meemsaf

Lately, I cannot stop thinking about how deeply complicit the United States, Britain, Germany and co. are in Israel's genocidal onslaught in Gaza. It would have become materially impossible months ago without these states (especially the US) keeping the weapons flowing.

This also pushes Israel to further pursue genocide: The genocidal far-right's biggest political weakness has (sadly) been how implausible its aims are: What they propose is not just abhorrent, but hardly doable. Unless, that is, the strongest states in the world give them the hardware and diplomatic cover to make it happen.

Without Western arms shipments, even with the Israeli public's overwhelming desire for vengeance, the onslaught against Gaza could not continue in this form, wreaking mass death and total destruction, for very long. The far right would have had to walk back its rhetoric, deflated, having lost all credibility.

In all previous conflagrations, Israel's genocidal far-right could save face in light of the unattainability of its vision by blaming others: Netanyahu was too cautious, the Americans pressured him, the “traitorous” left sapped public morale... None of these excuses applied in late 2023. But instead of throttling the flow of instruments of mass death and letting the far-right collapse under its own pretensions, the West has enabled it to actually carry out its monstrous aspirations and keep afloat.

And in doing this, they have also undermined voices of peace. For the mirror image of the right's implausibility problem is the Israeli “peace camp's” strongest argument, within a political system immune to moral concerns for its Palestinian victims: The right's course would ruin Israel's economy and security and lead to total international isolation.

In backing the extremist government and its manifestly criminal strategy in Gaza, the leading Western states have pulled the carpet from under Israel's meager internal conscience: They have shown that the right actually can “go mad dog” when in power and maintain international support.

Israel's apologists always ask the international community to support Israel so that its so-called “thriving democracy” has a chance to correct course. But this very policy of supporting Israeli crimes helps ensure this cannot happen, strengthening the genocidal camp and making fools of the moderates.

There is no prospect for deescalation, peace or justice when movements aiming for annihilatory “total victory” get carte blanche backing. In backing them, Western powers bring their monstrous, impossible dreams within grasp.

The horror cannot end without an end to Israel's impunity.

This page collects podcast episodes in English that can help understand the strange German form of pro-Israel politics. I only include things I have listened to — there is a lot more content on this topic out there! Find or add further recommedations in the replies to my tweet: 🗨️🐦 or Bluesky post: 🦋💬

Start here

The Dig: The German Question “Emily Dische-Becker on how Germany became attached to a wildly narcissistic anti-antisemitism and Israeli proxy nationalism that have made it one of the most anti-Palestinian governments on earth.” (Feb 2024) Podcast website Spotify link

Spaßbremse: Whitewashing and Statebuilding Daniel Marwecki on the geopolitical history of the relationship between (West) Germany and the state of Israel. (Dec 2023) Spotify & more

Dive deeper

Corner Späti: Insert Adorno Quote Here With Yonatan Miller, Talking about the “antideutsch”, the German left's hardcore pro-Israeli tendency. (Nov 2019) Podcast website Spotify link

On The Nose: The Trouble with Germany, Part I Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel talks with Emily Dische-Becker and Michael Sappir “about the bizarre and worrisome ways that Germany’s understandably zealous Holocaust memory culture is playing out among Jews, Palestinians, and other Germans in contemporary Germany.” (Jul 2022) Podcast website Spotify link

On The Nose: The Trouble with Germany, Part II “Joshua Leifer talks to journalist Hebh Jamal and lawyer Nadija Samour about Germany's intensifying crackdown on Palestinian identity” (Mar 2023) Podcast website Spotify link

Spaßbremse: 'Importing' Antisemitism, Subcontracting Guilt Esra Özyürek on Germany's post-WWII “emotional social contract” and how immigrants, in particular of Muslim background, are integrated into it. (Jan 2024) Spotify & more

Further recommendations

• 99 ZU EINS: The War on Anti-Semitism (Sep 2021) – “How the War on Anti-Semitism serves as a pretext justifying Germany’s internal and external security measures.” – YouTube
• Corner Späti: We're all Weird at Parties Now (Apr 2023) – On being Israeli in Germany. – Podcast website
• Corner Späti: Parallel World Palestine (Oct 2023) – On Germany after October 7. – Podcast website
• Bad Hasbara: Uber Allies (Jan 2024) – “Germany and Israel's special relationship and the state of German liberalism and the German left” – Podcast website

Curated by Michael Sappir

There can be no justification for the sweeping destruction of civilian life in Gaza, even if the stated goal of defeating Hamas for good is justified. But worse yet, that war goal is incoherent. The Hamas movement cannot be decisively taken off the board by this attack.

