By Wieland Hoban
At the time of this article’s writing, the genocide in Gaza has lasted almost 11 months.
Seasons have come and gone; the solidarity movement has marched through snow, rain and scorching sunshine. But the killing has not stopped.
It has become normalised, along with the continuing demonstrations all over the world and the repression of activism in Germany, whether by bureaucratic means or police violence.
No matter how many videos of their thuggery are disseminated on Instagram, the impunity continues.
And why not? Why should a country that supports genocide object to a few demonstrators getting beaten up?
Since my last article for The Battleground in December 2023, the German government’s repressive measures against the Palestine solidarity movement have taken on even more outrageous forms. Perhaps the most eye-catching case was the Palestine Congress, a major event in Berlin slated for mid-April 2024.
With a dense weekend programme of lectures and workshops by international speakers, it was a powerful statement of defiance, both against the state’s attempts to shut down the movement and Germany’s material and political complicity in genocide, which it underlined with the motto “We accuse!”
While not unprecedented in Germany, it was an urgently needed occasion for knowledge exchange, international networking and mutual reinforcement, with an expected attendance of over 800 people.
To the political establishment, especially in the militantly anti-Palestinian environment of Berlin, this was obviously unacceptable. Weeks in advance, hysterical incitement began in the local media and political circles.
On 14 March, one of the city’s gutter publications, B.Z. – The Voice of Berlin – ran a story titled “Antisemites Planning Hate Summit in Berlin”, in which the congress was referred to as “the biggest anti-Israel hate event in Berlin since the Hamas pogrom on 7 October”.
Since B.Z. headlines and summaries are displayed in Berlin metro trains, this grotesque portrayal was disseminated far beyond the paper’s active readership.
This defamation continued, with one conservative politician referring to the congress publicly as a “disgrace for Berlin” and many others demanding a ban. Virtually every pro-Israel “Antisemitism expert” had their opinion published somewhere, while the perspective of the organisers was rarely requested.
Behind the scenes, the police were putting pressure on the organising team to reveal the planned location, which had been kept secret because of the long-familiar experience of pro-Israel pressure groups harassing proprietors. Indeed, a fundraising event held at a café was cancelled after a menacing call from the police warning of “security risks”.
In the final days before the congress, once the police finally discovered the location after scouring the entire city, this intimidation culminated in a meeting with the proprietor. They told him his future livelihood would be at risk if he provided a space for the congress. Though profoundly distressed by the encounter, he did not cancel the contract.
A further obstacle placed in the path of the organisers was the freezing of Jüdische Stimme’s bank account with the Berliner Sparkasse, a state-owned bank. We had provided our account for collecting donations and the money from ticket sales. Since banning the congress in advance was proving impossible, why not block its funding?
Berliner Sparkasse hid behind bureaucratic explanations, but the political motivation finally revealed itself in the extensive lawyers’ letter written in response to our legal challenge, which referred to our political positions and activities.
The bank’s lawyers even claimed that the unusual step of demanding a full list of members was necessary to ensure that it did not include anyone on the EU terror list.
Thanks to another participating organisation, a workaround was soon found, and the congress finally began on 12 April.
A staggering 2500 police officers had been mobilised for the weekend. They made their hostile presence known hours before the event began and invoked fire hazard regulations to reduce the permitted attendance from 800 to 250.
But for all the restrictions and molestation, it was nonetheless a triumph that the congress could begin at all.
The victory was short-lived; one talk, by the Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal, was allowed to proceed undisturbed. Roughly one minute into the next presentation, a video recording of the Palestinian historian Salman Abu Sitta, the police intervened by interrupting playback and the live stream and shutting down the power by breaking into the control room without even asking for the key.
Officers flooded the room, blocked the screen and surrounded the stage area. As the person responsible for coordination with the police, I asked what was behind this violent interruption.
After various waffling, it was eventually explained that Abu Sitta had made Antisemitic comments in the past (based on an article about the attack of 7 October), and his words needed to be checked for hateful content. Since he had spoken in English, they also needed to be translated first.
As the interruption grew longer and longer, my repeated demands for clarification were dismissed with one evasion and half-explanation after the next.
