26 July 2024
Whether a story has a happy ending, Orson Welles famously quipped, depends on where you decide to stop telling it. In Germany, Israel represents the undoing of the Holocaust, or, as researcher Emily Dische-Becker put it, the ‘happy ending’ that could be conjured out of the ashes of Auschwitz. [1] The history of the founding of the Jewish state thus becomes a story about the righting of wrongs, and by extension, about the redemption of Germany – no wonder the country finds it hard to divest from it.
There is an element of sincerity to collective culpability. One can certainly commiserate with a generation that grew up tormented by the question ‘what would I have done had I lived under Nazism?’ now seizing the moment to prove they would defend Jewish life. But the plight of Palestinian civilians puts pressure on the established narrative. To acknowledge indiscriminate bombardments and the targeting of infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, or the deliberate destruction of farmland, opens up the terrifying possibility that a different story might hide behind the official one, a story in which present-day Israel might not represent the righting of wrongs but the wronging of wrongs. [2] The prospect that ‘standing with the Jewish state’ might not be equivalent to ‘standing with the victims’ is highly disturbing: it unsettles the atoning work for which the country believes it deserves congratulations. As a result, to quote Palestinian artist Jumana Manna’s article ‘The Embargo on Empathy’, solidarity with the Palestinian struggle becomes ‘the limit of Germany’s self-proclaimed pluralism’. [3] Rather than ‘acknowledge that no single narrative recounts the whole of history’s polymorphous cruelty‘, as put by Barnett R Rubin, Die Welt argues that ‘Free Palestine’ is ‘das neue Heil Hitler’. [4] For the German punditry, calling for a ceasefire is equivalent to calling for the erasure of Jewish people, expressing concern for civilian casualties implies support for terrorism, and having a sense of empathy is a symptom of moral bankruptcy. That which would warrant discussion cannot be discussed because the very idea that a discussion ought to take place, as Judith Butler argued, can render you an abject apologist ‘complicitous in hideous crimes’. [5] This is where the story changes: it is no longer a story about the Israel–Hamas conflict, although it intersects with it. This is a story about a society that drew the wrong lessons from history and its ongoing efforts to re-narrate the struggle against antisemitism as a struggle for imperialism.
‘The Jews or the angry-Arabs, we must decide whom to keep’
Germany’s unwavering support for the unpopular war Israel is waging on Gaza can only be sustained if dissent is silenced at home. The recent spate of cancellations, by now too numerous to list, have made international headlines. [6] Less known, however, is that in Germany the political encroachment into cultural programming, along with the practice of publicising accusations of antisemitism with insufficient regard to evidence, preceded by several years the October 7th attack in 2023 against southern Israeli kibbutzim. By 2020, the McCarthyist climate had intensified to the point that a great number of German institutions established the Initiative GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit (world-openness initiative) to counter it. [7] The signatories were particularly concerned about the 2019 motion that the German parliament voted in favour of, with its labelling of the BDS movement as antisemitic. For the same reasons it rejected the BDS call to boycott, Weltoffenheit rejected the parliament-sanctioned counter-boycott as ‘detrimental’ to the democratic public sphere. ‘Accusations of antisemitism’, Weltoffenheit argued, were ‘being misused to push aside important voices and to distort critical positions’. Their warnings went unheeded.
Although not legally binding, the anti-BDS motion had a chilling effect: it collapsed the distinction between antisemitism and criticism of Israel’s state policies, as well as between criticism of Israel’s state policies and denying Israel‘s ‘right to exist’. [8] In the wake of October 7th, German authorities began efforts to enshrine this informal consensus into law while casting the struggle for Palestinian rights as the new face of antisemitism. While Germany’s Bundestag debated making the recognition of Israel a requirement for obtaining access to citizenship, Saxony-Anhalt had already implemented it: applicants should state, in writing, ‘that they recognise Israel’s right to exist and condemn any efforts directed against the existence of the State of Israel’. In early January 2024, the Senate of Berlin introduced contractual clauses that condition access to public funding according to the adoption of the IHRA (the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism. In doing this, they are following in the footsteps of the Trump administration, which deployed IHRA as campus hate-speech code despite the objections of Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, who argues that IHRA must remain non-legally binding because otherwise it would clash with constitutional law. [9] In addition to pledging to implement the IHRA definition and recognising Israel’s right to exist, in Germany applicants were required to ensure that no public money would somehow trickle towards associations or activities classified as ‘extremist’ – but what and who can be considered ‘extremist’ can often prove surprising.
