War Without Aim

European diary, 18.5.2021: The Austrian chancellor has packed the flag away again. For days, an Israeli flag hung above the Chancellor’s Office on Ballhausplatz. As it was said out of “solidarity with Israel”, which suffers from the terror attacks of Hamas. The chancellor pushed through this sign against reservations in his own ranks. In fact, it was probably mainly a matter of political bargaining chips. At the expense of the people in Israel and Palestine. Because when it comes to solidarity between Sebastian Kurz and Benjamin Netanyahu, there is no longer any question of Austrian neutrality. Not even in the face of a civil war in which both sides are doing what they can to fuel the conflict. But one side has the more efficient means to do so. This should not be completely forgotten.

If you want to know more about the background of the current Hamas rocket attacks and the air raids on the Gaza Strip, you will find only sporadic information in European newspapers, and if you want to know more, you have to look in the New York Times or in Israeli newspapers like Haaretz. The whole disaster began to unfold as early as April. This year, several occasions for possible provocations coincide. The Israeli “national holidays”, not least the commemoration of heroes on the so-called Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembrance of the fallen soldiers, went hand in hand with the beginning of the fasting month of Ramadan.
Elections were once again scheduled in the occupied Palestinian territories. The last ones were held 15 years ago – and once again they were canceled. Once again, Palestinians in East Jerusalem were not to be allowed to participate in the elections. And Fatah feared an election victory for Hamas.
On the other hand, Benjamin Netanyahu had to fear that a coalition might actually form against him. That alone was enough to play with dynamite. And there was plenty of it in April. Unnoticed by the world public, this new drama, if one is looking for a symbolic turning point, had probably begun on the evening of April 13. The commemoration of Yom Hazikaron is to take place once again at the Wailing Wall. But it is also the first day of Ramadan, the highest Muslim holiday. And Israeli soldiers storm the Al Aqsa Mosque to cut off the juice to the prayer leader and his microphone. There are priorities.
At the same time, six Arab families in East Jersualem are fighting their expulsion from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah. The houses they live in have been legally disputed since it became possible after 1967 for Jewish Jerusalemites to reclaim their real estate property lost in 1948 when they were expelled from East Jerusalem, while conversely there is still no chance for Arab expellees from the west of the city to have their lost property returned. The Supreme Court’s decision on the acute case is still pending.
Protests against the expulsion began to gather momentum in April. And a few days after the first incident on the Temple Mount, for Arabs the Haram al-Sharif, the Israeli government has the square at Damascus Gate closed, the main access for the city’s Muslims to the Old City and its main mosques, all this during Ramadan. And there are increasingly brutal police operations against the protests. In Sheikh Jarrah as well as on the Temple Mount. Stun grenades are used, including on the grounds of the Al Aqsa Mosque, and as a result there are serious injuries. Attacks by Arabs on Jews further inflame the atmosphere, and as early as April 21, hundreds of Israeli right-wing extremists from the “Lehava” group parade through the Old City, chanting “Death to Arabs” and indiscriminately attacking Arab passersby.

Hamas is not long in taking advantage of this escalation to play to the fore as the true defenders of Palestinian interests. While the Haram al-Sharif Authority and Abbas’ Palestinian government stand as impotent cardboard cutouts, Hamas unleashes its arsenal of rockets. Twenty-seven days after the April 13 provocation.
In the meantime, however, something else has happened. The coexistence of Jewish and Arab Israelis in the mixed cities of Haifa and Akko, Jaffa and Lydda has turned into a civil war-like situation. For a long time it was pretended to the world public that a harmonious coexistence of the “Jewish state and its minorities” was possible there. And those who were of good will on both sides did everything to ensure that this possibility was lived out as well as possible, despite all resistance and discrimination, prophecies of doom and warning signals.

Now mosques and synagogues, Arab and Jewish houses are burning. Armed gangs roam the streets, spreading a mood of pogroms. But in this conflict, too, the government is making it clear who is the strongest and who actually enjoys the protection of state power in all consequences. Even though many police officers are actually trying to contain the violence of right-wing Jewish mobs as well, and not just to take action against Arabs. The official rhetoric, on the other hand, knows exactly who and what is meant when “pogroms” are mentioned. Only one side. And the Israeli government and its friends, in Europe and the United States, they keep pouring oil on the fire.

While the Israeli flag flies at the Chancellor’s Office in Vienna, as it does at some German town halls and government buildings, international diplomacy tries to persuade both sides to end the violence. But the Israeli government has no plan except to stay in power and prevent a “fall” of Netanyahu. And until that happens, the bombardment against Gaza continues unchecked and aimless. While Hamas has long since achieved “its” war goal. They have already symbolically won, no matter how many houses in Gaza Netanyahu still has reduced to rubble, no matter how many civilians on both sides have to believe in it. In any case, there will be many more on the Palestinian side than on the Israeli side, and the agitators on both sides can live with that.

