BOYCOTT… GERMANY, BEFORE ISRAEL
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Hakuin Ekaku, the Japanese Zen Buddhist from the early 17th century, taught his pupils to hear the sound of one hand clapping: “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?”[i] It looks that Claudia Roth, the German Minister of Culture, has learned how to do this.
At the closing ceremony of the Berlinale, the Palestinian film-maker Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham jointly took to the stage to accept the best documentary prize for their film No Other Land, which charts the eradication of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Adra said he struggled to celebrate his film’s success while people in Gaza were “being slaughtered and massacred”, and urged Germany to cease arms exports to Israel. Speaking immediately afterwards, Abraham decried a “situation of apartheid” that meant that his film-making partner did not enjoy the same voting rights and freedom of movement even though they lived only 30 minutes apart.
The public enthusiastically clapped the two, including Claudia Roth. Politicians were quick to condemn the event: Berlin’s conservative mayor, Kai Wegner, described the speeches at the Berlinale closing ceremony as an “intolerable relativisation,” and wrote: “The full responsibility for the deep suffering in Israel and the Gaza strip lies with Hamas.” A delegate for the Christian Democratic Union called for Roth’s resignation, while a politician for the Free Democratic Party proposed that the film festival’s state funding be withdrawn. Now comes the saddest moment: Roth issued a statement where she insisted she was only clapping the Israeli but not the Palestinian half of a film-making duo that won one of the major awards; she called the statements at the gala “shockingly one-sided and characterized by deep hatred of Israel”, saying the lack of a mention of Hamas’s terror attack was “not acceptable.” Yet another clear case of how even the German liberals who occasionally express their “concern” with Palestinian suffering move in the terrain determined by the conservative full supporters of Israel: they immediately “clarify” a gesture considered “problematic” by the conservatives.
The premise of Roth’s “clarification” is the mantra we were hearing all the time after October 7: the Hamas attack should not in any way be relativized, it was an act of unprovoked pure evil. So while we should not talk about the ruins of Gaza without mentioning October 7, the question of what situation created conditions for the October 7 attack is totally prohibited… This premise now lost the last shred of credibility: what Israel is doing now in Gaza is also a crime which cannot be justified as an act of defence. It should be judged as an act of its own, in exactly the same way that the Nazi Holocaust and the October 7 Hamas attack should be judged. And Palestinians now have the full right to fight back in exactly the same way Israel had the right to counterattack Hamas. Israel itself gave them this right with the manner of its “defence” (or, in Putin’s words, of its “special military operation” in Gaza).
But it is also important to note that No Other Land is a film about the West Bank, not Gaza – till October 7 attacks, Hamas had a very marginal influence in the West Bank. Israel now tries to prove that Hamas was also active there, and that settlers are just defending themselves – for obvious reasons: the implication is that the West Bank Palestinians should be treated in the same way as the Gaza Palestinians. Since the October 7 attack, the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs has recorded 590 attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank. (The terror on Palestinians in the divided city of Hebron is a special case, widely documented by numerous video clips.) The attacked farmers tell the same story as Abu Awad who reported the incident to the police, adding: “I got official paperwork saying I’d filed a complaint but nothing happened.” The reaction of the West? “As the UK, US and France impose sanctions on ‘extremist Israeli settlers’, Palestinians face assault by gun, bulldozer and attack dog”[ii] – like an obscene bad joke.
If Israel is the only Western democracy and the reign of law in the Middle East, and the state does nothing, why not sanction the state which not only tolerates but even supports such behavior (Ben Gvir)? “You have settlers that, half a year ago, came and beat [Palestinians] up as civilians, and now they are in [military] uniform with guns, and they come to beat you up,” said Shaul, another Palestinian farmer. “And you don’t know: is this part of their military assignment? Or are they just doing it in their free time?” “Almost half of at least 186 violent settler incidents resulting in casualties or property damage have been in the presence of, or supported by, Israeli forces. Settlers have used weapons in almost a third of these incidents.” There is no other way than to posit a simple equation: “Settler violence = state violence.”[iii]
This is too much even for some Western politicians: when David Cameron recently indicated that the UK will perhaps one-sidedly (without the consent of Israel) recognize Israel, was he not (measured by the standards of the present government of Israel) acting as an anti-Semite? Ami Ayalon, a former leader of Shin Bet, said on January 14 2023: “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation.”[iv] Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state, and Israeli authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of the second intifada, to direct negotiations to create one: “Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.” Is he not “anti-Semitic” here by the German standards? Does he not “relativize”/contextualize the Hamas attack?
