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“It’s about making us all stronger and safer through collective action”

Interview with 2 members of the Arts and Culture Alliance Berlin (ACAB) about artistic freedom and Palestine in Berlin


26/01/2024

Note: This interview was carried out on Monday, 22nd January, the day in which the Berliner Senat announced its withdrawal of the “Anti-Discrimination” clause.

Hello, thanks for agreeing to talk to us. Could you explain a little about your organisation?

ACAB is an alliance of artists who came together in the past few months after the Hamas attacks in Israel and the subsequent genocidal bombing that began in Gaza. The cultural scene in Berlin was very, very quickly becoming even more sensitive, prone to censorship and repressive than it had already been. So we assembled a meeting and started working together.

ACAB stands for Arts and Culture Alliance Berlin. The main goal was to make sure that the most marginalised amongst our community of artists are not the ones who are being left behind in the struggle. Unfortunately, they have been the ones who have been feeling the brunt of the cultural repression that’s been playing out at the moment.

There’s been this idea that arts and culture somehow need this kind of political repression in a heavier way than other fields. There’s a displacement of actual fighting against fascism onto people who are trying to speak out against the genocide.

It’s been Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, and people who support Palestinian Liberation who are losing funding, being de-platformed, and generally being cancelled by the establishment arts scene in Germany. This is part of the concerted effort of Germany to stand fully behind Israel’s manipulative upside down claims to have a right to defend itself when defence has become an obliterative offence.

Because Germany seems to think that the issue with all of this is just Jews and not genocide, it is forbidding any kind of dissent from within the country. Anyone in culture who’s even potentially in support of Palestine is an antisemite. And because of the right wing idea that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, the entire spectrum of political actors are clamping down and silencing critiques of Israel.

Who is involved in ACAB?  

It’s an alliance of cultural workers. And that can be defined as broadly as possible – anyone who calls themself an artist. If you have a similar feeling to us, you are welcome to join.

We felt the need to organise on a more grassroots level than what was already established through organisations like the Bundesverband Bildender Künstlerinnen (BBK) – an official body that represents the interests of visual artists and who are also doing amazing work. We also saw the need to organise from an intersectional position that centres the politics of the artists who stand the most chance of being silenced right now and generally speaking, those are not German. There’s a rift that’s opening up between what Germans believe is a left-wing politic, and an actual representation of marginalised voices in this country.

We saw that yesterday [21st January] in the demo against the AfD, where the Palestinian bloc was attacked by people at that demo. There’s a constant struggle where the German Left is paralysed by not knowing how to avoid antisemitism while also avoiding anti-racism.

A lot of people have chosen to exclusively privilege antisemitism. But we’re trying to say that all of these forms of discrimination are intersectional and must be treated equally. We cannot allow right-wing violence, even if it’s done by someone who claims to be a victim such as the State of Israel. That’s something that seems very hard for Germans to understand right now.

Can we say something about the “anti-discrimination” clause? ACAB has now organised two demos outside the Berliner Abgeordnetehaus against the clause. What does it mean for artists who live in Berlin?

Much of Germany’s cultural sector is publicly funded. That means that tax money pays artistic labour, for the existence of artistic institutions, and for our studios to be subsidised. Much of the cultural sector comes from public funding.

Now the CDU is in power in Berlin and their senator has decided to impose an “anti-discrimination” clause to be added to all funding contracts. If you sign it, you must accept the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which states that critique of Israel is antisemitic.

I was reading the clause again last night to be sure about the wording. And there’s one line which says that you agree not to work with anyone who is suspected of working with extremist or terrorist groups. This is for me, very worrying.

That means that the definition of who gets labeled a terrorist or extremist organisation is left to the often biased opinions of public officials. Groups who support Palestinian solidarity would be much easier to define as a terrorist or extreme rather than a right-wing German group.

Were the clause to be put into effect, what kind of cultural scene would we have? We would have people who did not have any qualms in endorsing Israel’s actions, who are either pro-Zionist or simply ambivalent or indifferent to genocide. It would be a very, very different cultural scene than the one that we have.

We are not against actual anti-discrimination measures. We absolutely believe in anti-racism and anti-discrimination, but the most marginalised people must be safe. What we have seen uses the language of anti-discrimination, but the so-called “anti-antisemitism” measures are being used as a weapon against marginalised artists.

It’s important to say that we don’t think of artists being completely free of politics. We believe in freedom of speech only up until the point that it is not discriminatory to others. The far right has used the language of freedom of speech for decades. But when we talk about freedom of speech, we talk about freedom towards a liberatory critique of power.

Has there been a reaction from white German artists to the clause?

Of course. They’re trying to show their support. But it’s not universal, and there’s a bit of a tipping point around freedom of expression. Any artist worth their salt knows that you can’t do this.  You’re getting a lot more people who may not be so sure about Palestine or antisemitism, but they’re sure about freedom of expression.

They’ll distance themselves very carefully to try to feel like it’s not too close to what they feel uncomfortable with. But when it comes to freedom of expression, and what can be said and done as art, they know that if they endorse the censorship, they will lose their legitimacy as experts in culture.

More than other demographics, artists are internationally networked. And internationally, people on the Left have sympathy for Palestine. It’s different within Germany, where the Left is very confused right now. But internationally the Left is far more secure. In the art field itself, there is a larger sympathy for a pro-Palestinian position than outside. For German artists, that’s kind of alienating and a bit threatening.

How have cultural institutions reacted?

We need arts and culture platforms to be able to maintain spaces for freedom of speech and criticism. But the institutions across the board were silent or pro-Zionist even before the government proposed the discrimination clause. The spreadsheet “Index Palestine” has kept track of how cultural institutions were reacting, and almost all of them were completely silent while so many events were being cancelled, and artists were being de-platformed.

