At the same time, Shammout, who runs a care home for elderly people in Lügde, west Germany, has become a conduit for information requested by her friends and colleagues seeking to understand the conflict.

The country’s political leaders have spoken repeatedly and without apparent hesitation about Germany’s Staatsräson, or reason of state, a principle that places support for Israel at the core of national identity.

But when this historical responsibility is used as an excuse for justifying massive human rights violations, for breaking international law, then it saddens and maddens me and I do not accept this so-called Staatsräson.”

Khalid wrote a commentary in the Berliner Zeitung arguing that the far right, in the ascendant in Germany notably in the form of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), was far more likely to be behind antisemitic attacks than ordinary Muslims.

For Derviş Hızarcı, the chair of Kiga, a non-profit organisation set up to tackle antisemitism but which increasingly finds itself dealing with Islamophobia as well, the widely circulated speech “was good and helpful.

In November, before the introduction of a fragile truce in Gaza, participants in a pro-Palestinian demonstration met outside the chancellery in Berlin to demand an immediate ceasefire, a call rejected by the chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

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