Ethiopian protestors at a rally in Tel Aviv (2015). Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0
The summer of 2021 marked the 50th anniversary of the Mizrahi Black Panther movement. Those months in the aftermath of the May events followed a remarkable decade during which Mizrahim succeeded in amplifying their struggle in the Israeli mainstream, even if only for its representatives, and as a kind of lip service and bon ton. Despite this progress, the anger and the pain remained: If previously it was the Mizrahi protesters who were “not nice” (the way they were referred to by American-born Prime Minister Golda Meir), today it is Ethiopians. Like the ultra-Orthodox, the Ethiopians burned tires and blocked roads. However, in frightening similarity to recent events, they also burned and overturned cars, thus becoming the enemies of Israelis that usually perceived the community as unthreatening and docile. The most chilling moment was revealed in a video which captured several Ethiopians at the Kiryat Ata junction chanting cries in Palestinian Arabic from the First Intifada: “Allah akbar”; “Free Palestine!”; “idbah al yahud”; “With blood and spirit we will redeem Palestine”; “Everybody hates you, 5 billion people hate you”; “Only money and greed interest you!” And finally – “You brought us so that we would fight for you, what do you think, that we are like the Moroccan chakh’chakhim (thugs). We are not!”
In this video, the Ethiopians identify with the Muslim population, thereby branding the “Jews” (certainly the new Jews of Zionism and of the luxury towers in Tel Aviv) as a symbol of the Global North. On the one hand, they removed themselves from the imagined collective that tolerates them only when they are “nice,” and at the same time they identified themselves—albeit forming a more radical critique vis-à-vis vis the state—with the Moroccan chakh’chakhim, illustrating their familiarity with the Israeli history of the 1981 election campaign. The demonstrators identified with a critical post- or even anti-Zionist view that rejected the myth of “return to a forgotten homeland” as its purpose was to bolster the Jewish population in the struggle against native Muslim Palestinians. The Ethiopian protesters recalled the Mizrahi struggle of the 1970s rather than trends of Mizrahi domestication into the new Israeli middle class in more recent decades. In their very name, the Israeli Black Panthers defined themselves as part of a globalized solidarity movement (Meir was terrified of any analogy being drawn between them and the American Panthers). They further underscored their global interconnectedness in how they appealed to other Blacks throughout the world, including Palestinians. The Ethiopian video reveals how potentially close the alliance is between suppressed identities in Israel. It creates an almost uncanny effect (in the Freudian sense) in which the warm and the familiar (the Ethiopian) is juxtaposed with the alien and most threatening of all (Palestinian resistance, including Hamas). Recalling this truly remarkable video of 2019 during the May 2021 crisis, I realized that someone was trying to remove it from the web, as I was only able to track it down again in an article by Salmach Salima published in “Siḥa Mekomit” web magazine (the Hebrew version of +972 magazine) in July 2019. There, Salima offers a ground-breaking criticism of the Palestinian struggle’s failure to forge alliances with other suppressed identities:
I nevertheless wish to help the suppressed populations in the society that I aspire to live in. And for me, as the weakest link in this chain of suppression—national, racial, and gender—I have a part to play in the liberation of others, even if these ‘others’ were exploited, willingly or unwillingly, and coerced into suppressing me and my people. This is the strongest position I can take at the moment as a Palestinian.
In the second part of this two-part post, I examine the ongoing ways in which Ashkenazi hegemony is perpetuated in Israel/Palestine and the necessity for the Left to recognize protests against that hegemony as legitimate. Salima’s words above indicate the kind of solidarity between marginalized groups that is necessary in the current moment.
Palestinians, Mizrahim, and…the Israeli (Ashkenazi) Left
The Palestinian struggle is also captive to the equation of “Jews-Arabs.” Recently, Palestinian intellectuals Haneen Maikey and Lana Tatour criticized Israeli human rights organizations for, in effect, preventing the Palestinians from telling their own story. They mocked B’Tselem’s definition of Israel as an apartheid state several decades after it had been so classified in Palestinian historiography. A similar discussion took place recently after editor-in-chief of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, expressed support for the narrative of the Nakba, 73 years after it happened. Maikey and Tatour had no compunction in claiming that “the Ashkenazi-Israeli human rights sector suffers from a problem of supremacy.” During the May crisis, all the organizations who have high visibility in times of Intifada, when the fabric of “co-existing” is jeopardized, speak about symmetry between Arabic and Hebrew and between Jews and Arabs. Not one of them alluded to Jewish-Israeli-Ashkenazi responsibility.
The fact that many people have a keen interest in maintaining the status quo cannot be overstated. In an article which appeared in Haaretz 25 years ago under the heading “The Bond of Silence,” sociologist Yehuda Shenhav-Shahrabani highlighted the Ashkenazi non-recognition of the oppression of Mizrahim. This same silence is passed down through generations and is bound up with Ashkenazi attitudes toward the Palestinian issue. While admitting the injustices done to Mizrahim threatens Ashkenazi hegemony, acknowledging those endured by the Palestinians does not. Furthermore, turning a blind eye to Mizrahim—or in other words, trying to avoid linking the colonialism within Israel with the colonialism in the occupied territories—was always a precondition for the existence of the “Left” (even before the 1967 expansion and occupation beyond the “Green Line”).
At issue here is the European secularization process that was enabled by the negation of religion (the Jewish, the Black, the non-European). Indeed, as Mahmood Mamdani wrote recently, “Zionism is both a product of the oppression of Jews under European modernity and a zealous enactment of European modernity under colonial conditions” (250). The brand of Zionism that Israel markets in North America and in Europe is only the enactment of European modernity. It should therefore come as no surprise that all the liberal media in Israel, as well as the English edition of Haaretz, continue to foster this separation, the significance of which is no less than the denial of the Mizrahi cause, which is what stands behind the false “religious” division between all “Jews” and “Arabs.” The crucial point is that Zionism’s colonization of the Jew himself, a notion at the core of early Zionist discourse, is now enabled by its focus on the distinction between “Jews” and “Arabs,” a binary which makes (Ashkenazi) Jews seem modern and secular. Nonetheless, when the focus turns to Mizrahi Jews, (Ashkenazi) Jews are reminded of their own “non-Europeaness,” and thus their failure to fully assimilate to White European identity.
While admitting the injustices done to Mizrahim threatens Ashkenazi hegemony, acknowledging those endured by the Palestinians does not. Furthermore, turning a blind eye to Mizrahim—or in other words, trying to avoid linking the colonialism within Israel with the colonialism in the occupied territories—was always a precondition for the existence of the “Left” (even before the 1967 expansion and occupation beyond the “Green Line”).
Because Mizrahim are unequivocally Jewish, unaffected by the complex political-theological discourse surrounding immigration from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, they serve as a painful reminder that Jews (including those of European descent) are themselves not European. Mizrahim remind Ashkenazim of their own Mizrahiness and that their assimilation into Whiteness and a modernist civilizational discourse came at a price, not just of losing their oriental heritage but in fact of losing their own Jewishness as a socio-political mark. It is interesting to note that since the defeat of the crime families—Alperon, Abergil, but also Rosenstein—the state has “nurtured” the crime scene in Arab towns. The much-discussed documentary series “Jerusalem District” (the Israeli broadcast channel, 2019) follows the capitol’s police force and their interactions with the city’s Palestinian population (like in the case of Sheikh Jarrah). The Jerusalem police often confront drug-related and other socio-economic crimes, those which are not connected to citizens’ ethnic or national identities. Because Mizrahi is not a category recognized by the State of Israel (unlike Ultra-Orthodox, Arabs [recognized as bnei mi’utim, minorities, and not as Palestinians], or Ethiopians), as a people they are often difficult to trace. However, in “Jerusalem District” the policemen’s surnames are so clearly Mizrahi that they border almost on the stereotypical: Obadia, Hazan, Gueta, Ohayon, Amsalem, etc. If the occupier is visualized as a fearless Ashkenazi from the Palmach and afterwards the Israeli Air Force, then policing in Israel is a Mizrahi performance: what was once the Minister of Police and then the Minister of the Public Security is now a job reserved for Mizrahim, starting with the first Minister of Police Bechor Sheetrit (the only indigenous Palestinian-Jew who signed the Declaration of Independence), and going on to Moshe Shahal and then Shlomo Ben-Ami. The picture that emerges is quite damning: the more blatantly evident it is, the greater its invisibility to us. Only this mesmerizing mixture of presence and absence—the entire domain of “internal security” is kept for Mizrahim who only police the Arab population—enables the perpetuation of this project of Jewish-Ashkenazi supremacy (and recall: the Oslo Accords granted Palestinians the right to police themselves; what is the PLO if not a police force?). In Israel, the victims become the executioners, and in this process the Israeli ethos is emptied of all hope for real political protest. It is also clear from this why Mizrahim themselves will go to any lengths to deny this.
