Germany makes Palestinians pay for its own genocidal crimes – Owen Jones

JVL Introduction

Owen Jones pulls no punches in his video commentary on Germany’s role in the Gaza tragedy. He says the German state, responsible for the slaughter of two thirds of Europe’s Jews during World War Two, deserves to be ostracised for suppressing opposition to the mass slaughter Israel is now perpetrating against Palestinians.

In a tone of horrified incredulity, Jones lists the many ways in which Germany has attempted to absolve itself of guilt for its abhorrent crimes by promoting punishment of the Palestinian people. It is now “one of the world’s leading legitimisers and apologists and backers for the present mass murder of Palestinians.” What is more, he notes, Germany’s crackdown on opponents of Israel’s war is both inciting racism against Muslims and disproportionately targeting Jewish people.

See below his YouTube video as posted on Twitter/X.

NWI

PS: We are also delighted to add a transcript of the video here, with fulsome thanks to Brian Robinson for his work in producing it to order at short notice!

Transcript thanks to Brian Robinson

I think it’s time for a boycott of the German state. Specifically, I mean a boycott of its public events. By artists, performers, writers. authors, musicians, those who care about human rights, who oppose mass murder, who oppose what the highest court on earth, the International Court of Justice, is investigating as an alleged genocide, that is, Israel’s mass murderous onslaught against Gaza and its people.

Here’s why. Now, if I were the German state at this particular juncture, I would simply keep a low profile. Let me just sit down and… just sit this one out. That is not the tactic they’ve gone for. Instead, they’ve settled on a particularly gruesome strategy to gain absolution for the attempt by the German state to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe in which two-thirds of Jews were murdered within living memory.

Now firstly, the German state has long loudly demanded that somebody else pay for the crimes committed by the German state, specifically the Palestinian people. It seems to believe, or does clearly believe, that compensation for what it did should be paid by Palestinians. Through being violently ethnically cleansed, repeatedly occupied, their land stolen, colonised, subjected to apartheid, huge state violence over and over again, mass incarceration, suspension of basic civil liberties, we could go on.

These are all horrors which clearly no German citizen would tolerate. Now I’m aware that it’s not just the German state responsible for 2,000 years of European antisemitism by any stretch. It is simply the case that firstly 19th century German antisemitism played a pivotal role in the racialisation of antisemitism, that is turning antisemitism into a race theory, which became a precondition for its particularly genocidal form, and the rise, obviously, of Nazism, and then the Shoah, the murder of six million Jews. All of that is a precondition for what is happening today.

Now, this attempt to force other people to pay the price for what Germany did as a state, now takes the form of being one of the world’s leading legitimisers and apologists and backers for the present mass murder of Palestinians. Now, that’s always been very profitable, I would note, for the German arms company since the arms trade between the two countries, Germany and Israel, began in the early 1960s. By November last year, military exports to Israel from Germany were up tenfold, thanks to fast tracks in the aftermath of the current… horror unfolding. Reading a headline in the Financial Times like “Israel-Hamas war boosts German investor interest in defence sector” says Renk Chief [Renk Group AG, a German arms manufacturer], that was the other day, or pass the sick bag.

Secondly, in a particularly perverse twist of history, not only is the German state targeting anyone who speaks out in support of the Palestinian people, they are disproportionately targeting Jewish people. You can’t make this shit up. Let’s just listen to Yuval Abraham, a brilliant Israeli Jewish journalist who I interviewed late last year. He’s one of the directors of No Other Land, a documentary film about the forced displacement of the Palestinian people of Masafer Yatta, where another co-director, Basel Adra, is from. Now, he made a speech at the Berlinale Film Festival. Let’s hear from him:

I want to say we are we are standing in front of you now, me and Basel are the same age. I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian, and in two days, we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under a civilian law, and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights. Basel is not having voting rights. I am free to move where I want. in this land. Basel is like millions of Palestinians locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.