On top of that, they were checking our Facebook posts or Instagram posts. If the clause goes into effect, this will put the institutions in the position of deciding who they want to work with, and who’s a safe bet. This censorship enters into the institutions and makes artists choose between getting funding and solidarity.

This is very dangerous for art because everyone starts to surveil each other. Institutions can say: “Oh, you made a post, you signed a letter that somebody else in favour of BDS signed.” It gets very insecure very quickly, because art does not generate money on its own. We need funding. The cultural scene is very dependent on external sources of money.

In other countries, where art is entirely based on foundations and private funding, the people who are affiliated with Zionism are just pulling shows and withdrawing money. Here, where it’s coming from the public funding and the government, the abuses of power are very intense.

I’m quite bolstered in my optimism in knowing that the cultural scene of Berlin can’t happen without us. Further, we have a voice because of public money. This is why it just seemed so urgent and necessary to start organising.

It was announced in today’s demo that the clause has been withdrawn. How much do you know about why this has happened? Is this a permanent thing? What happens next?

Since we were outside at the demo, we didn’t get to watch the proceedings. I’m just going on what we heard from other people inside. We can accept this as a victory because whatever the plan was, it is now no longer. The plan has been put on hold or at least postponed.

But we will definitely continue organising. Artists have now been awarded funding for 2024. They are all organised and ready to fight the clause if it shows up in our contracts. We will keep going. I don’t think the fight is over.

We want to make sure that things don’t get worse. There’s always going to be more to work on. If we win the fight on the anti-discrimination clause, we have 4 million other things. There’s so much more to do. The fact that we’re organised and we’re finding each other and building trust with each other is always going to be a good thing, no matter what.

Do you think your demonstrations affected the decision? 

Definitely. The first demonstration was really impactful. By the time they got to today’s meeting, they would have already made the decisions. So I think today was much more symbolic. But it’s good that we did it anyway. There’s been a lot of work going on behind the scenes that has definitely shifted things. But it’s not the end.

Part of what we’re doing is just for us. We’re doing this to show each other that we stand up against this. We are all working as hard as we can to build the culture that we want in our communities. This is a really big step. We have this network now and we have accountability to each other.

Berlin’s art community is diverse. There’s some who are pro-Palestine, others who are not so pro-Palestine, but for free speech. Some artists support you, but are very wary of signing any open letter because they know that this could mean that they lose work or funding.

What can artists in Berlin do to support what you’re doing and what you’ll be doing in the future?

We have open meetings, they’re welcome to join us. There’s lots of work to be done. Argue with Germans. There’s a discursive shift that needs to happen around what is fascism and where their voices are needed. We need everybody to get into these conversations and try to sway public opinion. It’s gradual, it’s not like you just step out and you’re fully radicalised. You take steps towards feeling more secure in what you are comfortable committing to.

If people are scared of signing letters, I would say that the more people do it, the more safe we are all together. If 10,000 artists in Berlin sign a letter, they can’t cancel all of us. That’s what was also really encouraging about the most recent letter against the anti-discrimination clause. It had a very wide reach with 5,000 signatories. I don’t know how many working artists there are in Berlin, but that’s a good proportion.

You don’t have to do it alone. There are ways that you can contribute to struggles without having to put your name out there or having your face in the media. It’s about making us all stronger and safer through collective action. This has been our guiding light in the ACAB group.

What is happening in Germany?

Palestine, the AfD and the German left.


24/01/2024

All this week massive demonstrations have been taking place in Germany. This includes an estimated 350,000 who rallied on Sunday 21 January in Berlin.

The demos are in opposition to the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) participation in a meeting held by right wingers and fascists in which they proposed to ‘remigrate’ vast sections of the German population.

The Correktiv magazine reported on a meeting held in a villa by a lakeside addressed by a far right wing extremist Martin Sellner, the Austrian leader of the ethno-nationalist Identitarian movement.
Plans were outlined for the future of certain communities in Germany. These communities were to be relocated to a territory in North Africa.

The meeting was attended by several high level members of the AfD, a right wing populist party with an increasingly dominant fascist wing, several prominent businessmen and even some members of the Tory-like CDU party.

Not only ‘foreigners’ were to be dealt with in this way but also those German citizens that ‘failed to integrate’ were to be deported.

This can be passed off as the ravings of deluded extremists, but comes at a time when the AfD are becoming the second party and the main opposition to an increasingly unpopular Red-Green-Yellow coalition of the Labour-like SPD, the Greens and a smaller pro business party, the FDP.

In several important upcoming state elections the AfD may take the leading positions.

It’s also a populist movement that comes from the countryside, is badly handled by the authorities, and shows signs of being influenced by the far right. The AfD MP, fascist Björn Höcke, strongly supports the farmers protests and demands. Martin Seller also supports them, and on some demos the flag of the Landvolkbewegung, an antisemitic countryside movement from 1920s, has been seen.

At the same time, increasing authoritarianism is evident in German policing. This is especially true of protests agains Israeli genocide in Gaza.

In the wake of October 7th, protests against the Israeli assault on Gaza were banned by the police. In Berlin’s Neukölln district people were arrested for showing visible signs of support for Palestine, including the wearing of the Keffiyeh. The slogan ‘from the river to the sea’ is prohibited, under threat of arrest. A main street, Sonnenalle, in a largely migrant area, was sectioned off and people were forced to undergo identity checks.

During one pro-Palestine demo, Jewish activist Iris Hefets was arrested for holding up the placard, “As an Israeli Jew: Stop the genocide in Gaza”. She was arrested again during another demonstration shortly after.