In 1996, Amira Hass published her monumental book on Gaza, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, which in my opinion is one of the most important works of Israeli prose. Even during the era of the peace accords and the consolidation of the separation regime, Hass, in her role as a collector of testimonies, understood the legitimate and popular origin of the Hamas movement and recognized it as a multi-faceted and human entity which has both moderate and less moderate streams. The phrase “my friend the Hamas activist” appears many times in the book. The Muslim Brothers, who helped found Hamas, are a popular movement in the Muslim arena. They are “popular” both in the sense of their wide reach and also in their connection to the people, that is, in their stand against the colonial elites and their emissaries from the early twentieth century. In many ways, the Brothers are reminiscent of the consolidation of the steadfast “Jewish bloc” in the Knesset during Netanyahu’s last governments (this bloc, based on the “Likud” party and the two Ultra-Orthodox parties, also presents itself as fighting the elites, which are often perceived to be under Western influence). This movement is conservative in the same way that Germany, for example, has been ruled for many years by a conservative Christian-Democratic-Union movement. Hamas was established in 1987 as a direct result of an earlier period of Israeli violence. In 1948, Israel was responsible for both ethnic cleansing in the south of the country and the bombing of new refugee areas, one which included the hospital in Majdal, now Ashkelon, where many future leaders of Hamas originated.
In an interview following the last war, Tareq Baconi explained that there was no consensus within Hamas regarding the use of violence. During “The March of Return” protests of 2018, for instance, it was apparent that non-violent protest attracts much less attention from the international community and from Israel itself, for which only the firing of rockets represents an act of war. The continuing siege is not perceived as violence that demands a response, and the “right to self-defense” is reserved for Israel alone. Hamas’ use of violence has a long history in the anti-colonial struggle: suffice it to recall the famous scene in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (1966), in which the native Algerians plant bombs in the fashionable handbags of the ladies of Algiers who innocently place them in the heart of the city’s Parisian cafes. And here, in the same classic book about Gaza, back in the 1990s when the hopes for peace were mixed with the distress surrounding segregation and closures, A’s testimony teaches us something about alienation and closeness in the colonial oppression of the global age:
There is no longer light you know, when I reach the Palestinian front [the checkpoint – OBY], the closest to the Israeli side where they thoroughly check all the documents, sometimes there is some Bedouin black as night posted there, who comes from Egypt or Yemen, so black that I cannot see him in the dark, and he does not know one word of Hebrew and he takes my work permit, shines his torch on it, holds it upside down because he has never seen a Hebrew letter, and he has to decide whether the permit is fake or not. Afterwards we advance with the car and reach the Israeli checkpoint, and we meet there an Israeli soldier, a new immigrant from Ethiopia, black as night and I do not recognize him in the dark, and he looks at the permit and reads it for half an hour, very slowly because he does not yet read Hebrew very well, reads and glances at me and again reads and looks at the photo and again looks at me, and I feel as if I’m the biggest criminal in the world who is about to be caught.
A certain guilt accompanies this blindness towards one another (“I don’t recognize him in the dark”) which is the lot of all subalterns who live under this regime, especially during times of violence. The Left remains indifferent to the state-sanctioned violence practiced by Israel as a matter of course against the large majority of its inhabitants who are not part of the European settlement project in the Middle East. The word “settlement” here is the same as “colonization,” which is used until this day in French, and was previously not differentiated from “settlement” in both German and English. For this “sane majority” (which is not a majority), many of whom are left-wing liberals, Hamas is an extremist movement and not one that raises the flag of protest against a siege that has lasted in various forms since the late 1980s and against many decades of racism and varying degrees of ethnic cleansing.
Hamas shooting missiles can be compared to a child in a refugee camp who throws stones, an expression of rage with which I, as a Queer Mizrahi, and thus as a victim of Israel’s degrading and humiliating system, can identify. A Left that just quells the flames is not Left, but hegemony; a true Left protests injustice. Perhaps a change will signal its coming when the Left will be able to declare, unequivocally: “Palestinian protest is just.”
The author wishes to thank Dr. Sigal Nagar-Ron of Sapir Academic College.
Dr. Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative literature in Tel Aviv University. This essay is based on her academic paper “The Flight of a Mother: Rape and National Coercion in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land”, Shofar 42:3, 2024, 155–180.
Protest in Tahrir Square (2011). Photo by Flickr User Hossam el-Hamalaway. CC BY-SA 2.0
Jews, Arabs, and… Ashkenzim
One of the most viral videos to emanate from the last Gaza war and the violence within Israel in May 2021 was of Amit Segal, Israel’s most popular political commentator. On May 13, Segal appeared on a prime-time news broadcast on Keshet 12. For several minutes, Segal, acquainted with the Right, laid out his grievances against the media for their symmetrical coverage of the Jewish-Arab violence when, in his opinion, the Jewish side was most often the victim. Close to four minutes into Segal’s monologue, which he subsequently posted on his popular Facebook page, a kind of dialogue began with his interlocutor, one of Israel’s star journalists, the non-partisan (i.e. in today’s Israeli media the Center-Left) Ilana Dayan. Dayan presented the discursive symmetry in Jewish-Arab relations, wherein the “other” is no more than a reflection of the “I” or “we” and its desires (“they are our doctors,” “I have an Arabic teacher,” “we live together”). At the 17:12 mark, Segal—for whom this “other” is an opponent and as such enjoys a modicum of independence from the “I” (always a Jewish “I”)—blurted out a word that was out of place in the context and was probably an unintentional slip of the tongue. When Dayan argued, “We must address the lynching in Bat Yam (where Jews are perpetrators) because we have a role to play here,” Segal asked, “Who is ‘we’? Who is ‘us’? Journalists? the Ashkenazi Jews?” Dayan replied “We the Jews.” Segal branded this “we” as an imaginary and narcissistic collective oblivious to internal pluralities of the Jewish communities in Israel. The Ashkenazim, at the height of the battle and on prime time TV, triggered those sitting around the “tribal bonfire” in the midst of the May 2021 escalation. They suddenly spoke about the “ethnic demon” (ha-shed ha-‘adati), always a Mizrahi demon. Segal made it clear, briefly, that the “we” that bears responsibility and which Dayan presumed so easily is not simply Jewish but unequivocally Ashkenazi. It was a moment, however fleeting, of admitting responsibility for the implications of Ashkenazi hegemony which has targeted Palestinians and Mizrahi differently but in interconnected ways.
Amit Segal (left) and Ilana Dayan (right). CC BY-SA 3.0
This was not the only time during the conversation that Segal took issue with Keshet’s official line, which it has held since its establishment in the 1990s—the prime-days of Israeli neo-liberalism—as the first commercial channel in the country. Unlike his liberal peers, Segal’s overall point of view amalgamates “the Arabs from Gaza and East Jerusalem with the rioters in Lod” (at 18:04), thereby eliminating any distinction between them. In his opinion, they all “do not want us here.” Although, naturally, this extreme point of view is incompatible with the position of any liberal media outlet, Keshet 12 has made every effort to accommodate it. Indeed, Segal subscribes to the pre-state Zionist ethos of victimhood in which the “Arabs” are perceived as an entity hostile to “Jews” (then in a minority)—an entity which was dismantled and fragmented by the liberal Left after the Oslo accords (around the same time as establishment of the commercial channel). Also in the 1990s, acclaimed Haaretz journalist Amira Hass (1996) showed that the Oslo Accords formed a division between “Israeli Arabs” (or Palestinian Israelis) and “Palestinians.” This acknowledgment came, of course, without recognizing the terrible split that the Zionist project has imposed on Palestinians since its very beginnings. This split ruptured ties between Palestinians of 1948 (who possess a blue identity card), Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank, Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, and of course Palestinians in the diaspora around the world. Segal’s words thus carry great subversive potential because he regards the region of historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael as a single entity. In the first part of this two part post, I will therefore grapple here with the way the liberal Left—for which Dayan serves a prominent example—normally frames Arab-Jewish relations in the region; namely, in a way that erases both the legitimacy of violence by subalterns and the entire Mizrahi question. While the Palestinian question, or case, is somewhat recognized outside the very provincial scope of the Israeli Left, the Mizrahi case has gained currency only recently and among a handful of Palestinian activists who insist on uttering, like Segal, a known harbinger of the Right, the word “Ashkenzim.”
