On December 14, we, a group of students from Freie Universität Berlin, occupied a conference room in an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people. This occupation was the first of its kind in Germany. The demonstration took place peacefully, although a group of counter-protesters tried to disrupt it.
The university’s reaction, however, was to call the police to evacuate the protesting students. Twenty of us were arrested, including myself. Although police and the university said there were no anti-Semitic attacks or discrimination at the protest, the latter attempted to justify its actions in a later statement with its zero-tolerance policy. with regard to anti-Semitism.
Last week we received letters from the police informing us that the university administration had filed a complaint against us for “trespassing”. In the meantime, a petition has gathered more than 26,000 signatures calling for our expulsion. Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger has also publicly called for the expulsion of “the most serious cases”, while the Berlin Senate is considering legislation to make such disciplinary measures easier.
The events of December 14 and the legal and media harassment we have faced occur against the backdrop of a society-wide attack on anyone expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people in Germany. There has been a relentless campaign to harass, frighten, intimidate, silence, dismiss, fire and deny funding to people and organizations who dared to go against the German government and institutions’ unwavering support for Israel.
At the heart of this brutal persecution is nationwide guilt-washing – or the cover-up of authoritarian state policies under the pretext of addressing Germany’s historical culpability for the Holocaust.
The message from the guilt-trippers is clear: Germany alone is exceptional in its position against anti-Semitism. Only Germany is capable of judging anti-Semitism. Germany, in opposing the exceptionalism of the Nazi era, is now exceptional again, but, of course, in a different and supposedly progressive way.
The simple lack of self-awareness would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic and its consequences weren’t so disastrous. Various Jewish authors and scholars have repeatedly highlighted the anti-Semitic nature of this blame-blaming approach.
“We have a form of anti-Semitism… that is not even called anti-Semitism, and that is the collective silencing of Jewish voices that do not respect the dominant discourse in Germany,” said Emilia Roig, a researcher and French Jewish writer. , said at an event in Berlin in December.
According to Jewish writer and researcher Emily Dische-Becker, a third of those “canceled” in Germany for alleged anti-Semitism (i.e. expressing solidarity with the Palestinians) were Jews, including descendants of survivors of the Holocaust.
Guilt washing fundamentally does not care about the safety of Jews. Otherwise, it would not promote discourse that so recklessly increases societal tensions at a time when hate crimes against Jews, Arabs and Muslims are on the rise and when cross-community solidarity is what is most needed.
Indeed, guilt-washing leans toward anti-Semitism – as well as anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia – because it operates at a superficial level and does not truly internalize the lessons of the past. It seeks to transpose anti-Semitism onto Arab and Muslim communities to deny and conceal the persistence of German anti-Semitism in the social and political arena.
Guilt-washing does not allow Germans to take a principled stand against state terrorism, genocide and the systematic violation of human rights – which should be the historical responsibility of every state, but especially of the German state.
Instead, Germany has adopted a robotic, mindless, one-dimensional reactive stance. “Never again” is promoted in the narrowest sense – which is not entirely surprising given the lack of education in Germany about its colonial past and other communities victimized by the Nazi regime. He refuses to accept that never again will this mean genocide against any people.
Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly openly and unapologetically expressed their genocidal intentions. Regardless of the context, such repeated statements would be considered the type of rhetoric that typically accompanies historical episodes of genocide.
And yet, German officials and public figures continue to ignore them. They also ignored the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide, as well as the practical unanimity of human rights groups and most of the international community on the character of Israel’s apartheid regime and its historic, serial violations of international law.
Guilt washing does not just mean acting out of a national pathology of guilt. It is also a power tool. This presents itself as a regret, but it helps to promote an ideal of German exceptionalism in the world and to provide a cover of legitimacy for the German desire to remain a world power.
Guilt washing allows Germany to maintain an expansionist foreign policy that reflects a racist worldview and involves continued support for Israel and other brutal regimes across the Middle East. Until recently, this also included close relations with authoritarian Russia, intentionally making the German economy dependent on Russian gas through the now infamous Nord Stream 2 project while the Russian military and mercenaries committed war crimes in Syria.
Blaming also allows Germany to cover up growing structural and institutional racism against various minority groups. He now readily dismisses criticism of anti-Arab and Muslim discrimination with his alleged anti-Semitism agenda.
German exceptionalism seems to have simply substituted one form of racism for another, taking advantage of today’s more permissive international environment with regard to anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice. This essentially created a community of replacement victims.
A recent view during a carnival in Cologne clearly illustrated the dynamics of this process. It depicted a woman wearing a keffiyeh with the well-known anti-Semitic caricature nose, holding two dogs on leashes with the Palestinian flag labeled “hate” and “violence”. The transposition of an anti-Semitic trope onto what, in the German mind, constitutes Palestinianness perfectly represents the racist essence of guilt-tripping.
Meanwhile, in a shocking example of historical revisionism, Berlin schools are being asked to distribute leaflets describing the 1948 Nakba as a “myth” – even though Israeli lawmakers use that term.
In the face of this society-wide attack on international law, history, human decency and fundamental freedoms, German academic institutions have done almost nothing. Even though they should act as the moral conscience of society and oppose the current distorted and deeply pathological public discourse, they are shirking their responsibilities.
In meetings we have had with university leaders, we have heard that speaking out would be too political or “polarized”, that it goes beyond the mandate of academia, and that the autonomy of universities is limited by their status as public institutions.
This appeasing stance stands in stark contrast to the historical lessons taught at German universities about the past failures of German institutions to push back against narratives of collective demonization.
Until this state of affairs changes, the German state and institutions will continue to delude themselves that they are trying to atone for their past sins. They will continue to try to escape responsibility for the consequences of this past by not recognizing the multiple victimizations that resulted.
The space we claimed last month was fundamentally a plea for basic human recognition of the atrocities committed in Gaza. But it was also an attempt to wake Germany up, to force it to open its eyes to the blatant reality unfolding before its eyes, to force it out of its self-centered pathology of guilt and to recognize the reality as it is. .
In this context, we must clearly emphasize that Germany owes reparations not only to the Jewish people, but also to the Palestinian people.
In a historic moment of genocidal violence, we will not be deterred from our mission by vexatious legal complaints, threats, harassment, assault or defamation. We will continue our fight, whatever the cost.
An open petition in support of the 20 students charged with FU can be found here.
A broader petition opposing the push for expulsions at Berlin universities can be viewed here.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.