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Documenta Racism Crisis

Interview with Documenta15 artist Hamja Ahsan on racism in Germany, the meaning of #HandsOffDocumenta and the class implications of fried chicken


28/08/2022

Hi Hamja, thanks for talking to us. Could you start by saying who you are and what you’re doing in Berlin?

My name is Hamja Ahsan. I’m an artist who was born and raised in London. I was selected by the Documenta15 exhibition as one of the few solo artists coming from Britain. I made a new series of works about Halal fried chicken chains, which are ubiquitous in London. I’m now in Berlin to research Halal fried chicken, and more broadly the place of Muslim diasporas within Berlin.

I’m also generally interested in fried chicken, and its relation to class and race. In London, fried chicken means working class black and brown people. It’s often used by politicians to gain credibility. So, when the Tory politician Rory Stewart was trying to become mayor of London, he got himself filmed eating fried chicken.

Pictures from Hamja’s exhibition (photos Ala Uddin)

How have you found Germany?

Being in Documenta15 has really awakened me to how bad racism, right wing politics and Nazi revivalism are here. I believed that Germany was a more civilized place than Britain, simply because a lot of white-art-world hipsters go and live in Berlin and Leipzig and say how life is so much better there.

I’ve now realised that if you’re Palestinian or Muslim or don’t belong to the Nazi blood family, Germany is actually quite a repressive place. I feel shocked about some of the things that have happened here, especially in relation to Documenta. The fact that the Chancellor interfered in the exhibition is astounding. I was speaking to some Turkish friends living here and they said Erdogan is authoritarian but would never interfere in the Istanbul biennial.

What I find weird about the German art world is how party politics is tied to it. The mayor of Kassel is an ex-cop from the SPD who twinned the city with an ethnically cleansed part of 1948 Palestine. He doesn’t know anything about art and even the staff members make fun of him. Yet he interferes with what artists can say.

I thought Germany was a place of artistic freedom and the opposite is true. It’s the only place I’ve been stalked, abused, and called a terrorist by members of the SPD. It’s the only place where a literal family member of Adolf Hitler’s cabinet – Beatrix von Storch from the AfD – rather richly described us as extremists. This is very shocking and frightening to me.

Documenta is like the Olympics or Mecca of art and should have been the best experience of my life. But it’s turned into the most terrifying, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian. The bureaucracy and the way no one takes responsibility is very deeply embedded in German society where many nice people with a bit of blond hair and blue eyes actually have a Nazi grandfather.

I’ve shown my art all around the world. I’ve spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia, especially in Slovenia. I’ve been to Trump’s America a few times. But I feel like my civil and constitutional freedom is better protected in these places than Germany.

In the US, I can go to an Ivy league university and openly speak about Palestine. Whereas when I came home from Documenta, I was abused and harassed nearly every single day. People called me a terrorist, and that’s never happened before. I was never even a big Palestine activist. It wasn’t that high on my cause list.

The media around Documenta seems totally divorced from any form of reality. The exhibition is extremely diverse – it’s fantastic. Everyone should go and visit it. It shows everything from childcare to neurodiversity and ecology. And a small part of it is concerned with the politics of the MENA region.

I was very shocked to listen to the parliamentary debate, which seemed almost deranged. The AfD were saying in parliament that they don’t like Documenta because it’s got too many Muslims. I was shocked that this is what people say in Parliament. I was also shocked about just how big the AfD are.

Germany’s got a good soft image abroad. But while everyone knows of George Floyd, everyone knows of the Christchurch massacre, no one in the Anglophone world knows about the NSU murders or Hanau. No-one knows about the assassination of the CDU politician Walter Lübcke.

What’s most disturbing is the complicity of the state and the media. I didn’t know what the Axel Springer press was – but it’s not just the Springer press: DW, the German equivalent of the BBC, also has a history of bullying their Arab Muslim brown staff.

Recently, DW sacked 7 Palestinian journalists, who are successfully challenging the sacking in court.

Yes, so it isn’t just the far right. I learned about the Anti-Deutsche and how they had infiltrated the staff network of Documenta. Some of them had been spying on me for things I’d said three years ago, and news stories from the Arab news media that I’d shared.

In Germany, I get accused of being in the Taliban, which is a Sunni organisation, as well as being part of a Marxist guerrilla group, the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], which is secular and atheist, and of supporting the Shia militia and Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq. I’ve not visited any of these countries. I’ve only been to Bangladesh.

There’s a think tank in Vienna called MENA Watch, which has an interview with this guy from the Alliance Against Antisemitism in Kassel. The alliance seems to be one lonely obsessive guy with a blog and 13 Twitter followers. He’s listed the names of artists who are pro-Palestinian, who he sees as antisemitic. The German media take this lonely, weird guy as some sort of authority although he has no journalistic or academic integrity.

The German media have produced a picture that has nothing to do with reality. You go to Documenta expecting to see 1930s Germany, a second Holocaust, and all these very weird things. But the exhibition is actually getting tens of thousands of visitors a day. It’s a very joyous occasion.

The AfD have tried to derail and shut down Documenta. They didn’t like Documenta14 last time because it was too pro-refugee. They attacked the Nigerian artist Olu Oguibe and his monument for refugees, which contains a line from the Bible about welcoming strangers in four different languages.