Gaza as an Israeli Space
Much has been said about the suitcases filled with dollars that were transferred from Qatar to Hamas with the approval of former Prime Minister Netanyahu, but no mention has been made of the currency —the Israeli lira and the shekel—used by Gazans to buy vegetables or pay for services, at least since its occupation in 1967. With the changeover to the new banknotes in Israel in 2013, I wrote in Haaretz about the feeling of alienation that a Jewish immigrant from Tunis must feel, never mind a native-born Palestinian, when waiting at the bank where images of statesmen and poets such as Moshe Sharet, Natan Alterman, and Shaul Tchernichowsky gaze out at her from plasma screens.Imagine how the residents of the most bombed buildings of the Gaza War of 2014 (Operation Protective Edge), for example, must feel when, while fleeing for their lives, they hang on to these notes as a kind of security. Of course, Gaza is part of Israel in many other respects, some civil (like area dialing codes and electricity infrastructure) and some under the umbrella known in Israel as “foreign and security affairs.” The latter has been under the control of the Israeli army since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and certainly since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the rise of Hamas a decade and a half ago. This reality is in complete contrast to the picture painted in times of war by Keshet 12 and all other mainstream Israeli media outlets. They talk of “Israel under fire” by an external agent with which Israel shares only a border. For this reason, it is legitimate for Israelis to claim that against such incoming fire, Israel, like “every country has the right to defend itself and its citizens.”
However, if Israel has sovereignty in Gaza over all matters relating to foreign affairs and security, is it really under fire from an external force when Hamas fires rockets on its citizens? What protection is being referred to if residents of Gaza, including members of Hamas, and residents of East Jerusalem, resort to violence against citizens of the same sovereign entity? Why do the media, and also a large part of Israeli academia, firmly refuse to refer to Palestinian violence, both internal and external, as a “protest”? As “Palestinian protest”? This protest is linked to the Mizrahi struggle in Israel, the Wadi Salib protest in the fifties, the current protest on the Asi Strem in the Kibbutz of Nir David, the social justice protests of 2011, the recurrent protests of persons with disabilities (who get minimal aid from the government), the Balfour demonstrations during the coronavirus pandemic against Netanyahu’s legal affairs, right-wing protests especially against the disengagement plan from Gaza in 2005, and the Ethiopian protests over the years. The protests of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in October 2000, which many people called to mind last May, are defined as “events,” in line with pre-state Zionist historiography that defines the Palestinian uprisings against the colonial apparatus (Turkish, British, and particularly Jewish) as events (1921, 1929, and now 2021 as well).
The “Palestinian cause/question” (al qadiyyah) and the “Jewish question” are both expressions of European modernity, whether in the form of their currency of nationalism or genocidal practices, neither of which are acknowledged in Israel.
In Arabic, just as in the context of the Arab Spring, these events are described via the language of revolts/uprisings. In Hebrew, the words meora’ot (events) and meḥaah (protest) are reserved for Jews, while pra’ot (revolts) or meora’ot (events) relate to the Jewish-Arab conflict. Mainstream historiography in Hebrew also uses the word “Palestina,” which was imported from German and Yiddish in order to foster the illusion that Palestina existed only before 1948, while Palestine is something which relates to theory alone. Another striking example of how the Israeli Center Left imagines the country’s reality can be seen in Avi Nesher’s spectacular film Portrait of Victory (Israel, 2021) that depicts the battle over Kibbutz Nitzanim in 1948. Because the narrator is Egyptian, half of the film is in Arabic with Hebrew subtitles, and while Palestinians and Egyptians refer to Nitzanim as a settlement (mustautanah), the translation refers to the foreign word “kolonia” (colony) and not to the Hebrew word hitnaḥalut (settlement). The latter is reserved only for the settlements beyond the green line, thus continuing the false legitimacy of the pre state colonization of the country by dubbing it with a foreign, and hence neutral, word. The “Palestinian cause/question” (al qadiyyah) and the “Jewish question” are both expressions of European modernity, whether in the form of its currency of nationalism or genocidal practices, neither of which are acknowledged in Israel.
This leaves the Israeli Orientalists mainly with Arabs who want to integrate into society or those, like members of the Joint List party, who are “troublemakers” or “terrorists.” It is convenient for Israelis to think that Israeli Arabs are not really interested in “Palestinians,” those on the other side of the “walls” whose protection gave its name to the May assault. The current Israeli discourse refers to “rounds” (sevavim) of violent skirmishes between the Israeli government and Hamas. The last major round was Operation Protective Edge in 2014, during which 70 Israelis—almost all of them soldiers, a terrible loss that is hardly ever mentioned in Israeli media—and more than 2000 Gazans lost their lives. And although Operation Protective Edge hovers in the background together with the endless rounds that prove that the process is at a standstill, there were several unprecedented factors during the 2021 round, most notably Hamas’ response to the events inside Israel and the responsibility it took for the fate of East Jerusalemites that resonated as well in an internal Israeli intifada.
The Protest of the Global South
When the May events began, we—that is, the Israeli media and academics—reignited a dialogue about Hamas itself and about Gaza, consolidating Protective Edge of 2014 as the central point of reference. But then the rebellion broke out within Israel, an uprising (intifada) in Jaffa, Lod, in Jerusalem and the North, as well as other places, which reminded some commentators of the October 2000 protests that ended with the death of 13 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. I suggest that the rebellion of 2021 and the imaginary “coexistence” that was projected by Israeli liberals, should not be separated from Israel’s war against Hamas. In my historiography of the events last May, there are two points of reference far more pertinent than Operation Protective Edge. First is the Intifada of the Individuals from 2015–2016, which broke out in the aftermath of Protective Edge, and was an assemblage of suicide missions during which Palestinians attacked security personnel with scissors or other ridiculous weapons with the sole purpose of bringing about their own death. Second are the Ethiopian protests in 2019 following the murder of Solomon Tekah. These protests, and not Protective Edge, uncover the seething venom that exists in all areas of the Greater Eretz Yisrael/Palestine, a venom of pain mixed with justified anger rather than the brittle “fragility” of coexistence. They teach us that, unlike what was formulated by Dayan and Keshet 12, the issue is not Jews against Arabs, but rather Israeli-Ashkenazi Jews against the Global South, which in Israel is represented by non-Europeans: Palestinians, Mizrahim, Ethiopians, and migrant laborers (almost all from the Global South).
In a state of emergency, every Mizrahi has to internalize (what Dayan nonchalantly parroted) that she is nothing more than a “Jew,” an imaginative signifier that also represents the adjectives “Israeli,” “liberal,” a “champion of progress.” In one stroke, Mizrahi identity is totally erased: the non-European Israeli Jew is no longer “Black” (whether ultra-Orthodox or Ethiopian), or as liberals in Israel tend to condemn Mizrahim today, a “Bibist” (a follower of Bibi Netanyahu). She has to suspend the knowledge that there is only one Mizrahi party leader in the Knesset, Aryeh Deri (who recently had to resign the Knesset and rule the party from the outside as part of a plea deal related to minor misdemeanours), that Israel has never had a Mizrahi prime minister, and that the new administration (that was inaugurated a month after the May crisis) is almost entirely Ashkenazi. In times of escalation, the Mizrahi will have Dayan and her colleagues to remind them that in the equation of Jews and Arabs, they are definitely not part of the latter. In the Israeli discourse, both in Hebrew and Arabic, Jews and Arabs are dubbed as two migzarim (sectors), each entirely homogeneous and distinct from one another. Thus, whenever the discourse becomes demographic, people repeat a fact that has become an axiom, namely that 20 percent Palestinians are also citizens. But that is a biased perspective that upholds the liberal discourse of a Jewish majority and an oriental minority. A different perspective, one which emphasizes those who inhabit the thoroughly oriental vicinity in the imagined Jewish nation state, will either address those who live between the sea and the Jordan River (thus capturing Mizrahim and Palestinians together as descendants of those who are indigenous to the Middle East) or will focus on those who are Jewish according to the Jewish Law and not to the State’s Law of Return. In the latter case, Mizrahim will also be the majority among the Jews, while the category “Jews” as a non-oriental signifier (with the help of such Jews as those who immigrated from Russia, who adhere to the Law of Return but not necessarily to the Jewish Halakha) will be abolished and instead undergird this signifier—“Jews”—with its lost oriental undertones. Remarkably, just recently this de facto approach to understanding Jews as non-Orientals became official with the census’ abolition of the generalized term “Jews and Others,” a designation which encompassed “those who are undefined” (meaning descended from the USSR) as well as “non-Arab Christians” for either “ukhlusia yehudit murḥevet (expanded Jewish population)” or “Jews and their family members” (the words of Prof. Danny Pfeffermann, director of the census). For my argument, it is sufficient to pay attention to the “non-Arab Christians” label, which evinces the politization of the non-Oriental.