How does the German full support of Israel affect the key event going on in Israel itself? Yuval Harari believes the biggest threat to his country comes not from Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran, but from the battle between Israelis for the "soul of the nation": "Personally, I fear most for really the soul of my country, of my nation in Israel at the moment. There is really a battle for the soul of the Israeli nation between patriotism on the one side and ideals of Jewish supremacy on the other side."[v] This brings us to the saddest fact: the German full support of Israel is not neutral in the ongoing struggle for the soul of Israeli Jews. Whatever the German intentions, it puts Germany firmly on the side of Jewish supremacy which has an extremely ominous past and present - here is what some Rabbis teaching at the (state-financed) Eli Academy, an elite school where many army officers are educated, are saying:
“The Holocaust was not about killing the Jews. Nonsense. And that it was systematic and ideological makes it more moral than random murder. Humanism, secular culture – that is the Holocaust. The real Holocaust is pluralism. To believe in man - that is the holocaust. /…/ The Nazi logic was internally consistent. Hitler said that a certain group in society is the cause of all the evil in the world and therefore it must be exterminated. /…/ For years, God has been screaming that the Diaspora is over but Jews aren’t obeying. That is their disease that the Holocaust must cure. /…/ Hitler was the most righteous, Of course he was right in every word he said. His ideology was correct. /…/ Their (Nazi’s) only error was who was on which side.”(Israel Channel 13 News, 19 April 2019[vi])
The continuity with Nazism is here directly asserted: Hitler practiced a correct stance, his only error was that he chose Jews (instead of Arabs) as the principal enemy to be annihilated. But even the annihilation of European Jews played a positive role: it was part of God’s plan to bring Jews back from Diaspora to their land. The conclusion is terrifying: Zionist who founded Israel are the corrected Nazis, they continue the Nazi politics with the only change that they apply it to a correct enemy… Although such an extreme stance is, of course, explicitly advocated only by a minority (but Smotrich spoke there and Netanyahu himself visited the Eli Academy, as can be seen on the video report!), it brings out the underlying premises that sustain what the State of Israel is now doing on the West Bank. Seyla Benhabib pointed out that the members of the present government of Israel are
“the legatees of a long line of Judeo-fascism, which none other than Albert Einstein, joined by Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook, denounced in their Open Letter to the NY Times on December 2, 1948, titled “New Palestine Party: Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed.” They write: Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine…. Today the legatees of this party and movement — Likud was established by Menachem Begin — are in power in Israel and they have brought upon Israel the worst disaster since the Holocaust.”[vii]
The conclusion that imposes itself from all this is what Harari calls the other, dark side of Israeli’s “soul,” the belief in Jewish supremacy, is in direct continuity with Nazism – and, to go to the end in this direction, THIS is the true deeper reason why Germany unconditionally supports Israel. So what are we to do? Owen Jones made a proper suggestion: countries should begin to boycott not Israel (which effectively is in a difficult situation) but Germany which is now continuing an inverted Nazi politics. “It’s increasingly clear that writers, artists and performers should boycott German events. As well as an orgy of state sanctioned anti-Palestinian racism, it’s estimated nearly a third of those targeted by Germany for ‘antisemitism’ are Jews.”[viii] We witness here a well-known scene again: Germans shouting at and oppressing Jews, deciding who is a bad and who a good Jew… So Germany got everything: full support of the darkest side of the Israeli soul with historical links to Nazism, and, as a surplus-enjoyment, a chance to humiliate and punish selected Jews again.
[ii] ‘They took our home, our land, everything’: Palestinians displaced by illegal settlers tell their stories | Palestinian territories | The Guardian.
[iii] Settler Violence = State Violence | B'Tselem (btselem.org).
[iv] Ex-ShinBet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada leader | Israel | The Guardian.
[v] Yuval Noah Harari: 'There is a battle for the soul of the Israeli nation' (youtube.com).
[vi] The Miseducation of Israel - YouTube. See also a report in Embracing racism, rabbis at pre-army yeshiva laud Hitler, urge enslaving Arabs | The Times of Israel. As expected, the defense of the Rabbis was that their statements were taken out of context: they wanted precisely to show how to help Arabs…
[vii] An Open Letter To My Friends Who Signed “Philosophy for Palestine” | by The Hannah Arendt Center | Amor Mundi | Nov, 2023 | Medium.
Germany hasn't found a holocaust it can't enthusiastically support starting with the Herero, Nama, San and Damara and going through european jews to Gaza today and as the Berlinale showed the West Bank and Hebron. Cuba in their presentation to the ICJ on the occupation called it a low intensity genocide. Sure what's happening in Gaza is the same as the Nazi holocaust but in that context it's also not the same, in that the Palestinians do not have an army or a state to manufacture borders and protect them, how then can they fight back? The fight is by civil society led by South African and now Nicaragua and other states need to step up to their obligations under the Geneva Conventions and boycott/sanction/divest from all the criminal states involved. There are alternatives today especially in China and it wouldn't take much to bring these economies to their knees.
State repression is at its worst when there is there is profound dysfunctionality in the material reality that the State is attempting to force an ideological version of.