Now they’ve come to attack Documenta again and to try to shut it down. But this time, everyone seems to have been fooled and the AfD have recruited pro-Israelis. It was strange to see the grandchild of Hitler’s finance minister calling us extremists.

She’s against abortion and same-sex relationships. For a white European, that’s incredibly archaic. She’s so extremist that she describes Le Pen as too socialist or too left wing, which shows how deranged and extreme she is.

Then she visits our exhibition and posts about it – mainly about Black Lives Matter – and describes that as extremism. To me, that’s more about her and the state of Germany. The fact that she can just walk in there and no one bats an eyelid is disturbing and shows the complicity of Germany, and the indifference and lack of partisanship towards actual, real Nazis and fascists.

For people who haven’t been following the Documenta controversy, it started with works shown by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa.

It actually started much before then. There had already been several attempts to derail and disrupt Documenta. The AfD had nakedly said that there were too many Muslim names. I’m probably the most pious Muslim in the whole festival. ruangrupa are not devout Muslims. They sell their own gin and a beer brand at the festival. They might say salaam and stuff, but they’re not very Muslim.

What happened first was that an Islamophobic artist projected this thing called #Documenta1933 onto all the public buildings around Kassel. He put pictures of them as Nazis and homophobes. But there are many queer collectives in the exhibition from around the world, so that’s just nonsense. He’s just doing this because he’s prejudiced against people from Muslim countries. In fact, Beatrix von Storch is much more anti-queer. She’s friends with Bolsonaro, who is also vehemently anti-tolerance and diversity.

That was the first attempt, but it was a bit of a flop. While this guy has a lot of Twitter and Instagram followers, you discover that a lot of them must be fake because some of his posts were retweeted only twice.

There’s been a lot of stuff about West Papua and Indonesia in Taring Padi’s work, but the artwork contained the slogan “West Papuan Lives Matter”; they’re supporting the West Papuan movement. Except that this was demolished by the German police when they took down the so-called “antisemitism” mural.

After that, there were loads of attempts to derail Documenta, like tweets about Documenta being Hitler’s favourite exhibition. But these would only get one retweet or something. There were attempts to discredit the exhibition before it started.

The first major incident, I guess, was when the exhibition space WH22 was broken into and vandalized with neo-Nazi graffiti. The name of the Spanish neo-Nazi youth leader Peralta, who’s known for Islamophobic incitement against Arab migrants, was graffitied all around my exhibition space.

After the bombings of Gaza last year, there was a new wave of cultural awareness of BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions]. Suddenly a lot of cultural figures were so disgusted about the inhumane mass murder and destruction of civilian life, that even Premier League footballers like Sadio Mane would start waving Palestinian flags.

This created a new overground mainstream. Even Dua Lipa, the singer from London, was posting about Gaza. All the artists who were shortlisted for the Turner Prize made a collective statement saying they were appalled at the brutal attacks on Palestine. As a response, the Israeli embassy is attempting to push back against this mainstream cultural wave.

This made Documenta probably the most important battleground for anti-racism and solidarity towards oppressed people in the arts. We should not let this go. We should show the utmost solidarity, firstly for artistic and creative freedom, without interference by the SPD or German foreign policy. It is also our civil and constitutional right to show solidarity with people who have been dehumanized and brutalized.

What was remarkable about the discussion around Documenta is how it quickly moved away from a discussion about the Indonesian works, where arguably a couple of them were potentially problematic. But within a couple of days, it wasn’t about them at all. It was about BDS and artists who support Palestine.

It started with BDS, but it didn’t get very far. There was quite an orchestrated media operation where they took two little details from a 20-year-old painting about the Indonesian genocide of left-wing people in the world’s largest Muslim country, which was under the Suharto dictatorship.

Taring Padi was a collective formed after that dictatorship. They created a ginormous mural, which looks a bit like a Hieronymus Bosch or Where’s Wally? Painting. And in this Where’s Wally? painting, they picked out two figures. One was a figure of a Mossad agent as a pig. This was alongside other intelligence agencies, such as MI5, the CIA, who were all portrayed as animals.

The pig in their work is the same as that used by the Black Panther artist Emory Douglas depicting police. It’s about imperialists and capitalists. These are people who they say they care about class politics and class struggle, not race.

So, it wasn’t antisemitic whatsoever. In fact, both West Germany and Britain were complicit in this genocide and much worse. The West was complicit in the mass murder of between half a million and a million Leftists, and never paid reparations. Germany has never said sorry.

The other little figure is a caricature of an SS soldier. But then, the SS were also complicit in that genocide. I think of artists like Harold Offeh and Kara Walker who also have what you’d call racist caricatures, but it is within the context of their work. It has layers of irony. There’s no hatred.

If you look at Taring Padi’s work, they always propagate multi-faith alliances. They always use the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim symbols together. It’s very clear from their work that they’re an anti-Nazi party. The way they’ve been portrayed in the media as if they’re Nazi propagandists is a total falsehood.

Beyond that, they were actually naive. As a British person, I’d gone through two general election campaigns with Jeremy Corbyn, so I know the playbook. It felt like Taring Padi was Jeremy Corbyn. Like Corbyn, they tried to appease their critics.