After protesting students were violently evicted, an open letter decrying the police assault landed an arbitrary number of signatories on the cover of Bild Zeitung and they were doxxed as ‘perpetrators’ (UniversiTäter), a term usually referring to war criminals (NS-Täter). [10] In what ought to have been a major scandal, revealing a level of political encroachment on academic autonomy unacceptable for democracy, the ARD magazine Panorama (NDR) revealed that the Federal Ministry of Education sought to have funding withdrawn from the signatories. Sabine Döring, state secretary responsible for higher education, was forced to step down, but minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger kept her position. Measures are being implemented to allow for expulsions and other disciplinary measures at universities. [11] Apparently unfazed by the country’s harrowing history when it comes to seizing Jewish property, the Berliner Sparkasse recently froze the account of Jewish Voices for a Just Peace in the Middle East. [12] After the state senate scrambled to find a legal ground to ban the Palästina Kongress [Palestine Conference], planned for 12–14 April 2024 in Berlin, the police shut down the event due to ‘the risk of anti-semitic hate speech’ – which could be called policing the subjunctive. [13] Next to those who would dismiss any indictment of Israel’s coalition government as ‘sensationalist antisemitism’, there are those who accept war crimes are being committed but find it tactless to mention them because they believe that focusing on Israel’s infractions, be they real or imagined, can only be motivated by hatred of Jews, or yields hatred against Jews. In this paranoid vision, it is antisemitism, and not the accessibility of streaming, that draws youth protests and student encampments. Palestinian lives do not matter, not even for those who advocate for Palestinian rights – who must be feigning their concern – and are just a convenient ploy to sow divisiveness and hostility. From this perspective, the thematisation of the war on Gaza is always ‘excessive’ and all forms of empathy are ‘suspicious’. In what Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman has described as an ‘attack on facts’, Taz smeared the forensic findings on the Al Ahli hospital bombing. [14] Shielding Israel from criticism can also be done, and often is, at the expense of Jewish life: Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham and his family received death threats after the vicious press reception of his Berlinale 2024 prize-acceptance speech. Together with Palestinian activist Basel Adra, Abraham won a prize for the documentary No Other Land (2024). Caught applauding, the German culture minister infamously said she was clapping only for the Israeli half. Studio Bonn apparently edited out a mention of ‘potential genocide‘ from Omer Bartov’s contribution to their discussion on ‘Art and Culture after October 7’. Bartov accepted this was a technical glitch, but the criminalisation of those who use the term ‘genocide‘ to describe the ongoing bloodshed suggests an alternative explanation. The term ‘genocide’, though politically fraught, carries a sense of moral urgency: a genocide demands a response. [15] The German authorities want to make those using the term to describe the current events in Gaza liable to criminal charges, because its usage sheds an unflattering light on Germany’s foreign policy and its complacency towards ongoing war crimes. [16]
To be clear, no one contests that antisemitism cannot be tolerated; what is contested is the ongoing attempt to codify political dissent as a hate crime. The IHRA clause was named the ‘anti-discrimination clause’, but, as recent events demonstrate, the defence of liberal values can, and often does, acquire a use-value for those with an illiberal agenda. Implementing IHRA makes the blatant denial of facts the condition for inclusion in the German public sphere, for employability and for participation in the social contract. Criticism of Israel can, indeed, offer cover for antisemitic sentiments and thus make Jewish students feel unsafe (criticism of the Islamic Republic of Iran can, and often does, offer cover for Islamophobia, but few would argue that such criticism is unwarranted). However, to try to prevent covert antisemitism by equating Jewish safety with Palestinian erasure is misleading. It is also a dangerous political route, as made plain by Focus magazine, which suggested that if Germany wishes to hold on to its Jews, ‘it must get rid of the ‘Aggro-Arabs’. [17] Besides, the fact that support for Israel presently exists among antisemitic groups that would like to eliminate the distance between nation and state is seldom pointed out. ‘Never again’, an expression so often bandied about, loses its actual meaning of ‘never again’ the persecution of vulnerable minorities.
