As of: March 13, 2024, 12:00 p.m
Comments
Press
Split
The writer Deborah Feldman is extremely critical of the German Israel and anti-Semitism debate.
© Henning Kaiser/dpa
British director Glazer used the Oscars to criticize Israel.
It is noticeable that the international view of the Gaza war is different than in Germany - even among the stars.
Why?
Berlin - The Oscar Gala is the biggest stage imaginable, and British director Jonathan Glazer used it to address the war between Israel and Hamas.
His film “The Zone of Interest” about the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß had just won the Oscar for best international film.
The 58-year-old, who is Jewish himself, read from a sheet of paper that he wanted to stimulate reflection.
“Our film shows what dehumanization can lead to in the worst case scenario.
It has shaped our entire past and present.
Right now, here we stand as people resisting their Jewishness and the Holocaust being exploited by an occupation that has brought so many innocent people into conflict.
Whether it's the victims of October 7th in Israel, the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization.
How do we resist?”
The audience responded with applause and cheers.
Many commentators also celebrated the speech the next day as a courageous statement - others, especially in Germany, condemned it as a trivialization of the Holocaust.
More criticism of Israel abroad
It becomes clear again and again that the discourse about the Middle East conflict abroad is different than in Germany - it is consistently more critical of Israel.
Most recently, at the Berlinale Gala, numerous members of international juries and award winners expressed their solidarity with the Palestinians.
Statements spoke of apartheid in connection with Israel and the occupied territories and of genocide - genocide - with regard to the actions of the Israeli army.
Afterwards there was strong criticism, including accusations of hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism.
Stephan Grigat, professor of theories and criticism of anti-Semitism at the Catholic University of North Rhine-Westphalia and head of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism in Aachen, is of the opinion that open hostility to Israel also occurs in the German cultural and academic world.
My news
Reminder for advanced students: “The Passenger” at the Bavarian State Opera
No Oscar for Sandra Hülser - and still everything was rosy: That's what the gala in Los Angeles was like
Duracell Brit: James Blunt in the Olympiahalleread
“Out of Rosenheim”: Mourning for cult director Percy Adlonlesen
“Tatort” today: Read Viennese anniversary thriller with less insults and more substance
“Reset”: Katja Riemann and Hannah Schiller shine in the new ZDF serieslesen
“But it’s true that overall the debates within the art and culture scene in Germany are somewhat different than in international comparison.
Naturally, in Germany - as in Austria, the second immediate successor state to National Socialism - there is a somewhat different debate about anti-Semitism as well as about Israel.
In the left-wing cultural scene internationally, there is almost always an anti-Israel positioning.”
Look into history
In many non-Western countries, the reference point for the ultimate crime against humanity is not the Holocaust, but colonialism.
But Western societies such as the British have also been working on their colonial past for many years, with good reasons.
On the left side of the political spectrum, this has often led to the state of Israel being interpreted as a Western colonial project.
According to this reading, Israel is the colonial power that actually has no place in the region, and the Palestinians are the oppressed native people.
Grigat considers this to be “completely unhistorical”.
The founding of the State of Israel was precisely an anti-colonial act because it meant that the mandated power of Great Britain was thrown out the door.
“And because that was the case, many of the newly decolonized states in Africa had a very close relationship with the young state of Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.”
In addition, a large proportion of Israeli Jews today no longer come from Europe, but from Arab states.
It is therefore absurd if Israel is classified as “white” and therefore privileged in today’s postcolonial debate about black and white population groups.
“If you apply this to the Israeli population, you realize that this is not true at all.
Over 50 percent of the Jews in Israel come from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt - they have nothing at all to do with white Europeans.”
Expand the demand: “Never again!”
Regardless of the colonialism debate, many intellectuals in Western countries accuse Germany of unconditionally defending the right-wing nationalist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu based on a cult of guilt stemming from the Holocaust.
The victims are the Palestinian civilians, who are thereby exposed to the violence of the Israeli armed forces.
“Free Palestine from German guilt” is the slogan here.
In a statement published in the Guardian, a group of Western humanities scholars accused Germany of saying that the commandment of “Never again!” should apply equally to Israelis and Palestinians - and not to Palestinians to a lesser extent.
There is no first or second class human dignity.
The writer Deborah Feldman, author of the autobiographical world bestseller “Unorthodox”, which has now also been made into a film for Netflix, also expresses her opinion.
“I am firmly convinced that there is only one legitimate lesson from the Holocaust, and that is the absolute, unconditional defense of human rights for everyone,” said the 37-year-old at Markus Lanz.
Feldman is himself the descendant of Holocaust survivors, grew up in a strict religious family in New York and has lived in Berlin for ten years.
“Almost mass hysteria”
She is extremely critical of the German Israel and anti-Semitism debate - the Germans are primarily concerned with themselves and their historical guilt.
The accusation of anti-Semitism is being used specifically to stifle criticism of the Israeli government, said Feldman at the Lit.Cologne literary festival.
The “perfidious distortion and instrumentalization of the accusation of anti-Semitism” has become “almost a mass hysteria”: Even Jews who have expressed themselves critical of Israel are now branded as anti-Semites.
Apartheid in Israel?
As an example, she cited the Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who made the film “No Other Land” about settlement policy in the West Bank together with the Palestinian Basel Adra and was honored for it at the Berlinale.
At the gala he spoke about how they would now both return to Israel and be treated very unequally there due to an “apartheid situation”.
Grigat believes the term “apartheid” is inadmissible: “It refers to the racist apartheid regime in South Africa.
In Israel, on the other hand, there are also Arab judges and parties.
And in the West Bank, the unequal treatment of the Palestinian population does not result from racist ideology, but primarily from the course of the conflict and the need for Israeli security measures in the face of ongoing terror.”
Amnesty International and other human rights organizations, on the other hand, allege that Israel has established an apartheid regime in the Palestinian territories it controls, which constitutes a crime against humanity.
Habeck: “That is my reason of state”
Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (Greens), who published a video on the subject of anti-Semitism shortly after Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel that was viewed millions of times, explained again last week at the Lit.Cologne why the discourse in Germany must inevitably be different than in other countries.
He emphasized that Germany, like other countries, has a duty to provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, improve their living conditions and work towards a two-state solution.
When it comes to Israel, Germany has a special obligation that arises from history.
“The promise after fascism in Germany was: There is a safe place in the world where Jews can always go.” Germany is still bound to this promise.
“That is why there is a specifically German responsibility - and it is different from the Danish or French responsibility - to ensure and defend and protect the existence of Israel and thus a safe place for Jews in the world.
And that is my reason of state.” dpa