What this did was to open the floodgate towards persecution and oppression of the other artists, including me. So, the next day I would get a message saying you are next on our list with a picture of a dog. I got very threatening messages from Germany.

The next big media scare was around an Algerian women’s collective of scholars who had a digital archive of illustrations about children being abused by Israeli occupation soldiers. They also included an image by Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian artist who created Handala. There’s now an attempt to withdraw that from the exhibition.

The artists from Documenta have these very big zoom meetings which stand for artistic freedom, solidarity with the oppressed, a lot of them are Global South artists. They’ve been through colonialism, occupation, imperialism, Fascist coup governments, etc.

I am clearly against antisemitism. I think every arts institution should adopt the Jerusalem declaration on antisemitism. But it seems to me is that they’re not even talking about antisemitism. What they’re talking about is allegiance and loyalty to German foreign policy.

And the idea that our artists, whom you’ve invited as a guest, should have to be in line with your foreign policy, seems to be a very fascist way of doing art. It’s a level of executive control that I’ve never encountered before anywhere I’ve been.

The narrative in the German press was first, “Look, here’s a postcolonial exhibition. We are letting people from the Global South exhibit”. The minute that the people from the Global South started saying things which weren’t according to the set rules, the press began attacking the artists.

Germany takes a lot of pride in Documenta, but actually, when you look deep into the history, the first few Documentas were curated by literal Nazis. And then Documenta10, which was curated by a French woman, Catherine David, created a bit of a controversy. Even the obsessive guy who runs the antisemitism blog in Kassel says she’s antisemitic.

But after Documenta11 in 2002, the game changed. Black and brown people were allowed more of a centre stage. And that inspired me. I dreamed of being in Documenta since then.

In the last 20 years, as Documenta has become more progressive, more internationalist, more black and brown faces in control, German society has becoming more regressive, right wing fascistic. Pegida started, the AfD became such a huge movement. There were all these Nazi mass murders. Today in Germany, far right violence is at a 20-year high.

So, it seemed German society was going one way and the art world was going another, which was going to create a fault line. And that’s what we’re seeing today.

Added to this, antisemitic incidents are rising, and the reaction of the political centre and part of the Left is to try to exclude any artist who is associated with BDS.

Yeah. I was very much wary of Germany because Kamila Shamsie, the British Pakistani novelist had an award taken away from her. My friend, the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, is very bleak about the state of Germany with attacks against Mohammed Al-Kurd and Achilles Mbembe, the brilliant black philosopher.

All of us see ourselves as being punished as part of this wider war against cultural workers who want solidarity with the oppressed.

How would you respond to someone in Germany saying, “Yes but BDS is the same as the Nazis saying, ‘Don’t buy from Jews?’”

Clearly that’s rubbish, and they should take a closer look. In Britain, every progressive person, whether liberal or left, supports BDS. Most trade unions support BDS.

Let’s look at house demolitions. A British company, Caterpillar, is used to bulldoze people’s houses. I don’t think that any human being alive would say that bulldozing somebody’s house is an acceptable way for a State to behave. This is why we boycott Caterpillar. There’s also the question of international law. Settlements are illegal. It’s modelled on the South African movement, which was effective.

Some of my best teachers are Israeli Jews. Tanya Reinhart wrote the first book I read about Israel/Palestine. There’s Gideon Levy. Even within Israel, there’s a movement called Boycott From Within. There are Israeli Jews living in Berlin who support BDS. When you see a house bulldozed, there’s people who think that is unacceptable, who are for BDS. And there are people who think it is acceptable, and they’re the anti-BDS.

I have this example in Documenta. I meet the staff and they’re very lovely young people interested in art. They come across as very nice. Then as soon as you say that Israel’s an apartheid state, they’ll suddenly be a bit tetchy and weird. They can’t swallow something that three human rights organisations – Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and Human Rights Watch – have affirmed. I find that white Germany just needs to be a bit more honest with itself.

The other horrible tendency is that while there is a horrible rise in antisemitic attacks, it is Nazis, Fascists and White Supremacists who are responsible, but Muslim minorities are scapegoated for this. Germany just needs to look in the mirror.

What happens next for Documenta and for you?

Everyone in Documenta has a guillotine hanging over their heads. Many are traumatized, many are depressed. It’s a mental health crisis. When I came back home, I couldn’t function; I didn’t know what had been written about me in the press. People were stalking me and slandering me. There was neo-Nazi graffiti.

It was crazy. Some of my work still isn’t properly installed yet. They derailed and disrupted their proudest cultural export to maintain an alliance with an illegal occupation by an Apartheid regime. I still don’t know what’s going to be said about me next week. Each day, a new shocking and disturbing thing happens.

Some of us have been physically attacked. Women in Algeria who are the most brilliant African female scholars are being witch-hunted, abused, and slandered. People think of Germany as such a welcoming place, and I’m finding the opposite. But I’m not going to let the racists win. That’s why I’m back in Germany.

I can walk down the street in London with a Palestine T-shirt and everyone wants to high-five me. When I do that in Kassel, I hear that they say “Here comes the Documenta artist. Let’s burn them alive. Documenta should be for German artists.” This makes me glad that I don’t speak or understand German.

I really admire the resilience of the Arab diaspora within Berlin, and I hope that one day Germany and colonised people can work together for a decolonial future.