And something else remains visible in the midst of this absurd and at the same time absolutely expected spiral of violence. For the first time, both Netanyahu and his opponents have actually included something hitherto completely impossible in their calculations, a new hypothesis: neither of the two camps can govern any longer without a partner from among the Arab parties. And no one has ruled out this possibility any longer. In the midst of the madness, a completely paradoxical, tiny option for normality, of a state that will either eventually be a joint state of its Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. Or, in the end, will no longer be a state at all.

Flashback, 18.5.2020: EU foreign affairs envoy Josep Borrell congratulates the new Israeli government while warning it on behalf of the European Union not to annex parts of the occupied West Bank. The coalition agreement of the new Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz envisages “extending Israel’s sovereignty” to parts of the West Bank. The EU maintains that it would not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders without the mutual consent of Israelis and Palestinians, and that unilateral annexation would violate international law.

Two of the 27 EU states have withheld their consent to the EU foreign affairs envoy’s statement. The anti-Semitic Orban government in Budapest and the Austrian federal government. Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn regrets the two states’ walk-out. The Austrian Foreign Ministry refers to a statement by Foreign Minister Schallenberg that Austria rejects a “prejudgement” of Israel. The Israeli government would be “judged by its actions.

Netanjahu, the German Right and Christian Europe

Flashback, 6.5.2020: The far-right AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) in Germany now advertises with the portrait of Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli prime minister who repeatedly stands up for his father.
Yair Netanyahu had tweeted on April 28: “Schengen zone is dead and soon your evil globalist organization will be too, and Europe will return to be free, democratic and Christian!” And further: “The EU is the enemy of Israel and all Christian countries in Europe.” What was meant was the support of the EU representation for the large annual peace event of the Combattants for Peace, which commemorates the victims on both sides on the eve of Israel’s Heroes’ Day.

The new Posterboy of the AfD: Yair Netanjahu

Netanyahu promptly received applause from AfD Member of the European Parliament Joachim Kuhs on his Facebook page. Which Yair Netanyahu answered with an enthusiastic call to Kuhs and the AfD to finally end this “madness” with his “colleagues.” What was meant was EU support for NGOs in Israel and Palestine.
Kuhs, chairman of the “Christians in the AfD” and member of the AfD federal board, has only recently visited Israel together with representatives of the “Jews in the AfD” to meet representatives of Likud – and writes again and again in right-wing and radical right-wing German and Israeli media about the “hostility of the EU towards Israel”, apparently one of his favorite topics.
The AfD, whose members are repeatedly seen with Israeli flags at right-wing demonstrations, also make no secret of the kind of Israel they love: namely the one that finally ensures that the Jews no longer want to be part of Europe – and in this way they can finally be gotten rid of.

Combattants for Peace

European Diary, 14.4.2021: Beyond all the terrible nonsense that is talked about Israel and Palestine, beyond all the demagogy and fanaticism, there are other voices. 200,000 people participated yesterday online in the annual ceremony of the Combattants for Peace, on the eve of Israel’s National Day, when above all memory is suppressed, the memory of the Palestinian catastrophe. Instead of singing the praises of heroes and martyrs, this evening commemorates the victims on BOTH sides. It is therefore no wonder that our “free press” in Europe hardly reports about this event. There, plain language is spoken. And worked on it, to break the logic of the conflict, at which large parts of the world, from all sides (!) used to feast. Here is the recording of this moving evening:

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„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.

 

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.”

A plea for open discourse

European diary, 10.12.2020: This morning, the “Initiative GG 5.3 Weltoffenheit” (world openess) was presented at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, a growing working group of cultural and academic institutions in Germany that is concerned about freedom of art, science and opinion, in a situation of a growing and disturbing instrumentalization and abuse of accusations of “anti-Semitism”, which increasingly place critical discourse about racism, colonialism, but also about the Middle East under blanket suspicion and prevent necessary debates. In addition to major institutions such as the Humboldt Forum, the Goethe Institute, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of Wo9rld Cultures), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin or the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (Federal cultural foundation), and the Alliance of International Centers of Cultural Production, the Einstein Forum in Berlin, the Moses Mendelssohn Center, the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin – and the Jewish Museum Hohenems were also involved. Here is the link to the plea and the complete list of those involved so far. The press conference at the Deutsches Theater is the prelude to a series of further events.
Please see page three of the link for the English translation of this joint declaration.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14WBPlOswuU8Vm2pQm1cteCLrDnPs7FZ5/view?usp=sharing

 

 

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.