Last Sunday, the 14th of January, police attacked the annual Luxemburg-Liebknecht march, which has been held since the 1920’s, except during the Nazi years. The excuse was the pro-Palestine participants participating in the march. The police claim that a person was using the banned slogan. The attack took place near the former Stasi HQ in east Berlin.

This follows the German government’s total support for Israel and it’s attacks on Gaza. Former Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that support for Israel was a ‘reason of state’ for Germany. This is a semi-legal justification that makes Israel’s security a matter of national interest for Germany.

Some see this unwavering support as an exculpation of German guilt for the Holocaust, but other reasons may be involved.

It allows Germany to cover over its failure to fully denazify the state apparatus after the war. For example, many judges kept their positions. Consequently, antisemitism is still deeply imbedded in German society, and a long list of fascist organisations since the fall of Hitler has culminated in the AfD today. The police and other state security agencies show strong support for the right wing. Crime statistics regularly show that homegrown white supremacy far exceeds any supposed threat posed by people from a migrant background. The state knows this all too well, as a native-born German with far-right sympathies tried to shoot his way into a synagogue in the city of Halle in 2019, killing two people.

However a key reason for the German stance is that it allows Germany to cover its World War Two actions and remain on the international stage as an integral part part of the West’s military alliances.

The war in Ukraine saw a huge lurch towards militarism on behalf of the German government and its dominating parties. The traffic light coalition had planned to double the money – to €8 billion – given to Ukraine to continue the war against Russia. Germany is considering supplying Israel with around 10,000 rounds of 120-millimeter precision tank ammunition. This comes after other increases in military spending and a more aggressive stance towards the possibility of German military intervention through NATO, thus increasing the presence of German imperialism on the world stage.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz joined in the anti-AfD march that took place in Potsdam as did his Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock. It is she, of course, that is leading the increases in military spending.

They are rightly condemning the proposition by the AfD to construct an ethno-nationalist state around German nationalism and racism. Unfortunately, at the same time in Saxony-Anhalt the CDU-led government has made citizenship conditional on the acceptance of the right of Israel, an ethno-nationalist state, to exist. This racist measure is to be debated in the Parliament, the Bundestag, and made to apply to the entirety of Germany. It is being proposed by the Tory CDU but it is said that other parties are sympathetic.

The German left however, has a problem.

The German wing of Fridays for Future separated from the global movement when Greta Thunburg declared her support for a ceasefire in Palestine. It is reported that they have also prohibited pro-Palestine protesters from joining the anti-AfD rally in Berlin.

This is not unusual. The majority of the left it seems, goes along withe the reasoning of the German state. This includes the majority of The Left Party. Leftists that support Palestine have been denounced as anti-semites by others, and some have branded pro-Palestine supporters as ‘Nazi ticks’. How deep this goes is indicated by the crisis in the proclaimed antifascist supporters of Hamburg football club St Pauli. International groups have felt forced to disaffiliate and some closed altogether after bitter exchanges and the club’s failure to move away from its pro-Israel position. This includes major groups in Italy and Scotland.

Through perseverance and courage Palestinians and their supporters in Germany have managed to win the space to hold demonstrations. These have become more frequent as the situation in Gaza becomes ever more dire. The marches and protests are overwhelmingly Palestinians, other migrant communities and nationals from other European countries. The German left, apart from a few groups, is absent. It seems however that they are somewhat detached from German public opinion. In a recent poll by a leading broadcaster, 61% of people said that they thought Israel’s actions were not justified, with only 25% supporting them.

This attitude of the left is very worrying. The scapegoating of Muslims and migrants by the state can only lead to further deepening of the support of the AfD. Whilst those on the left see Palestinians and Muslims as a problem or inherently antisemitic they will be unable to tackle the AfD. It is Muslims, Palestinians and their supporters that are facing real discrimination on the streets now.

Recently The Left Party split around Sahra Wagenknecht, who wants to be, ‘economically progressive but socially conservative’. The left, she says, should stop going on about minorities, which can only aid the right. It is well proven that faced with real racist parties or ones opportunistically spouting racism people generally opt for the real thing.

The huge mobilisations against the AfD are of course to be hugely welcomed. It shows that underneath the seemingly calm exterior of German society there is uncertainty about the future and that there is a willingness to take to the streets about it.

The protests have been very popularly based. Their intention to culminate in a protest around the Reichstag indicates this. A nascent organisation seems to have been formed, with groups sprouting up around the country. A key demand is the problematic call to ban the AfD. That may halt its immediate advance but it won’t deal with the reasons for their growing popularity. Similarly, calls for the movement to be channeled into voting against them, whilst necessary, does not tackle the real problem.

That is the growing economic uncertainty in society and the detachment of politicians from the lives of the populace. It is also caused by the mainstream politicians’ demonising of migrants and by their Islamophobia.

To tackle that, a movement on the streets is needed, to call out the AfD as fascists and to confront them wherever they appear. But a social movement is also needed, one that can offer hope to the disenfranchised instead of the Nazi movement of despair.

The movement for Palestine has set off a huge global wave of radicalisation to the left.

The massive mobilisations and the refusal of people in Germany to swallow the lies about Palestinian resistance despite all the mainstream media and all the political parties telling them they should back Israel is a source of tremendous hope.

A small number of activists in Germany are working in the right direction.

I wish them luck.

Ecuador in flames

Solidarity with Latin America


23/01/2024

The narco-right declares war on the people

After seven years of right-wing government, Ecuador has gone from being the second safest country in the region to being one of the most violent. Neoliberal dismantling of the state, takeover of judicial institutions and forces of repression by narcopolitical actors has allowed drug traffickers to expand operations in the country. In this scenario of precarization and violence, it is mainly poor, racialized young people who are recruited as cannon fodder by criminal organisations.