In part 2 of this series, I argue that a more emboldened left-wing movement is required if Ashkenazi hegemony is to be addressed and overcome in Israel/Palestine. This overcoming will require that Ashkenazi Jews relinquish their attachment to European white indentity formations and re-engage their “oriental” identity in solidarity with Mizrahi and other marginalized Jews.
The author wishes to thank Dr. Sigal Nagar-Ron of Sapir Academic College.
Dr. Hannah (Omri) Ben Yehuda is a scholar of comparative literature in Tel Aviv University. This essay is based on her academic paper “The Flight of a Mother: Rape and National Coercion in David Grossman’s To the End of the Land”, Shofar 42:3, 2024, 155–180.
Copy of a statue entitled “Reconciliation” (1977) by Josefina de Vasconcellos in Berlin. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-4.0
A True Friend
“A true friend,” that’s what Naftali Bennett, Israel’s prime minister, called Angela Merkel during her farewell visit to Israel in October 2021. Merkel had made Germany’s support for Israel a focus of her tenure as Chancellor, calling Israel’s security a matter of German Staatsräson in 2008. Now, during her last visit, she repeated what she meant by that: “Germany can only forge a truly good future in full awareness of its unending responsibility for the break with civilization that was the Shoah.” Later that day, Merkel added that even as it became “increasingly difficult because of the settlements” under no circumstances should one “lose sight of the two-state solution.”
But the two-state solution could not be farther out of sight than when Merkel first took office in 2005. Is that the legacy we would expect of a true friend? Shouldn’t a true friend at least have tried to move Israel closer to ending the occupation and finding peaceful ways forward? Shouldn’t she have used her much-applauded ability to forge compromise by bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table and keeping the two-state solution firmly in sight? Shouldn’t she have made every effort to secure an end to illegal settlements, human rights violations, and violent conflict?
A Moral Triangle
Angela Merkel may be an angel to the many immigrants who named their children after her in gratitude for receiving asylum in Germany post 2015, but with regards to Israelis and Palestinians, her name has not been an omen. This is the case even though—as Katharina Galor and Sa’ed Atshan’s The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians so powerfully demonstrates—there were so many opportunities to bring people together right at home in Berlin. Their interviews and analyses, thanks in part to the deep respect they have for each other that is palpable in the book, conjure up a hope that lies in the possibility of what could be if Germans were willing to spend political capital on the issue. If the new German government were to acknowledge that the Shoah and the subsequent creation of the state of Israel have indeed created a triangle that puts a moral imperative on Germans with regards not only to Israelis, but also to Palestinians, many new avenues for rapprochement and restorative justice could be opened up, rather than, as has been the case up to now, sacrificing Palestinian humanity in the name of Vergangenheitsbewältigung [Coping with the Past]. Indeed, there is a lot more Germany could do diplomatically to sanction human rights abuses, for example, in connection with illegal settlements. That said, the book also explains why high-level negotiations or diplomatic advances alone may not succeed. Ultimately, politicians are not able to initiate peace from the top down. Peace can only come from the bottom up. The true peace makers therefore are the artists, entrepreneurs, and activists portrayed in the book. They are those who dare to step across that invisible line that so often prevents people from seeing each other’s humanity. Like Yael Ronen. Like Armin Langer. Like Tarek Al Turk. Like Saleem Ashkar. Like Daniel Barenboim. Clearly, art and activism, but also entrepreneurship and innovation, can bring people together in ways that politics cannot. That said, the new German government should accept the political responsibility and make investing in creative approaches towards reviving the peace process a top priority.
A Missing Link
The moral triangle is missing a link, of course—the two authors only represent two of the three angles. Would the book’s message have changed had there been a third, a non-Jewish/non-Palestinian, German author involved? As a non-Jewish-non-Palestinian German reader, I was initially finding myself trying to resist the idea that the plight of the Palestinians is the Germans’ fault. What about the British? What about Israelis and Palestinians themselves? After all, the authors explain that the large majority of Palestinians living in Berlin today do not actually hail from the West Bank or Gaza, but from surrounding countries. But of course, laying blame is not the purpose of the book. Instead, its purpose is to reignite a difficult conversation despite all the challenges. The result is a dialogue that doubles down instead of going silent when the going gets tough.
Jewish-German Dialogue
The idea that lies behind the dialogue is a beautiful and encouraging one. It is an idea that reminds me of Jewish-German Dialogue group that I took part in when I first arrived at Brandeis University (the only non-sectarian Jewish-founded university in the United States) in 1998. One of the members of this group was my late colleague David Gil, Professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management for almost half a century, who passed away this year at the age of 96. David spent his professional life thinking about the theory of social change, the roots of violence and oppression, and how to develop policy strategies to respond to universal human needs. During the Holocaust he had fled Austria, first emigrating to Sweden and then to Israel. Eventually he and his wife Eva settled in the United States. The dialogue group, led by then Rabbi Al Axelrad, met about once a month, as a small circle of Jews and non-Jewish Germans who talked about the Holocaust. Invariably, the conversations in our monthly meetings would reach the topic of Israel, and David never failed to voice his deep dissatisfaction with the treatment of Palestinians. This also invariably incensed one of the other members of the faculty, a Professor of French and son of Holocaust survivors from France. The two of them would then argue while the German participants typically stayed silent. Interestingly, David never turned to the German participants and asked them about Germany’s responsibility for the Palestinians’ plight. Instead, the Germans (myself included) would sit there somewhat uncomfortably, thinking that this seemed more like a Jewish-Jewish and not a Jewish-German dialogue. If Athsan and Galor’s book had been available to us back then, it would have made the German participants realize that the Middle East conflict was their business. It would have confronted them with the realization that their own history was interwoven not only with Israelis’ history, but with the history of the Palestinians as well. And it would have taken quite a bit of the burden off of the Jewish participants, which in turn might have reduced the differences among them.
When I was a child growing up as a Lutheran pastor’s daughter in Germany, I heard about Israelis mainly in church on Sundays, and about Palestinians in conjunction with the RAF terrorists who had briefly trained with Palestinians in Jordan, and who were being chased by police. Their collected mug shots hung in all German post offices, even in the one on the small island in the North Sea where I grew up. My parents told me not to wear an Arafat-shawl like all my friends did. My friends who were wearing the shawls never talked about Israel or Palestine. It was simply the cool thing to wear. We all agreed antisemitism was something the Nazis did against the Jews, and was something that was not supposed to happen ever again. I did not hear the term Nakba until much later. I also never interacted with any living Jews or Palestinians for that matter. This did not happen until I came to the United States in my late twenties.
Palestine solidarity protest in Berlin (2018). Via Flickr user Hossam el-Hamalawy. CC BY-2.0.
David was not the only American Jew I have since met who was deeply critical of Israel. In fact, it was among Jews and Israelis in particular that I first heard about the Nakba. Thirty years ago it was a constant topic of discussion. Everyone placed “Shalom, Haver” stickers on their cars after Yitzhak Rabin was shot.[1] The saddest part of the book, therefore, is the fact that so many of the interlocutors were afraid of being identified, especially for speaking on behalf of Palestinians. The fact that there is “censorship of voices that support Palestinians” (150) in Germany is more than an unfortunate set of circumstances. It is indeed immoral. Galor and Atshan show that this dialogue, if approached with respect and empathy, is indispensable. They show that it is possible to be in solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians—that is, with the people on both sides who care for true friendship and true peace.
