Arnold Dreyblatt: Last Europeans?

3 lenticular transparent prints
Berlin 2022

An Installation for the Jewish Museum Munich.
With texts in German, English and Esperanto by: Agnes Heller, Ludwik Zamenhof, Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksman, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jaques Derrida / Jürgen Habermas

Arnold Dreyblatt: Last Europeans?
Photo: Eva Jünger

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
We are still in a phase of overcoming the nation state. Basically, it took us five hundred years to conquer the nation state and the cultural identities that emerged with it, with all their contradictions—revolutions, terrible historical moments—and to transform them into something new. Against this background Europe is a unique project.The question is not whether, but how quickly we accomplish the necessary transfer of national sovereignty to the European level. And how we shape this democratically.For the first time many people are realizing that there is not only their nation state and that the EU is not an abstract playground in the far distance. People are realizing that Europe has a very concrete impact on our everyday life. For the first time we have a European public. This is a decisive step towards a European democracy.

André Glucksmann
The crisis of the European Union is a symptom of its civilization. It doesn’t define itself based on its identity but, rather, on its otherness. A civilization isn’t necessarily based on a common desire to achieve the best but, rather, on excluding and making the evil taboo. In historical terms, the European Union is a defensive reaction to horror.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/philosopher-andre-glucksmann-a-dark-vision-of-the-future-of-europe-a-851266.html

Jacques Derrida / Jürgen Habermas
Today we know that many political traditions, which in the semblance of their naturalness demand authority, have been “invented.” In contrast, a European identity born in the light of the public would have from the beginning a feeling of something constructed. But only something constructed arbitrarily would bear the stigma of arbitrariness. The political-ethical will, which is expressed in the hermeneutics of self-understanding processes, is not arbitrariness. The distinction between the heritage we take on and the one we want to reject requires as much circumspection as the decision on the reading in which we appropriate it. Historical experiences are candidates only for a conscious appropriation, without which they do not acquire an identity-forming force.

Today’s Europe is scarred by the experiences of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and by the Holocaust—the persecution and extermination of European Jews, in which the Nazi regime also implicated the societies of the conquered countries. The self-critical debates about this past have brought to mind the moral foundation of politics. A heightened sensitivity to violations of personal and bodily integrity is reflected, among other things, in the fact that the council of Europe and the EU have made renunciation of the death penalty a condition of membership.

Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, “Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas”, FAZ, Mai 31, 2003 (excerpts)

Ludwik Zamenhof

I call patriotism or service to the fatherland only service to the welfare of all my compatriots, regardless of their origin, language or religion. I must never call patriotism the service to particularly the non-Jewish interests, language or religion of that population which constitutes the majority in the country. In accordance with the principle that citizens—even if they constitute a larger majority in the country—have no moral right to impose their language or religion on other citizens, I must advocate that in my country every people has the right to establish schools and other institutions for their members with their language and their religion if they so desire, but that in all public institutions, which are not exclusively for one people, only a neutral human language and neutral human or state stability should prevail. As long as this is not possible, I must work to ensure that there are schools and other institutions in my country with a neutral human language for those subjects who do not want or cannot use institutions with this or that vernacular; and from all mutual struggles of tongues or religions for supremacy I must abstain, for it is only a struggle between one wrong and another.

I am aware that in countries where the population is more or less ethnically homogenous the injustice that lies in the domination of one language or religion over others will not be understood for a long time, and the population will fight with all means against equal rights for all languages and religions and will persecute and sling mud at those who advocate equal rights. But I will never let myself be confused by this persecution and remember that I am fighting for absolute truth and justice, that no people can know what will happen to them tomorrow, that equal rights for all languages and religions will eliminate the cause of all wars and conflicts between peoples, that any action against the principle of “the empire for the citizens” and violence among citizens will always remain violence, even if committed by an overwhelming majority against a marginal minority, and that lasting happiness for mankind is only possible on the condition of equal and absolute justice for all people and countries, regardless of place and time and strength, and when in every empire there will be only human beings, only citizens regardless of their ethnicity.

I call my nation the totality of all people who live in my homeland, regardless of their origin, language or religion. But to my nationality I must always add the words “human being” to show that I do not count myself among my nation in a chauvinistic sense. The multitude of all people who have the same origin as me I call my people. I must not call my nation by the name of any people, I have always to call it—at least in conversation with like-minded people—by the neutral geographical name of my empire or country. If my interlocutor wants to know not only which political-geographical, but also which ethnic group I belong to, then I name to him my people, my language, my religion etc. separately. Example: Swiss individual, Petersburg individual, Warsaw individual.

Ludwik Zamenhof, Hillelismus, 1901

Ágnes Heller
Nationalism’s victory came in 1914—against the internationalism of the working class and the cosmopolitanism of the bourgeoisie. Europe’s “original sin” was the ugly child of nationalism. All previous empires began to break up into nation states. This trend is being continued to this day.

The exclusionary character of nation states is best illustrated by the history of European Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of the two world wars. Modern antisemitism (as opposed to earlier anti-Judaism) is a product of nation states. The shift from nationalism to racism was no accident, as the aspect of racism is inherent to ethnic nationalism.

After the devastation of the Second World War, some European states drew the consequences from the dark side of being nation states and established the European Union. The importance of this grand design should not be downplayed. Member states are obliged never to even start a war among themselves. Nonetheless, a sense of European identity has not, to this day, gained the same strength or significance as the national identities of the member states.

The European Union was founded on the decision to uphold certain values. However, even among those values chosen there are contradictions. First and foremost, because the Union is a union of nation states. As a Union, the value of solidarity must prevail; as a Union of nation states, on the other hand, it has to respect national interests due to a nation’s values, so nationalism will usually be stronger than solidarity.

Ágnes Heller, Paradox Europa, Wien 2019

“Libération” / Bernard-Henri Lévy
“Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity” often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.

Europe is being attacked by false prophets who are drunk on resentment, and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight.

Europe as an idea is falling apart before our eyes.

For those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe and Comenius there will be only ignominious defeat. A politics of disdain for intelligence and culture will have triumphed. There will be explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism. Disaster will have befallen us.

Our faith is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at stake forbids us from giving up. Our generation got it wrong. Like Garibaldi’s followers in the 19th century, who repeated, like a mantra, “Italia se farà da sè” (Italy will make herself by herself), we believed that the continent would come together on its own, without our needing to fight for it, or to work for it. This, we told ourselves, was “the direction of history”. We must make a clean break with that old conviction. We don’t have a choice. We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism.

Copyright: “Libération” / Bernard-Henri Lévy (signed by: Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek et. al., 25.01.2019)

Photo: Daniel Schvarcz

Esperanto:

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Ni daŭre estas en fazo de lukto por superi la nacian ŝtaton. Fakte ni bezonis kvincent jarojn por venki la nacian ŝtaton kaj la kune kun ĝi disvolviĝintajn kulturajn identecojn kun ĉiuj ties kontraŭdiroj – revolucioj, teruraj historiaj momentoj – kaj transformi ilin en ion novan. Antaŭ tiu fono Eŭropo estas unika projekto.

La demando ne estas ĉu, sed kiom rapide ni efektivigos la necesan transiron de nacia suvereneco sur la Eŭropan nivelon. Kaj kiel ni aranĝu tion demokratie.

Por la unua fojo multaj homoj konsciiĝas, ke ne nur ekzistas ilia nacia ŝtato kaj la EU ne estas abstrakta ludejo en fora malproksimeco. Oni rimarkas, ke Eŭropo tre konkrete difinas nian ĉiutagan vivon. Unuafoje ni havas eŭropan publikecon. Tio estas decida paŝo al eŭropa demokratio.

André Glucksmann
La krizo de la Eŭropa Unio estas simptomo de ĝia civilizacio. Ĝi ne difinas sin per sia identeco, sed, multe pli, per sia alieco. Civilizacio ne devige baziĝas sur komuna deziro akiri la plej bonan, sed, multe pli, sur la volo ekskludi kaj tabui la malbonon. En historiaj terminoj, la Eŭropa Unio estas defenda reago al hororo.