Scholarship and Direct Action
Next to the mainstream’s flirtation with ‘remigration’, an equally belligerent but far more insidious campaign is seeking to associate diversity, equity and inclusion with antisemitism while collapsing the distinction between scholarship and direct action. Reviving a 1989 article in the rightwing American magazine Commentary, accusing Edward Said of enjoying a ‘double career as literary scholar and ideologue of terrorism, NZZ called Said a dandified extremist ‘for whom terrorism was a legitimate means of fighting for the so-called liberation of Palestine’. [18] The mainstream Süddeutsche Zeitung contends that ‘the buzzword “post-colonialism” now justifies solidarity against Israel, with butchers, autocrats and quacks’; Der Spiegel accuses postcolonial studies of ‚‘intellectually ennobling hatred of Israel’; GlobKult magazine denounces the usage of the term ‘settler’ as a perverse justification for violence and argues that the postcolonial ‘dereliction’ of criticism should not be tax-funded via university budgets; Jungle World indicts Judith Butler for ignoring Hamas’s hatred of Jews in the name of a ‘post-colonial morality’, and Frankfurter Allgemaine (FAZ) contends: ‘Post-colonial theory turns science into an instrument of knowledge-blind activism. The Middle East conflict shows just how dangerous this is.’ [19]
While displaying different degrees of complexity, all these articles bemoan the ‘excessive’ thematisation of colonialism, which they see as subtracting from the singularity of the Holocaust, hence relativising – or, even worse, trivialising it. Next to this critique, and working in tandem with it, a cluster of adjacent grievances reflect what could be called the ‘Florida playbook’ and the DeSantis-led attacks on Critical Race Theory: ‘encouraging left-wing anti-semitism’, ‘spreading cancel culture’, or ‘expressing hatred of white people’. [20] Denouncing the protests at Sciences Po in Paris as the expression of an ‘ideology from across the Atlantic’, the French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal also sought to conflate the French distaste for ‘Wokism’ with pro-Palestinian protests, apparently unconcerned by the antisemitic undercurrents in his narrative about globalist elites corrupting French culture. As I was writing this article, Valérie Pécresse, the President of the Île-de-France region, decided to ‘suspend’ the funds to Sciences Po until the university removes the protesting students who had been partially occupying its buildings.‘Ideologically incoherent but politically effective’, this media-led campaign also mirrors the recent controversy over Churchill’s legacy in Britain and the Islamo-gauchism polemic, which rattled universities in France when, in February 2021, Frédérique Vidal, Minister of Higher Education, called for a probe of postcolonial studies and related academic subjects to ascertain whether supposedly academic work was not in fact a cover for activism. [21] Arguing for his IHRA clause, Joe Chialo, the Berlin State Minister for Culture and Social Cohesion, contended that ‘we need to distinguish art from activism with artistic elements’. [22] Governments often actively promote their cultural politics of choice, but they rarely give their preferences the force of law. When they do, they can no longer be called liberal democracies. In Germany, there is an obvious precedent: the 1933 Gleichschaltung, the coordination of German institutions into a cohesive ideological whole. As English historian Adam Tooze notes, the ‘anachronistic resonances of Staatsraeason were not misplaced: The commitment of Germany to Israel’s security, come what may, was a counter-majoritarian project, backed by a commitment to policing and managing, not to say censoring, domestic German public opinion’. [23]
‘Once Again Germany Defines Who Is a Jew’
Somewhat unfamiliar to English speakers, Staatsräson, or ‘raison d’état’, is a seventeenth-century term that means that the national interest can override all other considerations of a legal or moral kind. Hans Kundnani refers to the redefinition of the German Staatsräson – from Joschka Fischer’s commitment to the ‘responsibility for Auschwitz’ to Angela Merkel’s address to the Knesset in 2008, in which the chancellor declared that the ‘security of the state of Israel’ was the German Staatsräson – as a ‘shrinking of horizons, from universalism to particularism’. [24] Whereas ‘Fischer argued that Germany had a special responsibility to respond to the threat of genocide’, Merkel argued ‘that Germany had a special responsibility to stand with its friends’. ‘Never again’ already acquires a narrower meaning here: no longer ‘never again’ genocide but ‘never again’ will Germany fail Jewish (interpreted as Israeli) safety. As ‘a vision of the world organized around alliances’, this shrinking of horizons arguably doubles as reactionary politics, embodying a promise of freedom and emancipation for some at the expense of uncontested rights for all. [25] Acting on the idea that political intervention against ‘imported antisemitism’ is both warranted and necessary, Germany created an official task force to fight antisemitism, with fourteen federal states now (in June 2024) having