Ever since Tempelhof Airport closed for air traffic back in 2008, the debates about what to do with the gargantuan Nazi building haven’t let up.
Just as the United Nations Human Rights Council have determined that Israel is indeed committing genocide in Gaza, Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) has offered Tempelhof’s main hall for a display of Israeli war propaganda. An exhibition about the Nova music festival, where 378 Israelis were killed by Hamas fighters, is set to open on October 7.
After stops in New York City—where organizers claimed there were 100,000 visitors—as well as Los Angeles and Washington, the exhibition will be on display in Berlin. As Tagesspiegel have reported, the government is paying 1,383,840.33 euros for this, at a time when the city’s culture budget is being slashed by 110 million euros.
Context?
Far-right tabloid B.Z. claims that the Nova festival was the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. As I have written before, this is false. The biggest massacre of Jews since 1945 was the Argentinian military coup of 1976—which was supported by the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Israel (and, of course, also by Springer newspapers like B.Z.)
The one-hour documentary on October 7 from Al Jazeera Investigations includes images of gruesome war crimes—such as Hamas fighters firing on civilians as they cower in a bunker at minute 19:00)—but without omitting the context. The attack was not directed at a “site of peace and love”; people were dancing next to the barbed-wire fence of an open-air prison. October 7 took place after 75 years of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing, in what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has called an “incremental genocide”.
The recreation of the Nova festival—one reviewer called it a “nightmare vision of the Instagram museum” full of “flashing haunted house tactics”—is intended to make us forget everything that happened before and after. Visitors are supposed to feel empathy for 378 Israelis, yet nothing for at least 65,000 murdered Palestinians.
On October 7, a total of 36 Israeli children were killed. Israel has murdered an average of 28 children every single day since then. Why do only some children deserve remembrance? It feels quaint to say that every human life has equal value. As bourgeois society eats itself alive, it abandons any pretense of universalism.
Selective empathy is a hallmark of imperialism: “our” people deserve empathy, while the others are “human animals”, in the words of Israeli war criminal Yoav Gallant.
War propaganda
In a long and moving essay in the Guardian, Naomi Klein draws a fascinating parallel between current Israeli propaganda and the Indian Rebellion of 1857-68. Even as the British Empire massacred over 100,000 civilians in the colony, people in the metropolis were shown “horror-filled propaganda art” including “the Treacherous Massacre of English Women and Children”. The most high-tech visuals of the time, like wrap-around panoramas, were used to evoke empathy for civilian colonizers in order to justify violence against the colonized. As Naomi Klein puts it:
“Consumers of these experiences are encouraged to feel a distilled bond with the victims, who are the essence of good, and a distilled hatred for their aggressors, who are the essence of evil. The traumatized state is pure feeling, pure reaction.”
To take a more German example: in early 1904, the Herero and Nama people in Namibia launched a revolt against German colonial authorities. It began when indigenous people killed 100 settlers, including women and children. This was used as a justification for genocide: in the next three years, colonial troops massacred tens of thousands of people. Can you imagine an exhibition about those 100 settlers with no mention of the context?
Berlin
The Berlin exhibition is organized by First Music Production GmbH & Co. KG, a company without a website, where public records would seem to indicate it’s run by a bankruptcy lawyer. Tickets cost €20.60. I have asked the Berlin Senate administration for culture how much they are spending to commemorate Palestinian victims of genocide. I suspect it is zero, but I will update this piece when I hear back from them.
I don’t think anyone in the Berlin government would explicitly say that Israeli lives are worth more than Palestinian lives. But that is their policy: they pay to commemorate Israelis, while they send the police to beat up people commemorating Palestinians. Wegner has said the exhibition shows the “barbaric trail of death left behind on October 7”. But he has no words about the barbaric trail of death left by the IDF and its predecessors, from the Nakba until today.
The mayor also has a long record of praising notorious antisemites like Elon Musk and Heinrich Lummer. Even when asked directly, he refuses to distance himself from men who constantly inveigh against evil Jewish conspiracy that controls the world. It is safe to say that his support for Israel has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. No, German conservatives like Zionism because they agree that Jews don’t really belong in the diaspora: and because Israel helps maintain imperialist control of a geopolitically essential region.
Propaganda like this is designed to hijack our empathy. Scenes from the Nova festival really can remind us of parties we’ve all been to. Scenes from Gaza, in contrast, are so horrific that it’s hard to picture ourselves in them.
We need to reject this manipulation with a fight for universalism. We want a world in which every human being has equal rights, which requires dismantling every system of capitalist exploitation, racist oppression, and imperialist plunder.
Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.
