Palestine and German Studies
May 30, DDGC Germanists for Palestine Research Cooperative
As we write this post, Israel is systematically displacing, maiming, and murdering Palestinians. At the same time, a global web of power structures is actively suppressing solidarity campaigns with Palestine and Palestinians. State representatives, police agents, and university administrators (among others) form an assemblage of power that reinforces the delegitimation of collective struggles for Palestinian liberation. In this context, we bear witness to the severe violence targeting Palestinian life. We also bear witness to the destruction of Palestinian religious, cultural, educational, and other social institutions and essential infrastructures. And we face disciplinary constellations that expect us to ignore all that we witness. Those of us making humanitarian pleas on behalf of Palestinians and Palestine are told that the issue does not concern them. Others (including Jewish students, faculty, staff, and community members) are told their pleas are antisemitic in nature and infringe upon what is cast as a human right to use genocidalism as a form of state defense. And for those many of us working in German studies, these impasses find intensified expression as a result of the field’s historic ethnonationalist orientations and extensive ties to foreign service initiatives of German-speaking Europe.
Silences
What we observe is that fear, uncertainty, perceived distance to the violence targeting Gaza, or general apathy work in tandem with racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and xenophobia to bolster anti-Palestinian resentment in everyday life, broadly speaking, and in German studies, in particular (see also Sales 2023). The silence of our disciplinary institutions is replicated in teaching and scholarship. A cursory search of the entire online catalog (going back to 2005) of the respective journals of the two largest professional institutions yields only two results for the term "Nakba" (both of those hits come from book reviews). In one of those same journals, "Palestinian" appears only twice over this entire time period.
This mirrors what Hanna Al-Taher and Anna-Esther Younes have identified in German-speaking academia, where silence around Palestine becomes “a structural feature of colonially constituted forms of communication” (Al-Taher and Younes 2023; see also Author Collective scăpa شاهد). But we reject the affective impasse of this condition. Here, we draw inspiration from scholars working in different segments of German studies and adjacent fields who have been writing and organizing around Palestine. We believe that these past coalitional energies will help us move into the future. In fact, dozens of German studies scholar-practitioners have been organizing for months to develop lasting infrastructures by which to support Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinian solidarity initiatives—many extending the work they did decades ago into our fraught present.
Part of this work, in our assessment, includes ongoing needs to articulate and rearticulate why Palestine is a vital matter for German studies. In this post, we therefore hope to start what will be a series of engagements on the matter of “Palestine and German Studies.” Our aim is not to be comprehensive; nor can we be in the space we have. We work as emerging and established scholars, some precarious, others more resourced, disabled and able-bodied, scholars of color and white scholars, Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Currently we primarily work from North America and Europe, but we seek to collaborate with and learn from scholar-practitioners internationally and beyond German studies, in the hopes of developing frameworks for a more just future.
Histories of Racism and Colonialism
From within German studies we must recognize the German nation-state’s position in a complex historical trajectory extending from before and after World War II. Here, the German state’s moral responsibility for the horror of the Holocaust cannot be disassociated from the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent Nakba (catastrophe)—the dispossession, marginalization and oppression of Palestinians on their own lands. The Israeli declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, backed by UN General Assembly Resolution 181, but rejected by Arab and Palestinian leaders, produced a settler colonial project that is “European” in nature and “ongoing” in practice (Galor and Atshan 11). In this way, we can understand the Nakba as “a direct consequence of World War II” (22). And yet in Germany, in the countries in which we reside, in the institutions in which we work, and globally, disinformation and active suppression of this knowledge obscures these connections in public discourse and much foreign policy.
Further, as German studies scholars, we must express our deep concern about the tragedy of the Holocaust being powerfully instrumentalized in public discourses past and present to directly “legitimize” the Israeli settler colonial impetus and its attendant oppression of the Palestinian people (Atshan and Galor 28, 14; see also Segal 2023). Edward Said’s words resonate here: “Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees” (Said). Said’s dictum of “the victims of the victims” calls attention to an oppressive hegemonic structure that perpetually centers Christo-white ideals while patronizing Palestinians and benefiting from a manufactured set of dichotomies that cast Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims as fundamentally at odds. It also gestures to a shared, though never parallel and always uneven, set of relationships to a history of white supremacy.
Fatima El-Tayeb elaborates on this history when she writes of the intersection of post/colonialism and post/fascism. Discriminating and exclusionary control and regulation of Jewish ways of being has been documented across German history. For Jewish Germans it has never been possible to speak of an “equal” societal positioning (El-Tayeb, Undeutsch 218). Similarly, the impact of unacknowledged histories and modes of thinking of German colonialism (and German complicity in the European colonialism of other nations) is interdependent with contemporary racism in German society and German studies, where race emerges as a social construct, a “fictive ethnicity” (El-Tayeb following Etienne Balibar, Queering Ethnicities xiii). Al-Taher and Younes further examine how Palestinians are constructed in German publics as dangerous, antisemitic figures, often through the rhetoric equating Palestinian work toward liberation as “Naziism” (Al-Taher and Younes 2023).