antisemitism commissioners. Next to a gender equality representative, soon all universities will have a Beauftragter gegen Antisemitismus (antisemitism representative) sitting in hiring and admission committees. But, as Peter Kuras points out in Jewish Currents, none of the antisemitism commissioners ‘is ethnically Jewish’. [26] In fact, the commissioners often level accusations of antisemitism agains Jews, with 30 per cent of cancelled events in Germany involving Jewish authors. [27] While Jewish people are not afforded political identities, the conflation of Zionism and anti-antisemitism makes room for non-Jewish Germans to pose as its primary victims while pushing Jews aside. As one German commissioner put it: ‘left-leaning Israelis in Berlin should heed German sensibilities when they criticise Israel’. [28] Due to their harrowing history, Germans have metabolised Jewishness and are thus better at representing it. While Zionists are assertive and confident, Jews, consumed by a debilitating self-hatred, ‘know not what they do’. [29] Consequently, as Emily Dische-Becker and Eyal Weizman argue, once again Germany gets to define Jewish identity. [30]
Concerns for Jewish safety may often be feigned and insincere but can appeal to the well-meaning. Principles, as Donald Kinder and Tali Mendelberg argue, are best understood by how they are ‘put to use’, how they are employed and for what ends. Prejudice is always expressed in a language that a majority finds familiar and compelling; that is, racial animosity is always expressed in the language of principle. [31] This is also why, from the outset, the rhetorical function of accusations of antisemitism in Germany could best be understood by the way such accusations were put to use: to mask racism as anti-racism.
The Meaning of Gaza
Writing for The Guardian, novelist Howard Jacobsen contends that ‘charging Jews with genocide is to declare them guilty of precisely what was done to them’. This constitutes, for Jacobsen, a breach of the ‘decorum’ that ‘in the past has marked us out as civilised’. [32] But the geopolitical rivalries between the West and its adversaries only map easily onto the moral boundaries between civilisation and barbarism if one ignores inconvenient or destabilising facts. Gaza is thus what must remain unspeakable for Western representations of freedom and civility to ‘sustain their power of universal reiteration in contemporary political theory’. [33] Jacobsen quotes John Gray’s Straw Dogs, to ask: ‘When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?’ but fails to mention that when John Gray writes that those who suffer irreparable wrongs are rarely, if ever, forgiven, he had just referenced a lynching in nineteenth-century Georgia. Consciousness, Gray concludes, ‘blesses cruelty and injustice – as long as their victims can be quietly buried’. [34]
The meaning of Gaza, today, and whether the victims can be quietly buried, hinges on whether the Holocaust was an anomaly, a distortion or negation of modernity, or one of its constitutive features. If the Holocaust was a singular outburst of anti-modern barbarism, the postwar order represents the restoration of the moral project of modernity. If the Holocaust was informed and influenced by colonial violence, and the genocidal practices it unleashed over vast territories, it becomes impossible to deny that behind the moral order of modernity a racial order remains hidden.
In After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, Robert Meister argues that ‘political transitions are not just new beginnings’ but also ‘survivor stories’. The Allied‘s fight against fascism (and here I am quoting John Robert’s The Reasoning of Unreason) was a ‘fight to restore a set of older imperialist global arrangements’, which later, in the postwar period, ‘became the struggle against fascism’. [35] Delinking National Socialism from other modalities of nationalism and their legacies of extrajudicial bloodshed, deportations, differential allocation of resources, racialised citizenship, or the activation of murderous mobs, just gave the victors a pass. As Meister contends, ‘Pauline Christianity gave universal meaning to the experience of Jewish suffering without assuming responsibility for it’. [36] Instead, the survivors get a new beginning: post-World War II reconstruction was predicated on the idea that the defeat of Nazism meant the defeat of evil, the victory of humanism, and the renewal of a universalist legacy. [37] But to fight ‘evil’ is also a way of rationalising the limits of politics, and clearly delineate its outside. Today’s dominant view of humanism is thus not addressed to ‘victims who would become revolutionaries but, rather, to beneficiaries who do not identify with perpetrators’ and can, as a result, conceive of themselves as ‘would-be rescuers’ by endorsing ‘exceptional’ violence in the name of repudiating the violence of the past. [38]
This is the reason why the defining ideological question – in Germany in particular and in the Global North in general – is whether you see ‘Western values’ as a bulwark against fascism or as working in tandem with it. Tied to this question is the subsidiary question of what is the meaning of political modernity.