Jacques Derrida / Jürgen Habermas
Hodiaŭ ni scias, ke multaj politikaj tradicioj, kiuj en sia ŝajno de natura deveno postulas aŭtoritaton, estas „inventitaj“. Male eŭropa identeco, naskita antaŭ ĉies okuloj, dekomence surhavus ion konstruitan. Sed nur io arbitre konstruita portus la makulon de ajneco. La politik-etika volo, kiu montras sin en la hermeneŭtiko de procezoj de memkomprenigo, ne estas arbitro. La diferencigo inter la heredaĵo, kiun ni akceptas, kaj tiu, kiun ni volas refuti, postulas samkvantan diligenton kiel la decido pri la interpretado, per kiu ni alpropriigas ĝin. Historiaj spertoj kandidatas nur por konscia alpropriigo, sen kiu ili ne atingas identec-formigan forton.

La nuntempan Eŭropon karakterizas la spertoj de la totalismaj reĝimoj de la dudeka jarcento kaj de la Holokaŭsto – la persekutado kaj pereigo de la eŭropaj judoj, en kiun la NS-reĝimo implikis ankaŭ la societojn de la konkeritaj ŝtatoj. La memkritikaj konfrontiĝoj al tiu pasinto rememorigis la moralajn fundamentojn de politiko. Kreskinta sentemo pri lezoj de persona kaj korpa integrecoj inter alie speguliĝas en tio, ke Eŭropa Konsilo kaj EU rangigis la rezignon pri mortopuno je membriga kondiĉo.

Ludwik Zamenhof
Patriotismo aŭ servo al la patrujo mi nomas nur la servadon al la bono de ĉiuj miaj samregnanoj, de kia ajn deveno, lingvo aŭ religio ili estas; la servadon speciale al la gentaj interesoj, lingvo aŭ religio de tiu loĝantaro, kiu en la lando prezentas la plimulton, mi neniam devas nomi patriotismo. Konforme al la principo, ke unuj regnanoj, eĉ se ili prezentas en la lando grandegan plimulton, ne havas moralan rajton altrudi sian lingvon aŭ religion al aliaj regnanoj, mi devas penadi, ke en mia lando ĉiu gento havu la rajton fondi por siaj membroj lernejojn kaj aliajn instituciojn kun sia lingvo kaj sia religio, se ili tion ĉi deziras, sed ke en ĉiuj publikaj institucioj, ne destinitaj sole por unu gento, regu nur lingvo neŭtrale-homa kaj festoj neŭtrale-homaj aŭ regnaj. Tiel longe, kiel la atingo de tio ĉi estos ne ebla, mi devas penadi, ke en mia lando ekzistu lernejoj kaj aliaj institucioj kun lingvo neŭtrale-homa por tiuj regnanoj, kiuj ne volas aŭ ne povas uzi instituciojn kun tiu aŭ alia genta lingvo, kaj de ĉia reciproka batalado de lingvoj aŭ religioj pro regado mi devas teni min flanke, ĉar ĝi estas nur batalado inter unu maljustaĵo kaj alia.

Mi konscias, ke en tiuj landoj, kie la loĝantaro estas pli-malpli unugenta, ĝi longan tempon ne komprenos la maljustecon de regado de unu lingvo aŭ religio super la aliaj kaj ĝi per ĉiuj fortoj batalados kontraŭ la egalrajtigo de ĉiuj lingvoj kaj religioj, kaj la defendantojn de tiu ĉi egalrajtigo ĝi persekutados kaj superĵetados per koto. Sed mi neniam konfuziĝos per tiu ĉi persekutado, memorante, ke mi batalas por absoluta vero kaj justeco, ke nenia popolo povas scii, kio fariĝos kun ĝi morgaŭ, ke la egalrajtigo de ĉiuj lingvoj kaj religioj forigos la kaŭzon de ĉiuj militoj kaj malpacoj inter la popoloj, ke ĉia ago kontraŭ la devizo „la regno por la regnanoj“ kaj ĉia perfortaĵo de unuj regnanoj kontraŭ aliaj restas ĉiam perfortaĵo, eĉ se ĝi estas farata de grandega plimulto kontraŭ malgrandega malplimulto, kaj ke fortika feliĉo de la homaro estas ebla nur tiam, kiam por ĉiuj popoloj kaj landoj ekzistos justeco egala kaj absoluta, dependanta nek de loko, nek de tempo, nek de forto, kaj kiam en ĉiu regno ekzistos nur homoj kaj regnanoj kaj ne gentoj.

Mia nacio mi nomas la tutecon de ĉiuj homoj, kiuj loĝas mian patrujon, de kia ajn deveno, lingvo aŭ religio ili estas; sed al mia nacia nomo mi devas ĉiam aldoni la vorton „Homarano“, por montri, ke mi alkalkulas min al mia nacio ne en senco ŝovinista. La aron de ĉiuj honoj, kiu havas saman devenon kiel mi, mi nomas mia gento. Mian nacion mi ne devas nomi per la nomo de ia gento, mi devas ĉiam nomi ĝin – almenaŭ en parolado kun homaranoj – per la neŭtrale-geografia nomo de mia regno aŭ lando. Se mia interparolanto deziras scii ne sole al kiu politike-geografia, sed ankaŭ al kiu etnografia grupo mi apartenas, tiam mi aparte nomas al li mian genton, lingvon, religion k.t.p. Ekzemploj: Sviso-Homarano, Peterburgia Homarano, Varsovilanda Homarano.

„Libération” / Bernard-Henri Lévy
„Sufiĉe de ‘konstrui Eŭropon’!“ estas la krio. Anstataŭe ni rekonektiĝu kun nia „nacia animo“! Ni remalkovru nian „perditan identecon“! Jen la komuna agendo de la popolismaj fortoj, kiuj inundas la kontinenton. Ne gravas, ke abstraktaĵoj kiel „animo“ kaj „identeco“ ofte ekzistas nur en la imago de demagogoj.

Eŭropo estas atakata de falsaj profetoj, kiuj estas ebriaj pro rankoro, kaj deliras pro sia ŝanco okupi la spotlumon.

Eŭropo kiel ideo disfalas antaŭ niaj okuloj.

Por tiuj, kiuj ankoraŭ kredas je la heredaĵo de Erasmus, Dante, Goethe kaj Komenio, estos nur hontiga malvenko. Politiko de malestimo kontraŭ intelekto kaj kulturo estos triumfinta. Estos eksplodoj de ksenofobio kaj antisemitismo. Katastrofo estos trafinta nin.

Nia fido estas en la grandioza ideo, kiun ni heredis, kiun ni kredas la sola forto sufiĉe potenca por levi la popolojn de Eŭropo super ili mem kaj super ilia militema pasinteco. Ni kredas, ke ĝi restas la sola forto aktuale sufiĉe virta por kontraŭstari al la novaj signoj de totalismo, kiuj kuntrenas en sia kil-ondo la malnovajn mizerojn de la mallumaj epokoj. Tio, kion ni riskas, malpermesas al ni rezigni. Nia generacio eraris. Kiel la adeptoj de Garibaldi en la 19-a jarcento, kiuj mantre ripetis „Italia se farà da sè” (Italio faros sin mem), ni kredis, ke la kontinento kuniĝos memstare, sen nia bezono batali por ĝi, aŭ labori por ĝi. Jen, ni diris al ni mem, „la direkto de la historio“. Ni devas fari klaran rompon kun tiu malnova konvinko. Ni ne havas alternativon. Ni devas nun batali por la ideo de Eŭropo aŭ vidi ĝin perei sub la ondoj de popolismo.