As El-Tayeb argues, as long as colonial modes of thinking remain unacknowledged in German public spheres and in German studies, racism also remains unaddressed and insurmountable. It bubbles forth into our contemporary period in the characterization of various “migrant/refugee crises,” and through the Orientalist framing of contemporary migration from the Arab world. Notions of Self/Other are brought from the past into the present in the German public sphere, and as discursive modes, effect a convenient displacement of antisemitism onto the Muslim-German Other. New citizenship laws in Germany raise fears that solidarity with Palestinians may result in denial of citizenship and potential deportation. Pro-Palestinian voices among activists, artists, and scholars have been deplatformed in German-speaking publics (see the Archive of Silence documenting some public cancellations of scholars and artists speaking on Palestine).
Solidarities
We note as well that part of the impasse we see in German studies is created by an artificial dichotomy that suggests that German studies scholars (and Germans) are prohibited from forming solidarities with Palestinians because they are called to a responsibility to recognize the violence of antisemitism that has existed for centuries and led to the genocide against Jews during the Holocaust. The same sense of moral responsibility is not extended to Palestinians (further see Atshan and Galor). This derives from the same dichotomous, ethnonationalist, and in itself, antisemitic thinking that presumes a conflation of a people with a nation-state, and by extension, assumes that Jews will support the actions of Israel.
Such thinking ignores the mutual constitution of antisemitism and other forms of European racisms that produced colonialism and slavery. Racisms targeting Jews, Muslims, Black people, Arabs, the Roma, and others produced unique experiences and forms—but also arose together and in conversation with one another. Fighting racist violence does not prohibit the imagination of solidarities with Jews and Palestinians—it requires those imaginations. Challenging antisemitism, anti-Muslim racism, and anti-Arab racism are not mutually exclusive projects.
Doing the work necessary to understand these entangled racisms is not external to or marginal to German studies—it is integral to understanding the history of German (broadly understood) thought, culture, and artistic expression, and of their relationship to the world and planet.
April and May 2024 have seen the rise of inspiring solidarity initiatives for Palestine on campuses internationally. We have seen our students deploy what they learned (sometimes in our courses) into direct action. They organize, take care of one another, provide occasions for collective learning and unlearning opportunities, and aim to hold our institutions accountable for their direct implication in unfolding Palestinian genocide. In so doing, students in all instances were living the missions of their institutions. Critique of colonial practices takes many forms, and our students’ actions are a major and admirable instantiation of anticolonial violence. These were peaceful initiatives that made community and brought students, staff, faculty, and community members together in ways rarely possible on campuses. And instead of supporting and protecting students, our institutions used force to delegitimize, criminalize, and demonize these initiatives. This did not take place far away but indeed on our very campuses. The link between the colonial genocidal force deployed against Palestinians and our institutions’ suppression of students with the aid of the police state renders Palestine a matter for everyday life on all our campuses.
This is at the heart of what is happening at universities around us, and it is also at the heart of the field in which we work. If action on campus feels close to what we do, and the targeted violence against Palestinians distant, it is only because we have ignored the ways in which our field is implicated in broad histories of colonialism and racism—including the ways in which the places from which we teach and research are also marked by colonial histories.
With this post we cannot begin to express all the ways in which Palestine matters to German studies, but we can recognize the urgency to learn, better understand, call attention to, and teach about the ways of thinking and forms of expression that contribute to and challenge racist violence. We hope that future posts in this series will gesture to that work.
Please consider contributing to the work of the DDGC Germanists for Palestine's Research Cooperative. We invite you to join our work. Moreover, if you are interested in contributing to our blog series with your own perspective, please reach out to the co-op (contact info can be found on our co-op page).
Works Cited
Al-Taher, Hanna, and Anna-Esther Younes. “Lebensraum, Geopolitics and Race—Palestine as a Feminist Issue in German-Speaking Academia.” Ethnography, Nov. 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381231216845.
Archive of Silence. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vq2tm-nopUy-xYZjkG-T9FyMC7ZqkAQG9S3mPWAYwHw/edit?usp=sharing. Accessed May 28, 2024.
Atshan, Sa′ed, and Katharina Galor. The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians. Duke University Press, 2020.
Author Collective scăpa شاهد. “Witnessing the Architecture of a Cancellation: The Silencing of Voices on Palestine in Austrian Academia.” Middle East Critique (online first, 2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2024.2348942.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
El-Tayeb, Fatima. Undeutsch: die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft. transcript Verlag, 2016.
Said, Edward. “The One-State Solution.” The New York Times, 10 Jan. 1999. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/magazine/the-one-state-solution.html.
Salehi, Kumars. “Germany’s Unprecedented Crackdown on Pro-Palestinian Speech.” The Hill 17. Dec. 2023. https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4362806-germanys-unprecedented-crackdown-on-pro-palestinian-speech/.
Segal, Raz. “Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies on Mass Violence in Israel and Palestine since 7 October.” Contending Modernities. 9. Dec. 2023. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/statement-of-scholars-7-october/.
