Discovery Analytical Resourcing






Open Letter to regional and city governments:


"If this is an attempt to atone for German history, its effect is to risk repeating it. "


Jewish artists, writers and scholars in Germany.



The severity of the clampdown on public protest in Germany, also witnessed initially to a degree across most western European cities, has been astonishing: peremptory, arbitrary and violent. By late October, a substantial group of German-based Jewish artists, writers, and scholars had issued an open letter objecting to the crackdown on the civic right of protest ..:

    - on various grounds of presumed Palestinian sympathies;
    - or the 'imminent risk' of 'seditious, anti-Semitic exclamations';
    - or denunciation of the war (even by Jewish Israelis);
... and condemned the police occupation of the Neukölln district of Berlin (home to large Arab and Turkish communities). The letter continues to emphasise that suppression of non-violent demonstration has done little to avert the threat to Jewish life in Germany, citing the federal police statistic that 84% of anti-Semitic crimes are committed by the political far-right: "If this is an attempt to atone for German history, its effect is to risk repeating it."

On 2 November, the Federal Government proscribed Samidoun, a Palestinian prisoner-support network, and later the same month searched premises of supporters along with those of other identified Hamas sympathisers. These raids in Berlin and across the states of Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein were preceded the same week by dozens of similar police actions in Hamburg and throughout Bavaria. Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, commented: "We are continuing our consistent action against radical Islamists ... Islamists and anti-Semites cannot and must not feel safe anywhere here ... We have the Islamist scene firmly in our sights." In a video clip, produced following an upsurge in reported anti-Semitic incidents through October, Germany's Vice-Chancellor, Robert Habeck, stated:

    "Anti-Semitism is not to be tolerated in any form ... Anyone who is German will have to answer for it in court. If you're not German, you also risk your residency status. Anyone who doesn't have a residence permit provides a reason to be deported." 

Condemnations of Israeli military actions are ritually met with the official governmental response - having evolved into something of a protective mantra amongst statesmen of leading Western powers - of the first premise above, that 'Israel has the right to defend itself'. Such, to the exclusion of the impact of decades of military occupation, is the explanatory context for the explosion of violence that invariably follows. To what properties in reality, by virtue of the Israeli Defence Force's conduct in the field, does this claim show allusion ?

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