“Antisemitism!” – it rings through the room, a moment of stunned silence and the smug expression of unmerited righteousness on the accusers face (a smirk even), that always follows the magic spell. “Antisemitism!” a second chanting of the spell, as to make sure the dissenter is cast out. Sometimes I wonder if they expect the accused to vanish in billowing smoke; struck down by the powerful incantation.

But no such occurence today, in this small community hall in eastern Germany. The accused is still there, bravely continuing their factual recital of what is and isn’t considered a genocide by legal definitions and how it applies here. Shaking, a little tremble in their voice maybe, but this is what bravery looks like these days. Even amongst the left we now have to justify what can be clearly seen, measured, quantified and of which thousands of first hand accounts exist: a livestreamed genocide and the starving of children by a people who should have known better but maybe have been fundamentally broken by the horror they had to endure at our hands.

Even amongst us we now bend and stretch definitions as to find reasons why we do not have to move on, do not have to evolve and remain a living political organization and movement; but why instead it would be best to calcify around a select few core convictions not matter if they still hold true. Truth would be constructed after the fact if we would just agree to the project of self-petrification.

I look around the room. A weird assemblage of furniture and decor, walls drenched in an orangy beige, two indoor Gazebos at one end of the room framing a low to the ground podium. Its the exact kind of communal space we find all over the eastern part of Germany, where people with little to no possession and wealth wanted and needed to create something they could call their own with what they had and could afford at the time. Renovations like this usually took place in the late 90s or early 2000s and since then this room has been unchanged. This room is a testament to the people that build it, people who under radically altered material conditions and societal rules never adapted or actualized a new inner life. This room is one of the past, but not just its own past, much more so the past of the people that built it. This room was already old the day it was freshly renovated for it contained nothing new.

“That is because it’s antisemitism!” another person has come forth, a round of applause from the group of young and oddly self-assured accusers. ¹ Now, an older woman – clearly encouraged by their full-throated attacks – speaks up as well about how the jewish diaspora has always been persecuted, how 2000 years ago they have been slaughtered by this or that group of people of muslim faith (ignoring of course the fact that there were no people of muslim faith 2000 years ago) and palestinian or arabic descent. ² As if the murder and injustice from 2000 years ago would somehow justify the bombing and starvation of 2.2 million people, the carving apart of the West Bank and their continued displacement. As if her words would somehow move an entire room of people, thunderstruck by the sudden realization that we have been inhumane to each other for the better part of our history and that is why genocide is now acceptable, nay just even.

It is here where I first realize that this isn’t a debate about the situation in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank or the wider region at all; not even a discussion about genocide, displacement or their personal justification to stand for or against the state of Israel in its current authoritarian, settler colonial form or its ultranationalist, far-right government. What I am witnessing is the tokeniziation of an entire conflict and all the people involved in it for purposes of debate. What I am witnessing is a debate amongst people who are almost exclusively white East Germans of the political left talking amongst themselves and specifically to themselves. They are expressly adressing each other and that is the debate they are having.

In this room full of accusers there are no judges and no witnesses and the question of 80 years of conflict on Palestinian land is inanimate. It becomes painfully clear that this whole debate in itself has been colonized over the years and is now reduced to a mimicry. The sorrow of millions has become a strategic token to be used in conversation to demarcate the righteous from the wicked. The left squabbling amongst themselves, has made the correct application of language a tool to define its own inner hierarchies of virtousness. For the German leftist (and the entire West for that matter) the idea of an Israel has become much more important and interesting than its reality. For us Germans (leftist or not) this idea of the Israeli state was one of national healing by proxy. The Holocaust to this date remains irreal; the sheer scope of applied inhumanity arising from our midst unthinkable for most to this day. We hear the numbers, we learn about the conferences and the practical means that made it a reality but we rarely internalize it. We have truly made the act of murdering more than 6 million people a part of history, in that we confined it entirely to the past as an object to be studied – but not too closely as to make it actually real. History has become a vault to our greatest crime and most of us hoped it could stay this way.

Israel on the other hand became a reassurance for the darker corners of the mind that had to be sedated. Its existence was as irreal to us as the Holocaust is. It was to exist as to absolve us of our sin just in case; and that is precisely why it could not become real (or more precisely have reality). For the reality of the state and the material and moral conditions it created for the Palestinians would bring into question the reality of the Holocaust, so we decided against dealing with both.

For most of our lives the conflict on Palestinian land has been a clear cut affair for the left ³ and more broadly most people in the west. Allegiance to Israel and its goals was the default position that was never to be questioned and the only people who did were actual anitsemites, at times the far right ⁴ and the scholars that have been rightfully sounding the alarm against the established narratives for decades.

It was this unquestionable allegiance that in itself already pointed at the underlying problems within the debate and its paradoxical nature. It pointed at the whole debate being insincere and a moral shortcut to righteousness. An intellectual complacency had taken hold of the entire western world and the left in particular. Within it the uttering of magical sentences and words conjured up the ghosts of past transgressions and horrors employed to make contemporary debate impossible and contemporary horror invisible. The atrocities of today had entered into a hierarchy in which they had to give way to one of the most brutal episodes in human history. The industrialized eradication of more than 6 million people of jewish descent reverberates through the psychological Gestalt subconscious of an entire species.

