Why German state racism is now directed at the Palestinians
A demonstrator displays a placard reading: "Palestinian Lives Matter" during a pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin on 19 May 2021 (AFP)
The Holocaust serves, paradoxically, as an alibi for Europeans to assume they are morally superior to others, as the cancellation of an arts prize to Caryl Churchill shows
There are troubling insights to be gained into modern European racism from the German arts community’s decision to revoke a lifetime achievement award to the respected British playwright Caryl Churchill over her trenchant support for the Palestinians.
On 31 October, Churchill was stripped of the European Drama Prize she had been given in April in recognition of her life’s work. The decision was backed by Petra Olschowski, the arts minister of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, who said: “We as a country take a clear and non-negotiable stance against any form of antisemitism. This is all the more reason why a prize funded by the state cannot be awarded under the given circumstances.”
The jury - comprising eminent figures in German cultural life - said they had had their attention drawn, since making the award, to two problems. First, Churchill had backed BDS, a Palestinian grassroots movement calling for a boycott of Israeli institutions directly involved in Israel’s decades-long oppression of the Palestinians.
Back in 2019, an overwhelming majority of the German parliament designated support for BDS as “antisemitic”.
And second, the panel had been reminded of a short play called Seven Jewish Children, written 13 years ago in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s savage and extended bombardment of Gaza’s besieged Palestinian population in the winter of 2008-09. In a statement, the German jury said the play could "be regarded as being antisemitic".
In Churchill’s now largely forgotten play, Jewish parents articulate their trauma generation by generation.
Palestinians are not present. They are shadows. They are the referred pain of a wound from Europe. Instead, the play contextualises the suffering in Gaza through a series of monologues as each generation of Jewish parents struggles to decide what they should tell their children and what realities they should hide - be it about the horrors of Europe, the crimes involved in the creation of Israel, or the bombardment of Gaza.
The play hints at uncomfortable truths: that the oppressed can turn into oppressor; that traumas do not necessarily heal or enlighten; and that their effects can be complex and paradoxical.
Friends to tormentors
One conclusion to draw from the revocation of Churchill’s award - the latest episode in Europe’s endless “antisemitism rows” - is that German elites, who control the public discourse, have signally failed to internalise the Holocaust’s key lesson.
It is a universal one: that we should never tolerate the demonisation of oppressed and marginalised groups, or those who stand in solidarity with them, especially when the state itself or its representatives are behind such demonisation. That way lies pogroms and gas chambers.
How has support for the Palestinian cause of BDS - for boycotts of those directly involved in Israel’s decades-long oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians - come to be reinterpreted as racism against Jews?
This, of course, is not a uniquely German failing. Most western states - including the US, France and Britain - have willingly conflated criticism of Israel over its oppression of Palestinians with antisemitism, and sought to silence or criminalise calls to punish Israel through boycotts.
But this failure ought to be all the more surprising given the enormous efforts Germany has expended over many decades in Holocaust education, supposedly to eradicate the susceptibility of Germans to state-sponsored racism. How have they switched - so easily, it seems - from one kind of state-sanctioned racism, antisemitism, to another kind, anti-Palestinian racism?
But even more paradoxically, Germany has smeared not just Palestinians and their supporters through its crackdown on BDS, but Jews too. It treats them all as inherently responsible for the actions of Israel, a state that no more represents all Jews than Saudi Arabia represents all Muslims.
Germany’s ostentatious philo-semitism - expressed in its reflexive support for Israel - is simply antisemitism-in-waiting. If Jews are viewed as intrinsically tied to Israel’s actions, then their fate depends on how Israel is viewed at any particular moment. Should western elites support Israel, as they do now, then Jews are safe. Should western elites turn against Israel, then Jews are not safe.
Crucially, what Caryl Churchill and the vast majority of Palestinians and their supporters are highlighting is that Israel and “the Jews” are not the same. Criticism of Israel is not criticism of Jews. And those who claim it is are playing with fire. They are providing the conditions for those they now regard as friends to later become their tormentors.
‘Reeks of fascism’
So how has Germany reached the point where it can cancel an award to a renowned playwright - and smear her as antisemitic - because she supports the right of Palestinians to freedom and dignity and because she wishes to speak out against their silencing in Europe? How has Germany so casually, so unthinkingly, become racist towards Palestinians and their supporters, and once again to Jews?
As Mike Leigh, a famous British film director who is Jewish, has observed in Churchill’s defence, the decision to revoke the prize “reeks of the very fascism it affects to oppose”. There is a wider context to Germany’s repurposing of its racism.