Napoleon in Jerusalem
In 1799, during his campaign in Egypt and Ottoman Palestine, which marked the start of modern European colonialism in the Middle East, Napoleon Bonaparte published an edict urging all the ‘Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to re-establish the ancient Jerusalem’. Napoleon’s troops were defeated in Acre (modern-day Akka in Arabic, Akko in Hebrew), thus the promise of a Jewish state in the Middle East did not materialise. A ‘Letter to the Jewish Nation from the French Commander-in-Chief Buonaparte’, most likely a forgery, emerged in 1940, leading historians like Zeev Sternhell to dismiss the episode as ‘an oddity’. [39] Napoleon was later credited with Jewish emancipation in the territories conquered during the Napoleonic wars, abolishment of religious persecution and granting the Jewish population citizenship rights and equality before the law. But his edict points to the desire to establish a French presence in the Middle East, and to the entangled history of Liberalism and Imperialism, joined at the hip as both were born. It is hard not to understand the desire of many Jewish people, burdened by genuine pain and centuries of persecution, for a Jewish nation-state. In this world, this is a legitimate desire. But Israel represents two contradictory things at once: an emancipatory project for the Israeli citizenry and its supporters in the diaspora and a colonial project for the besieged Palestinians, languishing under occupation. Dehumanising Palestinians rather than heeding their demands for justice, reparations or at least a response, simply forecloses the possibility of a political resolution for the current conflict. This is the paradox of modernity: its set of inconsistent claims – all human beings are equal; some human beings can be justly kept in an unfair condition – is brushed aside as incidental to it but keeps haunting contemporary societies and their public spheres to the present day.
In an article for the London Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra details how postwar Germany found it easy to reconcile its unreconstructed and virulent antisemitism with its enthusiastic support for Israel, and examines the 1960 meeting between Konrad Adenauer, then chancellor of West Germany, and David Ben-Gurion. While pledging to invest in the country, Adenauer describes Israel as a ‘fortress of the West’. Around 1931, while he was Mayor of Cologne and Vice President of the German Colonial Society, Adenauer advocated for the ‘acquisition of colonies’ because those ‘who strive ever forward‘ have ‘gone to waste here’. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer, Mishra sustains, became ‘the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation’. The ‘exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations’ would thereafter involve ‘moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons’. [40]
This exchange structure was reiterated in 2015, when, in what could be considered a symbolic gift to Germany, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested in no uncertain terms that the Holocaust was the brainchild of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, instead of Hitler’s idea. After the October 7th attacks, both Israeli minister Nir Barkat, Andrew Roberts and Douglas Murray publicly stated that the Hamas fighters are worse than the SS because the Hamas fighters rejoiced in the carnage they unleashed while the SS allegedly did not. [41] Karl Lauterbach, the current Health Minister in Germany, retweeted Murray, who was also praised by Karin Prien, the Minister of Education, Science and Culture for Schleswig-Holstein.
Cultural theorist Simon Strick describes the ideological machine that the German state is building as a desiring-machine, the function of which is to make wishes come true – in this case, the long-held German wish to be able to call someone else a ‘Nazi’. [42] The mechanism works more or less like this: we hate Arabs but we know we cannot say it openly because that would be racist; we say instead that Arabs hate Jews, and hating Jews is what Nazis do; it is OK to hate Nazis, and once you establish an identity between the two, it becomes OK to hate Arabs too. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who contend that the Holocaust is a crime without comparison routinely compare it to the Hamas attack, and insist on the usage of the term Zivilizationsbruch to refer to October 7th. [43] Able to outsource its guilt at long last, the German right can indulge its worst instincts and suggest that the SS were good lads who, led astray, committed some bad deeds. [44] Wallowing in guilt, sections of the left do exactly the same. And in this implausible place they meet.