The Violent Spiral

Due to geopolitical readjustments and the interests of national elites and major world powers, Ecuador has become a strategic location for the storage, distribution and export of cocaine to Europe and the USA. Ultimately, cocaine trafficking is a colonial practice: consumption is concentrated in the imperial centres of the north, while the south is left to deal with the violence and plundering of resources. Gangs, with links to international cartels, fight for control of territory and trafficking routes in an upsurge of violence that has generated dozens of prison massacres, waves of insecurity in the streets and fear among the population. Last year was the most violent in Ecuador’s history—2023 saw more than 40 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest figure in Latin America. This is profoundly painful, and we condemn Ecuadorian bloodletting at the hands of the narco-state and its key figures both within and outside government.

Shock Therapy

On January 9th we witnessed an unprecedented new explosion of violence. After trafficking gang Los Chernos’ leader (known as ”Fito”) escaped from jail, banana magnate Daniel Noboa’s government admitted that it had no idea as to his whereabouts, declared a state of emergency and announced it was putting into operation “Plan Phoenix”, which envisions the construction of mega-prisons inspired by the authoritarian security model of El Salvador’s rightist president Nayib Bukele. This triggered a series of violent events which shook Ecuador and the world; prison mutinies with prison guards taken hostage, vehicles in flames, the live-broadcasted takeover of a television channel by criminal gangs, and kidnapping attempts at the University of Guayaquil. The resulting curfew, evacuation of workplaces and educational establishments, self-isolation and circulation of violent videos on corporate media and social networks fueled panic in the population.

The War Decree

This extreme violence paved the way for President Daniel Noboa to sign Decree 111, which declares officially that an “internal armed conflict” exists in Ecuador; the justification for which is said to be the fight against criminal gangs and drug trafficking. However, the decree carries imminent dangers for the Ecuadorian people and for popular organisation. By announcing a state of war against groups considered “terrorists and non-state belligerent actors”, the state runs the risk of giving organised criminal gangs the false status of “combatants.” The rhetoric of “good state vs bad criminals” obscures the fact that actors at the highest levels of the state, of politics, the police and private enterprise play an active role in the networks of violence and profiteering from drug trafficking.

Hate

The most disturbing thing is that Decree 111 constitutes a new peak in the militarisation of social life and the criminalization of impoverished youth. Within a week of its implementation, we have seen with horror how Decree 111 has given the police and military a blank cheque to abuse the rights of anyone who shows a “suspicious attitude”. Racialized young people from the poorest districts have faced increased aggression from the forces of repression. The population has been deprived of freedom and basic rights, and put under generalised suspicion. While the narco-state generates turmoil and fear, the hegemonic mass media stoke racism and hatred of the poor, providing justification for dangerous demands to “give a bullet to all of them”.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism

The authoritarian state is sustained by mass repression and terror. In Ecuador, there will shortly be a inappropriately named “public consultation”. Noboa plans to instrumentalize the rhetoric of the “war against terrorism” both to strength the police and armed forces, and to deepen neoliberal restructuring. State terrorism and impunity could be the bloody outcome. In economic terms, the government has already announced that it will finance the supposed “war against drug trafficking” through an increase in Value Added Tax. This increase is a profoundly unfair measure which will principally impact the already depressed incomes of the poorer sectors of society. Meanwhile, the Noboa Banana Exporter company, which belongs to the family of the president, has debts of 88 million dollars and has been denounced for labour exploitation. It is essential that the oligarchy pays its debts and stops robbing the Ecuadorian people. Without health care, housing, education and decent work, the authoritarian narco-right will continue to make inroads in the impoverished social base of Latin America.

The Attack on Popular Organization

After 2017 the governments of Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso deepened neoliberal austerity, increased social inequality and forced hundreds of thousands of Ecuadorians to emigrate in search of a better future. At the same time, they intensified repressive practices against indigenous and popular mobilizations. The “war against terrorism” today serves the narco-right in power as a tool to further stigmatize and criminalize the organisations and social collectives that fight for a dignified life for everyone.

The regional right and US interference

The intensified ”shock therapy” since January 9th strengthens an authoritarian, militarised politics that will only intensify the spiral of violence in Ecuador. But the extremism of the narco-right crosses  frontiers. On January 10th Patricia Bullrich, the Minister of Security of the anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei in Argentina, announced that she was prepared to send military support to Ecuador, stating, “this is a continental issue”. The extreme rightwing government of Israel, in the midst of committing genocide against the Palestinian people, has also offered security collaboration to the rightist Noboa. These alarming signals make Ecuador the epicentre of the strategy of securitization and death at the regional level. The bloody echos of violence perpetrated against our brothers and sisters in Colombia and Mexico with the excuse of the “war against drugs” stopped being only a distant memory some time ago—the old playbook of “internal armed conflict” is being recycled on the impoverished, racialized bodies of those considered disposable. Already in 2022 then-president banker Guillermo Lasso, asked the United States to apply a “Plan Ecuador”—Noboa’s Decree 111 is the perfect terrain to enable imminent US interference, which has already spilled a great deal of blood in Latin American history.

