Gessen and the Arendt Prize Controversy: Comparison is essential enquiry
Masha Gessen used the example of Nazi-era ghettos to describe the character of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Daring to make that comparison to help us think about using memorialisation to understand the present rather than to lock history to the past provoked predictable outrage. The selective outrage alarmed those awarding the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought who initially withdrew the richly deserved prize from Gessen.
The storm of protest over this censorious act forced The Heinrich Boll Foundation and the City of Bremen to recant but they insisted the prize be presented not in the grandeur of the City Hall but in a small salon as though they were ashamed of the award.
Masha Gessen recently won Germany’s Hannah Arendt prize for political thought for their major body of work. They (Gessen’s preferred pronoun) were initially deprived of the prize because some people took exception to the use of a comparison between Gaza and Nazi era ghettos in an essay in the New Yorker, In the Shadow of the Holocaust on 9 December.
It is a long, over 7000 word, carefully constructed essay dealing with memorialisation. Ironically, in the light of what happened to Gessen, it deals with the misapplication of German guilt to ostracize defenders of Palestinian rights, including the record of withdrawal of prizes from others, such as Walid Raad and Kamila Shamsie, deemed to be outrageous. Gessen describes the outlawing of campaigns for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel and the use of the poorly constructed IHRA working definition of antisemitism to circumscribe legitimate speech. The essay is in the context of the description of modes of Holocaust memorialisation Gessen finds exemplary: no Holocaust denial here.
Like all major events, the Holocaust is in the present, not hermetically sealed in the past. It is in the present partly because Israel constantly evokes it as confirming the necessity of the existence of the State of Israel, regardless of any of its actions. It is more broadly in the present as it shapes our frame of reference for interrogating current events. It is a point of reference, like the French Revolution, or 1917, or 1989, or the slave trade.
The Holocaust in history and the present
The Holocaust was conducted within history and not outside it. It was the idiosyncratic German enactment of social and cultural trends in a form enabled by industrialisation and modernity. These forces continue to mutate and exist while they do not of necessity lead to genocide nor are Jews the most frequent victims. The Holocaust was manifested in an age of mechanisation and railways. The current object of exclusion and demonisation is not the Jew but the Refugee; substitute global mobility for the railway and digitalisation for mechanisation and the comparison becomes compelling while the instantiation is very different.
Using the Holocaust as a point of reference can be crass and it can obliterate meaning by suppressing critical thought. But it can also be essential; both in showing that an event is evil while also showing that it pales in comparison. It can be even more essential for disclosing that something, even if it is not on the scale of the Holocaust, is on a road towards an equivalent level of horror. The utility of each comparison made can legitimately be questioned about its utility: whether it illuminates or conceals. Making an analogy is not, in itself, in any way wrong.
Gessen made their comparison thoughtfully and because they believed it helped understand the lives of Gazans better. It comprises less than 5% of an essay that makes an important intellectual contribution to our understanding but not, it would appear, to those who have a greater urge to condemn than to understand.
The section in its entirety reads:
For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.
Gessen’s comparison was not equality
Comparison does not posit an equality. There are fundamental differences between Gaza and the ghettos. It is a legitimate matter to debate whether those differences are so severe that the comparison is inappropriate. Making the comparison, especially by a distinguished Jewish intellectual is not, of itself, antisemitic, even if it were to be mistaken. It should only be rebuked as antisemitic if it can be shown to be malicious and intended to hurt Jews and not just Israeli amour propre.
Gessen did not threaten anyone’s safety, just their unthought through assumptions. This stands in contrast to Israeli extremists who take Nazi atrocities as a model to follow in Gaza: Israeli Local Council Head Calls to ‘Flatten Gaza Like Auschwitz Today’
The attack on Gessen and the withdrawal of the Arendt prize for a Nazi comparison is even more preposterous when Arendt, herself, made Nazi comparisons with Israel, a parallel that Gessen quotes in the essay. Indeed, Arendt’s biographer believes that under this thought regime Arendt would also not qualify for the prize
The BBC World Service showed itself at its best and at its worst in an extended segment on the comparison the withdrawal of the prize in its Weekend programme on 17 December (segment starts at 26”50’). It starts with a long, rigorous but constructive interview with Gessen where they were allowed to elaborate their points and provide solid reasoning for what they wrote. Gessen was at pains to emphasise the reality of antisemitic abuse and attacks but also how attention is diverted from these by the politicised lumping of Israel-critical discourse with antisemitism.