Hamja is on Instagram @shyradicals and Twitter @hamjaahsan.

Hamja Ahsan (photo: Florian Cramer)

Rise Up (against neocolonial activism)!

A new documentary highlights important struggles abroad, but is reluctant to show similar fights in today’s Germany


25/08/2022

The documentary “Rise Up” by Marco Heinig, Steffen Maurer, Luise Burchard and Luca Vogel was released in Berlin last week. The film is built upon inspiring stories, a compelling narrative and breath-taking images. What else is there to ask for? In times of a global pandemic, wars and ever increasing inequality we cannot but welcome such a work that, more so than books and academic discussions, has the potential to reach a wide audience and encourage us all to resist injustice. On top of this, I had the pleasure of being in the premiere in a somewhat epic scenography: in the gorgeous Freiluftkino in Friedrichshain and in the presence of a committed audience that remained despite the rain, sheltered only by their open umbrellas.

Having said that, as a critical scholar, I must say that there is, nevertheless, a core aspect of the film that is deserves to be pointed out. The goal of this essay is to open the discussion and highlight that, even within transformative initiatives, there is room for improvement.

An Afro-South African female activist shares her decades-long struggle against Apartheid and how she was all but satisfied by the end of the legal segregation system. Instead, she keeps on struggling for racial and gender equality in her country and abroad. A young Chilean feminist from the suburbs invites the public to feel and understand the struggle against the neoliberal government of Sebastian Piñera and the remnants of the last dictatorship. An Afro-American male activist opens the door to his long commitment to fighting police brutality in the core of the Imperium. A female East German socialist sheds light on her long fight against the DDR and how the goal was never to become part of capitalist West Germany but to achieve real socialism. Finally, a young white female activist shares her current activism in Rojava against state terror.

What is the message that the movie is transmitting with this choice? Is present day Germany too perfect to find a cause to fight for?

The problematic issue is as follows. On the one hand, the Latino activist in Chile, the female and Afro activist in South Africa, the Afro-American in the USA and the socialist activist in East Germany were/are all fighting against local injustices affecting their communities. In other words, the movie shows the struggles conducted by these “others” (Latino, socialists, Afro) and the social problems they face in their places of origin. On the other hand, when the documentary turns to the young white German activist (from current capitalist Germany), there is a striking difference from the other cases. She shares that she got to believe she should have been born in the active 1960s; i.e., that she was born in the wrong time and place as she could not find a community to fight with. She needed to discover the misery and human rights violations in Rojava to understand that she was born at the correct moment. In short, the creators chose a white, presumably middle-class, young, German who is the only one not fighting against local injustices.

What is the message that the movie is transmitting with this choice? Is present day Germany too perfect to find a cause to fight for? While all the other territories of “others” are full of injustices to be fought against, Germany offers no other possibility than travelling all the way to Rojava to find a reason to “rise up”? Would the film not be better off by pointing out the activism against gentrification and corporate power that leave countless people without the right to housing in Germany? Or those with a migration background, people of colour, and the many others affected and fighting against racism? Or those suffering from the empowerment of far-right extremism? What about those victims of police brutality as the 16-year old asylum seeker killed by police (body cameras suspiciously shut down) just last week? Unfortunately, the documentary only offers silent images of those conflicts but fails to put them at the forefront.

…the “bad” (imperialism, colonialism) and “good” (human rights, activism) tools of Northern intervention follow the same ethnocentric and stigmatizing mechanisms that… encompass harmful consequences for the so-called “others”.

This unfortunate choice ends up reproducing what Makau Mutua, a Kenyan-American critical scholar, characterizes as the saviour-savage-victim metaphor: the savages and victims are usually in the Third World, while the saviours are located in the North. In his article “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights”, he explains that “the human rights movement is marked by a damning metaphor. The grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext that depicts an epochal contest pitting savage, on the one hand, against victims and saviours, on the other”. This describes Northern countries as successful in terms of controlling their savages under the guidelines of international law (they are the “good” states), in opposition to the “evil” states, which express themselves through anti-democratic, or other authoritarian culture. In turn, the victim figure is so powerless that they need help from the North. That is how the saviour is represented by the “good” Northern countries, international non-governmental organizations, senior white academics and also good-heart activists that get involved in the situation to protect the victims from the savages. In short, within this metaphor, the North intervenes as a “saviour” in internal conflicts between “savages” and “victims” mostly located within or between global South nations. Savages, and victims “are generally non-white and non-Western, while the saviours are white.”

In his work, Mutua goes even further and traces a parallel between human rights and colonialism. He acknowledges that “colonialism was driven by ignoble motives while the human rights movement was inspired by the noblest of human ideals”. How­ever, he points out, despite these differences, “both streams of historical moment are part of a Western push to trans­form non-European peoples.” Additionally, Mutua argues that for the purpose of self-legitimization, both, colonialism, and human rights/international law have developed narratives of salvation and mankind. Colonialism has been associated with the “progressive” goals of civilization and development. In turn, human rights are framed within a narrative of equality and fraternity in which all nations are formally regarded as equal partners joined together to ensure global values. Thus, the “bad” (imperialism, colonialism) and “good” (human rights, activism) tools of Northern intervention follow the same ethnocentric and stigmatizing mechanisms that, as described by the SVS metaphor, encompass harmful consequences for the so-called “others”.

