And then it was just a pop symbol: Jan Delay at a concert in Hamburg in 2007 with a Palituch tie
Photo: Imago//POP-EYE/Gabsch
According to some daily commentators, left-wing Palestine solidarity belongs only to the area of anti-Semitism. In fact, it is part of the internationalist commitment of a movement that defines itself as anti-imperialist, anti-racist and anti-colonial and emerged as part of the global revolt of 1968. It is animated by a spirit of opposition to a time in which “there was only injustice and no outrage,” to use Bertolt Brecht’s words. As an empathetic movement with the oppressed, it has a considerable degree of one-sidedness.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse and Ulrike Meinhof as a “Konkret” columnist wanted to shed light on the blind spots of an overly dichotomous portrayal of the Middle East conflict during the Six-Day War in 1967. Ultimately, there is no easy solution to the conflicting claims of two peoples to one country; A solution must take into account the legitimate interests of both sides. But movement logics of resistant practice are sometimes hardly compatible with differentiation and increasing complexity. At that time, the specific radicalization was called “anti-Zionism”.
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However, the broadest part of the movement in solidarity with the fate of the Palestinians, who had a history of displacement since the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, spoke out in favor of a two-state solution. This form of moderate Palestine solidarity could be found in the trade unions and well into the social democrats. A smaller part perceived the conflict as a struggle between an oppressed people whose right to self-determination was taken away and who now had to defend themselves against an oppressive state that could only be viewed as a “colonialist structure” and whose right to exist was denied. An even smaller number felt morally and politically compelled to become part of the conflict by fighting militantly in their privileged situation as residents of the First World “in the heart of the beast” (Che Guevara).
The latter, the practice of “armed struggle,” which can only be understood from the development and crisis of the protest movement of the late 1960s, is historically perceived as overgrowing the multitude of political forms of Palestine solidarity.
In the GDR, Palestine solidarity in the form of “anti-Zionism” and support for Yasser Arafat’s socialist PLO was part of the state ideology and foreign policy. Interestingly, the majority of GDR artists who leaned towards anti-fascism held back from producing pro-Palestinian works of art. It is easy to find pictures of the Algerian or Vietnamese liberation struggle by committed artists close to the state such as Willi Sitte, Lea Grundig or Karl Erich Müller; GDR art for Palestine and against Israel is in short supply – which speaks against a popular image of the “anti-Semitic GDR” that historians like Jeffrey Herf paint.
Until recently, left-wing extra-institutional Palestine solidarity was part of a submerged protest culture in the Federal Republic. Hardly anyone remembers the mural that appeared on the squatted houses on Hamburg’s Hafenstrasse at the time of the Intifada in 1988. The boycott of Israeli goods, kibbutzim and beaches was then called for and, following the militantly anti-Zionist worldview, Israel was put in quotation marks.
From 1988 to 1991, there were serious discussions and arguments within the radical left about the limits of left-wing anti-Zionism. This was initiated by the Hamburg Communist League (KB), which rejected the Hafenstrasse slogan. For the militant left, the statement by the three prisoners from the anti-imperialist resistance, Michi Dietiker, Ali Jansen and Bernhard Rosenkötter, was not without meaning, who declared: “Left-wing criticism of the ruling ideology of Israeli settler colonialism is the fundamental opposite of anti-Semitic clichés and anti-Semitic thought structures , or it is actually anti-Semitism in disguise.” In the years that followed, the loud anti-German scene, with its opinion that any criticism of the state of Israel was anti-Semitic, ensured that Israel-related anti-imperialism was morally and politically discredited.
Other places of conflict and the struggle for liberation moved internationalists, such as the Zapatista attempts at self-government in Chiapas, Mexico or the battles of the Kurdish militias around Rojava in Syria. The old anti-imperialism of the 1970s was given a serious setback by the development of places of longing such as Sandinista Nicaragua, which developed into the Ortega family despotism. Russia’s war against Ukraine and regional neo-imperial or hegemonic regimes such as Iran, Turkey or Saudi Arabia simply made an old anti-imperialism that only focuses on the USA and Israel look antiquated and very ideological.
The newer forms of Palestine solidarity also obey less the grammar of the old anti-imperialism. Globally, they are strongly influenced by the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter. This movement gave rise to a new self-confidence among people and groups affected by racism. Left-wing and liberal Jewish artists practice deconstructionist practices of “Undoing Zionism” and form intersectional alliances of solidarity, empathy and the fight for liberation.
Now what Brecht put into his verses may apply to some commitments, according to which the hatred of baseness distorts the features and the anger over injustice makes the voice hoarse, sometimes hysterical. But attaching the label “anti-Semitic” to every loud and clear objection to Israel’s war against the civilian population in Gaza points not only to an intellectual shallowing of the German debate culture, but to a general tendency of authoritarian liberalism, which, under moralizing accusations, undermines freedom of expression and freedom of art intended to restrict.
The denunciatory labeling of pro-Palestine voices as “anti-Semitic” is familiar from the reactionary Springer press of the late 1960s and from the anti-German scene discourse of the 1990s and 1900s. A mixture of the two seems to have achieved a certain hegemony in Germany, which is not only reflected in the fact that anti-Semitism officers come from the anti-German milieu and people from this political movement, which has little concern for honesty, are passed on as experts on the subject of “left-wing anti-Semitism” in the public broadcaster become.
The new pro-Palestinian outrage movement, which uses civil disobedience to insist on undivided human rights and a “ceasefire,” finds itself at the mercy of ideological and institutional counterpressure that is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. The opposition is strange: German Israel supporters, mostly from the right-wing political camp, who see themselves as committed to a reason of state based on guilt, are sometimes opposed to Jewish internationalists and people of color who follow a radical human rights universalism.
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