Pali Cloth: Resistance Folklore | nd-aktuell.de

I’m not sure whether in a better future it wouldn’t be better for the German left to completely forego any kind of ethnic identity nonsense. You don’t go to an anti-racist demonstration with blackfacing.

The tendency to wear a Palestinian scarf in public, which has recently become more pronounced, especially among young citizens of this country who like to imagine themselves as resisters, is probably not just due to the deep-seated desire to make oneself important by stylizing oneself as the oppressed , to be explained.

Certainly: the smartphone has run out of juice again and dad has once again transferred his monthly pocket money too late. So you somehow feel like a victim of the prevailing conditions. You are somehow vaguely “against war” and you like the idea that you are significantly involved in a matter of global political importance and in the establishment of international justice, be it through a piece of cloth draped around your shoulders, which is primarily an expression of a blood and soil ideology, by chanting or by a bravely raised fist: you have to put in comparatively little effort to get a satisfying feeling.

Jittery and hormonally excited young people often want to see political changes quickly and tend to be more concerned with feeling than with thinking, hence the baseless enthusiasm, the shrill shouting of slogans, the stupid victory-or-death pathos and the tendency to appear uniform . If there are no suitable fanatics to hand with whom you can identify, your head will quickly become dull.

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This probably also explains – at least in part – why this sentence could be heard from the central loudspeaker truck on May 4th at a pro-Palestinian demonstration that led across Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, while the demonstrators continued to trudge undeterred on their way: » Maybe it will be time for a German, a German leader, a cancer healer, who will liberate this country, who will liberate this country from Zionism!”

In view of the traditional German preference for all sorts of folklore and local kitsch of all kinds, which is sometimes shared by some people who consider themselves somehow left-wing and progressive, it is difficult to convince young people not to go along to demonstrations, where people loudly and in pure Nazi jargon call for a “German leader” if they want to be taken seriously as a leftist.

Incidentally, it is no state secret that the so-called Pali scarf has also been worn by neo-Nazis for at least 25 years, who, as we know, also have a penchant for local kitsch, “national liberation” and the fight against, in their view, rootless, internationally active ones have groups of people.

Anyone who, as a leftist in this country, insists on the urgency of “criticism of Israel” should at least have previously taken note of the fact that – alongside drinking beer, watching football, complaining and waving the German flag – “criticism of Israel” is one of the local population’s favorite pastimes.

The writer and columnist Wiglaf Droste, who died five years ago and who wrote for the Marxist newspaper “Junge Welt” for decades and who, as is well known, did not particularly stand out as an ardent defender of “Western imperialism” during his lifetime, once summed it up aptly in one sentence summarize why Germans would do better to refrain from any kind of “criticism of Israel”: “There are six million reasons for Germans to refrain from making didactic comments and prosecutor-like accusations against Israel.” By the way, Droste’s recommendation also applies “if your Grandpa didn’t contribute to the fact that the gas chambers could run behind the front in the Wehrmacht,” as Deniz Yücel added in the “Taz” in 2014.

It may be that Israel is currently being ruled by unsympathetic figures. However, a rough estimate is that 99.9 percent of all states are currently governed by unsympathetic, reactionary figures, the majority of whom have not even come to power as a result of elections. A circumstance through which the committed “critics of Israel” who consider themselves to be on the left have so far not been able to be persuaded to switch to “criticism of Saudi Arabia,” “Iran,” or “criticism of Saxony.” They have also not yet heard the statement that “legitimate criticism of Hamas must continue to be permitted.”

In any case, one thing is certain: people who have not yet completely stopped thinking think it is unlikely that Hamas, which is classified as fascist, will become a queer anarchist collective in the foreseeable future.

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