‘Kuffiyehs in Buchenwald’ campaign challenges Germany’s anti-Palestinian culture of remembrance

 

Since October 7, the Palestinian kuffiyeh has been criminalized by German authorities and institutions out of support for Israel and Zionism. A new campaign is challenging this “hypocritical and deceitful ‘culture of remembrance.’”

For more than ten years now, Germany has seen a large-scale campaign against alleged antisemitism that in reality targets nothing more than criticism of Zionism – or even criticism of Israeli policy. This campaign has been driven primarily by the major political parties, the mainstream media, and several foundations, and initially focused above all on the arts and cultural sectors. Those targeted included the Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe, the U.S. philosopher Judith Butler, the Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, the former director of the Jewish Museum Berlin Peter Schäfer, the British musician Roger Waters, and the late Syrian artist Burhan Karkutli. For a long time, the main goal was to defame and criminalize the global BDS movement. Commemoration of the Nakba was also turned into a taboo.

In the early years, these intensified campaigns were still masked as “discourses” in order to give them a liberal veneer. A few voices spoke out publicly against them, for example the Australian historian and genocide scholar Dirk Moses with his noteworthy 2021 essay “The German Catechism.” But the debates provoked by him and others largely remained confined to the cultural pages of bourgeois newspapers.

All of this changed in October 2023. The uprising in Gaza and the genocide that followed at Israel’s hands revived solidarity with Palestine in Germany. Tens of thousands poured into the streets day after day, week after week. The attacks by the authorities – from police violence to censorship and bans to the destruction of people’s livelihoods – suddenly affected a critical mass. And this was a movement that marched, resisted, and made itself heard. 

Since then, the Palestine solidarity movement has sought to carry the struggle into every public space and fight it there: from the streets to cultural institutions, trade unions, university campuses and lecture halls, and even courtrooms. Even the Bundestag is no longer free of protest by spectators and individual members of parliament. Memorial sites for the victims of German fascism are no longer exempt either.  (more...)

‘Kuffiyehs in Buchenwald’ campaign challenges Germany’s anti-Palestinian culture of remembrance