Misapplication of allegations of antisemitism
However, the interview was followed by a series of hostile comments from a number of contributors. Some criticisms had substance, others were far less robust and which were insufficiently challenged. No rebuttal of any of the claims was permitted. Criticism is entirely appropriate: unchallenged partisan attack is not. Neither was the whole question of the proportionality of the withdrawal of a prize made for a corpus of work because of a dispute over one observation addressed.
The weight given to one highly disputed allegation of antisemitism shows how toxic defence of Palestinian rights can be to the reputation and, in too many cases, the livelihoods of Israel’s critics. Antisemitism used in this way is like a cluster bomb which, once thrown, can at any moment explode and maim any passer-by.
The prize was jointly awarded by the Green Party’s Heinrich Boll Foundation and the City of Bremen. After seeing the reaction to their decision the they relented but scaled back the ceremony and Gessen gave her speech Comparison is the way we know the world to only 50 people.
If anyone had reason to doubt Gessen’s thesis of the punitive misapplication of allegations of antisemitism, those who have led the attack on them over this comparison have conveniently provided ample proof.
I heard the programme on the World Service of the BBC and agree that Masha Gessen gave a very articulate and measured account of their piece of work. Perhaps because it was so calmly and effectively done, a number of other contributors were allowed to challenge what they (MG) had said, so, typically, the last word and several before tried to rescue the conduct of the Israelis.
This is a bit of a pattern on BBC radio; you can get opinions critical of Israel aired, but they mustn’t be the last word. That would question the orthodoxy that the BBC sees as its role to defend.
A small correction. The prize is funded by the Senate (state government) of Bremen and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The latter is linked to the Greens, the party of Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Federal Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck, both of whom have been outspoken in their support for Israel.
However, the prize is awarded by an international jury, functioning as the Hannah Arendt Prize Association, an autonomous body. They kept their nerve. Although the Senate and the Foundation withdrew their participation and refused use of the original venue (a change to the Institut Français was also cancelled), the prize of 10,000€ was awarded, albeit in a small private setting.
Masha Gessen has given several interviews to German media. One in the leftish Frankfurter Rundschau is telling. The interviewer spoke about the “discomfort” felt by non-Jewish Germans like him when comparisons are made between a Nazi occupied Jewish ghetto and Israeli militarily occupied Gaza.
This concern for their own comfort is an important part of the reason why so many Germans have gone down this mistaken and dangerous path. When Mahmoud Abbas, on a visit to Germany in 2022, stupidly declared that 50 holocausts had occurred in Palestine, Chancellor Scholz commented: “Particularly for us Germans, any qualification of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable”. Similarly, Federal President Frank Walter Steinmeier, as Foreign Minister in 2015 opposed classifying the massacre of Armenians in 1915 as genocide, because it would affect the singularity of the Holocaust.
This is not the first controversy for the Hannah Arendt prize. In 2007 the Jewish community leadership in Bremen called for the prize to be withheld from Tony Judt because of his anti-Zionist views.
Commenting on the current dispute, Naomi Klein tweeted: “At this rate, Germany is going to run out of Jewish intellectuals to ban.”
A helpful article. However, why is the Great Proletarian Socialist Revolution only referred to by its date, 1917?
As for ‘antisemitism’, if everybody slandered by zionist usage of this phrase declined to write or speak the term it would soon fall out of use.
The introductory analysis by Mike Cushman is excellent. Thank you.
We live in an age of hypocrisy. I have observed many genuine attempts at presenting the horrific treatment of the indigenous people by the extremist Israeli government being artfully and falsely construed as being anti Jewish.