There he is, calling for equality. Documenting facts established by independent human rights groups. What happens next? The mayor of Berlin condemns him amongst others for antisemitism. Now, the mayor of Berlin is not Jewish (just so you know) so the non-Jewish mayor of Berlin is condemning a Jewish Israeli for antisemitism because he called for equality and condemns human rights abuses. He’s also condemned antisemitism by Israeli television and has been subjected, because of all of that, to a tsunami of death threats since. So, a German non-Jewish mayor helped to whip up a firestorm of death threats against the Jewish-Israeli for calling for equality. Is that redemption for Germany’s past? Is it?

A speech was also made with a similar theme by the co-director who I mentioned there, Basel Adra:

I’m here celebrating the award, but also very hard for me to celebrate when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza. In Masafer Yatta, my community is being also erased by Israeli bulldozers. I ask one thing for Germany, as I am in Berlin here, to respect the U.N. calls and stop sending weapons to Israel. Thank you. [Applause]

Now, a German Green Minister, Green Party, I’m not talking about the far-right here, I’m not talking about a right-wing party, I’m talking about the Green Party, then releases a statement making clear that they were only clapping the Jewish-Israeli co-director and not the Palestinian co-director. That’s not even subtle racism. I mean on one level, refreshing, because politicians and media outlets across Europe and the US haven’t even bothered to pretend they have anything other than contempt for the Palestinian people and their lives. They’re just not normally so crudely honest about it.

Does the German state think treating people as inferior because of their ethnicity is redemption for Germany’s past? Does it really? Does it really think official statements issued by ministers, clarifying they’re not clapping someone based on their ethnicity. Is that redemption? I don’t think so. It’s bringing back memories, isn’t it? In the aftermath of the Berlinale, in a German newspaper, which is written in a hideous way, framed exactly on the terms of all of this outrage, it says government ministers threatened criminal action against those who said, for example, “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” claiming it’s an endorsement of the killings committed by Hamas on the 7th of October. Ludicrous nonsense!

I’d note “From the river to the sea” is in the founding platform of Likud, Israel’s ruling party. It’s also been stated, for example, by the Israeli ambassador to the UK. What they mean by it, “One Israeli state from the river to the sea” is apartheid. In practice, it can only mean the subjugation of the Palestinians who live there. But that’s fine: people who use it to mean equal rights for Palestinians across historic Palestine, turns out you’re going to jail in Germany!

Now, who thinks throwing people into police cells for thought crime is going to wash away the sins of Germany’s past? I don’t think so guys. I think all of this is having a pretty opposite effect to what you intend. The minister actually said that this was rewarding and they said rewarding and endorsing crimes as a criminal offence. Completely off their trees these people. He claimed that Berlinale suffered serious damage this weekend because antisemitism went too far unchallenged. No evidence of any antisemitism here. The newspaper offers evidence such as “calling for a ceasefire”. I repeat, you cannot make this shit up. You really can’t. Calling for peace and an end to a war machine and violence. That’s antisemitism.

It gets so much worse. The main targets of Germany’s offensive against those who believe in human rights and equality for Palestinians and oppose their mass murder are Muslim citizens. We’ll talk about that. But according to the researcher Emily Dische-Becker, almost a third of those targeted by the German state, whether through de-platforming or arrests, are Jewish. Now as an article on this by Kenan Malik and the Observer points out, [ Denouncing critics of Israel as ‘un-Jews’ or antisemites is a perversion of history https://tinyurl.com/5aetdk6p ] according to Susan Neiman, who’s a Jewish-American philosopher and a director of the Einstein Forum, she says to be a left-wing Jew in today’s Germany is to live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance. German politicians and media talk incessantly about protecting Jews from antisemitism, but many who criticise the Israeli government and the war in Gaza have been cancelled and certainly attacked.

