Re: <nettime> the silence on the rising fascism

[Andreas Broeckmann via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear Siraj,

apologies for the delayed answer. Thank you for your thoughtful  
message. I'm neither a political theorist, nor can I say anything  
about police strategy. I also cannot answer your recurrent question  
re: who is benefitting from restrictive police actions. - Over the  
past ten weeks there have been demonstrations in Berlin regularly in  
solidarity with the people of Palestine and against the terrible  
Israeli military campaign in Gaza, the last one was two days ago, on  
Sat 23 December at the central memory site of Brandenburger Tor, and a  
few days earlier there were a few hundred people demonstrating for a  
similar cause at the more mundane Hauptbahnhof, the main train  
station. Various Berliners join these demonstrations.

What I can perhaps say something about is this question:

> What were once acceptable protest placards
> are now charged with being signifiers of 'hidden antisemitism' e.g.
> the placard with 'From the river to the sea, we see equality', or
> 'From .... to ....' (left blank).

In my view, this change came with two events on 7 October. The first  
event was the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the murder of around 1200  
people in Israel, as well as the hostage-taking of over 120 people.  
The brutality of these attacks has been deeply shocking, and the fact  
that Hamas themselves distributed photo and video footage of civilians  
being massacred made this even more disturbing than it already was. It  
was reminiscent of the darkest moments of humanity, among which are  
not only the Shoah, but also pogroms like the deliberate and genocidal  
killings of Jews in many different places in Europe, in the decades  
and centuries before. Only that these murders mostly went unrecorded,  
for fear of retribution, and maybe also out of shame for something  
that was deemed wrong even by the perpetrators?

Due to the atrocities of 7 Oct, the claim "From the river to the sea"  
has taken on a different meaning. Until then, it was regarded as a  
barely veiled threat (to create a Palestinian state from the Jordan  
river to the Mediterranean, i.e. by eradicating the state of Israel)  
that was seen as drastic, but maybe the respective placards carried at  
earlier demonstrations were sometimes tolerated because it was hard to  
imagine that there was a realistic chance for something like this to  
happen; would pro-Palestinian forces even have the actual political  
will to execute such a plan, or was it ('From .... to ....') just a  
maximalist demand, made under the presumption that eventually only a  
partial solution would have to be found in negotiations? Thus one  
possible assumption until 6 October.

However, since 7 Oct, the will to actually destroy the state of Israel  
and to kill its inhabitants seems to have become a more realistic  
possibility. And it seems hard to imagine that people who have been  
carrying placards through Berlin during the last weeks, placards  
making the claim ('From .... to ....'), are not also aware that what  
they are saying will now be read differently.

The second event that changed the connotation of the protest placards  
you mention is the fact that, on that same evening, there was a group  
of people in Berlin-Neukölln celebrating the Hamas-led attacks. This  
celebration may have been even more crucial for the changes in police  
and public tolerance that you are observing. It is morally outrageous  
to imagine that there was a public demostration cheering the mass  
murder which had happened on that day. Personally, I don't have words  
for it. I cannot speak for anybody else, but from what I know about  
the German post-WW-II psyche, this event (this public "celebration")  
is one of the darkest moments in recent German history.

Since you are asking, I take the liberty to suggest that maybe your  
reflexions on the reactions to the demonstrations of the last 10 weeks  
should take this into account.

(About the following I'm not sure, but I have a sense...: The shock of  
witnessing these "celebrations" is not a sign of Othering those  
pro-Hamas demonstrators; I think the full force of this shameful  
moment comes from the fact that it happened here, among us, by people  
who live in this city, people who belong to the "We" of the Berlin  
inhabitants. Many of us have years, sometimes decades of experiences  
with the Berlin sociocultural mix, and most of us here were new  
arrivals at some point. - Unlike you, I think that the psychological  
drama you are witnessing and describing is not an issue of "Them", but  
of "Us".)

I may not have been paying sufficient attention, but I am yet waiting  
for somebody to say that they feel ashamed about the crimes committed  
on 7 October. Not because they were among the thousands of people who  
participated in the attack, but because they feel ashamed how the  
rightful cause of the Palestinian people has been tainted by these  
attacks, and how something utterly awful has been done in the name of  
a future, free Palestinian state. - When will somebody mention the  
progrom, by this or some other name, and maybe use one or the other  
adjective to offer a sign of rejection or moral indignation?

