The Challenge of Defending Memory in Germany
▻https://jewishcurrents.org/the-challenge-of-defending-memory-in-germany
A Berlin conference organized to combat right-wing appropriation of Holocaust memory faces enduring backlash over #Palestine.
Yet as backlash to the conference has slowly mounted in the weeks since its close—coming not only from the precincts of German opinion where hostility was anticipated, but from conference attendees themselves— it appears the opponents of the new right may be too divided to coordinate a response . After Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi argued in a speech that European Holocaust guilt must not be used as a pretext to deny Palestinians freedom and equality, Polish historian Jan Grabowski and journalist Konstanty Gebert denounced Baconi from the conference stage and then in the German press, accusing him of antisemitism. This division reflects the reality that many of those who oppose right-wing European governments’ revision of Holocaust history often do not challenge the notion that Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state is requisite recompense for the Holocaust—even if that means indefinitely denying Palestinians their fundamental rights. Now, a conference intended to address the instrumentalization of antisemitism risks becoming an object lesson in how such a process unfolds.
ON THE SECOND NIGHT of “Hijacking Memory,” Hannah Tzuberi, a Berlin-based scholar of Jewish and Islamic studies, argued in a talk that Europe’s incomplete process of coming to terms with its past—what the Germans call vergangenheitsbewältigung—had resulted in Europeans projecting their own guilt for the Holocaust onto Palestinians. In the 21st century European imagination, Tzuberi said, Germans and other Europeans had, through their support for Israel, absolved themselves of culpability for the Holocaust: It was now the Palestinians, resisting Zionist colonization in Palestine, who had become the Nazis. “The birth of a morally improved German polity, made of citizens who have learned their lesson and now wish to protect what their ancestors failed to protect, goes [along] with an inscription of Palestinians as perpetrators and of Jews as their victims,” Tzuberi said.
#culpabilité #Allemagne #antisémitisme #sionisme #colonialisme #crimes #impunité