A New Start and a Traffic Light
Angela Merkel’s departure should be an opportunity in this regard: A new German “traffic light” coalition government that includes the Green Party should finally dare to assume a more active role vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine. Although foreign policy played hardly any role in the German elections this year, the Greens do have a clause about peace and human rights in their party platform which says that they want to pass a law to prevent arms sales to conflict regions in general. Those in Israel who fear their influence may not like this part of their platform, but they should feel comforted that Merkel’s sentence about Israel’s security being part of Germany’s Staatsräson can be found verbatim in the Green Party’s election campaign platform. It also says there that “the existence and security of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people with equal rights for all its citizens is non-negotiable” (my translation). The party condemns threats to the state of Israel and its sovereignty. There is no mention of Palestinians, but there is explicit criticism of “escalation of violence as well as measures contrary to international law such as the annexation of occupied territories or the continued expansion of settlements” for standing in the way of a peaceful political solution to the conflict and an end to the occupation. Prominent Greens have also positioned themselves strongly against the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) movement. Like Merkel, the Greens express support for a two-state solution on the basis of the borders of 1967. That certainly does not sound like a desire to stake one’s political future on a renewed commitment to peace in the Middle East. Ending the sale of submarines and fossil fuel contracts should be combined with a new German diplomatic offensive in the region focused on addressing human rights violations and wooing both Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table with improvements in ecological agriculture, green energy, and innovative climate solutions for the entire region. Berlin should extend an invitation to the peacemakers on both sides and become—both physically and metaphorically—the place for a renewed peace process that centers the needs of the people on the ground. This would be in keeping with what Galor and Atshan envision, i.e. that “Israelis and Palestinians have the potential to create together a joint foundation of Israeli and Palestinian cultures that exist both separately and in an interwoven manner in a postcolonial context” (147). As stated above, this vision also allows for our Jewish-German Dialogue conversations to get un-stuck, and to develop new ways of speaking about Israel and Palestine, about antisemitism in all its facets, as a German responsibility. In addition to enjoying falafel and Klezmer music, Germans should encourage and facilitate uncomfortable conversations to show they have truly learned something from their many decades of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Because that’s what friends are for.
[1] “Shalom, haver” = “Goodbye, friend” is how President Bill Clinton referred to Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in his eulogy.
German Reichstag. Photo by jan zeschky. April 2007, CC BY-NC 2.0.
The Moral Triangle’s vision and motivation are its authors’ shared desire to extend the German state’s responsibility for the Holocaust to the Nakba. Could not, the authors ask, the Nakba be recognized as historically related to the failure of the pre-war project of German nation-building? If the German state’s affirmation of responsibility for the Holocaust implies a normative, moral commitment to support and protect Jews on a collective and individual level, can this commitment be practiced in ways that leads neither to a relativization of the Holocaust nor to a denial of Palestinians’ political rights in and beyond Germany? In asking this question, The Moral Triangle may be situated in the broader context of current efforts that demand liberal democracies recognize the persistent legacies of colonialism and racism. Underlying these efforts is a hope: Could not a more pluralist understanding of injustice enable a present and future less prone to rising nationalisms, political violence, and populist, racist agitation?
We concur that the hope for an extension of the memory and responsibility paradigm that developed in Germany with the institutionalization of the memory of the Holocaust may, indeed, lead to a recognition of more forms of violence and more historical victims. For example, it is through reference to the memory of the Holocaust that the claim for a recognition of its “other victims” gradually emerges. Yet, in this response we suggest that, contrary to Atshan and Galor, the desired pluralizationof victims does not necessarily lead to political pluralization, but perpetually inscribes the figure of the Jew as potential victim and the figure of the Palestinian as potential perpetrator. We suggest that, when implemented in the German context, the project of pluralization is bound to and determined by the German state’s desire to reconstitute itself as a liberal, democratic, and above all, anti-anti-Semitic polity. This reconstitution, however, has illiberal and violent consequences. It creates the need for a “new anti-Semite” against which Germany can re-invent itself as a protector of Jews, as well as the need to conceive of Jews as precarious “bare life.” The figure of the Jew does not stand in for religious difference and its recognition and protection, but is an empty foil that enables a German moral conversion from anti-Semitism to anti-anti-Semitism. When many Jews then relegate their political collective subjecthood to the Israeli nation state, Palestinians’ resistance to the latter is viewed through a German lens and reads as anti-Semitism. Consequently, the various forms of state violence committed against Palestinians are denied or met with indifference by large parts of the German public.
…the desired pluralizationof victims does not necessarily lead to political pluralization, but perpetually inscribes the figure of the Jew as potential victim and the figure of the Palestinian as potential perpetrator.
The city of Berlin is the site of Atshan and Galor’s ethnographic study. It is a place framed by the authors as a promising site at which the desire for an extension of moral responsibility could materialize: “Berlin is now known for its cosmopolitanism (in some ways reminiscent of pre-World War II Weimar culture); its critical engagements with the Holocaust; its grappling with issues of justice, immigration, social difference, and integration; its robust public discourse on moral responsibility; its vast cultural sphere; the massive refugee migration of 2015; and the rise of the far-right, populist and intolerant Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland; AfD) party” (5). As readers living in Berlin, such expressions of hope, of course, sound familiar to us: the multilayered branding of the new capital as “the most non-German German city”—the fostering of an image pointing towards a multicultural, liberal, non-nationalist European future—has been successful. Yet, as becomes abundantly clear from Atshan and Galor’s interviews, German conversations about “things Jewish”—from the Holocaust to Israel and Palestine to anti-Semitism and racism—are for some wrapped in fear of “civil death,” and for others in calculated or naïve innocence. Indeed, from among the “world champions of memory” (“Erinnerungsweltmeister”), as Germany’s memory culture is often referred to, only a handful of those who doubt Germany’s “memory success,” dared to be identified by name. It seems that beneath a carefully guarded, sanitized public layer of speech and performance of memory lies a tenuous, anxious, and fearful thickness. Let us, in the following, zoom into some aspects of this thickness.
Within the specific context of post-1989 Germany, Israelis are framed and addressed primarily as Jews. This seemingly banal fact matters because one of the central functions of German memory culture is to facilitate German inter/national rehabilitation and democratic, collective self-assurance. Seeking to demonstrate its stable and full belonging to the realm of “civilized nations,” the “new” German state institutionalized the memory of the Holocaust as its (post-) national, collective foundation. Especially after 1989, a shift in the reunited German state’s relation to the figure of the Jew is discernible: from now on, Jews are increasingly addressed no longer exclusively as survivors/witnesses from the past, but as living, flourishing, and active carriers of “Jewish life.” Israelis here function as embodiments of Jewish life, the “value” of which cannot be detached from the project of post-genocidal nation building and collective, anti-anti-Semitic self-assertion: “New Germany” became an identifiable nation, as well as a nation one can identify with, through a shift from a world in which the German state remembered its killed Jews to a world in which it actively protected living Jews globally, Israelis among them. In the exhibition “Berlin Global” of the Humboldt Forum, for example, visitors can watch a video-installation, in which, among others, a Jewish Israeli woman recounts how her grandparents fled from Berlin, and how, through her return to the city, a “circle is being closed” and the “sharp cut” is being healed. While the move from Israel to Berlin may, of course, be felt and personally referred to as a return, we suggest that the primary and ulterior importance and meaning of “Jewish life” here lies exclusively in its conceptualization as an answer to the Holocaust. It is part of a progressively evolving timeline that leads from Jews’ murder in the past to their revival/return in the present, and therewith, from German perpetration of atrocities against the Jews to German “guardianship” of Jews. “Jewish life” here has no significance beyond this—the protection of Jewish life does not entail, for example, any broader, normative recognition of religious practices of minorities (including Muslim religious practice) but is understood and globally marketed as a “sign against anti-Semitism.”
We suggest that this dynamic paradoxically necessitates ongoing Jewish precariousness: For it is Jewish vulnerability now that gives the guardians, supporters, and promoters of “Jewish life” the chance to experience the present as a new era—an era in which Germany can be marketed as having completed a collective moral conversion from genocidal, excessive nationalism, to liberal, democratic, and difference-embracing cosmopolitanism. The birth of a morally “improved” German collective, made of citizens who have “learned their lesson” and now wish to protect what their ancestors failed to protect earlier, necessitates not only the memory of the Holocaust to remain in vivid proximity, but also requires a sense of perpetual vulnerability of Jews in the present and future. By this we do by no means imply that Jews and Jewish communities in Germany are not de facto vulnerable. But we do suggest that such vulnerability—both as concrete reality and discursive trope—functions also as a necessary foil upon which German moral regeneration emerges.
