In repaying the historical debt of systematically murdering the European Jews
Germany seems to unload onto Palestinians the weight of this crime
by supporting the #genocide in #'Gaza with arms shiphments and political backing of the Netanyahu government.

The aim of eliminating any possible repitition of the #Holocaust is greatly missed if it brings about the annihilation of a whole population by military means.

Some Jewish people in #Germany don't agree with the mounting repression and epistemic violence
that enforces the authoritarian effort to silence all voices in solidarity with #Palestine and criticizing Israel's relentless warfare in #Gaza and the forced evictions of Palestinians in the #WestBank

English text of protest letter as printed in the paper Taz:

We, the undersigned Jewish artists, writers, and scholars living in Germany, are writing to express our deep concerns about the Bundestag resolution „Nie wieder ist jetzt: Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland schützen, bewahren und starken“—„Never again is now: Protecting, preserving, and strengthening Jewish life in Germany“—as it is currently being drafted by the SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP and Greens. This resolution claims to protect Jewish life in Germany. It promises instead to endanger it.

The current resolution draft is dangerous. It will chill free expression, isolate Germany from the rest of the democratic world, and further imperil ethnic and religious minorities, particularly our Arab and Muslim neighbors who have already become the targets of brutal police violence. Even if these consequences were somehow mitigated, the resolution does not achieve its own stated goals. It will weaken, rather than strengthen, the diversity of Jewish life in Germany by associating all Jews with the actions of the Israeli government, a notorious antisemitic trope. It will silence Jewish voices and put Jewish scholars, writers and artists working inside and outside Germany at risk.

Our concerns join a growing chorus in the German and international public spheres. Legal scholars have voiced doubts about the draft’s constitutionality. Respected public figures such as Jerzy Montag and Michael Barenboim have criticized it for conflating Jewish life within Germany with the interests of Israel. This conflation, and its misuse by authorities to restrict freedoms of expression and assembly, forecloses the very diversity of Jewish life it claims to preserve and jeopardizes the rights it purports to champion.

The current resolution draft calls for Germany’s federal government and states to draw up new regulations to restrict public funds for art projects deemed antisemitic, and to create new disciplinary posts to impose new penalties within universities for antisemitism in the classroom and on campus. Among our concerns, the draft directs authorities to refer exclusively to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of antisemitism as the means of making this determination. The IHRA WD has been widely criticized for conflating valid critiques of the Israeli government with antisemitism. Liberal Zionists, and even the definition’s own author, have decried how it has been misused to silence criticism of the Israeli government. The use of the IHRA WD in a previous resolution, the BDS resolution of 2019, is currently being challenged in the Federal Constitutional Court. With a bonafide alternative definition, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, available since 2021, there is no justification for its exclusive use.

The problems with the resolution do not end with its definitions. The draft is fixated on artists, students, and migrants as the country’s most dangerous perpetrators of antisemitism, suggesting that the most urgent threat to Jews comes from people associated with leftist politics and those who come from outside of Germany. This is a malicious distortion of reality, one that relies on the false conflation of antisemitism and any critique of the Israeli government. As Jews, we particularly reject the resolution’s suggestion that antisemitism has been imported by migrants into Germany, the birthplace of Nazism.

It is clear that the overwhelming majority of antisemitic crimes originate in the German far-right, a fact long confirmed by federal statistics. We do not fear our Muslim neighbors, nor do we fear our fellow artists, writers, and academics. We fear the growing right-wing as evidenced by mass gatherings of neo-Nazis emboldened by a national climate of xenophobic fear. We fear Alternative für Deutschland, the country’s second-most popular political party, whose leaders knowingly traffic in Nazi rhetoric. This threat is barely mentioned in the resolution, which instead focuses on foreigners and minorities, a shameful distraction from the largest danger to Jews in Germany. It is evidence that Germany has yet to overcome its past.

The drafting of the resolution took place in closed rooms, with no public conversation and without seeking the input from a variety of Jewish groups. The resulting text does not reflect a democratic process, nor does it reflect the diversity of mainstream Jewish perspectives. If passed, it will place thousands of Israeli and other Jewish academics and artists under suspicion by the German state.

If German leaders are truly committed to a pluralistic and open society inclusive of Jews, they must confront their own authoritarian tendencies. They should concern themselves with ideologues like former Green MP Volker Beck, who has urged the group drafting the resolution to ignore all public outcry about the damage that this resolution could do to the arts and academic world—as well as to Germany’s democracy. This resolution promotes the idea that Germany can only be made safe for Jews through repressive anti-democratic measures. But it is always a mistake to abandon democratic principles for short-term political gain. Germany’s leaders, in particular, should know better.

We demand that a variety of Jewish perspectives, and not only those that flatter German feelings, be invited to participate in any resolution passed in our name. We insist that the German state cannot safeguard Jewish life solely through repressive measures. We write in the belief that the only way of „protecting, preserving, and strengthening“ Jewish life in Germany is to protect, preserve, and strengthen the rights of all minorities. If there is a lesson from the catastrophe of the Holocaust, it is this: „Never again“ means „never again for everyone.“

taz.de/Dokumentation-Protestbr…