The wordplay approach to antisemitism argues that Arabs are ‘also semites’ and therefore the term ‘antisemitism’ should include them as well. This argument is often made with the intention of undermining serious discussion about antisemitism, but other times it is taken up by sincere people seeking to address antisemitism and anti-Arab racism simultaneously.
The following is a collection of comments I made on the topic. I was replying to the article “Anti-Semitism and the Assault on Gaza” on the website, The Commune. (The article and the discussion are available there in their entirety.)
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“In France, being an anti-Semite in the old way does not work,” [Bernard-Henri] Lévy said when I asked him about Dieudonné. “You will not raise a mass movement by saying the Jews killed Christ—nobody cares. Accuse them of having invented Christ, like Voltaire did in the eighteenth century, still nobody cares. As far as being a special race, nobody believes that anymore. But anti-racist anti-Semitism—saying that for the sake of the blacks, for the sake of the Arabs, we must make the Jews shut up—this works. If the Jews practiced ‘memorial pornography’—thus exaggerating their own suffering—they became responsible for why the world didn’t care enough about the history of slavery and the suffering of blacks. Dieudonné and his followers suppose that the capacity for empathy and the capacity for indignation is limited. But the brain doesn’t work like this—you can care about the Holocaust and slavery. The more you are concerned by one, the more you are likely to be concerned by the other.
“From “Laugh Riots.”
The German Left and Israel | Dissent Magazine | Spring 2009
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1403
By Robert Zwarg
Writing about the German Left and Israel—the debates on anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism of the last several years—often feels like a race against history. Not a day goes by without another piece being added to this complex and troublesome mosaic. No topic has stirred up so much debate and emotion and created so great a rift inside the German Left as Israel. These discussions, one could say, precipitated the erosion of anti-imperialism as a hegemonic framework for leftist thought.
In the beginning of 2009, there were huge demonstrations protesting Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Few voices asked for understanding or pointed out the complexities of the situation. When Chancellor Angela Merkel blamed Hamas for being the cause of Israel’s attack, she had to defend her statement against criticism in Parliament. Not only in Germany but throughout Europe there were the biggest anti-Israeli demonstrations since the second intifada. They lacked neither intensity nor (sometimes) violence. In Oslo, an Israel-friendly demonstration of about five hundred people was attacked by a pro-Palestinian group double its size. In London, an angry pro-Hamas mob tried to storm the Israeli embassy, chasing the police down the street. In Duisburg, Germany, during a protest, a neighbor enraged the demonstrators by hanging an Israeli flag in his window. The apartment was attacked with stones and bottles. Eventually the police, unable to cope with the situation, broke into the apartment and confiscated the flag while the protesters cheered.
Leaving these events aside, the year 2008, the sixtieth anniversary of Israel’s creation, provided a good occasion for reflection on the relationship between the German Left and Israel. It revealed something about the Left’s extra-parliamentary debate, happening mainly in cultural centers, journals, and the academy and something also about the reflection of this debate at the parliamentary level. These two levels exemplify two models of political practice: critique of ideology (Ideologiekritik) vs. Realpolitik.
Microcosm of the Left
On a mild Friday evening in May 2008, about 230 people, mostly between the ages of sixteen and thirty, gather at a local left-wing cultural center in a fairly large East German city to talk for two-and-a-half hours. The city is well acquainted with political debate. But there haven’t been this many people at such a meeting for a long time. The topic that brings them together might sound even more surprising: what can solidarity with Israel mean today?
Sitting on the panel are members of existing and former political groups, and the short presentation quickly turns into a discussion with lively audience participation. A number of things could strike an outside observer as peculiar. Everyone on the panel, as well as in the rather young audience, seems to agree on the importance of supporting Israel. There is no big fight about “selling out” left-wing standards, no one demonizing a country about as big as the federal state of Hesse. Instead, what seems to worry the debaters is the relationship of a pro-Israel position to radical left-wing politics—whether it’s an external relationship or an internal one, and what this means for actual political work. In particular, the question of strategic alliances is viewed differently among the discussants. Can a strategic alliance with members of the conservative Christian Democratic Party—which has at times proved to be more progressive concerning Israel than its left-wing counterparts —be justified? And since the radical Left still alludes to concepts such as “liberated society,” how is active engagement in the well-being of people in the Middle East, how is the democratization and— horribile dictum—capitalization of countries steeped in theocracy and modern forms of feudalism to be reconciled with a utopian vision, free from capitalism?