German Reichstag. Photo by _chris_st, February 2010, CC BY-NC 2.0.
This latter dynamic is complicated by the fact that especially in a German, post-unification context, the figure of the Jew became a desired figure that promised both an exit from national(ist) Germanness and a post-national, post-racial German future. The figure of the Jew was made to stand in for everything the Nazi state was not. Summoning democratic and liberal sensibilities, it thus became an icon of a post-national European future that was imagined to share one and the same moral space with the ideal, democratic German citizen. When the Jew’s body is depicted as vulnerable and precarious, yet bristling with life and resilience, it functions as a universalizable “stand-in” for the body of the new, democratic political collective that is endangered by the same forces as, allegedly, Jews—such as, for example, new antisemitism, extremism from the right and left, or political Islam. The figure of the Jew thus is a figure, the visibility and legibility of which is rigorously produced and maintained, because in recognizing Jewishness, Germany recognizes itself. Seventy years after the Nazi genocide, the desire for visible “Jewish life” permeates the German political present and unites a broad coalition of politicians, community activists, and engaged citizens, with “Jewish life” functioning as an umbrella under which different rationalities can be harmoniously joined. For example, the (re-)construction of a synagogue can be supported by some politicians as a measure motivated by a principled diversity policy, marking the neighborhood as multicultural and tolerant; for others, the synagogue makes “Jewish life more visible,” and for yet others it is a measure coupled more tightly to rehabilitation. None of these reasonings make the construction of a synagogue dependent on the actual existence of a Jewish community that would need, and use, said synagogue; yet all of them entail a vision of what Germany is supposed to “look like.” The synagogue here marks German public space as Jewish, and relatedly, a town’s policies and its citizens, as anti-anti-Semitic, liberal and democratic, without requiring protection of any other minoritized group.
In the moral-emotional economy of post-unification Germany, the figure of the Jew was thus made visible and legible as both the “other” and the paradigmatic, exemplary new German. Its appeal, desirability, and attractiveness stem from its being remembered, marketed, and re-enacted as a subaltern, vulnerable “other,” while the precise contents of this otherness remain wholly of a piece with post-unification, majoritarian conceptions of what it means to stand, this time, finally, “on the right side of history.” This is a figure of subalternity that is simultaneously hegemonic, a figure of “disruption” that stabilizes, a figure of transnational cosmopolitanism that defines national belonging.
The birth of a morally “improved” German collective, made of citizens who have “learned their lesson” and now wish to protect what their ancestors failed to protect earlier, necessitates not only the memory of the Holocaust to remain in vivid proximity, but also requires a sense of perpetual vulnerability of Jews in the present and future.
Dominant identification with the figure of the Jew has multiple effects on the project of political pluralization. First of all, a polity that defines itself via a conversion from anti-Semitism to anti-anti-Semitism needs someone else to stand in for everything that Germany today is not: someone has to be the illiberal, undemocratic, and anti-Semitic threat against which the good citizen can define herself as that which she is no longer.
Second, it does not protect Jews and Muslims from the regulation, problematization, and stigmatization of religious practices such as circumcision or ritual slaughter. As is emphasized in this series by Sultan Doughan, in German memory culture the category of race is being allocated to the Nazi past—to the experience of the genocidal state and the workings of “pseudo-science”—and severed from the category “religion.” Pre-war forms of racialization of Jewish minorities can take new shape with regard to Muslims and Jews in Europe today and stick to Muslims’ and Jews’ non-statist communities, illiberal normative orders, and non-secular epistemologies. Dominant identification with the figure of the Jew thus cannot prevent the regulation (and in some cases, the threat of prohibition or criminalization) of the religious practices of minoritized collectives who do not experience themselves exclusively within a moral, affective-political space shaped by the needs of German rehabilitation.
And third, dominant identification with the figure of the Jew impacts Palestinians, with increasingly repressive outcomes. Those who seek to enter the public arena can discuss Palestine on “German terms” only and are marked as subjects that require preemptive monitoring and sanctioning. For the sake of Germany’s reconstitution, Palestinians have to uphold the assumption of the figure of the Jew’s universal, perpetual vulnerability, even when they suffer the consequences of Jewish privilege and power in Israel. The Moral Triangle indeed attests to the difficulty of articulating forms of critique of Israeli state violence that are not (“always already”) marked as anti-Semitic, or at least under suspicion thereof. Yet this difficulty cannot be “smoothed out” through liberal “encounters” in the most “non-German German” city, as The Moral Triangle suggests: As long as the figure of the Jew remains a medium through which German post-unification identity is articulated and experienced, the performance of Jewish collective difference and political agency will be exclusively relegated to the State of Israel. The figure of the Palestinian, as well as Palestinians’ political subjecthood and demands for equality will, in turn, be addressed as either an annoyance to be ignored or a threat to be criminalized—rather than as a crucial prism through which the multiple layers of legitimatized moral violence in Germany have to be recognized.
We would like to thank Patricia Piberger, Sami Khatib, and Elad Lapidot for their helpful comments.
Qasem, Sindyan. 2020. “Little more than terrorists”: Eine Reflexion über das Verhältnis von Islamismusprävention und Palästinadiskurs, Jahrbuch für Islamophobieforschung: 71-90.
Hannah Tzuberi studied Jewish Studies and Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and was a research assistant at the Institute for Jewish Studies (FU Berlin). Currently she is a post-doctoral researcher in a collaborative research project "Beyond Social Cohesion. Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO)” at FU Berlin, directed by Prof. Schirin Amir-Moazami. She is the co-editor of “Jewish Friends: Contemporary Figures of the Jew” (Jewish Studies Quarterly 27:2–3, 2020) and is working on a book-project titled Reviving Judaism, Reviving the Nation: Post-Holocaust Imaginaries of the (German) Nation-State. Her research interests include contemporary European Jewry, nation-building, collective memory, religion, and secularism.
Nahed Samour is Fellow at the Law & Society Institute, Faculty of Law, Humboldt University Berlin. She has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard, and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin, and held a Post Doc position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy from 2014–2018.
Memorial plaque “Never again!” at the Evangelical Lutheran parish hall in Arche, Borkum, Lower Saxony, Germany (2020). Photo Credit: Dietmar Rabich, Borkum, Evangelisch-lutherisches Gemeindehaus Arche — 2020 — 2814, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Moral Triangle by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor follows Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin from a daring perspective: What if the German state would extend its moral responsibility from its Jewish victims to Palestinians, as victims of ongoing Israeli state-building/indirect victims of the Holocaust? What if the Holocaust and Nakba could be recognized in a causal relation carried through the lived or inherited experiences of Palestinians and Israelis living in the diaspora? Atshan and Galor demand precisely that when they argue “that the German-Israeli-Palestinian moral triangle requires an inclusionary ethos from all three parties that creates room for recognition of the Holocaust and Nakba” (24). In my discussion of Atshan and Galor’s book, I will intervene into the idea of perpetratorship, and in a next step point out the way Protestant morality infuses the current political landscape with regards to Muslims, Jews, and Germans. I see my interventions as pushing the authors’ proposal into the problem-space of secularism and its workings in history and memory.
The authors offer an accessible and inclusive language when describing the conundrums of Middle Easterners, specifically Palestinians, in trying to forge a dignified life in multiethnic Berlin. The book provides a panoramic view onto a range of concerns that the authors connect to the foundational violence of the Holocaust. These concerns include: “experiences of the Nakba, trajectories in pursuit of reconciliation, pathways of migration, policies toward refugees, integration of religious and ethnic minorities, racism, European politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (prologue). The authors’ approach is grounded in the framework of “multidirectional memory” as conceptualized by literary theorist Michael Rothberg whereby the memory of the Holocaust, and the attached traumas, can be juxtaposed with other violent events and experiences, such as the Nakba. This is done in order to “uncover […] historical relatedness [of Israel/Palestine to Germany] and work […] through the partial overlaps and conflicting claims that constitute the memory and terrain of politics” (xi).
