WTF is going on in Germany, Palestine edition
Germany is no stranger to racism, but anti-Palestine sentiment gets little coverage—and it's on the rise.
At the end of December, the German Conference of Interior Ministers (IMK)—basically a conference of security elites from Germany’s 16 states—put out a report labeling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic. Maybe this classification of a movement that uses peaceful tactics in response to the violence of Israeli apartheid is less surprising if you also know that in 2019, the Bundestag (German parliament) came to the same conclusion in a much more formal manner. And maybe it’s also less surprising if you know that Berlin, Germany’s capital, banned public Palestinian activities around Nakba Day and the killing of Palestinian-US journalist Shireen Abu Akleh this past summer.
This level of open disdain for Palestinians isn’t happening in an otherwise anti-racist vacuum, of course: Germany is no stranger to high levels of anti-Turkish and anti-Black racism, to say nothing of Islamophobia more generally. Yet in the grand scheme of things, anti-Palestinian actions receive scarce attention in broader coverage of German politics, despite its increasing prevalence.
Time, once again, for the evergreen question: WTF is going on in Germany?
Okay wait, what’s going on?
Well, a lot of things. If you want to understand the depth of anti-Palestinian sentiment in Germany, you have to go back to the aftermath of the Holocaust and Germany’s ongoing attempts to move past/reckon with/forget/etc. that legacy. In German, this is called Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung—literally, “working off the past.” I wrote a little bit about it here; the New Fascism Syllabus offers up a much deeper dive. More on that in a bit.
A turning point in more contemporary history, however, was the creation in 2018 of the post of Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Anti-Semitism (hyphen added in the German government translation, even though there is no hyphen in the German word, Antisemitismus). Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. And the German government was correct to note a rise in antisemitic activity in Germany, including attacks on Jewish people and defiling of Jewish cemeteries. Felix Klein, upon assuming the post in May 2018, argued that the BDS movement borrows from “deplorable Nazi rhetoric” by encouraging people not to buy from Israeli companies. Not only does this baffling logic create a false equivalence between the Israeli state (the target of BDS) and the Jewish people (a much larger, multinational, heterogeneous community), it also opens the door to calling any boycott movement a play on Nazi propaganda…which is very silly. (In 2020, a coalition of Jewish scholars and artists called, unsuccessfully, for Klein’s resignation.)
Nevertheless, this logic was repeated many times over surrounding the passage of a 2019 parliamentary resolution declaring the BDS movement as antisemitic. Supported by a coalition of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), center-left Social Democrats (SPD), libertarian Free Democrats (FDP), and the Greens, the resolution ends government funding for any group found to be “actively supporting” BDS. A more sensible resolution from the leftist Die Linke, calling for the condemnation of any antisemitic BDS statements (though admittedly, the widespread understanding of antisemitism among German elites also leaves this resolution open to abuse), and a more hardline resolution from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) that would’ve banned BDS entirely, were both defeated. The resolution called to mind an earlier bill in Frankfurt in 2017 that similarly prohibited organizations that supported BDS from receiving local government funding, and a 2016 case against a schoolteacher in Oldenburg for supporting BDS.
Is there precedent for these sorts of actions?
There are two ways of answering this question. First, is there international precedent for state-level condemnation of pro-Palestinian actions? Of course there is. Thirty-five US states have anti-BDS laws on the books, with proponents arguing that boycotts discriminate against Israelis (conveniently ignoring that by the same logic, US sanctions against Iran discriminate against Iranians, and the US embargo against Cuba discriminates against Cubans). Late last year, the Spanish Supreme Court declared BDS discriminatory. Austria and the Czech Republic have also passed parliamentary resolutions condemning boycotts against Israel as antisemitic.
Another way of answering this question is to look at the larger landscape of anti-Palestinian activities in Germany. Here, there is (unfortunately) a lot; just a sampling:
Palestinian-US journalist Hebh Jamal has documented anti-Palestinian sentiment in German classrooms, ranging from teachers erasing Palestinians by calling them Jordanians or Israelis and claiming the Nakba (the 1948 date in which Israeli forces displaced 700,000 Palestinians and destroyed 500 Palestinian villages) is a conspiracy theory to accusing Palestinians of pathological self-victimization. You should read and follow her work.
Last year, the Goethe Institute disinvited Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd from an event after he made statements critical of Israel. This calls to mind similar campaigns against pro-Palestine academics in the UK, such as Somdeep Sen, as well as in Germany, such as Anna-Esther Younes.
Also last year, the “Festival gegen Rassismus” (Festival Against Racism) in Stuttgart disinvited the Palästinakommittee (Palestine Committee) in Stuttgart on charges of antisemitism. The practice of conflating Palestinian activism with antisemitism has become widespread in arts and cultural spaces; Palästina Spricht (Palestine Speaks) on Instagram does an excellent job of cataloging these.
