In my dissertation, I have become an expert in antisemitism discourses in Germany—examining how they operate through racialisation, securitisation, and memory politics—yet I cannot apply for most if not all jobs in Germany that deal with antisemitism in research or non-profit. The irony is sharp: I am Jewish, I live here, I speak German fluently, and I have all the skills and competences one would expect. But the positions are framed around a very particular kind of “expertise” in what they call Israel-bezogener Antisemitismus—Israel-centered antisemitism—which in practice means focusing on so-called “Muslim” or “imported” antisemitism. These jobs advertise themselves as fighting antisemitism, but the work they prescribe largely sustains a racial divide, policing and pathologizing specific communities rather than researching, understanding, or dismantling the racial order that produces these divisions in the first place. Sometimes this racialised agenda is explicit; other times it’s more implicit, becoming clear only when you examine the projects, the partnerships, and the cooperations of the employers. It’s not always spelled out, but the patterns are there, and I’ve learned to approach job postings in this field with suspicion. In the current climate, “combating antisemitism” is too often reduced to surveilling protests and cataloguing dissent, especially in pro-Palestinian spaces, rather than engaging with the structural dynamics that underlie antisemitism in the first place and how it directly relates and more so correlates to racialising mechanisms in Germany. The space for critical, nuanced, and historically grounded expertese—even from someone like me or actually particularly from someone like me —feels vanishingly small in the current climate in Germany.

The recent coverage in the German "Bild" reveals a troubling pattern in how Palestinian voices are discredited and erased. Within a single week, the paper published one article claiming that famine in Gaza was staged for “Hamas propaganda” and another reporting the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif not as the assassination of a reporter, but as the elimination of a Hamas “mastermind disguised as a journalist.” In both cases, the Israeli army’s propaganda is presented as fact, while the work and testimony of Palestinians are either sidelined or cast as inherently illegitimate. In Germany, the label “terrorist” in the Israeli military lexicon functions much like the label “antisemite” in domestic political discourse: once applied, it overrides the need for evidence, context, or due process. Both operate as totalising accusations that collapse complex realities into moral absolutes. “Terrorist” justifies extrajudicial killing, erases civilian status, and silences documentation from Gaza. “Antisemite” delegitimises Palestinian narratives, constrains criticism of Israeli policies, and polices solidarity movements and migration. These accusations work through the same mechanisms: pre-emptively discrediting a source before their words or images can be considered; collapsing a person’s role into the accusation so that a journalist is no longer a journalist, a protester no longer a protester; and granting immunity to state violence by making it politically and morally unassailable. The targeting of journalists in Gaza is thus not only an attack on press freedom but it is part of a broader logic in which Palestinian speech is always-already suspect, whether under the label of “terrorism” or “antisemitism.”