‘The Sick Man of Europe’
On 17 August 2023, The Economist singled out Germany as ‘the sick man of Europe’. [45] This was not the first time the epithet was used against Germany – The Economist had already hurled it at the country in 1999 – but it is interesting to see an Orientalist metaphor, one instilling anxiety over a diseased body politic, resurfacing amidst a moral panic about antisemitism. The political and the medical never converge fortuitously: to speak of a sick economy suggests that contamination occurred and therapy is needed. The neoliberal playbook would suggest more deregulation, liberalisation of prices, or fiscal austerity. But Germany’s ongoing de-industrialisation, and subsequent economic contraction can hardly be fixed economically; it is the result of geopolitical decisions. [46] In Subversive Seventies, Michael Hardt describes the long Portuguese decade (4 February 1961 to 25 April 1974), and the investment in a colonial war that would ultimately be the regime’s undoing, as a function not of Portugal’s strength but of its weakness and resulting incapacity to undergo an economic transition that could usher in neoliberal reforms. [47] I would suggest a parallel with present-day Germany. No one expects the country to lift sanctions on Russia. No one expects it to reform its infrastructure, to digitalise its service sector and decarbonise its industry. No one expects the current Chancellor to challenge geopolitical orthodoxy, or exit NATO. Instead, it is widely accepted that living standards will plunge. [48] The task for the next decade is to administer the decline. Racism is thus the only political project on offer at the moment, and it cuts across the political spectrum in Germany. October 7th offered an opportune way to link young Muslim men and migrants to Hamas against a political background that still dares not say ‘mass deportations‘ without recourse to a moral ruse. [49]
Gaza is also a laboratory for coming events – namely, for inuring the population to the mass death that is about to be unleashed by climate change and its attendant crisis. As drought, flooding and extreme weather amplify violent conflict, ecosystems devastated by war will further feed this dynamic in a mutually reinforcing loop. A greater part of the global southern landmass will become uninhabitable and its surplus populations will put increasing pressure on heavily fortified European borders. Streamlined bombardments, children caked in blood and dust, grieving relatives, exhausted medics and absolute impunity are the testing grounds for coming conflicts. This is why I would like to briefly return to Judith Butler’s article for the London Review of Books, to ask what exactly is foreclosed when a public discussion about an ongoing war, and attendant war crimes, cannot take place. Empathy? History? Context? Knowledge? Scholarship? All of these?
Outsourcing moral responsibility, a revisionist history, the (implicit or explicit) humanisation of SS leadership and denialism are not just rhetorical operations but a political project. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Germany has adopted an ultra-Atlanticist orientation, with the Chancellor calling it a Zeitenwende. For both Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the meaning of Hamas and the meaning of Putin are the same: they are both waging war on Western values. [50] The response must thus be the same: to fight yet another existential war for Western civilisation in the Middle East. It would be worth asking, as Bruno Maçães does, ‘why so many wars for Western civilisation must happen in the Middle East?’ [51] From this perspective, one way to understand the unbridled support for Israel is to see it as the expression of a belligerent narcissism, unable to divest itself from a pleasurable investment in its own undue claim to universality. Alternatively, one could describe it as an effort to ‘identify and heighten local, particularised grievance’ while recasting it as a commitment to humanist ideals (anti-antisemitism). [52] This makes the oppression of racialised minorities appear as the desirable outcome of a struggle which claims to represent a progressive cause but is ultimately a struggle against democracy and pluralism, fought on behalf of the bitter and insular anti-universalism of mainstream opinion-makers.