Solidarity Without Borders

Our voices of denunciation will never be silenced by terror imposed in an attempt to paralyze us. Confronted with the politics of death, we respond with our profound love of life and hope. We have the historic task of constructing viable alternatives so that our people can live well. We will continue building networks of solidarity with all the oppressed peoples who have experience in resisting the blows of repression and in designing better collective futures. It is more important than ever to be alert, to support each other and strengthen popular organisation and resistance everywhere. Solidarity between comrades will keep us going in this dark period. We remember more than ever our comrade Dolores Cacuango, indigenous communist leader:

“We are like grains of quinoa. If we are alone, the wind will blow us away. But if we are together in a sack, the wind can do nothing. It can make us sway, but it cannot make us fall”

This article first appeared in Spanish on the Bloque Latinoamericano Berlin website. Translation: Ian Perry. Reproduced with permission

“Art is Resistance – Are We Free If We Cannot Speak?”

Artists protest against the censorship of voices for Palestine outside the Gorki theatre


22/01/2024

Amidst a state-subsidized crackdown on Pro-Palestinian voices within Germany’s cultural spheres, activists and artists gathered in front of Maxim Gorki Theater on Thursday 18th January to stage a performance titled “Art is Resistance – Are We Free If We Cannot Speak?”

A beamer confronted Gorki’s visitors with footage of Gaza’s ongoing destruction amid Israeli occupation and the buzzing sound of war drones all around. In front, they watched a die-in unfold, where a group of people lie down as if dead in solidarity with the over 25,000 Palestinians who have been killed by Israel since October. Surrounded by the images of war and death in front of them, the performing artists tried to speak out. However, their voices are violently silenced by the cultural institutions behind them.

This performance comes as a reaction to the Berlin Senate’s recent decision to implement a clause that requires artists applying for public funding to sign a declaration against “any form of antisemitism” as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), according to which “the targeting of the state of Israel” as well as any forms of antizionism are conflated with antisemitism. This McCarthyistic clause serves as a legal basis for the cancelling of those who oppose the right-wing nationalist policies of the Israeli government, particularly those whose art engages with the reality faced by Palestinians. As such, this definition disproportionately and primarily targets migrant, Arab and Jewish artists & intellectuals whose contribution to German art and discourse is vitally important. The IHRA definition in its current form restricts freedom of opinion and art, which is enshrined in Article 5 of the German Grundgesetz (basic law) and has even been criticized by the author of the IHRA.

As voices are being silenced, the activists gathered at Maxim Gorki to offer a thought-provoking foreplay to the premiere of “Die Optimistinnen”. The theatre, which prides itself as a beacon of progress in Berlin’s performance world, decided to single-handedly publish an intellectualized pro-Israel statement in October without consulting the feelings of either their diasporic audience or their ensemble members, and thereby showed us its real face beneath a faux-leftist mask. The activists demand from institutions such as Gorki to stick to their progressive promises and give Palestinian perspectives a stage. The message: Art is resistance. And we are not free under the weight of silence.

See a video pf the action on Instagram.

“Do not uproot! Palestine will live!”

Artists Joanna Rajkowska and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman discuss their work exploring the entwinements between Jewish suffering in Poland and Palestinian suffering in Israel.


21/01/2024

In 2002, Polish artist Jonna Rajkowska created Greetings From Jerusalem Avenue, a huge artificial palm tree in the middle of the busy roundabout at Warsaw’s Aleje Jerozolimskie. The palm was planned as a temporary project, but has remained for over twenty years, becoming a meeting point for Polish protests ranging from calls to welcome refugees, fight against the abortion ban, join a large-scale nurses’ strike, and solidarity with Palestine.

While the palm is often discussed as an uncanny nod to Warsaw’s 18th century New Jerusalem settlement and former large Jewish population, Rajkowska created it after a visit to Palestine/Israel, reflecting on the intertwinement of Polish, Palestinian, and Jewish traumas. On December 14th, Rajkowska and US-American artist Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman organized a protest action with the help of Grupa Granica at the palm in reaction to the post-October 7th ongoing genocide in Palestine. Holding heatsaving blankets, in reference to the refugees who have been barred from entering Poland’s borders in the past years, with GAZA written on top, they called out: “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people being severed from their lives, rights, families, and earth. We say to the Israeli regime and its accomplices: Do not uproot! End the genocide!” Read the full text here.

In this interview, Sarah Adler asks the two artists about the relevance of their action in a German context, especially in light of the recent scandal surrounding Masha Gessen’s comparison of the Warsaw Ghetto with Gaza — as a ghetto being liquidated. They reflect on the triangulation of Palestinian, Jewish, and Polish trauma in this particular project and their wider artistic practices, underlining a shared urgency of a broader critique of the historical and ongoing violence of the ethno-national state. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When I came across this project on Instagram, I was really intrigued. What was the inspiration for the recent protest action that the two of you did at the palm?

Joanna Rajkowska (JR): We felt a really pressing urgency to do something. From my perspective, I feel this tree is a major prop on the city stage, overlooking the 24-hour city spectacle. It therefore has some responsibilities. We met about a month earlier and just decided that the tree has to make a declaration of some kind about the genocide in Gaza, that it mustn’t stay silent. Then we discussed words around it, what it should contain, in what direction to go. I am really dismayed that there is no proper, mainstream media discussion in Poland about what is going on in Palestine.

What is the narrative right now in Poland about Palestine?

JR: It almost doesn’t exist and this is shameful. It’s overshadowed by current political events – the war in Ukraine and the Polish post-election euphoria. The major narrative about Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based on the simplistic, and falsely symmetrical juxtaposition: the Hamas terrorists, and the always-touted right to defend on the Israeli side, all backed up by the very palpable Holocaust memory. Of course there are some nuances and doubts but they don’t touch the core of the problem. What is shocking is that the right-wing press is actually quite active in voicing these doubts. What was traditionally a centre-left or neoliberal voice now stays silent or rigs the information in a way that portrays Israel as a supreme ethical power that needs to tame the savages.

