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Die israelische Linksaktivistin Inna Michaeli erklärte heute warum sie es für wichtig hält, dass ihr auch zur Demonstration "Berlin for Gaza" diesen Samstag mitkommt.

facebook.com/events/789194934466038/?fref=ts   Saturday 9.8, 15:00, in front of the Axel-Springer-Haus.

1. Because if my family and friends would be massacred, I'd want you and everyone on the streets too.
2. Because lives of Arabs and Muslims are devalued and disposable not only in Israel but across Western cultures. Racism kills.
3. Because I don't expect the organizers to make everything absolutely comfortable for me. I don't have to support every slogan or every organisation participating. It's not all about me, my sensitivities, my language, my politics, my terms. Solidarity is not about such position of power. It's about resisting this massacre together, as a starting point for future dialogues on politics and language and terms - on our shared society here in Berlin.
4. Because if I didn't go to places where someone may express something anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, racist, sexist or homophobic, I could just stay at home all my life. We all share the responsibility to fight all forms of racism everywhere, as we do to resist mass-killings.
5. Because I am appalled and terrified by the use of anti-Semitism as an excuse to be silent on mass-killing and de-humanization. As I am appalled by its projection from the German society onto its current Oriental "other".
6. Because the demonization of those demos feeds on the fear of white Europeans of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists. A group of Arab or Muslim men shouting slogans makes the average European think of Al-Qaeda. Berlin has to overcome this segregation and figure out how we can all live together as equals.
7. Because I want to contribute to a radical feminist and lesbian visibility in all struggles for justice and because out of more than 1,800 people killed and thousands injured by the Israeli army, there must have been hundreds of LGBT persons. No LGBT rights organisation mourns their deaths. 
8. Because I know that under occupation and blockade, it is so much harder for feminists, ethnic minorities and LGBT groups to fight for liberation and social change.
9. Because I understand that patriarchal culture and profit-driven globalized economy allow this bloodshed and thrive on it.
10. Because I know that Israelis are human beings. Like every other society, they too can be swayed in crazed nationalism, militarism, fear, racist hatred, conformism, war crimes, refusal to recognize the death and destruction they cause. People can support a government that drives them to their own destruction, to the loss of their humanity. Also educated, smart, sensitive or good-hearted people. This is happening right now.
11. and one more: Because, unlike all the people killed in this past month, I am alive and breathing. We can speak against the killing, against the blockade, against the occupation. We can call to end German and European support to these crimes against humanity. 

Everything feels, and perhaps is, useless and hopeless. Speaking out may not make it better. But staying silent will make it worse.