The reason laws of war exist is because committing atrocities can be expedient for military victory. The ear-numbing, brain-deafening insistence that Hamas must be defeated at any cost amounts only to war crime apologia. The atrocities remain atrocities.

The strategic incoherence adds tragedy to horror. Yes, the indiscriminate mass murder committed by Hamas on October 7 is unjustifiable and its repetition must be prevented. But the criminal assault on Gaza just ensures there will be plenty of recruits for the next attack of its sort.

The refusal to contextualize or try to understand the brutality of October 7 dovetails with framing the slaughter of Gazans as necessary and preventive: This attack is producing the context nobody will want to hear about next time. So many of us have warned, and continue to warn, that Israel's military domination and inhuman treatment of Palestinians will inevitably lead to brutal and inhuman attacks on Israelis. We warn, not to justify future terror, but precisely to show it is preventable.

Those refusing to see this dynamic, refusing to choose another path, not only dehumanize Palestinians by denying the humanity of their motivations and condoning their mass slaughter, but also condemn Israelis, including civilians, to fear and grief without end.

The grief and fear of the past weeks, the unhinged discourse, the state repression, make it hard to think and even harder to speak. But what was clear before October 7 remains clear today: Israel is on a path that can never offer its neighbors peace, nor its citizens safety.

We tend to think of Twitter as a thing, but like many 'things' we interact with in society, Twitter is actually a set of social relations mediated by things. Under its new ownership those relations are being radically reconfigured. It is no longer the same 'thing' it once was.

Because on a surface level—despite the ugly new icon and stupid new name nobody really uses—Twitter appears to still be the same 'thing' it once was, it is hard to tell when we no longer can or should participate in the social relations making it up.

In fact, the social relations making up Twitter have already changed a lot over the years. From a bit of a niche network where being anonymous was normal, since around 2015 it has become a kind of global town square, indispensible for politics and journalism. Those who have been part of this network since before that transformation have found it worth participating in after, while others left. Now, the unique modes of interaction Twitter offered in that phase are being actively undermined.

Worst of all, no real replacement for the set of relations called “Twitter” is in sight. Yes, there are many products, many 'things' which appear a lot like Twitter, and even aspire to create the same modes of interaction, or a better version of them. But that is not the same as offering the kind of central, global, public complex of interactions, involving major institutions and public figures as well as countless organizers, journos, activists, scholars, and other politically engaged people, all interacting with one another. Precisely the plurality of Twitter-esque products absorbing parts of this network prevents any one of them from actually becoming the new Twitter, at least for a long while. Because to be the new Twitter you need to be the new Twitter, not a new Twitter. There can only be one.

All this to say, I am here because there is still a critical mass of people here I want to engage with. It is not clear how long that will last. But after it ends, we will not have this again, not right away. And that is a terrible loss for us all.

Das Aiwanger-Flugblatt war antisemitisch, zweifelsohne. Aber es war nicht nur antisemitisch, und wird aktuell fast ausschließlich als antisemitisch behandelt. Das macht mir Sorgen. Denn mit der schnellen Abarbeitung und Normalisierung von Aiwanger wird nicht nur der Antisemitismus und die Bagatellisierung der von Nazideutschland betriebenen Massenvernichtung von jüdischen Menschen enttabuisiert. Im Flugblatt ging es ja um “Vaterlandsverräter”.

Jene “Vaterlandsverräter” waren es im Flugblatt Aiwangers, die in einer fantasierten Wiederholung des Holocausts vernichtet werden sollten; und es waren auch tatsächlich ganz real zunächst politische Gegner—Linke—, die ins erste Nazi-KZ, Dachau, gebracht worden sind.

Die rhetorische Reduzierung des Nationalsozialismus auf Antisemitismus wurde nicht 2023 erfunden, die findet man auch in gewisser Weise bei Horkheimer und Adorno, sowie bei Sartre, schon während des Kriegs. Inzwischen ist die Reduktion aber oft nicht nur rhetorisch.