We need to remember that Poland is going through a process of looking at its own position in the Holocaust. It is still a very fresh and open wound, a very fresh sense of guilt, not like in Germany, where it is almost cemented as part of the national identity. To see the conflict clearly, as two consequential genocides (Holocaust leading to Nakba 1948 – and then Nakba 2023), it needs time and reflection.

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman (RYS): Maybe it’s important to say that, distinct from the postwar German context, as far as I understand, the broad Polish Left continues to include important Polish Jewish figures like Adam Michnik and Konstanty Gerbert, who both work for the Warsaw daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, and have contributed immensely to humanitarian and democratic dissent since their involvement in the Solidarity movement.  Such figures, as well as the few official Jewish institutions in Poland, avoid critique of or endorse Israeli war crimes. Festivalt, a Jewish-led platform for art and activism, remains an exception, having released a statement condemning the Israeli response to October 7th while highlighting its collaboration with Jenin’s Freedom Theatre, which as we speak is trying to survive raids, arrests, and destruction. Then, the Polish Right, in many cases, is simply anti-Jewish. It is against the State of Israel as a Jewish collective and frames the genocide as evidence for inherent Jewish corruption. For instance, administrators in the city of Chrzanów just delayed a public action for Esther’s Willow, a project I co-direct, until after regional elections, as our act, the marking of a former Jewish square, will be used against those holding office.

Was your recent action an attempt to intervene in this debate, to add some kind of different perspective?

JR: We really wanted to shake the chaotic, patchy, unreliable, and skewed images emerging in Poland about what is going on in Gaza and the West Bank. Since the phrase “never again” doesn’t have the resonance here that it does in Germany, I thought: what if we get to the core of the conflict, which is about the land. I was thinking about uprooting, a severed and cut connection to the land, which is the fundamental problem of the situation, one shared by both peoples. The Europeans uprooted the European Jews and started the whole catastrophic chain of events.  It is ongoing in Palestine, where the same crime is being reproduced. We thought “do not uproot”, “nie wykorzeniaj” in Polish, would be the key to understanding the tree’s declaration.

…what is happening in Palestine/Israel is not merely another instantiation of oppression that all nation-states integrally manifest, but part of a specific and specifically unresolved logic of annihilation.

What resonances does your recent action have in a German context? I am thinking especially of the recent controversy surrounding Masha Gessen. The crux of the current debate surrounds Gessen’s comparison of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto with Gaza as a ghetto being liquidated, bringing up questions of interconnectedness and comparison of Palestinian, Jewish, and Polish traumas.

JR: Masha Gessen’s recent article was a revelation for me. I think the German perspective on the Holocaust is extremely limited in the sense that it is compartmentalized. Perhaps an action in Warsaw that directly refers to this error would hit at its core. Maybe it will work as, like Robert says, a triangulation of this problem. It should always be seen in a broader context and not as a German problem, or the German problem. It’s a Polish problem too, it has so many faces and shades. An action in Warsaw gives it a completely different tint. The Polish approach is a lot more visceral, physical, because the Holocaust crimes happened mainly here. Right here on this soil. It will always be a major subject not just in public debate, but in a perpetual cycle of history, which is an organic process. Remembering is different if it refers to physically distant soil, in the absence of organic remains, of places, of forests, under a different sky, under a different angle of light. Really, the Holocaust here comes into every conversation about the past, as an absolute ground zero point. If we included this type of physicality of memory, the life cycle of memory into the dry German view, perhaps something would change. Robert’s text very much includes this kind of organic feature of remembering – or perhaps more of a bodily reaction to the conditions of murder.

RYS: The Israeli regime has crossed an irreversible line and it promised this crossing immediately after the massacre on October 7th. At this point, there are 1.9 million people displaced, two-thirds of Gaza’s built environment in ruins, over 20,000 people murdered. In my earlier project about Gaza and Holocaust memory, Counter-Ruin (2018), I implicitly linked the Warsaw Ghetto with Gaza, in a visceral, intuitive movement—not dissimilar from DO NOT UPROOT.

In response to a massacre of demonstrators in the Great March of Return, I walked 16 kilometers across Berlin with a rusted-off car exhaust pipe tied to my abdomen, the word GAZA painted across my back, and 13 stones I had collected in the streets of Warsaw piled on one hand. Like the Great March of Return, I think I enacted this piece, the first of three such walks, as a warning — but to Europeans who live in the ruins of anti-Jewish genocide, and to myself. Like the walkers in the Great March of Return, I was trying to draw and walk my own line—a line that says what is happening in Palestine/Israel is not merely another instantiation of oppression that all nation-states integrally manifest, but part of a specific and specifically unresolved logic of annihilation. Europe depends upon the State of Israel as restitution. And it was not restitution. It was, and remains, a perpetuation of our persecution; a mere gift of the weapon.

DO NOT UPROOT announces this position at another, more dire, and this time irreversible moment. It announces, from the position of Warsaw — holy Warsaw! — and everything that Warsaw means to the planet, a new era has commenced, and it is time for a too-long averted restitution of the logic of annihilation. Projects I was learning from at the time, like Dor Guez’s book, Al-Lydd, explicitly averted these relations. Joanna did not. And this is why we have come to work together.