“I’m an Israeli citizen, and I’ve been accused of being a Hamas supporter and even a Nazi in mainstream media. Need I add that I am neither.”

So what, calling an Israeli Jewish person a Nazi in mainstream German media because they support peace. Is that atoning for the past? As the Israeli-born architect and academic Eyal Weizmann has acidly put it, this is me quoting Kenan Malik again, talking about a certain irony of being lectured on how to be properly Jewish — to be properly Jewish — by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are anti-Semitic. Are they trying to gaslight people to death?

Here’s another example. One Jewish woman, again actually an Israeli, for the record, arrested earlier this month for holding a sign inscribed with “Another Jew for a Free Palestine”. A museum cancelled an exhibition by Jewish artist Candice Breitz after she spoke out over Gaza, silencing and cancelling Jews for calling for peace. Washing away the sins of the past, is it? Targeting Jews with leftist inclinations, including with police repression. Is that absolution for Germany’s past, really? How is the disproportionate targeting of Jews not antisemitism?

I would note, leftist Jews were particularly targeted in the run-up to the rise of the Nazis, obviously the Nazis killed and targeted all Jews, but the claim Jews being dangerous leftist subversives was an important plank of antisemitism at the time, the international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, etc. Now you have German police attacking a Palestinian woman on film. because he called her “ridiculous”. Well, he clearly is ridiculous. A spot of police brutality, definitely washing away the past here!

In Berlin high schools, they’ve been ordered to distribute a leaflet describing the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, as a myth. German cities have been banning protests, Palestinian flags, the Palestinian keffiyah. In Berlin, a police officer stomped on candles for a vigil for the dead of Gaza. Banning protests. Silencing people. Authoritarianism. Is that atoning for the past?

A Palestinian author, Adania Shibli, had a ceremony for her award at the Frankfurt Book Festival indefinitely postponed. Now, the German authorities tried to strangle state support for artists deemed to cross extremely restrictive lines in criticising Israel, only backing down, you know, after outrage.

Meanwhile, rising discourse about the supposed antisemitism of Muslims has helped fuel already rising bigotry and prejudice towards the 5.5 million German Muslim population, ratcheting up bigotry against a minority which suffers high levels of discrimination and prejudice. Is that atoning for the past?

It should be known that the Berlinale Instagram feed was hacked into and someone posted “Genocide is genocide, we are all complicit.” Condemning the silence [indistinct] “[c]omplicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It says “after long internal discussion, we have decided to finally shed the idea that ‘German guilt’ absolves us of our country’s history or our current crimes as a nation.” They go on to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire. They add, “From our unresolved Nazi past to our genocidal present we have always been on the wrong side of history. It’s not too late to change our future.”

Well, that’s punchy, isn’t it? And that’s the point. The far right is on the rise in Germany. It is dangerous, it’s never been as powerful as it’s been since the end of World War II. It’s on the rise because of the abject failures of the German establishment, which itself is whipping up bigotry towards migrants and indeed Muslims, which is helping legitimise the far right, and we can see what’s happening here, we can see what’s happening here. Particularly in these arts and books and films and literature and performance spaces. I know the brilliant author Vincent Bevins, who was due to give a keynote address in Germany on his new book, cancelled again due to pro-Palestine posts on social media.

Okay, Germany, if you want to respond to this racist and genocidal past with racism and support for genocide and intimidating and harassing those who stand against it, disproportionately Jewish people, as well as the disproportionately targeted minority of Germany, Muslims, as they are disproportionately targeted everywhere, then we’ve got a responsibility to boycott all events in that country. This is a piss-take.

I think we should seriously be talking about a just general boycott of any events in Germany and to call out Germany for what it’s doing, which is not making amends for its history, quite the opposite. It’s bringing the terrible crimes of the German state right back to the fore, a reminder that we live in the shadow of what the German state did and that it is not atonement to support terrible crimes, not least when you are forcing other people, innocent people to pay for what your state did. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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