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03 October 6, 2021 - By Michael Sappir
Under these circumstances, it is clear that none of this is actually about protecting Jewish people. Meron Mendel — the Israeli-born director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, who has previously lauded the de-platforming of the BDS movement as part of the fight against antisemitism — warned in his comments on the El-Hassan case that characterizing all Palestine solidarity as antisemitic harms the fight against antisemitism and is not in the long-term interest of Israelis. "The fight against Jew-hatred,” Mendel wrote, "must not be instrumentalized to delegitimize Palestinian voices.”
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Many in Germany seem all too eager to sacrifice Palestinians in their effort to atone for the Holocaust, but this game is dangerous for all of German society and the reigning liberal democratic order. Like many before him, Mendel notes that such instrumentalization of antisemitism plays right into the hands of neo-fascist forces like the AfD party, which have long recognized that, by attacking Palestinians and others coded as "foreign” or "Muslim” as antisemites, they can obfuscate their own antisemitism, distract from their racism, and gain public legitimacy.
Facing this dangerous pact, the only way forward is to build solidarity between minorities in Germany and beyond; to bring together a diverse alliance that refuses to bend to racist slander, rejects the division sown by overzealous pro-Israel inquisitors, and recognizes our interdependence and common interests. The cancellation of Nemi El-Hassan is a new peak in an ongoing trend that has affected many of us before — Palestinians, people of color, non-Zionist Jews, and more. It is up to us to resist before it is too late.
02 May 24, 2021 - Sanabel Abdelrahman, sanabel.a.rahman@gmail.com
People recognise the great harm that inheres the «neutrality» in the silence of academics and intellectuals regarding the fanatically increasing bloody violence of the apartheid colonial state. While the solidarity of academics has not been non-existent in Germany and other places in the Western world, the silence with which many academics and intellectuals are currently shrouded is disconcerting. This is because academics, especially in Germany, are expected not only to be vocal about the Palestinian struggle but to also rescue the Palestinian discourse and right to narrate from German guilt which barricades and terminates it.
By staying silent or intentionally avoiding any form of acknowledgement and discussion about what is really happening in Palestine and how the events of today are a mere extension of a genocidal settler colonial system, the tools of academia, especially in postcolonial and decolonial studies become, instantly, obsolete. That is, by staying silent on settler colonial genocidal violence and the potential in revolting against it, silent academics are not only enabling the continuation of this system but actively depriving Palestinians of the awesome manifestation of their agency against those systems.
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This strolling around in the cities, cultures, histories, languages, arts, and movements of the Middle East without an active responsibility makes the apologist studying and investigation of the region a toxic flâneurship. This flâneurship further amplifies the privilege of silent academics in the West. The Middle East once again becomes an exotic space for academic investigation and the silent academic morphs into the new but old orientalist. Through this flâneurship, the orientalist ensures that the Arab always remains in the past; always a relic, and never an agent of their own reality performing an active reclamation of their looted histories.
I compare this harmful apologism to a necrophiliac desire that constantly prioritises the past or the already-dead over the present, the future, and the currently-alive.
It is time for vital and directly effective academic practices. The study of Palestine and Palestinians should not be defanged and abstracted because of fear. The study of Palestine and Palestinians should not be relegated to the infinitely extending past. Palestine and Palestinians are not abstract. We are living in the present and changing history. And we will not be silenced.
01 November 9, 2021
Conservatism and historical guilt are shrinking the space for Palestine activism in Germany — and campuses are among the fiercest battlegrounds of all.
By Hebh Jamal November 9, 2021
Despite the atmosphere of ongoing surveillance and censorship, however, advocates for Palestine in Germany have noticed a shift since the bombardment on Gaza and the violence in Jerusalem last May. Advocates on the ground estimated 15,000 protestors took to the streets in major German cities to voice their solidarity with Palestinians throughout the escalation.
"For a long time I was of the conviction that one of the fiercest battles that will have to be fought to win the struggle against the carefully designed Israeli system of legalized, institutionalized and normalized violent discriminatory rule over Palestinians will be in Germany!”
”Palestine really will be free one day.”
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This can be seen within classrooms as well. Roldán Mendívil, who was able to find a teaching position this year, claims her students actively spoke about Palestine in the classroom. "What they saw on social media was impossible to ignore,” she said.
Related texts
Free Palestine! Pages on Palestine/ Zionism