It is a genocide however. By broad agreement amongst almost all relevant human rights bodies and scholars of genocide in particular, there is no open question here anymore. ⁵ The more important question now is: How come then that debate is still undesirable or contested; especially amongst the German populace and more importantly amongst the German left?

“Never again!” was meant to shield us against humanities darkest impulses, no matter from where they would arise. For the left this has become a fight not only of actual and real decolonization in Palestine but more broadly one of the decolonization of our discourses and a return to honesty and authenticity. The current way we conduct ourselves is doubly unbecoming of parts of the global left by first not aknowledging the moral obligation to stand with the victims of ethnical cleansing and genocide and even more importantly by reducing their plight and suffering into a transactional conversational token and shortcut we throw around for clout in internal debates and fights of position.

The mirage of an infallible, moral Israeli state – a state that never truly existed in its more than 80 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing (other than as an imagined expression of our own selfishness and comforts in the West) – is long dead. If the global left wants to survive it and its inevitable downfall, and be an actual force for good in this world this is a watershed moment for our movement to finally move on from institutionalized and weaponized righteousness and to return to an authentic empathy that is felt and shared and not just found in the abstractions of declarations and political necessities.

Our fight now is to see that a people uniquely brutalized by history and us Germans (victims of one of the most barbaric episodes in history and of genocide and ethnic cleansing) themselves are capable of ethnic cleansing and genocide. For many decades “Never again!” was not so much a rallying cry but an implied certainty projected onto an idea – the Israeli state. The certainty that if we had learned at least one thing from the brutal 20th century it was that we as a species had evolved past genocide and the targeted eradication of cultures and peoples. We have been confronted with the realization, that even those most prominently and most directly affected by it did not learn that lesson at all and we are of course now confronted with the tragic irony (and reality) of the settler colonial nature of the state of Israel.

For longer than most of us would want to admit Israel has been much more of an idea and projection surface than an actualized state with its own reality. More than a land inhabitat by people it was a strict necessity for the westen consciousness. Thousands of kilometers away from its historical oppressors and butchers an enclave was envisioned ⁶ to be a post World War II project of the entire human conscience. Israel was a cleansing of collective sin and apathy in that it should – by its mere existence – acquit those that have been perpetrating their industrialized murder, or did not intervene in time to save them. All of it would only cost us one last people that would need to perish for our salvation to become a reality; and if we wouldn’t look too closely maybe it would be over before we knew it and the people would remain abstractions, statistics and numbers. A very comfortable outlook of moral inaction by people who have for centuries colonized and murdered most of the world.

The delusions and the self-deceit have become intolerable but they teach us one last lesson: the empathetic love for live must be real and internalized, it will not survive tokenization and wishful shortcuts to personal and collective deliverance. A people of the 21st century cannot look at the mounting evidence of the genocide and side with the perpetrators or sink into stupor; and the left will be a husk if it abides or even stands in support of it.

It is a genocide and we have to deal with its implications and the fact that we have not learned the truly important lessons from the most brutal century in human history. We did not adapt a new way of thinking and acting towards a livable civilizational outlook and we cannot will it into being by remaining blind to the suffering of the Palestinians. We will have to stand in solidarity and learn in this 21st century what the last one apparently couldn’t teach us.

Before we can move towards resolutions and the practical actions of decolonization and reparation it has now become imperative to decolonize our discussions and to be able to name that which couldn’t be named for decades. No viable solutions and no justice can be found without the possibility of truthful analysis and debate about the spiritual and material conditions in Palestine. Reality must be named without immediate social or institutional punishment. Before any actionable solutions can be formulated people must be able to describe what is.

We must refuse to let the oppressors, the settlers and the colonizers set the epistemic rules for their own crimes. If a solution cannot be found in honest debate that leads to a broad consensus and collective action (for it is not allowed to take place), in its stead armed resistance will rise and the outcome will be more dead innocents. An outcome only favoured by the colonizer to justify more violence against the colonized.

1. well organized too, as one person minutes every last word said here on their laptop ↩︎
2. to no ones suprise she cannot name the specific group ↩︎
3. who (after the actual antisemitism in its ranks in the 60s and 70s) had a vested interest in a normalization of the state of Israel and their relation to it ↩︎
4. Who nowadays pivots between support and hatred of Israel depending on the issue at hand, their specific flavour of far right lunacy, their christian doomsday cults and their greater hatred for everything Muslim. Also many of them being in favour of white ethno-states in their own right are impressed by the ruthlessness and the agenda of the Israeli state. for many of them Israel’s efficient brutality has become a model to emulate. ↩︎
5. Amnesty International, B’tselem, United Nations, International Organization of Genocide Scholars ↩︎
6. allthough we know that the project of a state is much older ↩︎