The nonsense of ‘Strike Germany’

By Dale Street

French writer and Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux, US academic and writer Judith Butler, and deputy director of the French National Museum of Modern Art Catherine David are the most prominent of the 1,500 signatories to have put their names to the “Strike Germany” statement to date.

“Strike Germany” was launched in early January. It calls for a boycott of German cultural institutions. According to its launch statement: “The German cultural and academic sectors’ complete reliance on public funds has increasingly transformed cultural production into an extension of state policy.”

The state policies opposed by “Strike Germany” are ones concerned with combatting antisemitism and, more recently, the war in Gaza.

In 2017 the German government adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples of antisemitism. The “Strike Germany” statement denounces the definition and examples as:

“Ambiguous in conflating criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism, … effectively censors criticism of the state of Israel and anti-Zionist perspectives from the German cultural sphere, … [has created] a repressive climate sanctioned by the IHRA’s ambiguity.”

In 2019 the German Parliament passed a resolution condemning “the pattern of argument and methods of the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) movement” as antisemitic. It called on the government not to finance any project which called for a boycott of Israel or supported BDS.

The result, claims “Strike Germany”, is: “Cultural institutions operate with the understanding that in Germany there is no space for solidarity with Palestine, under the threat of losing funding.”

In the immediate aftermath of the pogrom of 7 October the Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Israel as a show of support. At the same time, some German local authorities banned demonstrations about Israel-Palestine.

Individual federal states, and subsequently the national government as well, have now banned the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on the grounds that it negates Israel’s right to exist and thereby constitutes incitement to national, racial and religious hatred.

But, according to “Strike Germany”:

“German post-reunification ‘remembrance culture’, the state campaign to address Germany’s genocide of the Jews, acts as a repressive dogma. … No other state has made an unconditional alliance with Israel its raison d’état.”

As a result, the statement continues, Germany has “intensified the repression of its own Palestinian population” and “mislabelled solidarity protests as antisemitic”.

While Israel conducts a “genocidal campaign on Gaza, one of the deadliest assaults on a civilian population in our time” and “annihilates Gaza”, Germany has increased its weapons exports to Israel ten-fold.

The statement therefore calls on artistic and cultural workers to “fight for internationalist solidarity and the right to speak out against the ongoing massacre.” They can do so by “withholding labour and presence from German cultural institutions.”

There is nothing new – apart from the references to the war in Gaza – about the themes taken up by the “Strike Germany” statement and its core claim that bogus accusations of antisemitism are being used to stifle criticism of Israel in Germany’s cultural sphere.

In 2022, for example, in the German equivalent of the British controversy about the Mear One mural, there was uproar about the documenta fifteen art display in Kassell. Despite claims to the contrary, four works in the display clearly incorporated antisemitic themes.

These included a soldier-like figure depicted as a pig, wearing a scarf with a Star of David and a helmet with the word “Mossad”, while another figure with Orthodox-Jewish sidelocks wore a black hat bearing the logo of the SS and was portrayed with fangs, bloodshot eyes and smoking a cigar.

Similar conflicts have been prominent In the Berlin techno bubble, the milieu which has provided around a quarter of the signatories for the “Strike Germany” statement.

Buttons and Cocktail d’Amore (which organise queer parties) have boycotted the ://about blank techno club since 2021, accusing it of being run by “White Germans” who support “the apartheid state of Israel”, “silence People of Colour”, and “share responsibility” for racist attacks on the latter.

At the same time as the launch of the Buttons boycott, “Berlin Nightlife Workers Against Apartheid” launched a campaign, backed by DJsForPalestine, against what it called “the asphyxiating silence of the city’s cultural scene” about Israel’s “ethnic cleansing, colonialism and racial supremacy”.

The level of support for the “Strike Germany” appeal from the Berlin rave scene makes it all the more surprising that the statement contains not a single word of criticism of the mass murder by Hamas of 360 young people attending the Nova rave music festival.

In fact, the statement does not even mention the Hamas pogrom of 7 October at all.

Despite Hamas’s overt genocidal antisemitism and the fact that 7 October 2023 was the biggest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, it is Israel which the statement accuses of conducting a genocidal campaign and one of the deadliest assaults on a civilian population in our time.

(Over 600,000 have been killed in the civil war in Syria, around 400,000 in the civil war in Yemen, and up to 600,000 in the war in Ethiopia. After three months of fighting in Gaza, the current claimed figure for deaths is 25,000. In June of 1941 the Nazis murdered 33,000 Jews in a single day at Babyn Yar. That is what genocide looks like.)

The statement’s reference to a tenfold increase in the export of weapons to Israel by Germany is partly true and partly misleading. The value of exports has increased from $34 million to $323 million. Most of the exports are components for air defence systems. Lethal weapons account for only $22 million of the exports.

The statement also omits to mention that – until last weekend – Germany is the second-biggest donor of financial support to UNRWA. Its annual donations amount to more than twice the value of its military exports to Israel.

As an article about the statement published by the German website BellTower puts it:

“The appeal does not even make an attempt at balance. Not a word about the massive increase in antisemitism since 7 October. No condemnation of the Hamas terror. The appeal divides the world into Good and Evil.

On the one side: Israel, the German raison d’état and its culture of remembrance, the cultural institutions, racism and censorship. On the other side: artistic freedom, international solidarity, the anti-imperialist liberation movements.