Es ist klar, dass der Nationalsozialismus auf eine einmalige Art und Weise auf die Vernichtung jüdischer Existenzen fixiert war, von daher ist die Gleichsetzung von Nazis==Antisemiten nicht grundlos. Aber die Nazis waren (und sind!) nicht nur antisemitisch. Wenn wir den deutschen Faschismus und seine spätere Verklärung restlos auf Judenhass reduzieren, entkommt er in wesentlichen Teilen unserem Blick und lässt sich schließlich kaum bekämpfen. Diese Reduzierung ist in Zeiten aufsteigenden Faschismus eine ernsthafte Gefahr.

Die mörderische Unterdrückung der Linken ist kein Nebeneffekt des Antisemitismus gewesen, umgekehrt auch nicht. Ebenso das Wegmorden von geschlechtlichen und sexuellen Minderheiten und von Menschen mit chronischen Krankheiten und Behinderungen. All diese gehören mit zum Nationalsozialismus. Auch eine verklärte, mythologisierte Sicht auf nationale Vergangenheit und Identität; ein glühender Militarismus, der mit “Härte” und Gewalt alle soziale Probleme zu entfernen verspricht; eine Verselbständigung der Exekutivgewalt; und einiges mehr.

Ein Faschismusverständnis, das so dünn ist, dass es sich auf eine einzige Form von gruppenbezogenen Menschenfeindlichkeit reduziert, lässt fast alle Türen den Faschisten offen (alle, bis auf eine.)

Ein dermaßen dünnes Faschismusverständnis lädt zu einem derart dünnen Antifaschismus ein, dass sich manche Neofaschisten in ihn hineingebärden können: Sie müssen nur augenscheinlich zeigen, dass sie Juden per se nicht hassen. Das können inzwischen Neofaschisten weltweit ganz gut.

In Dachau wurden zuerst Linke eingesperrt, dann wurden da Vernichtungstechnologien und -methoden entwickelt und getestet, die zum Massenmord in Auschwitz und anderen KZs eingesetzt wurden. Wenn auch Linke heute Dachau und Auschwitz nur auf Judenhass reduzieren, mache ich mir Sorgen.

Eine Reduzierung des deutschen Faschismus auf Judenhass kommt auch auf kosten des essenziellen Verständnis, dass es im Eigeninteresse aller Gesellschaftsgruppen liegt, den Faschismus zu verhindern—und keine Wohltat für eine Minderheit ist.

Aber eine ganzheitliche Erinnerung des Nationalsozialismus erfordert wohl ein Grad an Selbstkritik und Veränderung—struktureller, individueller, kollektiver—das sich nicht durchsetzen konnte, und wir landen da, wo wir nun stehen: Ein Flugblatt voller Mordfantasien an “Vaterlandsverräter” und Verherrlichung der allgemeinen Gewaltherrschaft wird als Angriff auf eine einzige Minderheit angeprangert, sodass die Gefahr größtenteils aus dem Blick entfällt und viele einfach mit den Schultern zucken.

Dmitrij Kapitelman (@Kapitelmanslife) tweetete am 03.09.23: “An Tagen wie diesen wünsche ich mir, dass wir nach Israel statt Deutschland gegangen wären. Dass Aiwanger bleibt, ist ein Offenbarungseid.

“Wie sehr kann man den Juden hier für noch für die Shoa ins Gesicht spucken? Und zwar selbstherrlich, „recht tuend“ und von oben herab.” (https://twitter.com/Kapitelmanslife/status/1698268000011354557)

Traurig, dass auch jüdische Intellektuelle in Deutschland den Staat Israel eher als Symbol und als Verneinung behandeln, als sich mit der dortigen Realität auseinanderzusetzen und auf diese Bezug zu nehmen. Das real existierende Israel steht mit diesem Tweet in keiner Verbindung. Und nein: nicht einmal in dem Sinne, dass die israelische Politik die Erinnerung des Holocausts mit weit mehr Respekt behandele. Leider nicht mal das ist real bzw. aktuell.

