Germany’s domestic intelligence service has now placed the sliced watermelon among the identifying symbols of secular pro-Palestinian extremism and antisemitism. That assessment captures something larger than a single image. Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, slaughter of Jews, Western capitals have seen a wave of anti-Israel demonstrations, marked by familiar images and slogans: Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, accusations of genocide, and the “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chant that calls for the abolition of the Jewish state.
Accompanying these protests are images of a sliced watermelon—red flesh, white rim, green rind, black seeds, with its colors mirroring the Palestinian flag. These four pan-Arab colors herald to Islamic dynasties: the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, and Hashemites. In Palestinian iconography, black signals oppression, white hope, green land, and red the “blood of the martyrs.”
In Palestinian iconography, black signals oppression, white hope, green land, and red the “blood of the martyrs.”
From a political science perspective, however, the same colors also mark three radical ideologies: red for the far left, green for Islamism, black (brown) for the far right. All are united by antisemitism and by a common goal: to delegitimize or eliminate Israel. White, rarely a color of political extremism, denotes the few who speak of “peace” at such rallies—and yet, often normalize slogans that demand Israel’s abolition.
Rather than neutralizing one another, these currents increasingly coexist and reinforce one another in a fashionable “Watermelon Alliance.” It stretches from Marxist milieus, climate, queer, feminist, and “post-colonial” activists through supposedly anti-racist and anti-fascist networks to Islamist organizations, Turkish ethno-nationalists, neo-Nazis, and conspiracy-minded Querdenker circles. It is less a formal coalition than a mobilization space in which antisemitism becomes the common language.
The visibility of these overlaps exploded after October 7. Studies of street protests show that Islamist organizations, radical left-wing groups, and far-right actors appear at the same demonstrations. The premise is always the same: Israel is not a legitimate state, but a historical mistake to be corrected. For the postcolonial left, it is a “white settler colony”; for Islamists, a Jewish state on land understood as eternally Islamic is a blasphemous anomaly; for the far right, Israel is the outpost of “Jewish world power.” In all three visions, a Jewish nation-state is incompatible with their utopia—whether a borderless post-national world, a restored caliphate, or an “ethnically homogeneous” Europe. A “just” order requires a world without Israel.
This goal rests on a shared conspiratorial worldview. Whether the buzzword is “Zionist lobby,” “Jewish media,” “globalists,” or “Great Replacement,” Jews or “Zionists” appear as hidden engineers behind wars, economic crises, migration, and pandemics—condensed into the recurring claim that Israel and “international Jewry” dictate Western policy.
The Watermelon Alliance uses the left’s intersectional, anti-racist rhetoric—“occupation,” “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide”—while Islamists adopt the postcolonial vocabulary of “decolonization” and “apartheid,” and the far right responds with “Yesterday Dresden; today Gaza.” Everywhere, antisemitism is diluted into “just another racism,” dismissed as a racist invention of a “white majority society,” or portrayed as a trick to delegitimize “criticism of Israel.”
Across the watermelon spectrum, violence against Israelis and Jews is not only excused but also romanticized.
They minimize, deny, or invert the Holocaust: “Zionists/Israelis/Jews are the new Nazis.” Remembrance culture is treated as an obstacle to “Palestine solidarity”—“Free Palestine from German guilt”—and they accuse Jews of drawing political “profit” from commemoration. This narrative portrays Arabs as those forced to “pay” for a European crime, while erasing Islamist and Arab collaborations with Nazi Germany.
Across the watermelon spectrum, violence against Israelis and Jews is not only excused but also romanticized. The October 7 massacre is reinterpreted as “legitimate resistance,” as a “desperate reaction by the oppressed,” or as a tactical blueprint: from chants such as “Glory to our martyrs” and “Blood and soul for Palestine and al-Aqsa” to neo-Nazi channels celebrating the humiliation of a state they equate with “Jewish power.” Hamas appears not as a terrorist organization, but as a tool for making Israel disappear.
Even if the “Watermelon Alliance” may seem new, its ideological convergence is not. An early example was at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, when the Palestinian terrorist group Black September murdered 11 Israeli athletes and again turned Jews into targets on German soil. The attack already contained the core colors of the later Watermelon Alliance: the red of revolutionary “anti-imperialism,” visible in the terrorists’ “liberation” rhetoric and in praise from Ulrike Meinhof of the far-left Red Army Faction; the green of a martyr-centered Palestinian militancy later radicalized by Islamists; and the black of the far right, in logistical support from neo-Nazis like Willi Pohl.
In the end, the “watermelon triangle” is old hatred in a new aesthetic. The West must decide whether it will draw a line—or allow it to keep marching behind fashionable emojis.