The rightward march of recent decades has been caused by the myriad failures materialist economic base, the capitalist world-system.
Germany's openly State-driven censorious war-time repression of any and all dissent from its overseas military engagements is made all the worse as the Gaza War is going very badly for Tel Aviv, Berlin and Washington. The exception, as detailed in the Owen Jones video linked to by Zizek, is the bonanza being enjoyed by arms manufacturers. E.g. try the simplest act of posting an anti-war statement on the Deutsche Welle Facebook page and then watch the Skinhead Censors of the German State delete the comments and then summarily ban the poster with an off-handed bestial epistemic brutality that would horrify Chinese State Censors.
There is no victorious end to the Gaza Genocide in sight. All prospects are for ever increasing Evil, death and violence. Genocidal war crimes and the concomitant moral debasement of the war criminal genocidaires. Even the mentally sclerotic, morally feeble dotard Biden is too much of an independent thinker, too much an ethical creature for the monstrous Netanyahu. The fact that the longer the Gaza Genocide continues, the more that this helps Trump become potus is not a point that is lost on Netanyahu.
A historical moment of profound abyssal moral degradation.
All signs also point to an increasingly militaristic and far-rightist German State that is openly embraced by the German populace. With a nice bit of convenient xenophobia thrown in, in the form of the dark-skinned sub-alterns of Europe. The SPD and the Greens ("Die Olivgrünen") of today are **rightist** parties that are light-years away from their anti-systemic political origins. Petra Kelly and Joseph Beuys must be desperately attempting to leave the afterlife and return to earth so that they can curse Baerbock to her warmongering, genocidal military-colonial face.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/uelhhx/the_new_der_spiegel_cover_on_the_stance_of_the/
"“The Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.” These words have rung in my ears and sat in my chest with nowhere in particular to go, a hard, ugly truth at the core of German society that precisely reflects my experience living in it. It is bewildering, it is comical, and it is accurate.
From the neo-Nazis of the AfD to “anti-Deutsche” leftists who claim to be combatting German anti-Semitism by obsessively and unconditionally supporting Zionism, many of today’s Germans are brimming with repressed rage towards Jews. Whether they are aware of it or not, this is resoundingly apparent in the deep, hysterical hypocrisy of a reaction such as that of the man at the demonstration – spitting in a Jewish person’s face for standing against fascism and genocide on the basis of her personal, generational relationship to fascism and genocide and becoming enraged at being identified as an anti-Semite accordingly.
This fury is seemingly a reaction to the “injustice” of Germans having to repent for the actions of their ancestors, something they have been widely celebrated for on the global stage. The resentment takes the form of narrowmindedness and bigotry: The only acceptable concepts of Judaism, Jewish people and “Jewish life” are those they themselves, non-Jewish Germans, explicitly sign off on. (Refer to the “anti-Semitism commissioners” claiming to represent the interests of Jewish people in Germany – not a single one of whom is Jewish or an expert in any relevant or related field.) For many Germans, the only palatable Judaism is Zionism, which in fact is no kind of Judaism at all. When forced to contend with perspectives in conflict with this toxic narrative or with Jewishness that doesn’t align with their understanding of it, their anger surfaces violently, explosively. “Anti-Deutsche” weaponise the fetishisation of Jews through their obsessive Zionism to an extreme degree, spearheading aggressive hate and smear campaigns against those who do not share their views (including anti-Zionist Jewish people). How dare anyone, most of all Jews, call into question the authority of Germans in defining and relating to Judaism, anti-Semitism and genocide.
The sick, decades-long collaboration between Israel and Germany and the widespread assertion that Israel’s security is “Germany’s reason of state”(“Staatsraeson”), which upholds Zionist socialisation in the interests of political, racist ends, has created an atmosphere of fear, shame, guilt and ultimately self-righteousness that permeates much of German society. It punishes questions, dissuades education and quashes the necessary understanding of Judaism as a broad, differentiated and historically diasporic culture that existed long before Zionism – and will exist long after.
This designation of all Jews and all Judaism as a single uniform entity, necessarily speaking the same language (modern Hebrew), holding the same values (Zionism) and sharing an identical culture (which in Germany, must be determined by Germans), is, in fact, the precise definition of anti-Semitic, Nazistic racial segregation and the othering, dehumanising rhetoric they employed in its service. The rigid and inherently anti-Semitic conception of Jews as an undifferentiated people “native” to one land, characterised by the nationalist settler-colonial Zionist movement, has merely served as a continuation of Hitler’s work. It has erased secular Judaism in Europe. It has eradicated the Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian and other Hebraic languages. Eighty years after the Holocaust, it has succeeded in upholding the view of Jews as a monolith, a foreign nuisance separate from German society, the attempted annihilation of whom can now be exploited to justify the annihilation of another group."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/1/german-memory-culture-anti-semitic-zionists-and-palestinian-liberation