Der Staat Israel “als Verneinung”: das kuriose Phänomen, dass in Deutschland “Israel” als Folie verwendet werden kann, die in mancher Hinsicht als Gegenteil Deutschlands gelten soll. Das nimmt bei manchen “Antideutschen” extremen Ausmaß, kommt aber auch anderswo vor. Ich muss dabei an irgendeinen Text denken, in dem eine junge deutsche Jüdin davor schwärmt, dass in Israel jüdische Feste öffentlich präsent und von der Mehrheit gefeiert werden, als Gegensatz zu Deutschland. Nachvollziehbar, dass man sich danach sehnt. Aber: Beim schwärmen vor der Jüdischkeit der israelischen Öffentlichkeit wird das damit einhergehende, dauernde Problem ausgelassen, des religiösen Zwangs in der Öffentlichkeit. Und natürlich die Unterdrückung von nichtjüdischen Mitbürgern und Nichtbürgern. Zentrale Probleme der isr. Politik. Wenn man einfach so einen Aspekt, selbst einen realen – also nicht wie in diesem Fall –, aus der konkreten Komplexität der israelischen Lebensrealität auspickt, kann man anhanddessen nicht von “Israel” als die bessere Welt reden. Damit bleibt man völlig im innerdeutschen Diskurs, es geht nur um einen vorgestellten Unterschied im deutschen Kontext und nicht um den Staat Israel. Aber leider scheinen es vor allem solche Teil- und Wunschvorstellungen die zu sein, die in Deutschland mit “Israel” verbunden werden.

Concentrated power underpins the construction of a monolithic position for Jewish people collectively. Sometimes, what presents itself as democratic representation is anything but.

In an important piece published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Prof. Lila Corwin Berman highlights how and why a few organizations and their positions are made to stand in for all Jewish people: What makes them appear central and lends them legitimacy is minority wealth, not democratic majorities.

“As a historian who has written about many of these groups, I can tell you that every claim to be the united front, the central address, the singular American Jewish organization has rested on the surety that most American Jews believed no such thing. Indeed, words that posture such a “mainstream” are best read as indicators of dissent, debate and fracture.”

Berman writes about the United States specifically, but the effects of this process in America are felt worldwide. And the same process or a parallel one takes place in other countries, too. Here in Germany, we also have a constructed monolithic Jewish position framed as being above controversy. But there is a difference: the power legitimizing this “mainstream” is political rather than economic; the Geman state sanctions and promotes an official representation of German Jews. But here too, this representation is not democratically legitimized: while the Central Council of Jews in Germany is rooted in Jewish communities of faith, its leadership is not democratically or transparently elected.

What is also strange in Germany — though perhaps not entirely different from the US — is how many non-Jewish Germans are passionately dedicated to upholding a constructed Jewish consensus, claiming and perhaps feeling concern for “the Jews” but incidentally serving self-interest.

Majority and democracy

Criticism like Berman's or my my own often meets a very reasonable and fair objection: “but most Jews do support these positions!” However, this is somewhat besides the point, for three reasons.

First, “mainstream” Jewish organizations do not promote these positions as a result of a deliberative democratic process; they are not formally representative.

Second, the same organization are actively involved in shaping Jewish majority opinion. They organize endless events with Zionist and largely conservative speakers while deplatforming dissenting Jewish opinions and even excluding dissenting Jews from participation in community spaces. If the same organizations then run a poll and find their efforts have borne fruit and a majority agrees with the position they have been aggressively promoting, this cannot seriously be taken to mean the position they promoted was the true position of all Jewish people to begin with.

And finally, simply put, “majority opinion” is not the same as “the opinion of all Jews”. Most≠all. But this is precisely the equation being made: Opinions which are (supposedly) held by a majority are presented as being the opinion of “the Jews” or even of “world Jewry”. Again, this is materially different from actual democratic process, in which a group deliberates and forms a collective position by a collectively agreed procedure.

However, illegitimate power structures always produce resistance. Dissent among Jewish people is growing and becoming better organized. The powerful may back the Zionist consensus to the hilt, but those of us excluded by their representation are not going anywhere, and we will not be silent! ✊🏻

I recently saw a German pseudo-leftist neoconservative complaining that the slogans announced for a Berlin demonstration were exclusive of Jewish people – due to Palestine solidarity, of course. Some of the slogans, meanwhile, simply upheld the rights of refugees. That these might not be considered pro-Jewish would have been very confusing to anyone just a few generations ago: In the 20th century, Jewish refugees were a central part of this same struggle – both as beneficiaries and as actors. Where once Jewish people and our long history of flight and persecution appeared intrinsically connected with the struggles of all persecuted people, the foundation of the Jewish ethno-state and its promise to take in any Jewish refugee, has driven a wedge deep between our particular cause and the broader universal struggle it was once a part of. Indeed, not only has the State of Israel removed the threat to most Jewish people of ever becoming stateless; in the process of its founding it has forced a new group of people into the status of stateless refugees, and has aggressively prevented their repatriation. It has further yet sought to extract itself from the universal obligation upon all states to take in refugees not of their own dominant group, clinging to its demographic-ethnic imperative to protect Jewish rights by maintaining Jewish supremacy – supremacy of arms outwards, towards the displaced Palestinian population and neighboring countries, and supremacy of numbers amongst its enfranchised subjects.