Lucian Brunner: Language Struggle and Nationality Conflict 1900

European Diary, 15.4.2021: 107 years ago today, the former Viennese councillor Lucian Brunner died in Vienna. He was born in Hohenems on September 29, 1850, the son of Marco Brunner and Regina Brettauer. Lucian’s father, like most of his brothers and cousins, had left for Trieste in their youth to participate in the lively textile trade between St. Gallen and the Mediterranean, with which the Brunner family began its steep economic rise. Later Marco Brunner went to St. Gallen, where he represented the family’s business in Switzerland and soon also managed the “Bankhaus Jakob Brunner”, from which UBS was later to emerge.
In 1883, Lucian Brunner also joined his father’s private bank in St. Gallen as a partner. Soon after, in 1889, Lucian and his wife Malwine Mandel settled in Vienna, where he founded his own banking business but also became active as an industrialist and politician. He was active in a small liberal party, the “Vienna Democrats,” for which he was a member of the Vienna City Council from 1896 to 1901, as well as chairman of the “Democratic Central Association” and publisher of the associated newspaper “Volksstimme. In the Vienna Municipal Council he repeatedly opposed the anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger, where he contradicted the ever louder nationalist slogans. In the dispute over the Baden language ordinance, he took a moderating stance in the face of the surging hostility toward the Czechs. He took the view that the German lingua franca should be defended not with nationalist resentment but on the grounds of reason, without devaluing the language minorities in the Reich. “The representation of the city of Vienna (…) must keep in mind that it is not merely the center of a country inhabited by one nationality, but by many nationalities, and it should therefore be prevented that any other nationality of the Empire believes that this resolution contains a point, a hostility against it. (…) It has been customary in Austria for years that a policy of slogans is pursued, and one of the quickest of these slogans is the nationality dispute and the nationality quarrel. When a political party doesn’t know what to do, it starts to provoke nationality quarrels.” When representatives of the Czech minority in Vienna demanded a new school for themselves in October 1897, he also distanced himself from the national furor and called for pluralism to be allowed – referring to his own experiences as a member of the German minority in Trieste. Instead, he was insulted as a “Jew” in the local council. “It is precisely the coercion with which one wanted to force the peoples of Austria to become German that has damaged Germanism. (…) We want the right for our minorities, therefore we ourselves must nowhere suppress the right of a minority! Moreover, it does not befit the great German cultural nation to say that we are afraid of this Czech school in Favoriten. (…) I am a Jew, as you quite rightly say, and gentlemen, I am glad that I am one.”
He became a complete bogeyman of the Christian Socialists with his protest against a planned church building subsidy of the Christian Socialist majority. Lucian Brunner filed a lawsuit against this breach of the state’s religious neutrality, which was ultimately successful before the Supreme Court. He thus defended the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state – and now became a popular target of ongoing anti-Semitic attacks, in Vienna as well as in Vorarlberg. Lucian Brunner’s first wife, Malwine, died during these campaigns, which also affected the Brunner family personally.
Brunner always remained in close contact with his home community of Hohenems. For example, he donated considerable sums for the construction of the hospital and the gymnasium. On several occasions he also tried, in cooperation with Hohenems liberals and the Rosenthal family of factory owners, to realize tramway projects in Hohenems that would connect Hohenems with the Swiss railroad on the other side of the Rhine or even with Lustenau. A final tramway project, which in 1911 was to connect the Hohenems train station with the Rosenthal factory in the south of the market town, also failed to materialize, as the economic situation had in the meantime taken a heavy toll on the Rosenthal company. In Hohenems, too, the Christian Socialists were meanwhile agitating against the “Jew” Brunner-and against the Rosenthals, who would “cram” the school with Italian children.

Brunner remained a liberal throughout his life, even though at the end of his life he supported the Zionist movement in Vienna, probably out of disappointment with the political developments in Austria. When he died in Vienna on April 15, 1914, he left a legacy for an interdenominational school in his home community. The Hohenems municipal council did not accept the bequest. An interdenominational school was not desired.

Flashback, April 15, 2020: U.S. President Trump declares that the peak of the Corona pandemic has passed. And announces that the USA will stop its payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). German Development Minister Müller, on the other hand, declares that he will increase payments to the WHO: “The WHO must now be strengthened, not weakened. Cutting funding in the midst of a pandemic is absolutely the wrong way to go.”

Trump also decides that the “emergency checks” announced by the U.S. government to some 70 million needy people in the U.S. – to the tune of $1200 – should bear his name, in the midst of an election campaign that is about to begin. This has never happened before in American history.
Trump is threatening to send Parliament into forced recess on the grounds that he wants to fill vacancies without parliamentary participation. The possibility of ordering a parliamentary recess has also never been used by an American president. Trump plays on circulating conspiracy theories at a press conference, e.g. that the virus came from a Chinese lab.

EU Commission President van der Leyen, meanwhile, is calling for more commonality among EU members, saying, “A lack of coordination in lifting restrictions risks negative effects for all member states and would likely lead to an increase in tensions among member states. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to the crisis, but member states should at least keep each other informed,” the EU authority in Brussels warns. Van der Leyen announces a recovery plan for Europe that will include a common fund.

On the Greek islands, 40,000 refugees continue to be held in camps under inhumane conditions. Today, 12 (in words TWELVE) children from Syria and Afghanistan will be flown out of Athens to Luxembourg. Luxembourg is thus the first of eleven countries to show willingness to take in a few unaccompanied or sick minors from the camps. In addition to Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Croatia, Finland, Ireland, Portugal and Lithuania are participating in the rescue operation. On Saturday, 58 children are to follow to Germany. The Austrian government still refuses to help, although many mayors have now offered to take in new refugees.

 

„Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism“: About the new struggle about defining Antisemitism

More than 200 scholars from around the world have signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Most of them are Jews who have dedicated their lives to the study of Jewish history, anti-Semitism or the Holocaust. And who are united by a growing sense of unease that prompted me to sign as well.

https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/

The fight against anti-Semitism has been hijacked, by political interests that have little to do with defending Jewish life and culture, with defending Jewish self-determination. We live in a world in which an authoritarian nationalist like Victor Orban, who owes his power not least to an anti-Semitic campaign, can declare himself a friend of Israel. His propaganda is based on an effective strategy: he combines racism against Muslim migrants (of which there are none in Hungary) with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the alleged power of a “Jewish capitalist” who wants to rob Europe of its Christian identity by flooding it with “Oriental” immigrants. In the same vein, last year “King Bibi’s” heir to the throne Yair Netanyahu joined the AFD in calling for the end of the “globalist EU” and a “Christian Europe.” The world in which we fight anti-Semitism today has become more complicated.
But when German politicians talk about anti-Semitism today, there is almost only one topic: BDS, the Palestinian boycott movement and its friends – or, precisely, people who are accused of it, but who in fact are not. The dispute over this has various dimensions. It is about whether we understand Europe, whether we understand Germany as open societies in which we may be ethnically, culturally and religiously different, but live together in compliance with common rules, or whether we define identities and territories homogeneously, thus perpetuating the catastrophe of nationalism. This then also includes: to refer the Jews to “their” territory.
At the same time, it is about a painful inner-Jewish dispute: Can we still – or finally – live self-confidently and self-determined in the Diaspora after Auschwitz? Or, after the national delusion of the 20th century, must we all entrench ourselves in a “safe haven” that may turn into a self-imposed ghetto, only this time behind walls of our own making?
And finally, an internal Israeli dispute is becoming ever more apparent, over whether this country should be an ethno-religiously exclusive castle to which Jews can retreat, or whether the country should be “liberated” from “foreign occupation,” as BDS demands. Or whether it can become a common state of its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, which must find what these people can share with each other, but cannot be based on what separates them.
How and why one positions oneself in these conflicts also determines which definition of anti-Semitism one leans towards. And what and whom one fights under this sign. Only a few days ago, Germany’s “anti-Semitism commissioner” Klein uttered the strange sentence that there is no wrong and right understanding of anti-Semitism. Could he mean anything other than: there is no need for a proper concept of what we mean by defining something as anti-Semitism, because he alone decides that anyway? “Who is an anti-Semite, I decide”.
The “working definition” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is now used by many governments as a yardstick for such judgments, was launched with noble motives, and is proving to be a boomerang. It oscillates between meaningless generality: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”, and a focus on the issue of Israel that invites political abuse, an abuse that one of the definition’s first authors, Kenneth Stern, has since strongly deplored. To date, it is not really clear what the IHRA actually decided at its 2016 Bucharest conference. Just the skinny four lines posted on the Alliance’s website as a “working definition”? Or also the examples positioned below it, which, it literally says, may serve as an “illustration?
In 2017, the German government eagerly quoted the first sentence of the working definition as an allegedly decided part of the definition: “Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.”

With this “illustration”, which from now on will be colocated as a resolution, the IHRA definition produces above all a misunderstanding.