Does the documentary reaffirm this pervasive SVS metaphor? Unfortunately, I left the park feeling that, despite its good intentions, the film ends up endorsing that “savages” are perpetrating terrible injustices in Rojave, that the local population is the victim suffering them, and that the white young do-gooder German activist, who was not inspired enough by the injustices in her territory, is the saviour who travelled miles to save those out there.

Rise Up is currently showing in some German cinemas

 

Hypocrisy, Holocaust and Abbas

The manufactured outrage over Abbas’ remarks obscures Israel’s routine exploitation of the Holocaust. Guest article by journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein


24/08/2022

Last week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas traveled to Germany, where he held a press conference with German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. During the event, he was asked a Gotcha question:

Asked whether as Palestinian leader he planned to apologize to Israel and Germany for the attack ahead of the 50th anniversary, Abbas responded instead by citing allegations of atrocities committed by Israel since 1947.
“If we want to go over the past, go ahead,” Abbas, who was speaking Arabic, told the reporters.
“I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed in 50 Palestinian villages… 50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts,” he said, taking care to pronounce the final word in English.

Before delving into Abbas’ statement, it’s important to note that Mahmoud Abbas is no more the spokesperson of the Palestinian people than Donald Trump is the spokesperson for the American people. He is little more than a doddering potentate. A figurehead for a corrupt regime, who has betrayed, rather than served his people. My criticism below of the manufactured controversy over his remarks, is by no means a defense of the man himself or his leadership of the Palestinian people.

That being said, all of the faux outrage directed at Abbas’ response obscures a number of unsavory aspects of the incident and the world’s response.  First, why should Abbas apologize for the Munich Massacre? Though the Black September militant who organized the attack claimed Abbas provided financing for it, the claim was made 23 years after the Munich massacre. The Palestinian Authority, which he now leads, did not even exist.

Does Joe Biden owe an apology to Canada for America’s invasion during the War of 1812? Do Mexican journalists ask Joe Biden to apologize for stealing most of what is now the American Southwest in the Mexican War?

The question asked during the news conference was deliberately provocative. Unfortunately, Abbas was unprepared for it and walked right into a trap. He should have merely said something like what I wrote above and dismissed the question for what it was.

Second, the question was clearly asked in bad faith. Abbas’ outrage was justified. But lost in the maelstrom of denunciation is that Abbas was clearly engaged in hyperbole. The fact that he mentioned “50 slaughters, 50 massacres” before he added “50 Holocausts,” confirms this. Abbas does not literally believe Israel committed 50 Holocausts. Hyperbole is a common trope in political debate, including by Israel and its leaders.

For example, Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban defended Israel’s 1967 conquest of the West Bank and refusal to withdraw. He claimed that doing so would return it to “Auschwitz borders.” The statement was ludicrous on its face, given that Israel had proven during the war (and every war since) its absolute superiority to all the Arab armies it faced. Nevertheless, the mere mention of “Auschwitz” was enough to silence anyone bold enough to level criticism.

Similarly, Shimon Peres told a group of foreign diplomats in 2006 that an Iranian nuclear weapon (which Iran does not have) would be “a flying gas chamber.” Of course, this was hyperbole. But no one took him to task because Israelis are allowed to draw outrageous historical parallels to the Holocaust, while no one else can.

David Ben Gurion, desperate to ensure a Jewish majority in post-1948 Palestine, used Holocaust refugees to do so. Such a demographic majority was critical to his claim that Israel must be majority-Jewish; because this validated its claim to be the nation-state of the Jewish people. After the survivors immigrated, they were left to their own devices. One could argue that German reparations offered them more support than the State of Israel did. To this day, the few remaining survivors receive virtually no government support. Many live in abject poverty.

Third, Abbas’ statement was borne of desperation.  Israel has engaged in apartheid and mass murder of Palestinians for the past 70 years. The International Criminal Court has found sufficient evidence that it plans to open an investigation of potential Israeli war crimes. Though controversial, a number of genocide scholars have argued that such ongoing suffering constitutes genocide. I have similarly argued this here. When an entire people face enormous suffering with no recourse, they will do and say things for the sake of dramatizing their suffering to the world.  Given how little the world cares about Palestinian suffering, Abbas’ use of the term was completely understandable.

Israel’s is not the genocide of Nazi Germany carried out over a four-year period.  Nor the genocide of Pol Pot or Rwanda, which also happened over a much shorter period than Israel’s 70-year systematic campaign to erase Palestinian rights, civil society, and existence. Israel’s criminality over that period constitutes a creeping genocide, not carried out in a single systematic program, but rather over decades with multiple complementary methods of gradually erasing Palestinian identity. It’s akin to dropping frogs into warm water and raising the temperature until they are boiled alive.

