinians within the Gaza Strip. That’s the place the place nearly all of Israel’s victims, a lot of them infants and youngsters, have actually been “shredded” and “reduce to items” by air raids and bombing in addition to systematically starved and disadvantaged of housing and important infrastructure, particularly medical establishments, and, to not neglect, their caretakers: it’s Gaza below Israeli assault for which medical doctors needed to invent a brand new abbreviation: WCNSF – wounded baby, no surviving household.
Within the phrases of Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN humanitarian workplace liable for Gaza, Israel is training “deprivation by design” and the “deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life.”
The newest – de facto minimal – dying toll among the many Palestinians is approaching 63,000. Nearly 112,000 victims have been injured, typically severely, resulting in lifelong penalties, comparable to amputated limbs. Horrifying as they’re, these figures, generated by Gaza’s well being ministry – which, opposite to Israeli and Western propaganda, is conservative in its counting – are solely the tip of the iceberg. For one factor, a research within the authoritative medical journal The Lancet has lengthy maintained that the actual figures are seemingly to be considerably increased.
Killing, injuring, and maiming are, after all, just one a part of Israeli violence. Mass displacement and the literal razing of the Gaza Strip, a lot of which has been pounded into poisonous mud, and deep and pervasive psychological trauma are others. There is no such thing as a room right here to even sketch all of the vicious strategies of Israel’s genocide or all its horrendous penalties. And as with genocides earlier than, there’s additionally a restrict to language: It’s laborious to even accommodate in unusual phrases each what the Israeli perpetrators have been doing, along with their Western accomplices, and the vicious sadism that not a number of however many Israelis, in and out of uniform, are proudly displaying.
But that is, in spite of everything, what Amnesty Worldwide – and lots of others – have rightly recognized as a “live-streamed genocide.” As a result of beautiful shamelessness of many Israeli perpetrators and the event of recent media and particularly social media, it is a genocide within the international public eye as by no means earlier than.
That’s the reason it’s totally unimaginable to imagine the foolish makes an attempt to obfuscate and backpedal now made by the clearly something however “leonine” creators of the poster. Clearly stung by protests and afraid of attainable authorized penalties, Yorai Feinberg, proprietor of Feinberg’s, has retreated to claiming that the melons had been meant to face for – drum roll – “antisemitism,” and that the entire thing was simply satire anyhow.
Each claims are offensively absurd: Everybody is aware of that watermelons stand for Palestine, Palestinians, and their resistance, not “antisemitism.” It could, after all, be that within the unwell minds of the poster’s creators these two issues seem like the identical. That might be a classical Zionist delusion in addition to a propaganda trick. And nonetheless, clearly, a lie.
Additionally, it is rather, very laborious to clarify why issues now allegedly representing merely “antisemitism” wanted to be drawn with cute, childlike faces. No, that is, let’s print it, for-crying-out-loud bullshit, nonsense of the identical evil, brazen type because the Israeli genociders’ limitless, daft lies about Hamas right here and Hamas there, every time they really feel – which is usually – like bombing yet one more hospital, tent encampment, or residential constructing.
Relating to “satire” – a cop-out publicly endorsed by (shock, shock) the DIG – the place to even begin? If the makers of this revolting image actually felt that they had been producing one thing akin to a “witty” or “edgy” assertion, a type of “joke,” then that merely implies that they discover “joking” about genocide and particularly the mass homicide of youngsters “regular.” And there can’t be something much less regular and extra morally rotten than such a way of “humor.” Severely boasting of mass homicide or “simply kidding”? You realize what: It doesn’t matter – both means you’re a monster.
However this scandal includes greater than the bloody bigotry of 1 German and Israeli restaurant. Take into account that this was an official DIG occasion, attended by each its president Volker Beck and the Israeli ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor. They can not have been unaware of the ‘lion-exterminates-melons’ poster: an Instagram image confirmed each of them in entrance of the stand displaying it.
Beck is a serious – if previous his prime – politician from Germany’s Inexperienced Celebration, a fanatical supporter of Israel, and, because it occurs, additionally a determine with a lower than shining previous. He has argued for the decriminalization of “pedosexuality,” that’s, de facto the unpunished sexual abuse of minors, a reality he later tried to hide with out success; he has additionally been caught with severe medicine. Prosor is a veteran Israeli diplomat who does what Israeli diplomats do: Previous highlights embrace attacking UNRWA, a signature transfer of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians designed to chop them off from any help that may disturb Israeli siege and hunger operations. Certainly, Israeli assaults on UNRWA are presently the topic of yet one more case towards it on the Worldwide Court docket of Justice (ICJ).
Just lately, Prosor has sought to suppress important voices in Germany, together with Israeli thinker Omri Boehm, and, for good measure, police German universities by defaming resistance to Israeli crimes and German complicity as “new antisemitism.” How unique.
It’s not laborious to think about that each gents noticed nothing incorrect with that melon-shredding lion and should even have loved a splash of genocide-’joke’ smoothie. They usually received’t face any penalties, after all. For – and that is the widest and saddest context of this vile affair – Germany has chosen to aspect with Israel with a ‘to-the-bitter-end’ obstinacy harking back to that different very disappointing Germany that did not ever cease being loyal to – and combating for – Nazism till lastly stopped by others, principally the Soviets.
Berlin, the capital, has been on the forefront of this new, because it had been, transferred nationalism-without-restraint and Nibelungentreue for pure, apparent evil. Its mayor Kai Wegner has acquired a repute for genocide denial; its police for brutality towards these displaying solidarity with Israel’s Palestinian victims. And it’s the metropolis the place an anti-genocide protester has simply been convicted for “trivializing the Holocaust” merely for peacefully holding up an indication saying “Have we realized nothing from the Holocaust?” Clearly, that decide has not.
Towards this background of pervasive, dominant moral perversion, a poster viciously dehumanizing Palestinians got here as no shock. What’s intriguing is that this time there was some protest even, if all too faintly, in some mainstream media retailers. Possibly Germany shouldn’t be totally misplaced but. Or is it, as earlier than in German historical past, solely a minority that exhibits decency however can not change the deeply indecent course of the nation’s morally and intellectually kaput elites and the bulk nonetheless following them?
The statements, views and opinions expressed on this column are solely these of the creator and don’t essentially signify these of RT.