In fact the reverse is true. It is not primarily anti-Semites, but the self-proclaimed “defenders” of Israel, who want to define this state as a “Jewish state”, and thus as the core of the “Jewish collective”. And who can thus declare any criticism of this state, its policies, and its exclusive definition “as a Jewish state” to be a case of “anti-Semitism” when the Israeli “Ministry of Strategic Affairs”, set up specifically for this purpose, decides that this criticism is not appropriate.
No, the dispute about BDS is not really about BDS at all, it is about whether one is allowed to discuss a different constitution of Israel, and about whether Jews are allowed to make self-determined decisions about their lives in the Diaspora or not.

The fact that the debate about Israel and Palestine leads to all kinds of injustice, to double standards, and to a toxicity in the debates that can hardly be surpassed, is not primarily due to anti-Semitism. It has to do with the fact that the adherents of the two largest world religions assume that the fate of the world is decided in Jerusalem. This is an attitude that is often not even conscious and does little to resolve the conflict. To declare the respective opponent an anti-Semite or a racist only leads further in a hopeless spiral of violence and non-recognition of the other. The Jerusalem Declaration could help to bring the discussion about Israel and the discussion about anti-Semitism back into more rational waters, and that means, above all, to separate them a bit. Even if the storm of “indignation” or its seconder, the gloating, will not be long in coming.

 

Vaccination Nationalism

European Diary, 20.3.2021: The dispute over the distribution of vaccines in the EU is further fueled by the Austrian Chancellor. Last year, the EU Commission’s plan to distribute vaccines fairly among all EU countries was torpedoed, not least by countries like Austria, which wanted to choose their own vaccines – within the limits of the total quantities allocated according to population size. As a result, countries that relied on the cheap vaccine from Astra Zeneca, such as Bulgaria or Croatia, are currently losing out due to the production and delivery difficulties of the British supplier. And those that relied on the expensive Biontech vaccine, such as Malta or Denmark, are currently doing better.
Austria, however, has so far received neither too much nor too little vaccine, measured against the quantities available. But that did not stop the Austrian chancellor from proclaiming himself the spokesman for the “too short”. And to publicly attack his own Ministry of Health.

Apparently, the Austrian representative on the EU vaccine panel, Clemens Martin Auer, a veteran ÖVP man, missed an opportunity to do exactly what Chancellor Kurz is now accusing others of doing, namely placing another extra order at the “bazaar.” Whether this would have led to a faster delivery of vaccine doses may be doubted. Austria and the entire EU have already ordered far more vaccine doses than would be needed to vaccinate the population this year. The current delays are obviously not due to hesitant orders, but to slow deliveries.

A few days before the next EU summit, Kurz is calling for an EU summit. This demand sounds as if he were emphatically calling for sunrise after sunset, only to announce a success a few hours later.

EU Commission President von der Leyen announced a few days ago that the delivery of a further 10 million doses from Biontech-Pfizer could now be brought forward, after there were delivery problems from this manufacturer just a few weeks ago. With these doses now countries could be preferred, which bet with their orders in the last year on the wrong map. The fact that Austria, which has so far neither benefited nor been disadvantaged, is now making additional demands does not go down well with them, of course. After all, the attempt to compensate for the different delivery quantities with these additional Biontech vaccine doses depends on the willingness of some countries to voluntarily forego part of the deliveries to which they are entitled as agreed. The vaccination nationalism fomented by Austria is not really helpful in this regard.

Lithuania, meanwhile, is making a grand gesture of announcing that it will now allow its citizens to decide which vaccine they want to be vaccinated with. This, too, is obviously just a propaganda coup. Because the choice between Astra Zeneca and Biontech apparently consists primarily of getting vaccinated now or sometime later. Since there is too little of both, the Lithuanian government is at least gaining a little time – and its citizens: nothing.

Flashback 20.3.2020: Israeli historian Yuval Harari sees “the first coronavirus dictatorship” emerging in Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu is apparently using the Corona crisis and the imposed lockdown to secure a fifth term and break opposition to his reappointment, while the trial for fraud, embezzlement and bribery waits and waits for him.

Boris Johnson, meanwhile, is announcing what appears to him to be the toughest anti-Corona measure yet on the British Isle: “We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub.”

In an interview with the German Bild-Zeitung, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz explains that it was a phone call from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that woke him up. He probably means the telephone conference of numerous EU prime ministers on March 9, in which Netanyahu had also participated. Netanyahu would have meant, Kurz said, “you underestimate this in Europe.” The dramatic situation in neighboring Italy since early March apparently has not been enough to wake up the Austrian chancellor.

The EU Commission is reacting to the expected economic problems in the wake of the pandemic and its control. It is now allowing exceptions to the strict rules designed to limit distortions of competition caused by government subsidies. It has adopted a temporary framework that allows member states to grant economic aid within a short period of time.

About the freedom of the dissenter: Rosa Luxemburg

European Diary, 5.3.2021: 150 years ago today, the socialist Rosa Luxemburg was born in Zamosc, Poland, which was then part of Russia. When she was two years old, her family moved to Warsaw. A hip ailment suffered by the three-year-old was mistakenly diagnosed as tuberculosis and incorrectly treated. She would suffer from limping all her life. Sentenced to nearly a year of bed rest at age five, she learned to read and write self-taught, remained dwarfed, and at age nine began translating German texts into Polish, writing poetry and novellas. She wrote a Polish mocking poem about Kaiser Wilhelm, who visited Warsaw when she was 13, saying, “Tell your cunning rag Bismarck / Do it for Europe, Emperor of the West / Command him not to shame the pants of peace.”

Rosa grew up multilingual, speaking Polish and German at home, Russian and French, reading English, understanding Italian, and learning Latin and ancient Greek. At the age of 15 she joined revolutionary circles, a group called “Proletariat” founded in 1882. In 1888 she fled from the tsarist police to Switzerland.
In Zurich, women are allowed to study on an equal footing with men. The only place in Europe where this is possible. Many young Jewish women from Eastern Europe take advantage of this opportunity. Rosa studies philosophy, mathematics, botany and zoology, then international law and constitutional law, economics, political science and history. Soon she joins the Polish Socialist Party. But contrary to the party line, she advocates a resolute internationalism, founds the Polish exile newspaper Arbeitersache in Paris with her partner Leo Jogiches and other comrades, and opposes Polish nationalism. She is expelled from the party and founds a new Social Democratic Party that advocates democratic reforms in Russia instead of Poland’s independence. An independent Poland, she argues, is a mirage that would only distract the Polish proletariat from the class struggle, just as in other countries. From then on, as a Jew, she became the target of constant anti-Semitic attacks, insulted as a “Jewish spawn” whose “diabolical work of destruction” was aimed at the “murder of Poland”.
Her fight against the growing nationalism also in the labor movement brought her into fierce conflict with many leading Social Democrats, later also with Lenin. As a Jew and as a woman, she was repeatedly confronted with degrading undertones, also in statements by comrades. Nevertheless, living in Germany from 1897, she became one of the spokeswomen for the left wing of the SPD. She rejected reformism as well as Lenin’s authoritarian party centralism. Nevertheless, she succeeded in persuading leading Western European Social Democrats to make a decisive statement against growing anti-Semitism. Of course, she herself did not want to be thrown back on her Jewishness.  “What do you want with the special Jewish pains? Just as close to me are the poor victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo, the Negroes in Africa, with whose bodies the Europeans play catch ball.” Her internationalism goes beyond Europe. “I don’t have a special corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the whole world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”
She foresaw the coming world war and all the bestialities it would bring, the catastrophe of Europe, with great clarity. In 1913, in Frankfurt, on September 25, at the “Titania” in the Basaltstrasse (Basaltstreet) – a few steps away from where I am writing these lines – she makes a courageous speech against the war that would land her in jail: “If we are expected to raise the weapons of murder against our French or other foreign brothers, we declare: ‘No, we won’t do it!'” Less than a year later, she was sobered to discover that nationalism had washed away all reason – and all dreams of international class consciousness – in the European workers’ parties as well. In August 1914, together with other opponents of the war in the SPD, she founded the “Gruppe Internationale,” from which the “Spartacus Group” would later emerge.

