On May 13, historian Tarik Cyril Amar criticized a Berlin event, at which the state-funded German-Israeli Society, held an “Israel Day” celebration in late April. A Jewish restaurant, Feinberg’s, displayed a poster promoting a watermelon smoothie that should have been enough to turn any decent person’s stomach.
The poster showed a lion (a symbol of Israel) holding drinks made from watermelons—a symbol of Palestinian identity. “The background consisted of a pile of watermelons, often cut open, many featuring instantly recognizable baby faces,” Amar writes in RT. “The poster’s text said (partly in English and partly in German): ‘Watermelon meets Zion. Israeli-style watermelon, shredded, mashed, and hacked to pieces.’”
Amar commented that “The poster was, of course, an unmistakable allusion to Israel’s ongoing combined genocide-ethnic cleansing operation, with its main (though not sole) target the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. That is the place where the majority of Israel’s victims, many of them babies and children, have literally been ‘shredded’ and ‘cut to pieces,’” adding that “it is Gaza under Israeli assault for which doctors had to invent a new abbreviation: WCNSF—wounded child, no surviving family.”
Amar concluded by posing the question: “What is intriguing is that this time there has been some protest even, if all too faintly, in some mainstream media outlets. Maybe Germany is not entirely lost yet. Or is it, as before in German history, only a minority that shows decency but cannot change the deeply indecent course of the country’s morally and intellectually kaput elites and the majority still following them?”
A German journalist, James Jackson, shared the grotesque poster on X on April 27, concluding: “Many are interpreting this as a violent fantasy.”
Amar is a historian of the 20th century, specializing in Ukraine, Russia, and the Soviet Union, and has held scholarships at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.