This wooden way of looking at the world was already apparent in documenta fifteen. It [the statement] is the latest nadir of a cultural branch which likes to see itself as progressive and enlightened but again and again shows a blind spot for antisemitism.”

The same article is also right to say that the “Strike Germany statement “introduces nothing new into the debate.”

The statement makes the standard tired and inaccurate criticisms of the IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism, wrongly claiming that they stifle criticism of Israel by conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel.

The statement wrongly claims that opposition to BDS means that there is no space for solidarity with Palestine. But there are many, and far better, ways of showing solidarity with Palestinians which do not involve boycotting the Jewish national state.

(Irony seems to be a lost cause for the statement’s authors and signatories. They claim that their voices are being silenced and censored. But that is exactly what the BDS seeks to achieve in relation to Israel – advocating a boycott even of organisations such as Standing Together.)

The statement denounces Germany’s remembrance culture as a repressive dogma. But this is a straightforward throwback to the antisemitism of the German new left of the early 1970s which spoke of Germans having a Jew hang-up (Judenknax). According to one of its exponents:

“Under the guilt-stricken cover of coming to terms with the fascist horrors inflicted on Jews, West Germany provides decisive assistance to the fascist horrors which Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian Arabs.”

The statement accuses the German authorities of mislabelling Palestine-solidarity protests as antisemitic. But it gives no examples of this, thereby sidestepping the question of whether such protests actually do provide a platform for antisemitism.

An additional weakness of the statement in this respect is that it advocates the definition of antisemitism in the Jerusalem Declaration as the ‘correct’ alternative to the IHRA. But some of the most prominent German signatories to the Jerusalem Declaration have denounced the “Strike Germany” statement.

According to Uffa Jensen (Berlin University Centre for Research on Antisemitism): “We have to speak, and not boycott. The appeal’s blunt attack on the German remembrance culture is completely wrong and inappropriate. In order to understand the problems of the Middle East conflict, we need a free debate and exchange [of ideas].”

And according to Wolfgang Benz, who formerly taught at the same institution: “Such a statement merely promotes a highly damaging further polarisation of the debate. For me, the strict division into friend and enemy which is expressed in it is the actual catastrophe.”

At bottom, the statement is just another example of a failure to understand antisemitism, and, thereby, an alibi for it.

The pattern of argument of BDS is antisemitic. Opponents of the campaign for a boycott of Israeli academia in the early 2000s in what is now the UCU trade union explained this repeatedly and at length. They were right to do so.

Likewise, “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free” is an antisemitic slogan. It does not matter if some of those chanting it do not know what river they are referring to, do not know what sea they are referring to, and do not know the actual meaning, and origins, of the slogan.

The German authorities are not wrong to identify BDS and the river-to-the-sea slogan as antisemitic. Where they are wrong is to adopt a “top-down” and sometimes authoritarian approach to challenging such manifestations of antisemitism.

The “Strike Germany” statement, by contrast, simply denounces the actions of the German authorities without recognising that those actions, whatever criticisms they may merit, relate to real issues and expressions of antisemitism.

It does so because the statement’s authors themselves are exponents of precisely that antisemitism:

Boycott Israel (but no other country in the world, including ones with far worse human rights records); advocate its physical destruction; glorify genocidal antisemitism as anti-imperialism; denounce a people who were victims of genocide as a perpetrator of genocide; and dismiss the IHRA as a Zionist conspiracy to stifle criticism of Israel.

Whether the “Strike Germany” call for a boycott will have much an impact is an open question.

Ernaux’s literary agents have confirmed that her books will continue to be sold in Germany and that her plays will continue to be performed there. It seems that the same applies to Butler’s books.

Butler herself had already decided to boycott Germany even before she signed up to “Strike Germany”. In November of last year she told Die Zeit newspaper that she would not be taking part in public events in Germany because felt herself treated with contempt and crudely caricatured on earlier visits.

By contrast, Bosnian-Serbian writer Lana Bastasic has cancelled her contract with her German publishers. Translations of her works, however, will still be available in Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary and Tory Britain.

Britain’s DJ Jyoty pulled out of last week’s Berlin dance music CTM festival because she is against cultural institutions “helping the government enforce what they believe is antisemitism (sic), which actually consists of being pro-freedom for Palestinians.” She will, however, continue to organise events for Prada and Jacquemus.

In Beirut in the Lebanon the Haven for Artists collective has rejected a grant of $35,000 from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (RLF) – which has offices in Ramallah and a long record of supporting Palestinian NGOs – because:

“The RLF has neither distanced itself from its vice-chair Jan Korte, who has advocated and endorsed the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt, not has it condemned the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Freedom and justice for Palestine are at the centre of our values, principles and practice of de-colonial intersectional feminism.”

(In December of last year Korte, a member of the German Parliament, asked what steps the German government was taking to pressurise Egypt into accepting Palestinian refugees for the duration of the fighting in Gaza. Not quite the same as ethnic cleansing.)

Perhaps most outstanding of all, last week supporters of “Strike Germany” in New York disrupted a symposium organised by the Goethe Institute in memory of the Black anti-racist filmmaker Skip Norman.

The pogrom of 7 October and the Israeli response have given rise to many strange forms of “solidarity” with Palestinians (which do not actually constitute solidarity in any meaningful sense of the word). Despite the crowded field, “Strike Germany” has managed to stake a place amongst the worst of them.

• This article also appears (under a slightly different headline) in the latest issue of Solidarity and on the Workers Liberty website