Israel’s defenders bristle at the use of the term. But the UN definition of genocide clearly fits Israeli policies since 1948. Though actual extermination and mass murder are major factors defining the term, there are a number of other definitions which clearly match Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. One of them is the Nakba, the expulsion during the 1948 War of 1-million indigenous Palestinians from their native homes (and 300,000 more after the 1967 War). As Hanin Majadli wrote in Haaretz:

For years, the Palestinians have been trying to tell the story of their Nakba because, from their perspective, it is their holocaust.
…We also heard this week that the army killed five children in an attack in Gaza during Operation Breaking Dawn. Not a holocaust, but how would you describe this disaster? And this is just one disaster out of hundreds and thousands that sometimes occur every day, every week and every month, and in every operation. How would you describe the fact that, despite all this, Israel doesn’t recognize its crimes…
…One thing Israeli Jews are experts at is being shocked that their catastrophe, their trauma, their tragedy, is not recognized. Because only they exist, only they are victims. It is a little ironic that Abbas is now being crucified.

Another objectionable characteristic of the Israeli response to Abbas is the implicit view that Jews, and by conflation Israelis, have the sole right to use of the term “Holocaust.” That this event was sui generis. That Jewish suffering sets the Holocaust apart from any similar act of mass murder.

This is one of the reasons Israel has refused to label the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians as genocide. In addition, Israel has supplied weapons to a number of regimes engaged in genocide, including Rwanda, Burma, and South Sudan. Any Jew who wishes the world to recognize the Nazi Holocaust should treat other peoples who suffered similar tragedies as they would be treated. And above all they must never aid and abet contemporary genocides.

Arguing against Israel’s sole ownership of the Holocaust, survivors themselves like Hajo Meyer, Hedy Epstein, Chava Folman-Raban, objected to Israeli policies and did so in the name of themselves and their fellow victims. They likened Israeli crimes to those of the Nazis. As my friend Tony Greenstein wrote to me: Israel exploits the souls of the Jewish dead to legitimate its crimes. Let’s name it Holowashing. Such abuse of their memory is a chilul ha’shem (desecration of God’s name).

Personally, many of my relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Thus, I do not note such parallels lightly.

Even Israel’s then-deputy chief of staff, Yair Golan, warned in an unprecedented speech that Israel was turning into a latter-day Nazi Germany:

“If there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating processes that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in the year 2016,” he said.
…He called on Israelis to…“uproot from among us buds of intolerance, buds of violence, buds of self-destruction on the path to ethical deterioration.”

If an IDF general can compare Israel to Nazi Germany, why can’t a Palestinian, actually suffering under the Israeli jackboot?

Further, the victims of the Holocaust were Jews (and Roma, gays, socialists, etc.), not Israelis. Israel did not yet exist. So why should we permit Israel to wrest this historical tragedy from the Diaspora Jews who were its victims?

When Eichmann visited pre-state Palestine in 1937 he said that were he born a Jew, he too would be a Zionist. He too clearly distinguished between Diaspora Jews, whom he despised; and Zionists, whom he praised (because they would rid Europe of the “Jewish problem”). Israelis too shared a similar disdain for Diaspora Jews in general and Holocaust survivors in particular.

Ben Gurion once infamously said that he would prefer rescuing half of European Jewry – if it meant they emigrated to Israel – than saving all of the Holocaust victims if it meant they did not come to Israel. In fact, Zionist Israel despised Holocaust victims, seeing them as going like “sheep to the slaughter.”

Israel’s implied monopoly on the term, unfortunately enables it to define who may or may use it, and how they may use it. Israel’s outrage concerning the German incident is an attempt to constrict debate on Palestine. It is a form of linguistic policing which denies Palestinians access to their own suffering.

Does a rapist get to tell their victim what terms the victim may or may not use to describe the crime committed? Does white America have the right to tell Native Americans that the former didn’t commit genocide? These examples warn against permitting perpetrators to define their own crimes.

It’s also troubling that the world has embraced Israeli hegemony over issues like anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Germany, in particular, has codified the misguided IHRA “definition” of anti-Semitism as law. This has led to the absurd result of arresting Israeli Jews for protesting against Israeli policies. It has led to the dismissal of German-Palestinian newscasters from their jobs on trumped-up charges of being anti-Israel and, by extension, anti-Semitic.

In the case of the Heidelberg 3, they were victorious and all charges dropped against them. An independent report commissioned by Deutsche Welle vindicated the Palestinian staff and found the charges against them were also unfounded.

Germany, because of its role in the extermination of European Jewry, must navigate a minefield of moral ambiguities. While it must embrace traditional democratic values of free speech for critics of Israel, it must also pay respect to Israel as the state borne out of the Nazi Holocaust.

But the German government has become unmoored in facing that conflict. It has abandoned free speech in favor of the Israeli juggernaut. It has permitted itself to be extorted (willingly) by Germany’s Israel Lobby and the Israeli government itself.

Because of guilt over past sins, Germany feels the only way to make amends is by capitulating to every Israeli demand. The current debate over anti-Semitism in Germany has little to do with the Holocaust or anti-Semitism; and everything to do with a political means for Israel to assert its control over its own image throughout Europe and the world. The only way it can suppress criticism of its crimes against the Palestinian people is by invoking the red-herrings of Holocaust and anti-Semitism.

In Germany’s context, it’s important to remember what I wrote above: that the Holocaust was a crime against Jews. Its moral obligation is to Jews, not to Israel. Nor does Israel represent all Jews. In fact, the conflation of Israel with Judaism and Jews is a longstanding anti-Semitic trope.

Israel must not be permitted to distort the lessons of the Holocaust in order to protect it from its own crimes. By giving Israel carte blanche in this regard, the world compounds these crimes and renders it complicit in them.