As early as February 1914, Luxemburg was sentenced to fourteen months in prison for her Frankfurt speech on charges of “inciting disobedience to laws and orders of the authorities.” In February 1915 she had to begin her imprisonment in the Berlin “Weibergefängnis”. Her letters from her imprisonment are among the most moving writings she was to leave behind.

Released in 1916, she was arrested again just three months later. She spent more than three years in prison until 1918. In her theses written there under the pseudonym Junius, she drew a fatalistic and at the same time defiant balance in 1917: “The world war has destroyed the results of forty years of work of European socialism.” It was not by a greater power that the socialists had been destroyed; they had “blown themselves up.” The main task in this situation was: “to unite the proletariat of all countries into a living revolutionary power, to make it, through a strong international organization with a unified conception of its interests and tasks, with unified tactics and political capacity for action in peace as in war, the decisive factor in political life to whose role it is called by history.” And at the same time she criticized the totalitarian tendencies of the Russian Revolution: “Freedom is always the freedom of dissent.”
All this remained utopia. In November 1918, the workers’ movement and the short-lived soviet republic in Germany split. In the civil war, the majority of Social Democrats under Ebert allied themselves with right wing Freikorps and imperial troops to suppress the weak revolutionary forces of the Spartacus uprising.

In these days of spiraling events, Rosa Luxemburg also came into sharp opposition to the leadership of the Spartacists around Karl Liebknecht. She warned in vain against the futile attempt at armed revolution and demanded that democratic elections be held. But her admonitions went down. The last weeks of her life must have been marked by helplessness and a desperate will to hold on to the armed revolution publicly in the newspaper Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag), against her own convictions – while calls were made in the streets of Berlin for her and Liebknecht to be murdered.
On January 15, 1919, on the same day as Karl Liebknecht, she was arrested in Berlin by soldiers of the “Guard-Cavalry-Rifle Division” and murdered in a bestial manner. She was tortured in a posh Berlin hotel where the militia had set up their quarters, then dragged to a car. Her killers tried to smash her in the head with a rifle butt, drove the unconscious woman to the Landwehr Canal, shot her in the head on the way, wrapped her body in barbed wire and threw her into the water. At the end of May, her remains were found at a lock. Thousands attended her funeral on June 13, 1919.

Julius Gumbel, a Social Democrat from Heidelberg, later researched political murders in Germany. He arrived at the following figures: From 1918 to 1922, leftists murdered 22 people. There were 38 convictions. Right wing perpetrators committed 354 murders in the same period. There were 24 convictions. In 23 cases, the courts acquitted even confessed perpetrators who openly boasted of their deeds.

 

Somewhere Between Europe and Israel – A Conversation with Avraham Burg

European Diary, 25.2.2021: Yesterday Avraham Burg was our guest – online – in a joint event with the Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue (Vienna).

Conflicts about the future of Europe have always been linked to disputes about the role of European Jews. Their emancipation was seen as a test case of the liberal hopes of the 19th century, and their cross-border cosmopolitanism as a precursor of European unification – or as a scapegoat for nationalist ideologies. Today, the state of Israel seems to symbolically take its place – admittedly under the opposite sign, as the favorite child of right-wing populist and nationalist politicians. Avraham Burg has already crossed many borders in his life. After his political career, Avraham Burg is engaged in publishing and in various political initiatives for an ethnically and religiously neutral state of its citizens, a state that would follow the ideals of the European Union. While these ideals are admittedly coming under increasing pressure in contemporary Europe. In a recent interview with the newspaper Haaretz, he explained why he no longer wants to carry the entry “Jewish” as a “nationality” in the Israeli civil registry.

Avraham Burg was born in Jerusalem in 1955. His Dresden-born father, Josef Burg, was a rabbi, leader of the National Religious Party, and minister in twenty-one Israeli governments. Avraham Burg, on the other hand, linked his political involvement with the Peace Now movement and the Labor Party. Between 1995 and 1999, he was chairman of the World Zionist Organization, then president of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, for four years. In 2004, he left politics after publicly calling for Israel to choose between democracy and discrimination against the Arab minority.

„The patriarch Abraham discovered God outside the boundaries of the Land of Israel, the tribes became a people outside the Land of Israel, the Torah was given outside the Land of Israel, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is more important than the Jerusalem Talmud, was written outside the Land of Israel, the past 2,000 years, which shaped the Judaism of this generation, happened outside Israel. The present Jewish people was not born in Israel.”

Bruno Kreisky: or the courage of the unfinished

European Diary, 22.1.2021: 110 years ago today, Bruno Kreisky was born in Vienna. To this day, the memory of the probably most popular chancellor of the republic is polarizing., a chancellor who was at the same time anything but a typical Austrian politician. His political opponents in particular left no doubt about this. In 1970, ÖVP Chancellor Josef Klaus ran for office with the slogan “A real Austrian. This, according to the party’s calculations, said everything there was to say about Kreisky, a Jew and emigrant. But Bruno Kreisky led the SPÖ to a relative majority of 48.5 %. And after an interlude of a cabinet tolerated by the FPÖ, which was highly controversial even among his friends, the SPÖ achieved an absolute majority three times in a row with Kreisky. It’s been a long time, one might say.

Bruno Kreisky
Photo: Konrad Rufus Müller / Source: Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue

Kreisky had no qualms about working with former National Socialists. Precisely because he did not want to be told that he was doing politics as a Jew. Kreisky was above all a European politician, and his own experience of persecution and exile had taught him his own Austrian patriotism: which consisted of not wanting to be a nationalist. And certainly not a Jewish nationalist.
This was eventually to drive him into a dispute in which neither his opponent nor he himself could reap any glory. His bitter feud with the arch-conservative Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal stands to this day like an erratic block in the Austrian memory landscape.
Simon Wiesenthal, whose good relations with the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) were not a bit clouded by the traditional anti-Semitism of the Christian Socialists, gleefully scandalized Kreisky’s lack of inhibitions about cooperating with former Nazis, whether such in the FPÖ or those in the SPÖ. Four of the thirteen ministers in Kreisky’s Social Democratic cabinet in 1970 had belonged to the NSDAP. And FPÖ leader Friedrich Peter, with whom Kreisky was considering a coalition in 1975, had been active in an SS terror unit, which Wiesenthal also deliberately brought to public attention.
Kreisky’s subsequent insults against Wiesenthal (“Nazi collaborator”) are legendary. Austria was able to watch two Jews at each other’s throats in public. But behind the dispute was by no means only Kreisky’s political calculation to curry favor with parts of the electorate. Behind it was – more or less unspoken – the dispute about Jewish experiences from which Wiesenthal and Kreisky had drawn diametrically opposed conclusions.
Kreisky’s traumatic experiences did not begin in 1938 with National Socialism, but in the Austrian fascism of the Ständestaat. In 1936, the young socialist Kreisky was sentenced to imprisonment. He had every reason to distrust the political descendants of the Austrofascists as much as the National Socialists, who drove him into exile in 1938. Kreisky survived in Sweden, where he also met Willy Brandt, who had emigrated from Germany – the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Kreisky remained a passionate European, but he did not like Zionism. For him, there was no question of helping to build a democratic Austria after 1945. His four chancellorships were marked by reform initiatives in social policy and education policy, as well as in family and criminal law – and, as with so many Social Democrats, by a confidence in technical progress that also made him blind to the new issues that came onto the agenda with the dispute over the Zwentendorf nuclear power plant. Even defeat in the referendum, however, did not prevent him from winning the 1979 elections for the fourth time.

While Wiesenthal made Israel as a “Jewish state” the core of his own identity in Austria, Kreisky tried to mediate in the Middle East conflict. Which entangled him in contradictions. He cultivated relations with Arab politicians such as Sadat and Gaddafi, and discreetly negotiated with Moscow for the release of Jewish Soviet citizens who wanted to emigrate to Israel.
What Kreisky mastered best was the art of playing with the public. His press conferences are unforgotten. Not necessarily what they were about in each case. But the style was new. Instead of pronouncements, there was communication.
“I don’t value wreaths that posterity will weave for me. I don’t value monuments. What I would like, however, is for the period in which I was able to influence political conditions in Austria to be regarded as a period in which great reforms were introduced, which left their mark on society and brought about an improvement in social conditions. Nothing would be more gruesome than the thought of having merely administered.”