[1] Susan Neiman quotes Dische-Becker in her article ‘Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire’ in The New York Review, 19 October 2023
[2] See Ruby Mellen, Toluse Olorunnipa, Adam Taylor and Hazem Balousha, ‘Biden says “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza is costing Israel support’, The Washington Post, 12 December 2023; Forensic Architecture’s investigation ‘Destruction of Medical Infrastructure in Gaza’, 7 October 2023–ongoing; and Kaamil Ahmed, Damien Gayle and Aseel Mousa, ‘“Ecocide in Gaza”: does scale of environmental destruction amount to a war crime?’, The Guardian, 29 March 2024
[3] See Jumana Manna, ‘The Embargo on Empathy’, Hyperallergic, 1 November 2023
[4] See Barnett R Rubin, ‘The Janus-faced history undergirding the Israel–Gaza conflict’, Responsible Statecraft.org, 24 October 2023; and ‘Free Palestine ist das neue Heil Hitler’, ‘Welt Talks’ with rapper Ben Salomo, Welt, 12 December 2023
[5] See ‘The Compass of Mourning: Judith Butler writes about violence and the condemnation of violence’, London Review of Books, vol 45, no 20, 19 October 2023
[6] See ‘Archive of Silence’ on Instagram
[7] See the GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit Initiative
[8] The ‘right to exist’ is a 1882 concept coined by Ernest Renan; it is not recognised in international law but has framed the discussion about the Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1950s. The BDS movement deliberately refrains from advocating any particular political outcome, such as a one-state or two-state solution.
[9] See Kenneth Stern, ‘I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it’, The Guardian, 13 December 2019
[10] See the open letter decrying the police assault and Bild Zeitung
[11] See John Goetz und Manuel Biallas, ‘Als Reaktion auf Kritik: Bildungsministerium wollte Fördermittel streichen’, Panorama (NRD), 11 June 2024; and the ‘Statement of the RefRat of HU: Against the reintroduction of university disciplinary law – against the political disciplining of student bodies’ by the General Students Committee FU Berlin, 26 February 2024
[12] See James Jackson, ‘Germany Is Seizing Jews’ Money Again: It’s fine, they’re pro-Palestinian’, Novara Media, 28 March 2024
[13] See the Berlin Pälastina Kongress program from April 2024
[14] See Mira Anneli Nass, ‘Kritik an Forensic Architecture: Zweifelhafte Beweisbilder’, Taz, 3 January 2024
[15] See Omer Bartov’s ‘tweet’ on X on 15 March 2024. The word ‘genocide’ was coined by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who used the neologism to pursue a convention outlawing it. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) was the first human rights treaty ratified by the General Assembly of the United Nations. African-American activists sought to link their struggle to it by publishing a petition titled ‘We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government against the Negro People’. The petition was immediately derided as Soviet propaganda by the US State Department, which aborted the discussion by deeming it ‘anti-American’. Fearing a loss of support, Lemkin severed ties between his convention and the struggle for civil rights.
[16] See Amnesty International, ‘Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza’, 20 October 2023; and Human Rights Watch, ‘Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza’, 18 December 2023
[17] See Jan Fleischhauer, ‘Die Juden oder die Aggro-Araber: Wir müssen uns entscheiden, wen wir halten wollen’, FOCUS Magazin, no 46, 2023, 16 November 2023
[18] See Edward Alexander, ‘Professor of Terror’, Commentary, August 1989; and Thomas Ribi, ‘Der Philosoph, der Steine warf: Im Westen wurde Edward W Said als intellektueller Gentleman bewundert. Dass er “Arafats Mann in New York” war, kümmerte keinen’, NZZ, 24 November 2023
[19] See Phillipp Bovermann, ‘Falsch abgebogen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28 October 2023; René Pfister, ‘Wie der Hass auf Israel intellektuell veredelt wird’, Speigel, 22 October 2023; Eric Hendriks, ‘Postkoloniale Terror-Apologeten’, Globkult, 26 November 2023; Udo Wolter, ‘Der Elefant im postkolonialen Raum’, Jungle World, 9 November 2023; and Ulrich Morgenstern and Susanne Schröter, ‘Die Konstruktion des Bösen’, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 24 April 2024
[20] See Stefan Ouma, ‘Kritik an Postkolonialen Theorien: Revanchistischer Kulturkampf’, Taz, 6 April 2024