Atshan and Galor uncover historical relatedness in this instance by asking a range of Palestinians, Germans, and Israelis about their opinions, lived experiences, and relation to official discourses about the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. While the interviewees are selected based on a seemingly narrow and clear categorization of national identity, the responses trouble such assumed identities and demonstrate how the interviewees position themselves vis-à-vis the issues interrogated. The authors refer to their interlocutors as “actors” (9), as if they had the agency to act and change the course of things. But agency is connected to a specific notion perpetratorship as I will explain below in more detail. They also state that most Palestinians preferred to stay anonymous because they feared repercussions for their statements. It becomes clear that all of these actors are not equal in society. I would add that Palestinians, much the same as most other German citizens of Middle Eastern descent, do not have the agency to act within politics and enact political change when it comes to these matters that concern them directly because they are considered dangerous Muslims before they are considered anything else. In other words, there is a situation in Germany and Europe in which the question of Palestine has become embroiled with the securitized “Muslim problem.” And perhaps this is the most important contribution of the book: it does not buy into this racializing politics, in which the Palestinian, as the quintessential figure of the Muslim, is a threat. Instead, The Moral Triangle claims a place of equality for Palestinians and brings them into a conversation that has been hitherto organized intimately between “the country of perpetrators or victims” (Chapter 2). The authors show that the victim narrative has a certain function within Israel and has also influenced Palestinian thinkers to reflect on being injured by the figure of the victim. Atshan and Galor open up a triangulated relationality through this figure and attach the Palestinian to the Israeli, as kind of a victim sibling. In Germany, however, this dynamic does not work so neatly. In fact, inmyown research with civic education programs in Berlin the place of Palestinian or Muslim victimhood was usually denounced as “victim-competition” and ultimately antisemitic. Atshan and Galor in contrast, both operate with these terms and include the Palestinian in need of political recognition for his victimhood. And they also question these two broad categorizations by meticulously showing how their interlocutors identify or reject these perpetrator/victim categories, or in the case of Palestinians, become attached to these categories because they are the victims of the victims.
The categories of victimhood and perpetrator are more than models of national identification. They in fact establish an orientation toward the nation-state project after the Holocaust. In other words, because the Nazi state committed a crime against Jews and others, the German state after the Holocaust has committed itself to act in ways that would protect Jews or prevent other attacks on them, either as individuals or as a collective, as a diasporic community, or as citizens of the state of Israel. People residing in Germany may disagree with this privately, as Atshan and Galor show us. But these privately held opinions only show us how effective Holocaust memory is in structuring state-citizen relations in public. Allow me to refer to Hannah Arendt, who was dismayed about the idea of perpetratorship that would translate into collective guilt. She stated that in a country in which everyone is guilty, no one is guilty. For Arendt, there were concrete perpetrators and criminals who had to be tried for their individual actions. According to her, guilt was neither inheritable nor something that could be collectively shared. Claiming guilt collectively, according to Arendt, just offered a cover for those perpetrators who were indeed guilty of specific crimes. For Arendt, then, guilt could be only valid at a symbolic level. But there is something that Arendt overlooks, as do Atshan and Galor in a certain respect. Beyond how people actually feel or actually think, perpetratorship is decoupled from historical and personal action and enables more than a national or symbolic identity as Atshan and Galor conceptualize it. Perpetratorship allows for repair and maintenance (Wiedergutmachung) of German liberal democracy.
The categories of victimhood and perpetrator are more than models of national identification. They in fact establish an orientation toward the nation-state project after the Holocaust.
Claiming historical perpetratorship has shaped the language and practice of citizenship. In my own research on memory politics and secularism, my interlocutors in German civic education usually stated: “Of course these teenagers are not guilty of any of those crimes. But they have a responsibility for liberal democracy. They need to be able to prevent such crimes from happening again.” In other words, the grand narrative of perpetratorship is a crucial element of citizenship, inculcated and practiced in non-formal civic education programs, but also in formal high school education and in ritualized Holocaust commemorations that work as a form of public pedagogy. This inculcation enables participation in public as a German citizen and ultimately shapes political agency. The ideal German citizen has cultivated the right capacities and sensibilities towards the figure of the Jew, liberal democracy, and the secular state after the Holocaust. And although these morally charged relations grow out of a particular German-European-Western Christian history, they thoroughly inform the universal category of the rights-bearing citizen.
Historical perpetratorship is an inclusive concept in Germany and it includes the figure of the Jew as a sacrificial victim. Once one submits to perpetratorship, it enables and empowers them to act and be recognized as a rightful citizen. In my observations with Middle Eastern civic educators, their recognition as rightful citizens went beyond the history of the Holocaust and Germany. They had to condemn Palestinian violence and omit the larger structure of occupation. Bringing up the structural issue of occupation could be read as criticism of Israel, especially when one was not similarly criticizing any other Middle Eastern country involved in comparable crimes. Palestinians, specifically those who trained to become civic educators, had to do the double labor of proving that they were not antisemitic by giving up their claims on Palestine as ancestral land. Clinging onto an idea of Palestine or pushing for a right to return was discussed in civic education and among antisemitism watchgroups as an attack against the Jewish character of Israel, even a potential genocide in planning. In other words, Palestinians could not simply naturalize into Germanhood by way of perpetratorship. Even if Palestinians naturalized into historical German perpetratorship, they appear as current and potential future perpetrators in German discourse, lacking the right conduct vis-à-vis the figure of the Jew. It was then only a matter of time until they were exposed as antisemites. This exposure, however, was usually talked about in depoliticizing terms as harboring sentiments of raw Islamist hatred, integral to Muslims since the days of the Prophet. By way of a discourse on “Muslim Antisemitism,” similar to, but different from “Christian Antijudaism,” Palestinians have become the central subjects of Islamic extremism prevention projects.
Institutionally, the position of the perpetrator was first claimed by the German Protestant Church (EKD). Lothar Kreyssig, a former judge and a major figure in the EKD, regarded the Holocaust as “a sin against God’s creation” and pushed for atonement beyond the church and interreligious dialogue. Atonement meant working through one’s burdened conscience by doing voluntary service in Israel and with victims of Nazi crimes. According to church records, however, the first volunteers in the early 1960s neither felt guilty nor particularly burdened. Some had not even reflected on their parents’ complicity in Nazi crimes when they started their service. Yet the volunteer service and the value attached to it connected them to a bigger cause of repair after genocide. Again, certain practices and forms of labor, such as caring for Holocaust survivors in an Israeli kibbutz, allowed for the shaping of sensibilities and capacities towards oneself as a person with a greater mission and a citizen oriented towards creating a more moral state after the Holocaust in relation to the figure of the Jew.
The history of post-Holocaust Germany and German-Jewish relations cannot be fully grasped without understanding the wider efforts of the Protestant Church. These efforts include the re-organization and incorporation of certain religious concepts, such as conscience, into the post-war German constitution. But they also include the EKD’s perception of the figure of the Jew as a human who had been killed, but who was also reborn in the state of Israel, thus giving Germans a second chance to make up for their sins against God. And although many Berliners might think of themselves as atheist, non-religious, or secular, as Atshan and Galor describe in their book, this conviction only speaks to how well certain religious concepts have been converted into the secular state’s foundational elements and public institutions. This conversion process includes the figures and elements through which the Holocaust remains experientially sacred, unique, and exceptional, and constitutes a civic responsibility for the creation of a better secular state and a liberal democracy.
The history of post-Holocaust Germany and German-Jewish relations cannot be fully grasped without understanding the wider efforts of the Protestant Church.
What I have hitherto discussed is how certain Protestant morals have found entrance into secular institutions and have helped overcome a political-moral impasse defined by a narrow notion of genocidal guilt. My intention is not to decry an incomplete secularism, but to point out how religious reason, memory politics, and citizenship are enmeshed in the secular state with far reaching consequences as to who belongs. In this context Germaness already is equated with the secular—because of a neat conversion of traditionally Christian practices through public, legal, and educational procedures—Muslims are equated with the religious, and being Jewish ambiguously designates in most cases belonging to the state of Israel. Consider for example how antisemitism and Islamophobia are understood by one of the interviewees: “Anti-Semitism is hatred of the state of Israel and Islamophobia is hatred of a religion” (105). Atshan and Galor describe this as a conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel. I would rather contend that this is the aforementioned successful conversion of Protestant morals within the secular state. The success lies in how it universalizes its own particularity and attracts pedagogical practices, integration, and reformist Islamic politics for an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous population of former migrants and refugees.