Much of what Kreisky wanted to set in motion is still waiting to happen.
Willy Brandt, Kreisky’s companion for over fifty years, delivered the eulogy for him at Vienna’s Central Cemetery. “Farewell, my dear, my difficult friend.”

 

“We are the new Jews”

European Diary, 4.12.2020: One of the leading figures and closest confidants with whom Viktor Orban has been bringing Hungarian cultural creators and institutions into line for years is Szilard Demeter, the director of the Petöfi Literature Museum in Budapest – and a member of numerous committees in which decisions are made on the allocation of grants to the literary and music industry. Szilard did not become known for his rather moderately successful literary and musical attempts, but rather for his marked right-wing slogans and threats of violence. Now he has also gone a little over the top, even for Orban’s best friends, the Israeli government.

George Soros, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor and former investment banker who has been the most popular target of anti-Semitic campaigns by the Hungarian government for years, made Europe his “gas chamber”, according to Szilard in a commentary on the Internet portal origo.hu last Saturday. “Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life.” “The liberal Führer, and his liber-Aryan army” would try to erase the Christian and national identity of the European peoples. “We are the new Jews,” writes Demeter, referring to Poland and Hungary, and the intention of the European Union to punish violations of the rule of law in the future, which Poland and Hungary want to prevent by blocking the entire EU budget.
Demeter, who calls himself a “fanatical Orbanist”, has half-heartedly backed down after strong protests by the Jewish community in Hungary, numerous organizations and yes, even the Israeli embassy. Of course, there is no question of resignation or dismissal. After all, the fact that Soros allegedly wants to “flood” Europe with Muslims is the core of Orban’s daily propaganda, in which he is advised by close confidants of the Israeli head of government, Netanyahu. The fact that Szilard has made a few mistakes with the text modules here will not really hinder his career in Hungary.

“We are the new Jews,” wasn’t it with these words that the chairman of an Austrian right-wing party in 2012 complained about being insulted on the way to the ball of fraternity members. “It was like the Reichskristallnacht”. Only five years later the man was vice chancellor. Szilard Demeter must have a brilliant career ahead of him. Well, at least for a while.

Omri Boehm: Rethinking Israel

European Diary, 3.12.2020: Yesterday the Israeli philosopher and political thinker Omri Boehm was our guest, in a Zoom event organized together with the German-Israeli Society of the Lake Constance Region.
His book “Israel – a Utopia” is causing lively discussions and joins a growing number of critical voices that no longer cling to the failed phantom of a “two-state solution” but explores new visions for a binational state.
Our Zoom-webinar with him was attended by 150 guests from Vienna to New York and Berlin to Zurich. Here is the recording of the talk, that was mainly conducted in English.

 

There is a blatant contradiction between a Jewish state and a liberal democracy, says the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm. For a Jew (and thus a fully-fledged Israeli citizen) is only someone who is ‘of Jewish descent’ – or religiously converted. In his great essay, he sketches the vision of an ethnically neutral state that overcomes its nationalist founding myth and thus finally has a future.
Israel has changed dramatically in the last two decades: While religious Zionism is becoming increasingly popular, both leftists and liberals lack convincing ideas and concepts. The two-state solution is widely considered to have failed. In view of this disaster, Omri Boehm argues for a rethink of Israel’s statehood: Only the equal rights of all citizens can end the conflict between Jews and Arabs. The Jewish state and its occupied territories must become a federal, binational republic. Such a policy is not anti-Zionist; on the contrary, it lays the foundation for a modern and liberal Zionism.
Omri Boehm, born in 1979 in Haifa, studied in Tel Aviv and served in the Israeli secret service Shin Bet. He received his doctorate at Yale with a dissertation on “Kant’s Critique of Spinoza.” Today he teaches as professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is an Israeli and German citizen, has conducted research in Munich and Berlin, and writes about Israeli politics in Haaretz, Die Zeit, and The New York Times.
The book:
Omri Boehm: Israel – eine Utopie,
Propyläen Verlag, Berlin 2020, hardback, 256 pages,
€ 20.60, ISBN 978-3-549-10007-3
The English edition, A Future for Israel: Beyond the Two-State Solution, will appear in April 2021 at New York Review Books.

Yad Vashem: A Memorial, a Name, a Controversy

European Diary, 26.11.2020: Almost exactly ten years ago, an aspiring nationalist politician from Austria visited the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. It was at the beginning of December 2010. Instead of wearing a kippa or a hat, he entered the memorial site with a fraternity cap, a symbol of the right wing, often Antisemitic traditional students organizations in Austria and Germany. At home in Vienna, right-wing extremists of all colors were thigh tapping happy about this macabre joke. Others were worried that the demonstrative pro-Israel course could now make right-wing populists presentable in Austria as well. If Israel welcomes him into the country like this, “sooner or later no one in Austria will be able to say anything. He makes himself capable of governing”, a representative of the Viennese Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance warned. Well, seven years later the strange guest from Austria was Vice-Chancellor of Austria. And he would probably still be today, if he had not run into a fake oligarch on Ibiza, a trap created by critical journalists who exposed the corruption of these right wing politicians.

Now there is a dispute about Yad Vashem again. Also this time it is about a right-wing extremist racist. But according to Benjamin Netanyahu, this racist is not supposed to visit, but to take over the management of the “World Holocaust Memorial”: Effi Eitam.

Eitam’s military career as a brigadier general culminated in the fight against the Palestinian intifada. Four of his soldiers beat a Palestinian prisoner to death on his orders and were – after all – sentenced. Eitam got off with a reprimand, but was no longer promoted.
Consequently, he was drawn into politics, where he attracted attention as a member of the Knesset and as a minister with racist statements, among other things, when he called Arab Israelis a cancer and demanded that these citizens be deprived of the right to vote. He demanded that Palestinians be forcibly expelled from the West Bank and that one of the most popular Palestinian leaders, Marwan Bargouti, be murdered.

The planned appointment has triggered protests worldwide, from Holocaust survivors as well as scientists, memorials, archives and Jewish museums. Finally, Yad Vashem is also a scientific institution and one of the most important archives in the world. Should it be the plaything of nationalist politics and the explicit oppression of minorities in the future? On Tuesday, survivors of the Shoah took to the streets in Israel and protested outside the offices of the responsible minister Ze’ev Elkin. “The way Eitam talks about our citizens and neighbors reminds me of what I heard when I was a child,” one of the aged and apparently awake and young protesters, 92-year-old Eva Morris, told the Jerusalem Post.

In the conflict over this occupation, of course, only those contradictions that have long been a problem are revealed in a grotesquely exaggerated way. And not only in Israel. Memorials are and have always been a plaything of nationalist politics. Whether in Poland, where for decades in Auschwitz the Polish suffering was celebrated as “Jesus among the nations,” and the Jewish victims were appropriated among the Polish. Or in Buchenwald, where the “true” Germany, liberated from fascism and capitalism, ranked among the peoples of the world whose salvation consisted in communism. Whether in the “Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny”, where an inflated copy of a “Pieta” by Käthe Kollwitz since 1993 also commemorates all Jewish and other victims of mass extermination in Christian iconography and as anonymously fallen soldiers. And thus at the same time declared victims of an equally anonymous evil that had nothing to do with Germany. Or in Yad Vashem, which, as a memorial, not only claims to be a universal world memorial, but at the same time incorporates all victims of the Holocaust not only in an understandably Jewish but also in a nationalist narrative. As a “memorial to the martyrs and heroes of the State of Israel in the Holocaust”, Yad Vashem (following an Israeli law) declares the dead posthumously as Israeli citizens. My grandfather would turn over in his grave – if he ever received a grave.

The path through the history museum of Yad Vashem, which was reopened 15 years ago, does not end with an architectural gesture of trauma, no authentic or staged expression of what the survivors since 1945 have to cope with. No, the path through the museum ends on an imperial balcony, a view from above in triumph over the land – and with a side view of that hill on which the village of Deir Yassin stood, whose inhabitants were massacred by right-wing militias under the orders of Menachem Begin in 1948.