Regards,
-a


Am 21.12.23 um 10:38 schrieb Siraj Izhar via nettime-l:
> Thanks for extending the post on the silence on the rising fascism,  
> @Podinski.
> Can some-one (who?) address the realpolitics of this for those who  
> break out of the silence on the rising fascism? Or try to in  
> concrete ways.
> In recent weeks in Berlin has seriously forsaken any claim to  
> liberal dissent and protest seeing individual protestors being  
> dragged out of Palestine solidarity demos (the neck hold dragging  
> out seems the common method in my documentations). What were once  
> acceptable protest placards are now charged with being signifiers of  
> 'hidden antisemitism' e.g. the placard with 'From the river to the  
> sea, we see equality', or 'From .... to ....' (left blank).
> I see flyers, placards, banners being unpacked, unfurled, checked  
> and photographed by police prior to entry to a solidarity demo for  
> Gaza to prevent any violation of the Staatsraison. For any mention  
> of the protected term Israel at a Palestine demo.
> The numbers of arrested at each demo are then published in msm  
> (which is the only coverage to be expected there, as x numbers of  
> arrests).
> What exactly is the real purpose of this theatre and who is making  
> political mileage out of all this?
>
> The space of permitted dissent and opinion in a pluralist society  
> has collapsed. It means regular raids on private homes mainly in  
> Neukölln, Wedding etc - immigrant neighbourhoods. It has become a  
> hunt. Expression of resistance becomes meaningless when everything  
> is charged with genocidal intent on behalf of a memory culture with  
> its own genocidal past.
> And in the past few days ramped up police raids on poorly resourced  
> leftists anarchist homes like @zora_berlin, and solidarity cafes  
> like Karanfil. We see the references in the media of archaic 60s/70s  
> Palestinian groups like the PFLP, of Leila Khaled alongside tags of  
> 'Israel haters', numbers of arrests and so on.
> https://www.bz-berlin.de/polizei/170-polizisten-im-einsatz-razzia-gegen-israel-hasser
> Again who is making political mileage out of this theatre? and the  
> nature of the threat it poses.
>
> But on all this, let's talk here not just about the silence in the  
> current situation in Berlin but also the noise that lives off it and  
> amplifies itself. And of the types of silence in the face of an  
> ongoing genocide played out on screen and social media. Of who then  
> is staying silent and who is making noise?
> The silence of the endowed, those with rights is never the same of  
> silence of those with conditional rights - of residency and so  
> forth, the silence of the precarious. One silence does not know the  
> other. The Staatsraison is playing with this so different silences  
> entwine with the silence of fear and a fear of silence. German  
> society is becoming segregated by differentiations of silence. In  
> workplaces, at schools, universities. Segregated by those who fit  
> its memory culture and those who don't.
>
> And yes there is always a residual silence in every society aka  
> apathy, indifference but there is also a manufactured silence and  
> there is a complicitous silence (scratch a liberal and a fascist  
> bleeds).
> 'Genocide, what genocide,
> not sure it's a genocide....'
> 'It's complicated.'
> Of course that it could be a genocide that comes with the  
> displacement of a people left without rights, a displacement that  
> still has no relation to, and therefore no memory in Germany's  
> post-reunification memory culture is a silence?
> (Which is why Nakba commemorations have to be banned?)
>
>
> Public space for Palestine, solidarity with Gaza is invariably  
> equated with risk of antisemitism to be met with summary force of  
> the Staatsraison.
> We see this most clearly with the Palestine solidarity meeting/  
> occupation against an unfolding genocide (or what genocide?, it's  
> complicated...) organised at the Free University  Berlin. The  
> university called in the police to clear the space with total force  
> and then put out this tweet:  
> https://twitter.com/FU_Berlin/status/1735655031486001342
>
> "The Free University of Berlin has no place for anti-Semitism,  
> racism and discrimination."
> "The Free University of Berlin is not a lawless space."
> "The Free University of Berlin is a place of debate"
>
> In other words: To those affected mentally by watching a genocide,  
> you must stay silent. There will be no public expression of it as  
> protest.
>
> But let's get to the core. Unlike Ukraine, the silence is here  
> useful. Because every raid on a solidarity space, every smear on  
> Palestine solidarity in public space is converted into the noise  
> that is becoming pervasive but inaudible (the silence of the endowed).
> There is so much to pick from but here's one:  
> https://x.com/janfleischhauer/status/1720810560214712458?s=20
> (In translation, "I may be mistaken, but most Germans think in these  
> pictures: “We have nothing to do with these people and we don’t want  
> to have anything to do. Why are they here?”)
> Is it permitted to ask if his grandparents were saying the very same  
> words in the 30s?  - as there is no policing here.
>
> Then, take this: 'Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler'
> https://www.welt.de/podcasts/welt-talks/article248996436/Mathias-Doepfner-im-Gespraech-mit-Rapper-Ben-Salomo-ueber-den-wachsenden-Antisemitismus.html
> The vital point to note is WHO now is free to make comparisons with  
> the Third Reich in Germany today? And make noise on the rising  
> fascism.
>
> How surprising then that the subjects (or the only possible subject)  
> who can critique this state of affairs to break the silence and make  
> noise happen to be Jews in Germany. Candice Breitz, Masha Gessen and  
> so many more, against whom the entire apparatus of the state culture  
> industry has to be mobilised for daring to compare the realities of  
> Palestine today with Germany's Nazi past, i.e. its own fascism.
> But God forbid if an Arab, or a non-native Other should make such  
> comparison - that would be met by instant summary unpersoning. It's  
> becoming defacto. The unpersoning of the undefended, the 'imported  
> antisemitism' of the immigrant Other as antisemite by which an uber  
> German liberalism can differentiate itself through its memory  
> culture. Which is where the real silence of the undefended is at  
> work now?
>
> So can we begin to dissect the realpolitics of silence and noise in  
> the contemporary German liberal-sphere and its direction? as the  
> silence on the rising fascism? (as Podinski phrased it). For that  
> it's worth reading the essay by Samantha Hill posted on Gessen and  
> Arendt with her assertion of a necessity to revoke:
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/18/hannah-arendt-prize-masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essay
>
> Siraj


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