Corbyn: The fight against social inequality is the core challenge of left-wing politics

A German journalist reports from a rally in Edinburgh


22/08/2022

Introduction: Sarah Alemu from Wedding, Berlin, was in Edinburgh to witness an interview with Jeremy Corbyn. This is her report.

The Edinburgh fringe festival is the world’s largest theatre festival. It takes place every year in August in the Scottish capital. As part of this year’s festival, Scottish journalist Graham Spiers spoke on 9th August with Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the British Labour Party and MP for Islington North in London.

Like other events in the festival, the meeting was limited to just 60 minutes. The Grand Hall of the Stand’s New Town theatre was full to capacity – outside you had to wait for 45 minutes in a long queue of young and old people who were clearly Corbyn fans.

Spiers began by asking Jeremy what would have been different if he had become prime minister in 2017 or 2019. Corbyn replies that things would be very different. The first thing that he would have done, and which should be the duty of every government, would have been to help the many homeless people in the country.

He stated that life would also have been better for many young people. At present, many are looking at a very uncertain future, particularly in England, where they still have to pay tuition fees, and leave University with large debts.

Labour is very popular among young voters under 30. It had been more of a problem to appeal to older voters, which according to him needs to be worked on in the future.

Corbyn spoke of further core tasks of his politics, such as fighting inflation, getting the gas problem under control, job security, wage increases, and more social justice in general. In recent years, the gap between rich and poor has widened – wages have been falling in the last ten years. The need to revoke the Conservative Party’s anti-union laws.

Corbyn received much applause when he said that it was not wage rises which had caused the current immense inflation, but the profit-making of those who already have a lot. When asked why he had lost the election, he blamed great resistance against himself. Rich and influential people did not want a Labour Party with progressive politics. He estimated that at the beginning of his election campaign, 90% of the press were against him.

Corbyn only spoke briefly about resistance within his own party. Overall he seems to be cautiously optimistic about the future of his politics. As an example, he referred to the slowly increasing membership of trade unions. He also said that within Labour, an internal party debate is necessary.

So, he said, MPs must have a closer connection to their constituencies. The current problem with the Tories is that they lack this closeness to the people. It is frightening how little care they show. This is an opportunity for the Labour Party.

Corbyn also mentioned the health system, and in particular care. He went on to say that state control over the housing market is an important part of left-wing politics. It is not acceptable to leave rent rises to the market – this would lead to an explosion of costs, as we can see in Edinburgh.

Asked about the renewed referendum for Scottish independence, he replied that Scots must have the right to decide for themselves whether they want to live in an independent state. However, he conceded that his government would have made more money available to the Scots. It sounded like he hoped that Scotland would vote against independence. But the “Better together” campaign of the Scottish Labour Party, together with the Conservatives had been a huge mistake.

The Brexit campaign also weakened the Labour Party. There were Labour strongholds which voted for Brexit. Labour would not have been able to convince them with the aim of staying in the EU.

The interview lasted for approximately 40 minutes, after which there were 20 minutes for questions from the public. One of the first questions asked Corbyn for his views on refugee politics. Corbyn clearly called for the right of refugees to stay. It is not illegal to ask for asylum.

However, he saw a problem with the way in which refugees from different countries are treated unequally. If something applies to Ukrainian refugees, for example, it should also apply to refugees from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from Palestine, etc.

Asked about the chances for a change of government, Corbyn was cautiously optimistic. The Labour Party could win the next election. However, for this to happen, they need a credible programme which is close to the people and with the growing inequality in the country as a central issue.

Asked to elaborate more, Corbyn mentioned four big themes that should be central to Labour’s election campaign – housing the homeless, taking the “Big Five” (electricity, gas, rail, post and water) into public ownership, investing in social housing and controlling private rents.

After exactly one hour the meeting ended with standing ovations. Unfortunately, Corbyn left the stage very quickly, and since photography during the interview was strictly forbidden, interested observers were left with a stage containing two antique chairs in the centre.

Translation from the original German: Phil Butland

To undermine NATO retrenchment, the left must fight to win the peace.

Ali Khan offers a provocation for supporting Ukraine’s military effort


21/08/2022

Today’s radical left has long recognised only one foe, that which Ayatollah Khomeini aptly titled “The Great Satan” – namely the USA. Little attention was paid lately to about “The Lesser Satan” – or Russia. For over 30 years after the fall of the USSR, we only imagined a single imperialist actor on the world stage. But 179 days ago we were reminded of the presence of another imperialist contender with full force. For too many, memories of the World War I collaboration of Social Democratic parties and the labour movement linger. The depressing jingoism of Western Europe and the USA prevents us from assessing a moral and rational response to the situation. As useful as historical parallels are, when we face a situation with almost no convenient parallel, at least none that are readily accessible and understandable to a population at large, we face a most difficult intellectual challenge. Let us not be fazed.

