On December 14th, a group of students from the Free University of Berlin occupied the lecture hall to express our solidarity with the Palestinian people. This occupation was the first of its kind in Germany. A group of counter-demonstrators tried to disrupt it, but it was peaceful.
However, the university's response was to call in the police to remove the protesting students. 20 people were detained, including me. Both the police and the university said there had been no anti-Semitic attacks or discrimination at the protests, but the latter sought to justify its actions with a zero-tolerance policy for anti-Semitism in subsequent statements. And so.
Last week, we received a letter from the police informing us that university authorities had filed criminal charges against us for “trespassing.” Meanwhile, a petition calling for our expulsion has gathered over 26,000 signatures. Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watsinger has also publicly called for expulsion in the “most serious cases”, and Berlin's upper house plans to pass a bill to facilitate such disciplinary action.
The events of December 14th and the legal and media harassment we have faced since then come amid a society-wide attack on anyone expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people in Germany. A relentless campaign of harassment, intimidation, intimidation, silencing, firing, firing, and defunding is being waged against people and organizations who dare to defy the German government and institutions' resolute support for Israel.
At the heart of this vicious persecution is the cover-up of authoritarian state policy under the pretext of national guilt-washing, that is, addressing Germany's historical guilt for the Holocaust.
The message of the sin-washer is clear. Germany is an exception in its stance against anti-Semitism. Only Germany can judge anti-Semitism. Germany has resisted the exceptionalism of the Nazi era and has become exceptional again today, but of course in a different and perhaps progressive way.
The complete lack of self-awareness would be funny if it weren't so tragic and the consequences so dire. Various Jewish writers and scholars have repeatedly pointed out the anti-Semitic nature of this approach to washing away sin.
“We have a kind of anti-Semitism… that is not even treated as anti-Semitism, but rather a collective silencing of Jewish voices that do not conform to the dominant discourse in Germany.” says Emilia Roig, a Jewish-French scholar and author. he said at an event held in Berlin in December.
According to Jewish writer and researcher Emily Dische-Becker, one-third of the people in Germany who were “cancelled” for suspected anti-Semitism (i.e. expressing solidarity with the Palestinians) were Holocaust survivors. Jews, including descendants of
The Washing of Sins basically doesn't care about the safety of the Jews. Otherwise, at a time when hate crimes against Jews, Arabs, and Muslims are skyrocketing and solidarity between communities is most needed, promoting a discourse that so recklessly heightens social tensions. I don't think that will happen.
In fact, guilt washing tends toward anti-Semitism and even anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia because it operates on a superficial level and does not truly internalize the lessons of the past. It seeks to shift anti-Semitism onto Arab and Muslim communities, denying and concealing the persistence of German anti-Semitism in social and political spheres.
A sense of guilt prevents Germans from taking a principled stand against state terrorism, genocide, and systematic human rights violations. This should be a historical responsibility for any nation, but especially for the German nation.
Instead, Germany adopted a robotic, unthinking, one-dimensional, reactive position. “Never Again” is promoted in the narrowest sense, which is not at all surprising given the lack of education within Germany about its colonial past and other victim communities of the Nazi regime. . It refuses to accept that this should not mean never again committing genocide against any people.
Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly and openly and unabashedly revealed their genocidal intentions. No matter the context, such repeated statements would be considered the type of rhetoric that has typically accompanied historical episodes of genocide.
Nevertheless, German officials and celebrities continue to ignore them. They also cited the International Court of Justice's ruling that Israel was likely to be committing genocide, and the fact that human rights groups and most of the international community regard Israel's apartheid character and a series of historic violations of international law. matches were ignored.
Washing one's sins does not only mean acting on the pathology of national guilt. It's also a power tool. Although it is regrettable, it promotes the ideal of German exceptionalism in the world and obscures the legitimacy of Germany's desire to remain a world power.
The cleansing allows Germany to maintain an expansionist foreign policy that reflects a racist worldview and continues to support Israel and other brutal regimes across the Middle East. . Until recently, this has included close ties with authoritarian Russia, with Russian troops and mercenaries committing war crimes in Syria while plowing the German economy into Russian gas through the now infamous Nord Stream 2 project. I was made dependent on it.
Blaming also allows Germany to hide its growing structural and institutional racism against various minorities. It now easily dismisses criticism of anti-Arab and Muslim discrimination as having an anti-Semitic agenda.
German exceptionalism appears to have simply replaced one form of racism with another, taking advantage of today's more tolerant international environment towards anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice. It essentially created an alternative victim community.
a recent views The Cologne Carnival clearly illustrated the dynamics of this process. There, a woman wearing a keffiyeh with a nose emblazoned with famous anti-Semitic caricatures held two dogs on leashes with Palestinian flags labeled “Hate” and “Violence.” It was depicted as being there. Replacing anti-Semitic tropes with what constitutes Palestinian-ness in the German mind perfectly illustrates the essence of guilt-washing racism.
Meanwhile, in a shocking example of historical revisionism, a school in Berlin has begun distributing leaflets describing the 1948 Nakba as a “myth”, despite even Israeli parliamentarians using the term. It is ordered.
Amid society-wide attacks on international law, history, human decency, and fundamental freedoms, German academic institutions are doing little. They should act as society's moral conscience and oppose the current distorted and highly pathological public discourse, yet they are shirking their responsibility to do so.
In meetings we have had with university officials, we have learned that speaking out is too political or too 'polarizing', that it is beyond the responsibilities of academia, and that university autonomy lies within their status as public institutions. I heard an opinion that it is limited by.
This appeasement stands in sharp contrast to the historical lessons being taught at German universities about their past failures to resist discourses of collective demonization.
Until this situation changes, the German state and institutions will continue to deceive themselves into trying to atone for past sins. They will continue to try to escape responsibility for the consequences of their past, without recognizing the multiple victimhood that stems from it.
The space we claimed last month was essentially a plea for basic human recognition of the atrocities being committed in Gaza. However, it is also an attempt to awaken Germany, to open its eyes to the obvious reality unfolding before its eyes, to force it to break free from the pathology of self-centered guilt, and to recognize reality as it really is. there were. .
In this connection, we must clearly emphasize: Germany has an obligation to make reparations not only to Jews but also to Palestinians.
In this historic moment of genocidal violence, we will not allow persistent legal claims, threats, harassment, assault, or defamation to deter us from our mission. We will continue our fight no matter what the cost.
A public petition for support for 20 paying FU students can be found here.
An extensive petition against Berlin's university-wide expulsion drive can be found here.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