JR:  There is a difference between the view from above, the perspective of knowledge and power and the view from below, on a bodily level — a labyrinth, a barricade. I did a project last year called SORRY, an anti-monument, based on this difference. The wall folds itself into letters: S, O, R, R, Y. This makes me think of the German perspective in the sense that it is just an urge to protect a chosen group of people, an urge that is singled out and isolated from the cause and effect sequence. No matter that the Nazi strategies are reproduced. Germany found itself exactly in the same place on a spiral of history. In a different configuration and different context, but the same algorithm is being deployed. With the same problem: there is no bodily level involved, it is just a view from above. Bringing it down to the level of the body is important — hence we used life-saving thermal blankets as flags in our performance. And this is why we used the tree as a figure of this completely different understanding of how we belong to the land. How land produces us as much as it produces trees and other forms of life. How it produces cultures. Reversing the view might change the ethno-nationalist understanding of that very mechanistic, in the sense of what Masha Gessen describes, perspective or paradox of the reproduction of evil.

This seems linked to the text Robert wrote for DO NOT UPROOT in its call not just against the uprooting of particular peoples, but against a broader violence being enacted by the political form of the nation-state.

RYS: In the wake of the October 7th massacre and the machination of this genocide, I felt an exhausted internal political stasis break open. In the short DO NOT UPROOT text, I try to distil what I’ve come to think through the influences of mentors like Joanna, Dirar Kalash, A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh and my recent humble participation in the Kurdish struggle in Rojava, Bakur, and Rojhelat. When in our text, I write, the nation-state is premised on “depopulation, suicidal militarism and racist borders,” I am trying to say our planetary conditions necessitate more than pure resistance to imperialism, war crimes, or settler-colonialism. When the overwhelming structure of nation-states are more often premised on identitarian divisions created themselves by modern territories that claim eternal genealogies; where refugees, exploited workers, silenced poets, and peasants are pitted in a life-death struggle against the descendants of refugees, exploited workers, silenced poets, and peasants amidst broad trans-generational erasures of inconvenient heterogenous languages, cosmologies, and relations.

Warsaw’s palm and the Kurdish anti-statist proposal for universalist, ecofeminist, democratic confederalisms that empower local cultures in tandem and listen foremost to the needs of the land and water are planetary gifts to our shared, messy and more-than-human struggle to survive with dignity and consent. The Kurdish theorist-activist Nastaran Saremy and I call this “imagined land”. Relations to place erupt from particular moments in the land, by way of translocal imaginations and temporal sovereignties. Territorial boundaries have nothing to do with such eruptions. Absolute borders do not mark place, but domination. The palm is a monument to such an eruption, which is why in the nation-state of Poland, it is considered an anti-monument. Nastaran says, “It lives in imagined land.”

Contemporary post-war Polish identity is based on a void in one way or another. During Communism the Jewish fate was diluted by the trauma of the second world war tragedy, which was palpable in every Polish family, whether Jewish or not… the tree is not about a chosen fragment of Polish-Jewish history, but about a principle embedded and repeated in European history that reproduces endless catastrophes on a global scale.

It’s interesting to think of this as a prompt to ask what free Palestine means now, how to keep this from turning into the call for another ethno-national state, how to think of different configurations. It also brings up the memory of Palestine embedded in the tree itself. Often when the palm is discussed, it is seen as bringing the memory of both Jewish life and Israel back to Poland, but how was it also rooted in Joanna’s experience of Palestine and the Second Intifada?

JR: The palm was never supposed to be a completed statement. It was a doubt, a lack of comprehension, unthinkability, a lack of solutions, visions. It’s about conflict that is an abyss. When I went to Palestine for the first time, in 2001, there was a pure fear and tension there that I sensed with my entire body. I was not able to sleep. I remember being in East Jerusalem during the Second Intifada and smelling the stress sweat in the air, hearing the distant sound of shelling in Bethlehem. My image of Israel was based on that anxiety. At the same time, I realized that if I were one of them, the new Israelis in the forties, I would have come, gone through the same trajectory from enthusiasm, kibbutz, labor, ambivalence, to disappointment. It seemed to be unavoidable. When I came back to Warsaw, I deeply felt the void. Jerusalem Avenue seemed to be completely deserted, it needed something, a sign in which this void would culminate and be transformed.  It wasn’t a political statement — but, of course, at the core it was fundamentally political in terms of connection to the land, it was anti-Zionist as much as a tree can be. The inner structure of the palm tree is that it is completely empty, a frame without content. The frame was the history of Jerusalem Avenue. It’s deeply symbolic that this existed invisibly, undetected in the city background.

Contemporary post-war Polish identity is based on a void in one way or another. During Communism the Jewish fate was diluted by the trauma of the second world war tragedy, which was palpable in every Polish family, whether Jewish or not. But the loss was generalized in an unhealthy way. I know it sounds like heresy and I don’t want to compare the traumas. The proper debate exploded after 1989 with such a force that no other issues were admitted into that explosion. The palm tree was put up in 2002, so still at a pretty early stage in the post-transformation time. And my generation was the first to take it onboard. It couldn’t really include dialogue around Israel and Palestine at the time — this is why I mention 2011, when pro-Palestinian activists put a keffiyeh on the tree’s trunk and the issue became really apparent, and 2023 with the genocide in Gaza. The gravity of it transformed the original “frame” as I described it earlier. It became apparent that the tree is not about a chosen fragment of Polish-Jewish history, but about a principle embedded and repeated in European history that reproduces endless catastrophes on a global scale. It is simply about the traumatic consequences of the European project.

Joanna, one of your works, Camping Jenin (2008), a collaboration with Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp, had a lot of interesting parallels to this because it departed from Oxegenator (2007), a project that took place in the site of the former Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. It was a project about reimagining experiences of trauma and how they resonate as a bodily experience. How are these resonances playing out in how you or the tree deals with Jewish and Palestinian trauma in a Polish space?

