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Paper short abstract

This paper builds on twelve months of fieldwork among Arab migrants in Berlin in 2024-2025 and shows how they emotionally interacted with feelings of existential displacement in response to the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism relating to Israel's war on Gaza

Paper long abstract

This paper builds on twelve months of fieldwork among Arab migrants in Berlin in 2024-2025. During this year, Israel’s war on Gaza and the subsequent unrest it brought about in the region, as well as political developments in Germany that translated in the repression of pro-Palestinian activism have significantly impacted Arab migrants. This paper focuses on how these events created a sense of collective disillusionment and questions about belonging among my interlocutors who described this in the language of “regression." I argue that this is grounded in freedom being an existential project for many who have migrated in the aftermath of the failure of the Arab revolutions. As such, my ethnographic account demonstrates how "critical events" such as the genocide and political repression in Europe can valorise affects and temporalities relating to past lives guiding migration trajectories (Das, 1995). I show how my interlocutors emotionally interacted with feelings of existential displacement in the city and the mediums through which they expressed these emotions. This included collective mobilization to provide spaces for grieving those killed in Gaza and expressing feelings of disempowerment through open mic, poetry and communal events. I also focus on how my interlocutors personally navigated feelings of alienation in their daily lives as they interacted with people in their surroundings who negated the reality of the unrest in the region in support of Israel. I build on literature within existential anthropology to highlight how people experience emotions of "de-anchoring" in response to political crises (Obeid, 2025; Hage, 2021).