Description

For many years, Germany has been censoring and criminalizing support for Palestine, a suppression that has reached a fever pitch since October 7, 2023, when Israel began its current, ongoing genocide in Gaza. To justify its countrywide policies and cultures of anti-Palestinian racism, anti-immigration, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism, and genocide support, German politicians and media rely on their favourite self-deception: the country’s “special responsibility to Israel.” Germany’s enduring racism and conservatism are being rerouted through a sham concern for antisemitism, making anti-Zionists—and above all people from Muslim-background countries, regardless of their politics—this century’s “Volksfeinde.” German society’s resentment of their (imposed) postwar guilt, and their reluctance to take responsibility for their own genocides, has boiled over into a frenzied support for Israel’s genocide across all political groups. In the meantime, German weapons companies get rich from arms sales to Israel; millions of Palestinian people are being killed, forcibly starved, abducted, tortured, and displaced; and people of conscience objecting to genocide in Germany and other German-speaking European countries are arrested, brutalized, censored, driven underground, and deported. 

Within German Studies, Palestine barely registers, despite its direct relevance to the field’s most beloved topics: the Holocaust, Jewish trauma, German guilt, antisemitism, and Nazism. Palestine operates as the invisible, repressed kernel of contemporary German Studies. Palestinian people— in Palestine and in German-speaking Europe—are being made to pay the steepest price for this repression. Academics in German Studies fill classroom after classroom to discuss Nazi Germany, but stay silent on Zionist Germany. They eagerly teach the Holocaust, but not the Nakba or the current genocide. They publish on Jewish trauma, but never on trauma caused by Zionism. The field’s collective philosemitism (philozionism, more accurately) entails a simultaneous anti-Palestinianism. We want to re-centre Palestine in German Studies, and reckon with the field’s long complicity in the erasure of and opposition to Palestinian sovereignty. Please join us in our efforts.

Schedule

Monday, July 28th

9-9:40 am PDT / 12 - 12:40 pm EDT / 6:00 pm - 6:40 pm CEST / 7:00 - 7:40 pm EEST

HeART of Gaza (Donate at Chuffed)

Féile Butler and Mohammed Timraz, “Introducing HeART of Gaza”

9:45 - 10:15 am PDT / 12:45 - 1:15 pm EDT / 6:45 - 7:15 pm CEST / 7:45 - 8:15 pm EEST

Sarah El Bulbeisi, “Taboo and Trauma - Palestinians in Germany”

10:25 - 11:25 am PDT / 1:25 - 2:25 pm EDT / 7:25 - 8:25 pm  CEST / 8:25 – 9:25 pm EEST 

Ali Abunimah, James Jackson, and Fathi Nimer, Roundtable: “Outsider Perspectives on Anti-Palestinian Racism in German-Speaking Europe”

11:35 am - 12:15 pm PDT / 2:35 - 3:15 pm EDT /  8:35 - 9:15 CEST / 9:35 - 10:15 EEST

Academics for Justice (Munich), “First-Hand Experiences of Academic Organizers for Palestine in Munich"

Tuesday, July 29th

7:30 - 8 am PDT / 10:30 - 11:00 am EDT / 4:30 - 5 pm CEST /  5:30 - 6 pm EEST

Dan Weissman, “Weaponised Scholarship: A Case Study of the TU Berlin’s Decoding Antisemitism Project”

8:05 - 8:35 am PDT / 11:05 - 11:35 am EDT / 5:05 - 5:35 CEST / 6:05 - 6:35 EEST

Sami Khatib, “On Return, Singularity and the End of the Human Rights Discourse”

Break 

9:20 - 10:10 am PDT / 12:20 - 1:10 pm EDT / 6:20 - 7:10 pm CEST / 7:20 - 8:10 pm EEST

Yasmeen Daher and Nora Ragab, “The German Exception: Palestine and the Undoing of Responsibility”

10:15 - 10: 45 am PDT / 1:15 - 1:45 pm EDT / 7:15 - 7:45 pm CEST / 8:15 - 8:45 pm EEST

Interview with Melanie Schweizer