On December 14, we, a bunch of scholars at Freie Universität Berlin, occupied a lecture corridor in an act of solidarity with the Palestinian individuals. The occupation was the primary of its form in Germany. It was peaceable though a bunch of counterprotesters tried to disrupt it.
The response of the college, nonetheless, was to name the police to clear the protesting college students. Twenty of us have been detained, together with myself. Though each the police and the college stated there have been no anti-Semitic assaults or discrimination on the protest, the latter tried to justify its actions in a subsequent assertion with its coverage of zero tolerance on anti-Semitism.
Final week, we obtained letters from the police notifying us that the college administration has pressed legal fees towards us for “trespassing”. In the meantime, a petition has gathered greater than 26,000 signatures calling for our expulsion. Federal Minister of Training Bettina Stark-Watzinger has additionally publicly referred to as for the expulsion of “essentially the most extreme circumstances” whereas the Berlin Senate is planning to push via laws to make such disciplinary motion simpler.
The occasions of December 14 and the next authorized and media harassment we’ve confronted are taking place amid a societywide assault on anybody expressing solidarity with the Palestinian individuals in Germany. There was a relentless marketing campaign to harass, scare, intimidate, silence, hearth, dismiss and defund individuals and organisations who’ve dared go towards the German authorities’s and establishments’ staunch assist for Israel.
On the coronary heart of this vicious persecution is the nationwide guiltwashing – or the cover-up of authoritarian state insurance policies via the pretense of addressing Germany’s historic guilt for the Holocaust.
The message of the guiltwashers is obvious: Germany alone is outstanding in its stance towards anti-Semitism. Germany alone is match to evaluate anti-Semitism. Germany, in opposing the exceptionalism of the Nazi period, is at this time distinctive as soon as once more however, in fact, in a unique and supposedly progressive means.
The sheer lack of self-awareness can be amusing if it weren’t so tragic and if its penalties weren’t so disastrous. Numerous Jewish authors and students have repeatedly identified the anti-Semitic nature of this guiltwashing method.
“Now we have a type of anti-Semitism … that’s not even addressed as anti-Semitism, and it’s the collective silencing of Jewish voices that don’t abide by the dominant discourse in Germany,” Emilia Roig, a Jewish French scholar and author, stated at a December occasion in Berlin.
In response to Jewish author and researcher Emily Dische-Becker, a 3rd of those that have been “cancelled” in Germany for alleged anti-Semitism (i.e. expressing solidarity with the Palestinians) have been Jews, together with descendents of Holocaust survivors.
Guiltwashing doesn’t essentially care concerning the security of Jews. In any other case, it could not be pushing a discourse that’s so recklessly rising societal tensions at a time when hate crimes towards Jews, Arabs and Muslims are spiking and when intercommunal solidarity is what’s most important.
Certainly, guiltwashing is leaning within the route of anti-Semitism – in addition to anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia – as a result of it operates on a superficial stage and doesn’t genuinely internalise the teachings of the previous. It seeks to transpose anti-Semitism onto the Arab and Muslim communities to disclaim and canopy up the persistence of German anti-Semitism within the social and political area.
Guiltwashing doesn’t enable Germans to take a principled stance towards state terrorism, genocide and the systematic violation of human rights – one thing that ought to be the historic duty of any state, however particularly so for the German state.
As an alternative, Germany has adopted a robotic, senseless, unidimensional reactive place. “By no means once more” is promoted within the narrowest sense – which isn’t altogether stunning contemplating the dearth of training inside Germany about its colonial previous and different sufferer communities of the Nazi regime. It refuses to just accept that by no means once more ought to imply by no means once more for genocide towards any individuals.
Israeli authorities and army officers have repeatedly made clear their genocidal intentions brazenly and unabashedly. In any context, such repeated statements can be seen as the kind of rhetoric which have sometimes accompanied historic episodes of genocide.
And but German officers and public figures proceed to disregard them. They’ve additionally disregarded the ruling of the Worldwide Court docket of Justice that Israel is plausibly committing genocide, and the sensible unanimity of human rights teams and many of the worldwide group on the apartheid character of Israel and its serial historic violations of worldwide regulation.
Guiltwashing doesn’t solely imply appearing on account of a nationwide guilt pathology. Additionally it is an influence software. It postures as remorse, however it works to additional a really perfect of German exceptionalism on this planet and supply a canopy of legitimacy for the German want to stay a world energy.
Guiltwashing permits Germany to take care of an expansionist international coverage that displays a racist view of the world and includes continued assist for Israel and different brutal regimes all through the Center East. Till not too long ago, it additionally included shut relations with authoritarian Russia, willingly making the German financial system depending on Russian fuel via the now notorious Nord Stream 2 venture whereas the Russian military and mercenaries dedicated conflict crimes in Syria.
Guiltwashing additionally permits Germany to cowl up the rising structural and institutional racism towards numerous minority teams. It now simply dismisses criticisms of anti-Arab and Muslim discrimination with its supposed anti-Semitism agenda.
German exceptionalism seems to have merely substituted one type of racism for one more, making use of the extra permissive worldwide surroundings in direction of that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice at this time. It has mainly created a substitute sufferer group.
A latest show at a carnival in Cologne illustrated effectively the dynamics of this course of. It featured a determine of a lady carrying a keffiyeh with the well-known anti-Semitic caricatured nostril, holding two canine with Palestinian flag leashes named “hate” and “violence”. The transposition of an anti-Semitic trope onto what within the German thoughts constitutes Palestinianness represents completely the racist essence of guiltwashing.
In the meantime, in a stunning instance of historic revisionism, Berlin colleges are being advised to distribute leaflets describing the Nakba of 1948 as a “fantasy” – regardless of even Israeli lawmakers utilizing the time period.
Amid this societywide assault on worldwide regulation, historical past, human decency and primary liberties, German educational establishments have achieved nearly nothing. Though they need to act as society’s ethical conscience and oppose the present distorted, deeply pathological public discourse, they’re shirking away from their tasks.
In conferences we’ve had with college officers, we’ve heard that talking up can be too political or “polarised”, that it’s past the mandate of academia and that the autonomy of universities is proscribed by their standing as public establishments.
This appeasing stance is in sharp distinction to the historic classes being taught at German universities about previous failures of German establishments to push again towards discourses of collective demonisation.
Till this state of affairs modifications, the German state and establishments will proceed to delude themselves that they’re attempting to atone for previous sins. They’ll proceed attempting to flee duty for the implications of that previous by failing to recognise the a number of victimhoods which arose out of it.
The area we claimed final month was essentially a plea for a primary human recognition of the atrocities being dedicated in Gaza. Nevertheless it was additionally an try to attempt to shake Germany awake, to power it to open its eyes to the blatant actuality unfolding earlier than its eyes, to power it out of its self-centred pathology of guilt and to recognise the fact for what it’s.
On this context, we should always emphasise clearly: Germany owe reparations not solely to the Jewish individuals, however to the Palestinian individuals as effectively.
In a historic second of genocidal violence, we is not going to be deterred in our mission by vexatious authorized complaints, threats, harassment, assault or libel. We’ll proceed our battle regardless of the prices.
An open petition of assist for the 20 charged FU college students might be discovered right here.
A wider petition opposing the push for expulsions throughout Berlin universities might be discovered right here.
The views expressed on this article are the authors’ personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