[21] See Alberto Toscano, ‘The War on Education – in Gaza and at Home’, In These Times, 15 February 2024; Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?’, The Guardian, 17 March 2021; Philippe Marlière, ‘The “Islamo-gauchiste threat” as political nudge’, French Cultural Studies, vol 34, no 3, August 2023; ‘Minister orders probe into “Islamo-leftism” in French academic research’, rfi, 18 February 2021
[22] Ingeborge Ruthe and Susanne Lenz, ‘Kultursenator Joe Chialo: “Zwischen Kunst und politischem Aktivismus mit künstlerischen Elementen unterscheiden”’, Berliner Zeitung, 13 September 2023
[23] Adam Tooze, ‘Reasons of State: Memory Politics, U-boats, Iran & the German-Israeli Relationship’, Chartbook 271, 26 March 2024
[24] Hans Kundnani, ‘“Zionism Über Alles”’, Dissent Magazine, 15 March 2024
[25] Tooze, ‘Reasons of State’, op cit
[26] Peter Kuras, ‘The Strange Logic of Germany’s Antisemitism Bureaucrats’, Jewish Currents, Spring 2023
[27] See ‘The German Question w/ Emily Dische-Becker’ podcast, The Dig, 31 January 2023
[28] Felix Klein, Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Anti-Semitism, in an interview with Hanno Hauenstein from Berliner Zeitung, 11 January 2021
[29] See Andreas Scheiner, ‘Juden protestieren gegen Israel: Ist es Selbsthass?’, NZZ, 28 March 2024
[30] See George Prochnik, Emily Dische-Becker and Eyal Weizman, ‘Once Again, Germany Defines Who Is a Jew | Part II’, Granta 165, 29 November 2023
[31] See Donald R Kinder and Tali Mendelberg, ‘Individualism Reconsidered: Principles and Prejudice in Contemporary American Opinion’, in Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in America, David O Sears, James Sidanius and Lawrence Bobo, eds, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2000, p 44
[32] Howard Jacobson, ‘Charging Jews with genocide is to declare them guilty of precisely what was done to them’, The Guardian, 3 December 2023
[33] Barnor Hesse, ‘Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black Fugitivity’, Political Theory, vol 42, no 3, June 2014
[34] Philosopher John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals was originally published in 2002
[35] John Roberts, The Reasoning of Unreason: Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p 5
[36] Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, p VIII
[37] See Roberts, The Reasoning of Unreason, op cit, p 105
[38] Meister, After Evil, pp VIII, IX
[39] See Amiram Barkat, ‘Herzl Hinted at Napoleon’s Zionist Past’, Haaretz, 26 April 2004
[40] Pankaj Mishra, ‘Memory Failure’, London Review of Books, vol 46, no 1, 4 January 2024
[41] See Waitman Wade Beorn, ‘The Idea That Hamas Is Worse Than The Nazis Dangerously Distorts the Holocaust’, Time, 26 January 2024; Andrew Roberts, ‘What Makes Hamas Worse Than the Nazis’, The Washington Free Beacon, 24 November 2023; Douglas Murray, ‘Why must Jews watch their backs as London mobs cheer?’, The Jewish Chronicle, 9 November 2023
[42] See Simon Strick, ‘Wunschmaschine Staatsräson. Part 1: Staatsräson as Desiring Machine’, Die Ausnahmel Und Die Regel, 30 March 2024
[43] See Deborah Hartmann and Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, ‘Einfach weitermachen ist unmöglich’, Taz, 4 November 2023
[44] The European Parliament’s far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group expelled the Alternative for Germany (AfD) after Maximilian Krah, AfD’s lead candidate, said that ‘not all’ Waffen SS were ‘criminals’; see ‘European Parliament’s far-right group expels Germany’s AfD after SS remark’, Reuters, 23 May 2024
[45] The expression was coined by Tzar Nicholas I to refer to the Ottoman Empire; see ‘Is Germany once again the sick man of Europe?’, The Economist, 17 August 2023
[46] See David McHugh, ‘Germany went from envy of the world to the worst-performing major developed economy. What happened?’, AP News, 19 September 2023
[47] Michael Hardt, The Subversive Seventies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2023
[48] See Michael Hudson, ‘The Euro Without German Industry’, michael-hudson.com, 4 October 2022
[49] See Christoph Hickman and Dirk Kurbjuweit’s interview with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Der Spiegel, 20 October 2023
[50] See Lily Lynch, ‘Conjuring Trick’, New Left Review, 14 December 2023
[51] Bruno Maçães, ‘Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy’, Time, 10 January 2024
[52] Roberts, The Reasoning of Unreason, op cit, p 5
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a professor at HBK Braunschweig and a faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute. She is co-editor of The White West: Fascism, Unreason, and the Paradox of Modernity (Sternberg Press, 2024), and author of Entropy and Chronopolitical Allegory (forthcoming, Sternberg Press).