Initially stating that playback could resume once it had been ascertained that Abu Sitteh had said nothing illegal (such as Holocaust denial or incitement to violence), the officer in charge suggested that one could move on to the next presentation – a live video lecture by Yanis Varoufakis – but keep the livestream switched off since there was a possibility that any potential hateful content might be disseminated globally if it were on.
Shortly afterwards, there was a police announcement that the entire congress had been terminated.
This heavy-handed disruption, rounded off by a national entry ban for Yanis Varoufakis and a Schengen-wide one for the Palestinian-British surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, the rector of Glasgow University, who was stopped at Berlin Airport and sent back to the UK, gave the congress international attention that it would never have enjoyed if it had simply been allowed to proceed.
The German government had embarrassed itself and shocked viewers worldwide.
Tellingly, several articles in the German press did not mention Jüdische Stimme as an organiser, presumably because it would have interfered with the framing of the congress as an Antisemitic event. Going even further, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser congratulated the police on their intervention and stressed the importance of cracking down on the “Islamist scene.”
In fact, most of the organisers were leftist groups, including Varoufakis’s Diem25 movement. When confronted with the leftist and Jewish makeup of the organising team at a subsequent press conference, the ministry spokesperson merely told the journalist smugly to consult the ministry’s definition of Islamism.
Since then, we have forced the bank to unfreeze the Jüdische Stimme account and a Berlin court has dismissed the bank’s appeal of the decision, which the judge described as highly irregular. They intend to appeal yet again.
Through my activism since October 2023, I’ve probably spoken to, listened to, and met more people (activists and non-activists alike) than I had in the previous ten years. Of the many appreciative things said to me by people at activist events in which I have participated, one simple statement stands out: “You give us hope.”
I have heard this on several occasions, usually from Palestinians or people from other Arab or Muslim backgrounds. Since they are dealing not only with Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza and ethnic cleansing elsewhere in Palestine but also with increasingly overt and normalised racism in Germany, I often find them grateful for support from the white population, especially from Jews who reject the conflation of their identity with Zionism.
Some of them are, for the first time, considering leaving Germany, and it is clear from the harmony between the state’s support for Israel and its demonisation of migrants, not only from the far right but also the so-called political centre, that something deeply harmful has come to fruition. Once certain illusions have been dispelled, it is neither new nor baffling.
Germany’s much-vaunted culture of memory and atonement was always a strategic fiction.
To be sure, there has unquestionably been an intense academic and cultural engagement with the past in recent decades, with an institutionalised reconstruction and documentation of Nazi crimes and their social contexts on the one hand and the erased Jewish communities on the other.
On the surface, this engagement is exemplary, especially when compared to America’s relative non-engagement with its history of genocide and slavery or the continued glorification of the British Empire. One has to scratch a little to find the rot.
But rot there is: the rot of a racism never truly confronted.
When giving talks about Antisemitism and the broken German discourse on Israel-Palestine, I sometimes mention Settela Steinbach, a Sinti girl who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of nine and killed there.
The photograph of her that became internationally known shows her looking through the doorway of the train to her death. Before her identity was uncovered through research, she was known simply as “the girl with the headscarf”.
I contrast her, who is already othered from a Western perspective on account of that headscarf, with Anne Frank, who is more relatable here as a middle-class white girl.
The Nazis made them equal comrades in extermination, of course. However, in the present day, the one who “looks like us” (as was said by some TV reporters about the Ukrainian refugees arriving in 2022) is more grievable than the one who does not.
What applies to Settela Steinbach applies doubly to the children of Palestine, who are reduced either to human shields, future terrorists or haters of the state that oppresses and murders them.
In the early 1950s, when the subject of Nazi crimes was suppressed in much of German society and state structures were full of ex-Nazis, from judges to doctors who had conducted racial experiments, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the Reparations Agreement with Israel (1952, in force from 1953). He began selling weapons to the Zionist state a few years later.
Until Washington took over in 1967, Germany remained the top arms supplier to Israel (and is currently the second-biggest). After the world’s disgust at the Holocaust, Adenauer had recognised that the road to international rehabilitation had to lead through Israel – because, as he explained in retrospect in a 1965 interview, “One should not underestimate the power of the Jews, even today.”
While stressing that Germany had committed terrible crimes against the Jews, he made it clear that this was a matter of realpolitik, not just ethics.