As early as 1988, Yehuda Elkana captured the inner contradiction of every Holocaust remembrance in a memorable formula. There are two conflicting imperatives that lead to completely different consequences: “this shall never happen again” – or “this shall never happen again to us“.
At the same time, the conflict over Eitam also reveals the fundamental dilemma of the Israeli state, which wants to be both a democracy and a Jewish state. Omri Boehm has described this in his new book “Israel- a Utopia” with good reasons as an attempt to say something like: “A square is square in so far as it is round, and a circle is round in so far as it is square. One asserts nothing more than a contradiction, but with pathos, and believes in it.”

As a “national memorial”, Yad Vashem, too, is supposed to be a squaring of the circle, a manifesto against racism and the oppression of minorities, and at the same time an institution for the establishment of Jewish Israeli identity, which symbolically excludes a growing number of Israeli citizens. Effi Eitam would indeed be the man to “dissolve” this contradiction. With fatal consequences, of course. For Yad Vashem is also one of the most important archives in the world, a research site where many people have seriously dedicated their lives to the memory of the greatest crime of humanity. A crime that can only be remembered if its universal and Jewish dimensions are taken into account equally. Without abusing it for national political purposes, that is, for domination over others.

And finally, the dispute over Yad Vashem reveals a growing contradiction between Jews in the Diaspora and the Israeli state, which usurps Jews even against their will, dead or alive, and plays them off against the Arab citizens of Israel and against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. A dispute that has now even encompassed the occupation of leading positions in Zionist organizations around the world, decisions that the Israeli government has made the sole concern of its internal coalition deals, instead of coordinating them with Jewish organizations in the diaspora as it has done in the past.

If the appointment of the chairman of the board of directors of Yad Vashem is now also the subject of a coalition dispute between Israel’s “best enemies”, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu and Benjamin (Benny) Gantz, then it is not because Benny Gantz has problems with abusing Yad Vashem as a place of nationalist brainwashing, but because a number of top positions within Israel are currently being occupied again. And both of them want to make a good cut. After all, Netanyahu needs people in leading positions in the judiciary who will spare him the threat of a trial.
Ze’ev Elkin, the minister responsible for Yad Vashem, who wants to hold fast to Eitam’s occupation, has already reached the peak of cynical hypocrisy:  He hopes, he told the Israeli daily Haaretz, that “Yad Vashem will not become a hostage in a political game. There are things that are above politics. If Effi Eitam can be prevented, a bitter aftertaste will remain. And much to do. We need to know that.

The Moment of the European Commission – the Persistence of the European Parliament

European Diary, 12.11.2020: Within a week, good European news comes from Brussels and Strasbourg. After the cleverly launched news of the breakthrough in the development of a Covid-19 vaccine by the German company Biontech the tabloids worry about whether “we” (i.e. mainly us and not the others) will get enough of the vaccine. So it becomes clear what would happen to all of us if competition, power and corruption alone decided on the supply of vaccines. Meanwhile, the EU Commission has concluded treaties to ensure an even distribution of resources in Europe. And this on a large scale. One may be curious to see what kind of troublemakers will emerge in the process. But Brussels seems determined to finally get its hands on the ball.

Meanwhile, the German-Turkish community is particularly happy about the good news. Back in April, the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel newspaper ran a report on Biontech with the ironic headline: “We are vaccine”. And revealed to the astonished readership who is behind the company and its current success: the founder Uğur Şahin and the medical director Özlem Türeci, both of whom are Turkish migrant children.

Even the European Parliament is now tired of being the toothless tiger in Strasbourg. The cutbacks in European projects in the fields of education and health, with which the Council and the Commission wanted to sweeten the expenses for the large Corona “aid package” in order to calm down the stingy Austrians and their consorts, have now been at least partially reversed. The real breakthrough, however, lies in the fact that the EU can actually take on debt together now and jointly generate revenue through its own taxes. This is exactly what all national chiefs have tried to prevent so far. For this is finally a further step towards shared sovereignty. And it also means an effective commitment to common standards under the rule of law.

In the debate on procedures under the rule of law, Parliament has now reached a compromise with the Commission and the Council, which at least sends a clear signal that violations of the rule of law, such as those now commonplace in Poland and Hungary, should actually be punished in future. And this would be the case even if the misuse of EU funds were a possible consequence, and not only when this has already happened (as the half-baked German compromise had proposed in between). Consequently, this would also mean: if the legal conditions in a member state would no longer guarantee democratic control over their use. Of course, the decision would still not be taken by the parliament, but by a qualified majority in the Council of 15 states (representing 65 percent of the EU population). So it remains to be seen whether the parliament has finally found its teeth. For basically the conditions for democratic control have already been largely dismantled in view of a press that is already largely controlled by the Orban regime in Hungary and a judiciary that is already under heavy influence by the ruling parties in both Poland and Hungary. And thus there is a need for action.
Poland and Hungary, on the other hand, continue to threaten to veto the budget and the “aid package”. Money from which they themselves would of course benefit disproportionately. So things remain exciting.

René Samuel Cassin and human rights

European Diary, 5.10.2020: 133 years ago today René Samuel Cassin was born in Bayonne, one of the most committed advocates of human rights in the 20th century. In 1968 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his achievements.

René Samuel Cassin

Cassin’s father Azarie Henri Cassin came from a Sephardic, Portuguese-Marran family and worked as a wine merchant in Nice. His mother Gabrielle Dreyfus came from an Alsatian-Jewish family. Cassin was drafted to serve in World War I as a doctor of law and returned seriously wounded in October 1914. Still during the war, he founded the Union fédérale, the French association of war victims, together with other war participants, which he was to preside over from 1922. In 1921 and 1924 he organized conferences of war-disabled and veterans who advocated understanding and peace agreements between the enemy nations. He did so as a French patriot who was convinced of a French universal mission:

“For centuries we have embodied an ideal of freedom, independence and humanity”, and therefore for him the members of the Union fédérale were the “representatives of French morality in the world”.

As professor from 1920 in Lille, then from 1929 at the Sorbonne in Paris, he taught international law. Above all, however, Cassin was active in countless non-governmental organizations and political offices.  From 1924 to 1938 he represented France at the League of Nations. In 1940 he emigrated to London and, together with Charles de Gaulle, founded France Libre, the French exile army in the British armed forces. From 1941 to 1943 he became National Commissioner of the Free French Government in London and in 1944 he was one of the initiators of the French Committee for National Liberation in Algiers and as president of its legal commission prepared French legislation after 1945. In 1944 he became vice-president of the French Council of State (until 1960) and in 1946 also president of the French elite academy École nationale d’Administration.

From 1946 to 1958 he represented France at the United Nations and was one of the founders of UNESCO. In particular, he was one of the closest circle of authors of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, together with Karim Azkoul, the Lebanese diplomat and philosopher.

Finally, from 1959 to 1968 he was vice president, then president of the European Court of Human Rights.

A trip to Palestine in the 1930s, perhaps also his Sephardic family heritage, had motivated him to work for the advancement of the Arab-Jewish population of Palestine. After 1945, in addition to his many other offices, he became president of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (which in the 19th century represented the ideals of the French Revolution and was intended to spread European education among Oriental Jews, not without a certain amount of European-colonial arrogance).

“Hitler’s main goal was the extermination of the Jews,” wrote Cassin, “but their annihilation was also part of an attack on everything the French Revolution stood for: freedom, equality, brotherhood and human rights. Hitler’s racism was essentially an attempt to erase the principles of the French Revolution.”
Cassin supported the Jewish national Zionist project after the annihilation of European Jewry. After 1945, however, Cassin demanded clear limitations on national sovereignty in all matters of human rights, which must take precedence over any national legislation and must also be enforced by means of coercive measures. His advocacy of social rights also aroused distrust of him in the United States. An official of the State Department did not hesitate to call him a “crypto-communist”. But apart from his commitment to human rights and the ideals of equality, Cassin remained a classically conservative liberal in many sociopolitical issues. For example, he had a rather hesitant attitude toward legal equality for women, and in the French parliament in exile in Algiers he even voted against the immediate introduction of active and passive suffrage for women.

Cassin died on 20 February 1976 in Paris.