In sum, it has created the perverse situation in which one might suppose that protecting Jewish people is in tension with protecting refugees or undocumented people. And this is not some mistake in understanding the situation: it is a reflection of a reality in which the “Jewish Question” has been resolved (temporarily) in a manner that undermines universal protections of persecuted people. The same institutions ensuring Jewish people are not susceptible to becoming refugees are invested in preventing others from returning home, invested in exempting at least one country from the obligation to take in and protect refugees – thereby negating the demand that people in flight be allowed to resettle wherever they may go, the same demand once at the forefront of the struggles of Jewish people.

We must recognize that the only durable and just resolution to the plight of refugees is to universally uphold, implement, and protect the right of all people to safely flee and resettle. Providing particularistic protections for one group undermines the struggle for refugee rights writ large, and at the same time pits the persecuted against those awarded special protections, threatening those protections and undermining their viability in the long term. A historically-aware defense of Jewish rights must uphold the rights and protections of all persecuted people and reject attempts to protect only persecuted Jews, especially at the expense of other people. A defense of the State of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, now more than ever, is fundamentally incompatible with the fight to protect all those who are persecuted as we once were, as we may be again some day.

Refugee protections everywhere are the only defense we will have left when the State of Israel inevitably ceases to be able to provide the special protections it has promised.

“I knew my loss / before I even learned to speak” I've been thinking a lot about this Smashing Pumpkins line. I doubt it’s what they had in mind, but it really speaks to how I feel about generational trauma. I think, not to put too fine a point on it, that Germans lost something too, when their ancestors murdered away the entire life-world of our ancestors. I think they too are born into a wordless loss. Perhaps the whole world is. But I do not think they can know our loss. It might sound parochial, and maybe it is. But I suspect that every group touched by historical calamity and atrocity lives in a loss unknowable to all others, despite similarities, kinships and solidarities. Such loss is experienced only in and through a specific context. But the loss German society lives with is one that does not have space to be articulated, because the collective experiencing it is also considered responsible for it, and really shouldn't be such a whiny little shit about it, so to speak. Fair enough – but hardly healthy. I suspect a lot of Germans, admirably trying to right wrongs and empathize with their ancestors's victims, end up assuming they can know our loss. Partly because they know a lot about it, partly as a legitimate substitute for the intimately related loss they actually live with. But sometimes, I find it offensive when Germans suggest or presume they understand what Germany did to the Jews. They merely know about it. Those who did not live it cannot know it, but growing up in its wake, we know our loss – a loss I think can only be known from within.

Adorno warnte oft davor, den Antisemitismus bei seinem Wort zu nehmen. “Seine Substanz”, betonte er, hat “gar nicht an den designierten Feinden”. Es handelt sich dabei “um projektive Momente.” (Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus, 1967) Diese Projektion hallt nun bei der Antisemitismusbekämpfung wider.

Es ist kein seltenes Phänomen, dass man im Kampf gegen einen Gegner sich ihm in gewissen Dingen angleicht. (Auch das hat Adorno zuweilen erwähnt, wenn ich mich nicht irre.)

So werden die vermeintlich designierten Feinde des Antisemiten – aber nicht alle Jüd*innen der Welt gleichermaßen, sondern vor allem der Staat Israel – rein projektiv beschützt: nicht ihrer Realität wegen, sondern deswegen, was sie für einen symbolisieren. Ja, gerade diese ungleiche Beschützung des vermeintlichen jüdischen Kollektivs, die in der Tat die Beschützung des Staates Israels als Stellvertreter des vermeintlichen Kollektivs, ist an sich schon projektiv und ideologisch.

Die deutsche Israelsolidarität, in Widerhall des deutschen Antisemitismus, der mit ihr bekämpft werden soll, steht nicht mehr für die konkrete Opfer des AS ein, als er wiederum in ihnen seine Substanz findet. Sie ist genau wie er ein durchaus projektives, ideologisches Projekt.