JR: My idea was that people would experience history and trauma in a way that would avoid using language, therefore freeing it from the structures that language imposes. Oxygenator was a pond with a cloud of oxygenated air hovering over it, but more importantly it was a place to breathe and synchronize breathing with the rhythm of pulsating life around. We knew exactly what kind of ground we were dealing with, how the layers of rubble are mixed with the soil. This was a profoundly physical project — like killing a vampire, putting a stake in its heart. At the same time, it sought to create this living layer on the top of dead rubble, stoked by the life cycles of plants, fish, all beings who were there in the soil, water, and us. To my shock, this was completely understood. People were mesmerised and would sit there for hours. On this land that, as one of the elderly women put it, was literally bathed in blood, every square centimetre traumatised. Where Marek Edelman, a major figure in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, an anti-Zionist, Bund leader, slept in a bunker on the edge of the square.

I went to Freedom Theatre in Jenin with this uplifting hope that if it worked in Poland, it must work in Palestine, which was a little bit naïve. I tripped over my lack of psychological education in a sense, that fresh trauma is not past trauma. I worked with teenagers, boys, who went through the horror of the 2002 Israeli invasion on the Jenin refugee camp. And it was only six years prior to my arrival. They were in a horrible state. The ongoing Israeli harassment which overshadows life in the West Bank on a daily basis doesn’t allow anything to heal. Every minute you are reminded that you are under occupation, controlled, limited, that you have no future. The IDF’s presence strategy is felt at every point. Frankly, it makes me smile when I am reading about the Israeli anxiety, which is incomparable to Palestinian anxiety — it is not even an anxiety, it is simply despair. You live in a constant paralyzing fear that slowly changes you. I was trying to work with that using fiction, to transcend the boys into a space of possibilities, imagination, fairy tales. That was welcome. They didn’t want to stay in reality and face their own trauma or abstract it out. The Oxygenator strategy worked only partially. It was a very different type of trauma, not a scar tissue but an open wound. I was trying to be as careful as possible but I made many mistakes. Luckily I wasn’t alone, I worked with Nabeel al Raee and he was a very good advisor.

It’s also interesting how these projects sit within your broader practice, especially the unrealized Minaret project (2009 – 2011) as a counterpoint to the palm. Robert, you have already mentioned your work Counter-Ruin (2018). You came from Warsaw to Berlin and did an artistic action reacting to the Great March of Return on May 14th, 2018 when 62 Palestinian protesters in Gaza were massacred. You walked from different sites of and monuments to Jewish death to the Israeli embassy, US embassy, Sonnenalle, picking up and placing stones (traditionally laid upon graves as a symbol of remembrance of and respect for the dead in Judaism). Do you see connections to Joanna’s works?

RYS: There are many fundamental connections. The series of three Gaza walks, Counter-Ruin, was created as the public culmination of a long term project called Lost in Jüdischer Friedhof Weissensee (2018), which was influenced by Joanna’s Basia (2009), in which she enacted her then recently deceased mother’s dreamed-of escape from hospital incarceration for progressive psychosis and Alzheimer’s. Around the time I read about this piece, I found myself thinking I had become locked while lost in Berlin’s Jüdischer Friedhof Weissensee, the largest intact and active Jewish cemetery in postwar-Europe. It was the first time in Germany that I spatially dwelled in an uninterrupted community of Jewish generations, from the 19th century to the present, created by Jews themselves and their dead, not artists, museums, or city officials reflecting on a mythology of presence. Basia gave me the idea, indeed the muscle, to reenact a situation that was fervently, necessarily, imagined but which never happened, because the repercussions of such imagining were deeply telling, politicising, and poetic. The ensuing durational performance of being lost in and devoted to this cemetery for six months would envelope my reality. The place became one in which while there I had no choice but to ask myself impossible and fundamental questions about Jewish political existence and otherwise in the contemporary moment.

…these suicides were people who in a desperate way refused to leave, could not leave, their imagined land, and I felt something of the Palestinian struggle in this desperate refusal, as well as the messy impossibility, the labyrinth, of this lineation of our catastrophes.

While working with/in the cemetery, I traveled to Warsaw to meet Joanna and be in the city where my great-grandmother was born. The Great March of Return had begun in Gaza and I was seeing it peripherally, unable to face it. Returning by train from Warsaw to Berlin, it was reported that 62 Palestinians had walked to the Gaza fence, the one broken open on October 7th, and were massacred by IDF snipers. I envisioned walking from the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof, a Nazi deportation site, to the cemetery, placing stones I had collected in Warsaw, on the graves of the many thousand Jewish Berliners who had committed suicide in 1942, during the onset of mandatory deportations for all the city’s Jews.

Why did it feel important to focus specifically on these suicides at first?

RYS: I’m not sure why, and I’m still working this out, I fixated on these suicides, and wanted to link them to Palestinian rights of return and ghettoisation. Perhaps because it had been an honourable, if heretical, transgression of that institution’s norms to bury suicides, and that I learned from it something about manifesting urgent intra-Jewish transgression in a time of need. And because more than any others, these suicides were people who in a desperate way refused to leave, could not leave, their imagined land, and I felt something of the Palestinian struggle in this desperate refusal, as well as the messy impossibility, the labyrinth, of this lineation of our catastrophes. I enacted a slightly revised form of this vision, wherein I also crossed places like the Israeli Embassy, the US embassy (where I intentionally spilled and painstakingly re-gathered my Warsaw stones in front of its police guards), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and Sonnenallee, which is probably the largest Palestinian commercial district in Europe.

Thank you both for sharing your thoughts today! Any final words from both of you?

JR: Perhaps, from my side, I hope DO NOT UPROOT becomes an obvious phrase. We need to think through the living tissue of all the organisms around us to be able to reinvent our political and social structures.

RYS: Yes, imagine land.