The Hour of the Parliament

European Diary, 6.10.2020: Yesterday the European Parliament debated the present report on the dismantling of legal principles in some member states. A turbulent discussion.
For months, the European Parliament and the Commission have been struggling to find a clear line towards those European states that abandon the rule of law on the way to “illiberal democracy”, i.e. states without a free press, without an independent judiciary, without protection of minorities from arbitrariness, discrimination or incitement, without the political corrective of an alert civil society – states in which the people are only called to the ballot box to confirm their leaders in office, who in any case announce even before the elections that they will not resign if they lose.
At the end of September, the European Commission published its first EU-wide report on the situation of the rule of law in the individual member states, which, as expected, is worrying. The report points not only to the growing state “control” of the press and judiciary in countries such as Hungary and Poland, but also to considerable deficits in areas such as fighting corruption or the separation of powers, including in other states such as Bulgaria, Malta, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovakia and Romania. Commission President von der Leyen made every effort to remain diplomatic. “Although we in the EU have very high standards with regard to the rule of law, there is a need for action at various points. One would “continue to work on solutions with the member states”. Vice President Véra Jourová had already become clearer in a previous interview with Spiegel, describing Hungary as a “sick democracy”, which immediately prompted Orban to demand her resignation.
In the course of the EU Commission’s 1.8 billion euro deal, which aims to revive the European economy and in particular the most severely affected states after the Corona collapse, the Commission and Parliament had also promised an effective mechanism to demand compliance with the rule of law. Poland and Hungary made it clear from the outset what they thought of this – and threatened to block economic aid in the Council. Admittedly, they themselves would also benefit greatly from such aid. A week ago, the German Council Presidency presented a compromise proposal that looks more like a toothless tiger. Cuts in EU financial aid would thus only be possible after it had been established that violations of the rule of law also have a direct impact on how EU money is handled. The EU Commission wanted to take a tougher approach and make access to funding generally dependent on compliance with the rule of law. But even the German compromise proposal, which would probably remain completely ineffective in case of doubt, naturally fails due to the veto from Budapest and Warsaw.
But the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and Finland also vote against the German mediation. For them, the proposal understandably does not go far enough.
And so the EU Parliament is now finally getting ready to get involved in this issue.
Katarina Barley, the German deputy president of the EU parliament, explains to Deutschlandfunk radio that the EU does not want to be blackmailed by Hungary and Poland and their threat to blow the entire budget. “If we give up the rule of law now, then we will have conditions in the EU for the next seven years that our citizens do not want either, because our tax money will then go to regimes like Orbán’s and Kaczynski’s, which above all shovel money into their own pockets but convert their countries into democracies that no longer have anything to do with the values of the EU.” After all, Hungary would be financially dependent on the EU.
In yesterday’s parliamentary debate the Slovakian member of parliament and parliamentary rapporteur on democracy and the rule of law Michal Simecka gave a moving speech. Hungary is no longer a democracy, and Poland is on the way to that. Bulgaria is also on a dangerous path, he said, where people have been protesting unsuccessfully for three months against the rampant corruption of the government. He himself had already experienced before 1989 what it means when people are arbitrarily arrested or lose their jobs because they speak their minds. The image of the EU as a “guarantor of democracy” was severely damaged, he said. Only “better monitoring” as demanded by the EU Commission was not enough. The “rule of law” must also be able to be enforced. The governments criticized in the report reacted differently. While Bulgaria and Romania announced further reforms in line with the EU recommendations, Poland and Hungary attacked the EU head-on and rejected all criticism.

Tomorrow the report will be voted on in the Parliament. A broad agreement is expected. Then it will become clear whether the Parliament will stand firm against the European Council, in which countries like Poland or Hungary threaten with their veto right against the aid budget.
On the Internet, the most loyal friends of Orban’s “new democracy” are already on the move, above all Henryk Broder, who is allowed to make fun of the “dominatrix” Barley in the right-wing blogger paradise “Axis of Good”. Sexism must not be missing in this male association.

“Symbolic politics”

European Diary, 12.9.2020: The Austrian chancellor posts a video message. This has the undeniable advantage for him that he no longer has to put up with uncomfortable questions from rebellious journalists. Lying is even easier that way.
After all, more refugees cannot come here every year, he says. But in fact they have been getting fewer and fewer for years. In 2019 there were as few asylum applications as hardly ever since 2000.
Once again he reiterates his refusal to accept unaccompanied children or anyone else from the destroyed camp Moria. And in doing so he demonstrates a stubborn version of “morality”. “This inhuman system of 2015, I cannot reconcile with my conscience.” What “system” is he talking about? What conscience?
Instead, he says, “help is given on the spot, so that a decent supply is guaranteed.”
In the meantime, one had the opportunity to do this for years. And Austria has not lifted a finger. Because the conditions in Moria were supposed to serve as a deterrent, and therefore could not be inhumane enough. The demand for more humanitarian commitment on the part of Austria “on the ground” has so far interested Sebastian Kurz only in rhetoric, both as Foreign Minister and even more so as Federal Chancellor. Almost nothing has happened. Now he is calling for a “holistic approach”. What does he mean by this? He rejects “symbolic politics”, by which he obviously means the modest (shameful?) attempts by Germany, France and some other European states (including Switzerland) to free at least a few hundred children from the inferno on Lesbos.
This is the same man who looks dutifully serious at commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Shoah when the Talmud is quoted: “Whoever saves a human life saves the whole world.”
I don’t know if that is really true either. But every child rescued from the chaos on Lesbos will at least feel that way.
Thousands of refugees are still camping out in the open. But even for Salzburg’s Governor Haslauer, the 13,000 refugees are just a collective arsonist and blackmailer who set fire to his house “so that (his) neighbor(s) will have to take him in”. And who therefore should not be helped.
This sick logic is currently widespread not only in Austria’s government, but above all in social networks. Does it still make sense to argue against it in any way? With such helpless sentences like:
Most of the people there didn’t set fire to anything at all, only a few of them did. And wasn’t it customary in Austria to rescue children from a house, even if one of the inhabitants of the house was perhaps an arsonist? But the people in Moria did not live in a “house” anyhow, but were locked into a camp against their will. And they were “kept” there under conditions that everyone knew would eventually lead to an explosion of despair. In the end, Corona came to the camp and the naked panic broke out.
How will people even talk to each other when such simple truths no longer matter? But that is exactly the point. There is no point in talking to each other here. That’s why there is a video message.

Hungary’s enemy?

European Diary, 13.9.2020: Hungary’s Prime Minister Orban and the country’s media, now largely controlled by him, are apparently worried that with the aged George Soros they could at some point lose their favorite enemy, the Jewish world conspiracy to flood Europe with Muslim migrants. The Central European University Orban has also successfully expelled from Budapest (to Vienna), at least its regular teaching activities.

Now Orban has discovered the conspirator behind the conspirator, the Austrian migration expert and pro-European activist Gerald Knaus.

His small think tank ESI (European Stability Initiative) critically observes corruption and anti-democratic tendencies in many European countries, restrictions of press freedom or the treatment of minorities. And of course also the worrying developments in Hungary.

The major Hungarian daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet now dedicates an entire six-part series of reports to Gerald Knaus, beginning on the front page with a portrait of Gerald Knaus and George Soros side by side. And colorful infographics that reveal their secret power and network. An unprecedented hate campaign.

The facts are quite banal. Gerald Knaus was one of those who in 2015 advised German and European policy-makers to reach an agreement with Turkey on the support of refugees on Turkish soil, but who at the same time repeatedly called for a fundamental examination of the causes of flight, especially the situation in Africa, in order to offer people a legal, but also controllable way to migrate to Europe, instead of just “offering” the illegal (and very often letal) trafficking routes to them. Gerald Knaus has also repeatedly and sharply criticized the way the EU deals with refugees on its own periphery, not least on the Greek islands. He has now dedicated a book to his observations and political advice, which will be published in October (“Which borders do we need?”) and which he will present in November in Hohenems and Vienna, among other places.

Whether the Hungarian campaign is connected with the fact that Knaus is currently (all the more so because of the events in Moria) again a sought-after interview partner in Germany and Austria, or whether the concerted media action of Viktor Orban’s vassals was prepared for this hunt anyway? You need to know Hungarian to penetrate this jungle of hate speech.

Even the Hungarian television was involved in the smear campaign: On september 12th HIR TV dedicated an own TV discussion to Gerald Knaus, with four sinister “experts” discussing how to fight “Hungary’s enemy” for an hour.