Masafer Yatta destruction: the film and German reaction
JVL Introduction
The film ‘No Other Land’ (see JVL post 15.11.2024), now on general release in the UK, has been highly praised by critics around the world (a rare 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes) but not in Germany. The film, focuses on Masafer Yatta within the South Hebron Hills and is a directorial collaboration between Palestinian, Basel Adra, and Jewish Israeli, Yuval Abraham. When it received the Audience Prize for Best Documentary at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, the federal culture minister Claudia Roth, who enthusiastically joined in applause, was ridiculed for later saying she had only been applauding Abraham and not Adra. Berlin’s city portal website added a warning to its listing of the film, saying that it ‘has antisemitic tendencies’ to which Abraham fired back with a scathing rebuttal. The warning was taken down but this highlights the increasing pressure on any dissent against the genocide and Germany’s major role in it. The distortions are so extreme that Abraham, son of Holocaust survivors, has been targeted as ‘antisemitic’ and has received death threats.
You may also want to read the New Arab on the same issue which also reports that “Most recently Palestinian playwright and artistic director of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin Ahmed Tobasi had his play ‘And Here I Am’ cancelled at the Euro-scene theatre following pressure from German group Artists against Antisemitism.”
Germany continues to suppress all criticism of Israel and in the Bundestag earlier this month almost unanimously passed a resolution on antisemitism that “While paying lip service to “all the facets” of Jewish life…narrows that life down to one element: the state of Israel”. JVL joined organisations across the world objecting to this ,
RW/LL
This article was originally published by The Canary on Fri 15 Nov 2024. Read the original here.
Jewish filmmaker slams Germany for weaponising antisemitism to ‘silence critics of Israel’
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Is it any surprise that Germany targets anti/non-Zionist Jews for persecution and anti-Semitic libel. They are literally following in the footsteps of their Nazi predecessors.
On 28 January 1935 Heydrich, the Chief of Police and Himmler’s Deputy issued a Directive stating that Zionist youth organisations ‘are not to be treated with that strictness that it is necessary to apply to the members of the so-called German-Jewish organizations (assimilationists). ‘Lucy Dawidowicz, War Against the Jews, p.118]
On 31 May 1935 the Gestapo banned all Jewish political meetings with the exception of Zionist meetings. [Francis Nicosia, Zionism in National Socialist Jewish Policy, D1264]
In May 1935 Schwarze Korps, paper of the SS, wrote that:
the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state…. The assimilation-minded Jews deny their race and insist on their loyalty to Germany or claim to be Christians because they have been baptized, in order to subvert National Socialist principles.’ [Dawidowicz]
The German state today is following a well trodden path. See my article Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza? https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/8/why-is-germany-supporting-israels-genocide-in-gaza
Thank you Tony Greenstein. You have explained what and why Germany is acting this way.
I do not agree with Tony on this occasion. I do not think that Germany is “following in the footsteps of their Nazi predecessors”. Having had some substantial dealings with Germans recently I think their unquestioning support for Israel is primarily about overblown collective guilt. They think the right way to “atone” for their past is to support Jews and through ignorance and because of the Zionist lobby they think that they are doing the right thing.
The AFD (and others) may well think the way Tony suggests as do some British and American supporters of Zionism but I am not prepared to suggest that the only motivation of these governments is to drive Jews out of their countries to Israel. That is too simplistic an analysis.