Originalversion auf Deutsch mit allen Unterzeichnenden hier
Original German version here with full list of signatories

English translation:

Letter from Berlin – An Appeal to the German Public by Critical Academics

Since the massacres committed by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the subsequent collective punishment of Gaza by the Israeli army, Berlin authorities have banned numerous protests in solidarity with the civilian population in Gaza. These include a demonstration by Jewish associations, a demonstration under the motto “Youth Against Racism,” as well as numerous demonstrations by Palestinian associations, despite their clear framing as pro-peace events. As critical academics, we call on the state government to immediately cease and desist from political repression of this kind, which also includes repressive instructions to schools issued by the Berlin Senate (e.g. to ban the wearing of the Palestinian keffiyeh).

Following October 7, there has been an increase in antisemitic attacks in Berlin. Since then, police repression against Palestinians or those in solidarity with Palestine, as well as against large parts of the population in the largely migrant Berlin district of Neukölln, has also reached alarming levels. Ensuring the safety of Jewish people in Berlin requires a response from society as a whole, including antifascist structures and teaching programs, democratic political education (which would entail reversing major funding cuts), and a better understanding of the diversity of Jewish life. Instead, an entire district is being criminalized by repressive measures like racial profiling. These developments also call for a reaction of solidarity. Jewish people as well as Palestinian youth and children experience police violence in the context of demonstrations due to the escalation of state repression. This violation of fundamental rights to free speech and assembly is unacceptable and far from an effective means to combat both the latent and increasingly aggressive antisemitism in Germany. In an open letter, dated October 22, over a hundred Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Germany pointed this out.

Antisemitic attacks such as the arson attack on the Kahal Adass Yisroel synagogue on Brunnenstrasse in Berlin-Mitte on October 18, as well as demonstrations against the policies of the state of Israel in front of Jewish institutions, express an equation of the Israeli government with Jewish people. This equation is, in itself, clearly antisemitic.

A logic of equation also pervades German politics and the public sphere to a frightening, if unsurprising, extent. This is demonstrated, for example, by politicians’ and journalists’ almost unanimous support of the military operations of the Israeli government in the name of a supposedly pro-Jewish raison d’état—even as these operations have already been criticized by the UN and described by experts as genocidal. When Israel’s right to self-defense is invoked within the framework of international law, it should also be stressed that the same law prohibits the collective punishment of an entire civilian population as well as the destruction of civilian infrastructure. In Germany, people have cultivated a practiced indifference to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ongoing since 2007 in violation of international law, with catastrophic consequences for the civilian population. To assure the Israeli government of unconditional support in this moment only feeds the illusion that military occupation offers a prospect for safety and peace.

In this context, the historical responsibility of Germany toward Jewish people resulting from the Shoah is interpreted in such a way that it prevents a critical confrontation with the openly right-wing extremist policies of an important geopolitical ally. The Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently offered a comment in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that hardly any German media would publish at present:

You Germans have long since betrayed your responsibility, the one “arising from the Holocaust”—that is, from the murder of my parents’ families, among others, and the suffering of the survivors. You betrayed it by your unreserved support for an Israel that occupies, colonizes, deprives people of water, steals land, imprisons two million Gazans in a crowded cage, demolishes homes, expels entire communities from their homes and encourages settler violence.

From a democratic perspective, nation states must never grant each other unconditional and uncritical support; this also applies to the relationship between Germany and Israel.

In the first days after October 7, the massacres in the South of Israel and the taking of hostages by Hamas were at times cynically downplayed, and the grief of Israeli relatives was mocked in some instances. Large sections of the media, as well as many politicians at the federal and state levels, then started to label any expression of solidarity with Palestinian civilians as a trivialization or even glorification of Hamas in a blanket way, again following a fatal and racist logic of equation. Palestinian people are not to be equated with Hamas, just as Jewish people are not to be equated with the Israeli government. Moreover, the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip and the settlement policy in the West Bank, which is equally in violation of international law, must be recognized as the political context for the events that are currently unfolding. Those who fail or refuse to take such contexts into consideration pursue a politics of prejudgment, foreclose an engagement with the social and political causes of violence, and make themselves complicit in the further escalation of the current conflict. As the situation in Berlin shows, there are currently hardly any possibilities for Palestinian people in Germany to express themselves as political subjects with their own perspective and a claim to self-determination. In fact, this has been the case for quite some time now. Any such expression, whether political, literary, or artistic, is increasingly confronted with the sweeping suspicion of being antisemitic.

Berlin is home to the largest community of the Palestinian diaspora in Europe. One of the constitutional duties of the government is to protect the people who live here. This applies to Palestinian youth, who instead are confronted with the indifference of German politics and large sections of the public to the suffering of the civilian population in Gaza and who are now placed under general suspicion, criminalized, and threatened with deportation by politicians. This also applies to Jewish critics of Israel’s governing regime, whose mourning and anguish for relatives in their homeland is being appropriated by German politics and the public and whose space for public sympathy is also being restricted. The assumption that police repression and restrictions on fundamental rights will ensure protection for these populations is a misconception.

Repression fuels resentment. Violence generates counter-violence and undermines forms of living together in solidarity that are being practiced in many places in Berlin. The course of action taken by the police is therefore detrimental to all those who are caught up in this war. It not only restricts basic political rights for the very people who have no state of their own to stand up for them but actively prevents political alliances between marginalized groups in Berlin, who are in any case publicly denounced and discriminated against in the current anti-migration debate in Germany. The fact that calls for the deportation of Palestinians are growing louder at the very time there is a war in Israel and Palestine, and the civilian population is under threat of systematic military violence and expulsion, testifies to a particularly insidious contempt for humanity.

The day after the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, the AfD party, with its extreme right-wing program, celebrated significant electoral successes in the states of Bavaria and Hesse. In Bavaria, Hubert Aiwanger, who only shortly before had gained new notoriety as the suspected author of an antisemitic leaflet, was directly elected for the first time. To locate the antisemitic threat in Germany primarily in the protests against the violence in Gaza is racist populism and ignores the historically deep and socially powerful antisemitic tendencies in broad sections of society, the police, and legislatures.

It is the task of critical scholarship to describe and name social relations of oppression and to analyze their interrelations. Even if racism and antisemitism are based on different dynamics of oppression, they are to be fought under the same social conditions, which also means fighting the social conditions within which they are reproduced. How suffering and violence manifest themselves in the present must be the yardstick for determining political lines for this struggle. An ahistorical understanding of antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance, as it has long pervaded large parts of German society, undermines a sensitivity to multidirectional relations of violence and the suffering they produce. Such sensitivity is the condition of solidarity.

Against antisemitism. Against racism and police violence.

Release all hostages and ceasefire now.

Berlin, October 28, 2023