In 2017, three BDS activists were arrested in Berlin and subjected to criminal charges for protesting against an anti-BDS speech by Knesset member Aliza Lavie. This occurred before the Bundestag resolution but around the same time as Berlin mayor Michael Müller made more general statements accusing BDS of employing “unbearable methods from the Nazi era.”
But isn’t there a lot of actual antisemitism in Germany?
Yes, sadly. The German post-Holocaust attempt to quasi-criminalize critique of Israel has, unsurprisingly, done little to address underlying anti-Jewish attitudes (because, again, Israel =/= Jewish people). The number of antisemitic hate crimes in Germany has been increasing since at least 2008, hitting a 10–year high in 2018 and further increasing to 2,275 in 2020. Requisite caveat that police data are imperfect and biased in predictable ways, but the other readily accessible data on antisemitism in Germany are from RIAS and I refuse. In any case, this increase mirrors similar climbs in France, the UK, Hungary, and other European countries, accompanying a surge in white supremacist political activity across the continent. Perhaps the most famous incident in Germany is the 2019 Halle synagogue shooting, though street violence and painting swastikas on public spaces are far more commonplace.
In brief, there is a lot of real antisemitism in German politics and society among everyday individuals. Needless to say, attacking BDS and instituting an anti-Palestine school curriculum hasn’t helped here.
So why has Germany got this so wrong?
Heads up that this is a very brief analysis: there are enormous bodies of work addressing the post-Holocaust construction of antisemitism in Germany, the interpellation of German identity, and the selective application of alleged democratic principles to those admitted to white German-ness. If you are brand new to this line of thinking, be aware that a lot of “learning from the Germans”-type pieces fall victim to historicizing racism and antisemitism, exceptionalizing the Holocaust, and pinning white supremacy to a single event rather than noting its structural role in German society, so be careful what you Google. A really good piece that doesn’t do any of this, offers an accessible introduction, and is in English is this, from Clint Smith.
ANYWAY. The positioning of Israel and its security in the national imagination is probably familiar to most US folks. In Germany, it takes on an additional layer thanks to the legacy of the Holocaust. As former chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated, the existence of Israel as a guiding principle is enshrined in the German state’s raison d’être. Even light criticism of Israel, such as questioning an Israeli military narrative of a conflict, reads as unfathomable to many Germans (speaking from experience). And for Germans, Israel is a synonym for “all Jewish people,” even though large numbers of Jewish people themselves reject this false equivalence (and many Palestinians and other Arabs are also Israeli, at least as far as their passports go; I digress).
To reckon with the Holocaust—to make it graspable and thus something that can be moved past, in the sense of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung—means collapsing it down and making it singular. This means invisibilizing the deeper racism and colonialism underpinning the Holocaust and by extension German society. This racism and colonialism enabled Germany’s first genocide, against the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia in the early 1900s. The point is not to rank genocides against one another, but rather to point out continuity in ideas and practices that make further acts of violence thinkable, even as precise forms and contexts change. This racism and colonialism enabled widespread sterilization of Black Germans. This racism and colonialism enables police brutality against migrants racialized as nonwhite to this day.
But if Germany is to present itself as a modern democratic state—and one, most importantly, distant from the Nazi era—it must deny these continuities and instead locate them within one singular historical moment. This is a move, by the way, that the international community is only too happy to indulge. Construct the apex of white supremacy as Nazism, and all other acts either fall short of the “Hitlerian connotation” or become a pathway back to it, depending on how much they recall the dominant view of what the Holocaust was and whence it came. In a nutshell, the modern sense of German state identity—and its ontological security, to employ some jargon—requires creating bogeymen connected to an exceptionalized white supremacist past whilst pushing structural racism and antisemitism to the fringes of popular thought.
Happy 2023, I think? I feel positive energy directed toward this year, at least. That said, here’s a headline that seem to undercut that. Both, and, or something like that.
In response to noticing that it’s arresting a lot of children on violent extremism charges, the UK has proposed…continuing to arrest children but maybe not throw them in jail? Instead, a new proposal suggests sentencing children to at-home surveillance rather than surveillance in a prison cell. An alternative proposal, called Not Subjecting Children in the Carceral System, does not appear to have been considered.
Over the holidays, I read Davarian L. Baldwin’s In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities, and by read I mean devoured. Typically I am a slow reader of nonfiction, but this book hit so close to home and threw into sharp relief the monopolies universities (and sometimes even liberal arts colleges) have developed over the urban areas they reluctantly call home. Especially recommended if you have any connection to NYU, UChicago, Columbia, ASU, and/or Trinity College.
ISO: I’m teaching my Responding to Violent Extremism class again this term (I didn’t choose the title), and I am on the hunt for examples from Latin America of governments employing the “terrorist” or “extremist” classifier against journalists, protesters, etc. This is of course a common practice in most parts of the world, but I’m especially interested in Central and South America because UK students get so little exposure to this region. TIA!