Pars Today

On December 14, a group of students from the Freie University in Berlin organized a rally in solidarity with the Palestinian people. This gathering, unprecedented in Germany, was conducted entirely peacefully despite some attempts to disrupt it. However, it did not end well!

The university's reaction to the event was calling the police and the arrest of 20 protesting students. Although both the police and university officials acknowledged that no anti-Semitic or racist actions took place during the protest, the university still pressed charges against these students, and even a petition signed by 26,000 people was prepared for their expulsion.

The events of December 14 and the subsequent legal and media harassment happened amid a societywide assault on anyone expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people in Germany. There has been a relentless campaign to harass, scare, intimidate, silence, fire, dismiss people and organizations who have dared go against the German government’s and institutions’ staunch support for Israel.

However, the main purpose of this harassment is nationwide guiltwashing, through the pretext of addressing Germany’s historical guilt for the Holocaust.

The message of the guiltwashers is clear: Germany alone is exceptional in its stance against anti-Semitism. Germany, in opposing the exceptionalism of the Nazi era, is today exceptional once again but, of course, in a different and supposedly progressive way.

So far, various Jewish writers and scholars have repeatedly pointed out the anti-Semitic nature of guiltwashing.

“We have a form of anti-Semitism … that is not even addressed as anti-Semitism, and it is the collective silencing of Jewish voices that do not abide by the dominant discourse in Germany,” Emilia Roig, a Jewish French scholar and writer, said at a December event in Berlin.

According to Jewish writer and researcher Emily Dische-Becker, a third of those who have been “cancelled” in Germany for alleged anti-Semitism (i.e. expressing solidarity with the Palestinians) have been Jews, including descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Guiltwashing does not fundamentally care about the safety of Jews. Otherwise, it would not be pushing a discourse that is so recklessly increasing social tensions at a time when hate crimes against Jews, Arabs and Muslims are spiking and when intercommunal solidarity is what is most necessary.

Also, guiltwashing does not allow Germans to take a principled stance against state terrorism, genocide and the systematic violation of human rights – something that should be the historical responsibility of any state, but especially so for the German state.

Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly made clear their genocidal intentions openly and unabashedly. And yet German officials and public figures continue to ignore them. They have also disregarded the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide, and the practical unanimity of human rights groups and most of the international community on the apartheid character of Israel and its serial historical violations of international law.

Guiltwashing allows Germany to maintain an expansionist foreign policy that reflects a racist view of the world and involves continued support for Israel and other brutal regimes throughout the West Asia region.

Guiltwashing also allows Germany to cover up the increasing structural and institutional racism against various minority groups. German exceptionalism appears to have merely substituted one form of racism for another, making use of the more permissive international environment towards that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice today. It has basically created a replacement victim community.

The performance that was recently staged in the city of Cologne during a carnival vividly illustrated this process. In this carnival, there was a depiction of a woman wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, holding two dogs named "Hatred" and "Violence". The leashes of these dogs were made from the Palestinian flag. The substitution of an anti-Semitic metaphor with something that, in the German mindset, is associated with being Palestinian clearly demonstrates the racist nature of guiltwashing.

Meanwhile, in a shocking example of historical revisionism, Berlin schools are being told to distribute leaflets describing the Nakba of 1948 as a “myth” – despite even Israeli lawmakers using the term.

Amid this societywide assault on international law, history, human decency and basic liberties, German academic institutions have done almost nothing. Although they should act as society’s moral conscience and oppose the current distorted public discourse, they are shirking away from their responsibilities.

This content is an excerpt of a note published on the al-Jazeera website.

MG/ME