Given the history of leftist movements, the sole fact that solidarity with Israel, at least in some places, is accepted among such groups is remarkable. But an event like this one is exceptional. Similar groups in other cities encounter the strong and at times even violent resistance of traditional anti-imperialist and communist groups. (At a discussion in Magdeburg in June 2008, attackers used stones and tear gas to disrupt the event. And just a few days before this article was written, a pamphlet on the United Kingdom Indymedia Web site called for “visits” to known pro-Israel leftist venues in Berlin, giving names and addresses. The internal dynamics of political movements, that is, the way in which substantial differences accumulate and finally explode, haven’t changed. Allegations of sectarianism, of “selling out,” and of careerism are as much a part of these debates as is the wish to solidify one’s own position.
So the debates are not new. Ever since the West German Left in 1967 turned from being rather Israel-friendly to being vehemently anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic, this dominant position has always been contested, if only by minority groups. After 1989, when Germany was facing a wave of nationalism and the Left needed to reconsider almost its entire framework, the discussions took on a whole new dynamic. It was not only a debate about current political events—the second Gulf War being the most important. It was also a troubling revelation about the history of leftism, that is, its own connection to nationalism and anti-Semitism. In a nutshell, it can be described as a history of perception blocked by the neutralizing layers of the cold war, with a return of memory after 1989. While the traditional Left continued to interpret the world along Manichean geopolitical lines, a significant minority launched a critique of anti-imperialism, anti-Semitism, and regressive forms of anti-capitalism. As for anti-Zionism, one went by the late sixties slogan of Jean Améry: “Anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm.”
Contested Fields
When Gregor Gysi, parliamentary co-leader of Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke), gave a speech on “The German Left and the state of Israel” in April 2008, celebrating Israel’s sixtieth birthday, he probably knew that he would upset many of his comrades. His party is the successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, which ran the country. From 1949 to 1989 the German Democratic Republic refused even to recognize Israel; in 1976, trade with Israel was forbidden, and reparations for Holocaust survivors were refused. Gysi’s speech thus came as a surprise. In the strongest terms ever heard from the leadership of the Left Party, he deemed anti-imperialism an inadequate framework for a full and responsible comprehension of Israel’s history and the conflict in the Middle East. Furthermore, he strongly criticized the romanticization of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas as “anti-imperialist” forces and firmly emphasized Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. Controversy wasn’t long in coming. In April, Werner Pirker—a writer for the traditionally left-wing newspaper Junge Welt and notorious for bashing Israel—denounced Gysi for rejecting the crucial coordinates of left-wing politics. Other party members criticized the speech as a move toward the center and toward the acceptance of the value of the nation-state (a position whose wrongness they commonly forget when it comes to Cuba and Venezuela). More than a few people felt offended by the presence of the Israeli flag on the party’s Web site. That Gysi is one of two members of the German Parliament with Jewish ancestors (Jerzy Montag of the Green Party is the other) aroused suspicion.
The controversy is not surprising. In the discussion of Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Gysi’s co-leader, Oskar Lafontaine, expressed sympathy for Iran, which he saw as under an imminent threat; he gave up his plans to visit the country only after Gysi’s speech. An invitation to Hamas to attend a conference on the Middle East only failed due to entry regulations of the European Union. And Norman Paech, the party’s foreign policy spokesperson, frequently accused Israel of being one-sidedly responsible for the conflict, at the same time minimalizing anti-Semitic sentiment in the region and denying the threat to Israel. At a demonstration in January 2009, he held that Israel’s attacks on Gaza were in no way justified by a right of self-defense and were indeed “criminal.”
Gysi’s speech thus stands out for several reasons. First, statements like these are rarely heard from party officials, who usually only react on this issue. Second, and most important, Gysi knew that he spoke without the support of a large part of his base and against a number of people in the party’s leadership, not least Lafontaine. The bigger parties can support a variety of policy positions without turning them into existential issues. The intensity this issue provokes, however, suggests that for a large part of the Left, opposition to Israel is not only integral to their political framework, but utterly necessary.
To be clear, anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist incidents occur periodically in all politically relevant parties in Germany. Just to name a few: on October 3, 2003, a national holiday commemorating Germany’s reunification, Martin Hohmann, a Christian Democratic parliamentarian, wondered publicly if it wouldn’t be justified to deem the Jews a “people of perpetrators” (Tätervolk) for their involvement in the Russian Revolution. The aim of the speech was to absolve Germany of collective responsibility for the horrors of the Second World War. Jürgen Möllemann, a representative for the liberal Free Democratic Party until 2002, did not hide his sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers. When his colleague Jamal Karlsi, back then a member of the Green Party, used national-socialist rhetoric and spoke of a “war of annihilation” (Vernichtungskrieg) against the Palestinians and denounced a supposed “Zionist lobby” for obstructing open discussions, Möllemann rushed to his support and organized Karlsi’s move to the Free Democrats.