As for the now-infamous Staatsräson, there is so much discussion of the subject, yet so little that needs to be understood: like any government-proclaimed “national interest”, it has little to do with the interests of the populace and everything to do with the state’s self-image and material interests.
The guilt narrative is merely a cover story for that, and even a slogan like “Free Palestine from German guilt”, which accurately summarises the way the German discourse has managed to shift the stigma of Antisemitism from majority white society to migrants, gives too much credence to that guilt.
In some parts of civil society, yes – but not in the policies of a state that has long sought to whitewash its materially motivated participation in Western imperialism and now genocide, by eternally regurgitating the same tired moralistic narrative.
This façade cannot hide the bitter truth of Germany’s profound moral failure. The many people who seem to think they would not have kept silent in Nazi Germany have held their tongues with infinitely less of a threat to their safety than people faced then.
What is perhaps most depressing from the safe distance of the West is not the horror of daily atrocities in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank too (which, like Gaza, would have to be rid of its Palestinian population before it could be annexed, since the Jewish majority of the resulting state would be jeopardised otherwise), but the normalisation of everything relating to them.
Thanks to the Internet and smartphone cameras, we have the gruesome luxury of being able to gaze at images of dismembered children and exploding neighbourhoods every day, from morning until night.
Polls say that the majority of Germans are against Israel’s deeds in Gaza, yet only a microscopic sample of them attend the protests.
The vehemence of their disapproval seems little greater than their preference for one ice cream flavour over another, which could be captured equally in a survey. Who knows. Perhaps 61% of Germans don’t like chocolate ice cream either.
That won’t make them hit the streets to protest, especially when the stigma of Antisemitism is always lurking nearby.
It is not only the daily death and destruction that have been normalised but also the protests against them. And in Berlin, where every demonstration is accompanied by police violence and countless recordings of that violence are shared on Instagram, beating and choking protestors has also become normalised.
There are plenty of Berliners who have nothing against such responses to demonstrations they consider either threatening or at least a nuisance.
On the other hand, in cities where there is less resistance to pro-Palestine activism, the detached toleration of such events quickly leads to indifference. They become background noise, like the detonation of civilians’ homes.
Nothing dents the German government’s propaganda or the torpor of the majority, whether actual (as opposed to invented) decapitated infants, the spread of famine and disease or revelations about the torture camp Sde Teiman, where uncharged prisoners, even medics, have been sodomised with truncheons.
In Israel, meanwhile, one of the perpetrators has become a talk show celebrity, and politicians have debated the pros and cons of gang-raping prisoners.
One of the few sources of encouragement for the continuation of solidarity and antiwar activities are the messages of appreciation from Gaza, from people who face the possibility of death daily, yet encourage us to keep going and remind us how much it means to them.
Such straws to clutch at can make the difference between giving up and continuing the fight. Another formulation that has stayed with me is from last November, when I attended a lecture in Marburg by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.
Towards the end, speaking as an activist rather than an academic, Pappé said, “We don’t have the luxury of giving up hope.” His statement perfectly encapsulated the tension between despair, determination and privilege that defines the position of activists in the West.
For all the difficulties, it would be wrong not to mention the progress that has been made.
The rulings at the International Court of Justice on the genocide and the occupation have paved the way for more and more countries to reassess their overt and covert cooperation with Israel, and there has been an immense growth in the Palestine movement since October 2023.
Even in Germany, many new activist groups have formed, especially ones led by students, including many second or third-generation Palestinians.
After protest encampments began appearing in the US in the spring, the trend manifested here. Many young activists have learnt a great deal, both about practical organising and colonial history, within a remarkably short time. While not all of this activity can be sustained, something has been set in motion that cannot be reversed.
There has also been a steady growth in pro-Palestine Jewish organising.
While this has been most visible in the US, which has almost as many Jews as Israel, there is a growing international network of more and more Jewish groups who reject not only this genocide but Zionist colonial oppression in general, along with the imposition of that racist ideology as a frequently unchallenged part of their collective identity.
Here, too, it is the youth who show the most promise.
Gazing alternately on global tendencies and the state of German society, I can’t help thinking of an enigmatic statement attributed to Franz Kafka: “Oh, there is hope, an infinite amount of hope… just not for us.”
Photograph courtesy of Matthias Berg. Published under a Creative Commons license.