Grudgingly, we must admit that the US and NATO allies were correct on several points, in a way their past record made impossible for a sceptical left to accept. Even the Ukrainian government struggled to accept US intelligence of an impending attack. Furthermore, NATO support to Ukraine in the form of training, intelligence, munitions and modern weaponry was decisive in helping overcome Russian numerical superiority. For context, the US has supplied one third of its stockpile of the iconic Javelin missiles that have been so effective in stopping Russian armour. NATO is training brigades of soldiers to use the latest military equipment that the US has to offer; in addition to training up an officer corps to lead the influx of new recruits being mobilised. Initially, we feared NATO intervention escalating in a spiral that would see a battle of the nations take place on Ukrainian soil, culminating in a nuclear device being deployed by a desperate Russia. Instead, NATO has shown restraint in comparison to the Russian army.

Some fear Ukraine will become the next Afghanistan as a hawkish Hilary Clinton suggested, cannon fodder for imperialist competition that will be abandoned immediately after. I find this to be revealing when leftists accept the words of a failed politician like her at face value. Afghanistan is a Muslim country, far outside the orbit of the West. It was left to rot precisely because it was, for all intents and purposes, a backwater whose instability posed no immediate trouble to Europe or the US. Leftists who think that Ukraine will be left to a group of far-right extremists in the Azov Battalion mould as her citizens are left to descend into a civil war on the doorstep of Europe, forget the material mechanics of racism.

That is not to say that an impoverished and traumatised Ukrainian population will be exempt from exploitation. But comparisons with Afghanistan are terribly counter-productive on multiple levels. Even if the risk of Ukraine becoming another Afghanistan after the war is invoked, it does not in any way delegitimise the validity of arming Ukrainians to defend themselves. If anything, this historical awareness gives the left the best point of entry into the debate.

The blueprint of a post-war Ukraine has already been laid out. As Peter Korotaev has argued in Jacobin, Ukraine’s economy is being suffocated by neoliberal dogmas in the midst of a war to defend its existence. International institutions are sowing the seeds for economic subjugation that will worsen the conditions that Putin sought to exploit in the first instance. Impoverished Ukrainians will be split into a reserve pool of labour into three tiers – highly educated labourers who work in Northern European economies, skilled manual workers supplementing central European economies like Poland and Hungary, and then those left in Ukraine who will supply the ultra-cheap labour to repay Ukraine’s post-war debts.

Ukrainian refugees are being let down by the UK government, face risks of human trafficking and sexual exploitation because of inconsistent provisions by governments happy to share arms but not give aid. In a sickening twist, Ukrainian refugees are treated as “perfect victims” and receive preferential treatment over refugees from countries like Syria. It is on these issues that the left can expose and resist the hypocrisy of the West. By defending the internationally enshrined rights of refugees, by fighting against any bifurcation of refugee status, and by launching a pre-emptive war to win the peace can the left can reclaim its position of moral leadership. But that project can never get in stride if we do not support the Ukrainian war effort militarily.

We fell into a moral trap at the start of this war where we let the presence of the far-right within Ukrainian politics hesitate from recognising Russian imperialism. We were focused on blaming NATO’s expansionary ambitions while failing to recognise the legitimacy the invasion has conferred on NATO in addition to the material misery the invasion has caused hundreds of millions of people in the Global South due to energy and subsequently food shortages. Javelin missiles and HIMARS rockets did not cause a food shortage, a naval blockade of Odessa did. This blindness is perhaps exemplified by the venerable Jeremy Corbyn, who wants peace but does not seem to have a plan for achieving it outside an idealistic framework of pacifism. Nothing in the Russian attack gives a hint of rationality or pragmatism, nothing in Putin’s statements nor in Medvedev’s suggests a desire for peace. Furthermore, Antifascist Europe has covered the influence of neo-Nazism within the Russian state extensively. It would follow therefore, that leftists should support an aggressive approach to rooting out the power of fascism within the Russian state.

This is not to offer a blank cheque as the German government has offered to the Bundeswehr. It does not mean advocating for troops to be sent to fight against Russia. But given the military imbalance, it should not be uncontroversial to say that Ukraine ought to be supported until every Russian soldier is expelled from Ukraine and this includes Crimea. People may balk at this suggestion but it is no different to demanding, rightly, that Israeli settlers give up their stolen Palestinian lands. As unrealistic as it sounds, and acknowledging the total lack of solidarity shown by Ukraine towards Palestine, the principles of national sovereignty obliges us to support these ambitions. Just as Palestinians need not be perfect victims for us to defend them against imperialism, as for Ukrainians.

Irrespective of military support in the present, we do not need to concede a permanent rearmament in Europe for the next decade at the expense of social spending and refugee rights. The left’s political support for a Ukrainian military victory should be tied to a commitment to upholding international conventions on refugee rights and adequate social spending, on an equal priority basis to any jingoistic ambitions concocted by the establishment.

If a ravaged Ukraine, a poorer Europe, and a hungrier Global South is allowed to be the outcome of Ukrainian military success, then victory against the Russian Army will be Pyrrhic. If the left organises solely against NATO and US militarism, it will leave its most important flank unguarded. A permanent stalemate with a Russian occupied Donbas will entrench the militarism of NATO for decades and make it politically impossible to prioritise the primary concerns of the left. It is on this basis of winning the peace and supporting the fundamental right of a people to defend themselves, that I have shifted towards strictly enabling military support that facilitates the Ukrainian army’s effort to liberate the Donbas and Crimea.

This article is intended to provoke a debate and does not necessarily reflect the views of theleftberlin editorial board. If you would like to respond to the article, please contact us on team@theleftberlin.com