But it is especially interesting to consider the dynamic of these discussions in the Left Party. In a way, the debates of the extraparliamentary Left over the last years are now being repeated on the parliamentary level, with special intensity. The “radical Left” plays a role in this repetition insofar as the Left Party is one of the only political spaces open to a “radical politics” (whatever that means). Not only does its membership consist in large part of former socialists from the GDR, it also has a communist section, made up of traditional communists and Trotskyites.
However, the younger party members, who come out of the radical Left, could lead to an erosion of dominant views on the Middle East. In 2008, an internal party workgroup was founded: BAK Shalom (BAK standing for the German word Bundesarbeitskreis, meaning Federal Working Group). Its long-term aim is to foster a serious discussion on the renewal of progressive positions in the twenty-first century. That involves, as the caucus declared in its founding document, opposition to anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, as well as to regressive criticisms of capitalism inside and outside the party. “The leftist movement in general and the Left Party in particular,” argued Benjamin Krüger and Sebastian Voigt, members of BAK Shalom, “have to decide whether they want to be a modern Left, as they already are in part, or if they would rather stick to old ideological dogma, peering at the world through the prism of the Cold War.”
Even if they are still a minority, these young people not only managed to draw attention to the debate outside of Germany, but also to stir up discussion inside and outside the party. Party officials, like Norman Paech, who was sharply criticized by BAK Shalom, either denied the need for discussion or tried to shut it down. On January 15, 2009, the newspaper Neues Deutschland, a main organ of the Left, announced that it would no longer publish Jürgen Elsässer. Elsässer, author and journalist and close to Die Linke, especially to Lafontaine, was one of those who frequently appealed to national-bolshevist sentiment, calling upon the nation to fight finance capital. These ideas brought him close to the far right, which heralded him as one of their own. After a discussion in which he sought to start a Volksfront (popular front) against “Anglo-American finance-capital,” at which Nazis and a Holocaust denier were present, Neues Deutschland cut him off. BAK Shalom had demanded his removal that same day. The statement might not have triggered the decision of the newspaper but the issue shows that it becomes more and more impossible to ignore such discussions.
Quo Vadis?
Since the time of Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first chancellor after 1949, a generally Israel-friendly position has been part of Germany’s raison d’état. This wasn’t always a sign of true conviction but rather of a bad conscience and of the desire to fit into the postwar international community. Even during the Adenauer years, former national socialists, such as Hans Globke—active in the formulation of the racist Nuremberg laws—could occupy leading positions in politics. And it certainly didn’t affect the government’s reluctance—to put it mildly—to agree to pay reparations to people who had to endure forced labor on German soil. The argument about that is still going on today. Even in 2008, when Angela Merkel’s speech in front of the Knesset was called “historical,” Germany was the second largest trade partner of one of Israel’s fiercest enemies, Iran. Any close look at this issue always has to distinguish between official declarations, single actions of party members, and the common sentiment of the German population. In 2003, according to a poll funded by the European Union, 65 percent of Germans felt threatened by Israel and deemed it a larger threat to world peace than any other state.
Opposition to these attitudes and resentments should always be supported, not only by the Left—though perhaps especially by people who feel themselves part of that tradition. That these categories— left and right—themselves may seem outdated or at least blurred is another question. It’s certain, however, that they continue to reassert themselves in the struggle for a truly reasonable politics. As a framework of debate, they can’t easily be done away with; nor should they be ossified into dogma. That at least a part of the Left has managed to think past its history is a success, even if the ramifications of this new thinking are still small. What does that say about the relation of these extraparliamentary discussions to mainstream politics? It is important that progressive movements be a step ahead of whoever is in power and maintain a critical distance— in the best tradition of Ideologiekritik. This is not, of course, just for the sake of being different but for the sake of never being content. What’s commonly understood as Realpolitik is never going to fit perfectly with the traditions of the Left. A mediation between the two is not a bad goal for the Left. Meanwhile, it is crucial to bear in mind certain peculiarities of the German situation. Despite all official declarations on behalf of Israel and against anti-Semitism, Germany’s recent history has given more than one reason for remaining skeptical. In a society in which history always tends to distort political discussions, an actor who takes on the role of the “bad conscience” is absolutely necessary.
Robert Zwarg is a student at Leipzig University and a member of the Coalition Against Anti-Semitism-Leipzig. He was an intern at Dissent in spring 2008.