The task before us as scholars then is to understand and explain how Germans became secular, Middle Easterners/Palestinians became Muslim, and Jews came to stand for the state of Israel after the Holocaust. And what is the role of Holocaust memory in secular conversion? Perhaps this is work that must be done on scholarly terms before Atshan and Galor’s vision of mutual recognition among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians can become true.
Sultan Doughan, PhD (University of California-Berkeley) is the Dr. Thomas Zand Visiting Assistant Professor of Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at Clark University. Doughan is a political anthropologist with a research focus on contemporary Holocaust and human rights education, antisemitism, racism and racialization, Middle Eastern migration and diaspora, gendered religious difference, Muslims and Jews, and secularism and nationalism in Western European liberal democracies. Her primary research sites have been civic education projects in immigrant neighborhoods, schools, and neighborhood organizations across Berlin, Germany. More broadly, she is interested in how pedagogical practices intervene in state-citizen relations by affectively reshaping a relation to the Holocaust past, the figure of the Jew and forms of comporting, expressing, and experiencing oneself consistent with the ideal of citizenship. She is currently working on her first book, Converting Citizens: German Secularism and the Politics of Tolerance after the Holocaust. Her book brings back the minority question in order to conceptualize the various ways in which Muslims have to convert (assimilate, integrate, reform, re-learn) into German secularism.
Storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
With the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 many involved in new age spirituality denied the reality of the pandemic entirely. They held this position in common with many on the political right-wing, particularly those labelled Christian nationalists. These groups may seem like strange bedfellows. New age spirituality involves understanding “the universe” as a form of divinity, composed of energy vibrating at certain frequencies, the raising of which has a millenarian outcome called the ascension, or in earlier parlance the coming “new age” of peace and harmony. It may seem genealogically connected with the 1960s counterculture, and so is often characterized as left-wing politically. How those involved in new age spirituality came to share common ground with Christian nationalism indicates conjoined roots in neoliberalism. A consideration of this convergence complicates our view of exactly what “religious nationalism” entails.
Instead of accepting the reality of the pandemic, those involved in new age spirituality blamed another environmental toxin like chemtrails, perhaps spread by 5G, which were designed for the purpose of forcing vaccinations and furthering government control. This denialism put many engaged in new age spirituality in line with the rapidly spreading QAnon theories, which they were exposed to through shared online ecosystems. Posts on social media combined hashtags for spiritual awakening and QAnon, indicating a cross-pollination between the two. One of my long-term interlocutors, a man I met because he slept in a tent in the backyard of the house where I studied meditation in Sedona, Arizona, began posting memes that indicated his shift toward Christian nationalism. This may seem surprising, but those involved in such spirituality are not, or are no longer, the left-wing hippies of caricature. What I first observed when I began my fieldwork in 2012 was a form of anti-politics. Many of those involved in new age spirituality rejected all political affiliations and did not want to be involved in politics at all as it was seen as lowering their “vibration.” By 2020, they had transformed into supporters of an imminent civil war because they felt under attack by mask and vaccine mandates.
As an anthropologist, I have been studying new age spirituality since 2012, completing multiple periods of ethnographic fieldwork in Sedona, a nucleus of the burgeoning spiritual scene in the US due to the presence of special energy locally known as “vortexes.” People involved in spirituality in Sedona would often report awakening experiences. It was a fundamentally disruptive experience that altered their life course, a key moment on their spiritual path that led them to become shamans, starseeds, or yoga teachers. They also expressed a fundamental disagreement with society as it is currently organized, with capitalism, environmental destruction, and political corruption as major complaints. There was also a prevalence of conspiracy theories concerning chemtrails, anti-vaxx, fluoride, UFOs, and deep underground military bases, or DUMBs. There was even a rumor in town that there was a DUMB underneath Secret Canyon. Political scientists and journalists often distinguish between “real” conspiracies, things that really happened, and “conspiracy theories,” things that are patently false and dangerous to democracy. But for my interlocutors, the existence of verifiable conspiracies indicated the truth of conspiracy theories; they were connected.
Conspirituality creates a space of convergence between new age spirituality and other religious traditions that may on the face of it seem to have disparate political commitments. Charlotte Ward and David Voas (2011) coined the term “conspirituality,” combining new age spirituality and conspiracy theory to describe this ostensibly surprising convergence. While conspiracy theories have long been a core part of new age spirituality, they are also becoming an increasing presence in contemporary American Christianity, especially among Christian nationalists, who express a conviction that God is on America’s side, Jesus died for their nation, and American prosperity is contingent on the Christian faith. Being against Christianity in any way is seen as being against America. This means that they think that their understanding of Christianity should be privileged in law and public policy, and if the government is not aligned with Christian nationalist ideology, it should be overthrown, which appears to be the justification of many of the rioters at the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. In Taking America Back for God (2020), sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry link Christian nationalist commitments to support of a social order with a hierarchy based on gender, race, citizenship status, and sexuality. As the story goes, this social order is being undermined and Christian nationalists know it.
Much of the blame for the subversion of this social order is placed on “enemies,” both foreign and domestic. This is where conspiracy theories enter in as explanatory frameworks. Many of the conspiracy theories popular among Christian nationalists, like in new age spirituality, are animated by broadly populist sentiments—anti-government, anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-corporate (but pro-small business). The “elites” are doing something nefarious to the masses in an us vs. them situation. Conspiracy theories operate as explanations for events, occurrences that go against presumptions of the “natural” or “normal” order of things—9/11 must be an inside job because the great and mighty American empire cannot be undone by box cutters and amateur pilots; Obama must be a fraud because the president of America cannot be Black. In White Evangelical Racism, historian Anthea Butler recounts how conspiracy theories became more tolerated by evangelicals after the election of Obama, who they felt threatened their beliefs in a White nationalistic Christianity (130).
There are major differences between new age spirituality and Christian nationalism. For example, “America” as a nation is fetishized in the latter but rejected in the former. Spirituality is also more socially progressive than Christian nationalism. However, it is also fiscally conservative, even libertarian. Christian nationalists and those involved with new age spirituality hold prosperity in common as a value, the former via the prosperity gospel and that latter via prosperity consciousness, in which trusting the universe takes the place of trusting God’s plan as the route to riches. Prosperity for both is rooted in Whiteness, requiring an unacknowledged subjugation and exploitation of Blackness. Whiteness does not entail that these movements are composed entirely of White people, but rather that they are ideologies that uphold and promote what Butler calls a “cultural whiteness” (141). Another point in common is millenarianism. Both expect an imminent end of this world, with a new perfected world to be created in its place that is purged of impure elements. Both Christian nationalism and new age spirituality have adherents who have embraced QAnon, with those more influenced by Christianity seeing Trump as the messiah, and those more influenced by new age spirituality seeing him as a lightworker (a spiritually enlightened being working on Earth to help others achieve ascension). Both also face emic dismissal as perversions, as not being “true” Christianity or “real” spirituality.
Trump 2024 flag in Sedona, Arizona. Photo courtesy of the author.
In Neoliberalism’s Demons, Adam Kotsko theorizes that freedom is understood in a moral paradigm as an index of “blameworthiness” in which demonization is a “form of moral entrapment” (2018, 2) through which political systems rooted in Christian theology legitimate themselves. The current form of political theology is neoliberalism, which he calls “the paradigm in which the strategy of moral entrapment that I call demonization has been pushed to its uttermost limits. Neoliberalism makes demons of us all, confronting us with forced choices that serve to redirect the blame for social problems onto the ostensible poor decision making of individuals” (2–3). In Ripples of the Universe (2021), I describe how new age spirituality is connected to neoliberalism via a moral individualism wherein reality is entirely created by individual choice. This means that any poor choices, and the outcomes that follow from them, are entirely one’s own fault. Many who subscribe to this moral system find themselves trapped by circumstances that are beyond their control. Yet, they still label the problems that they face—e.g. health problems they can’t afford to treat, job losses they can’t rebound from—as the result of poor choices.
Conspiracy theories fill in this gap between assumption and reality. They operate as a theodicy; someone else is to blame, much like the devil is to blame for human sin and suffering. Health problems are from a “toxic environment” of chemtrails, fluoride, and vaccinations; economic problems are caused by a “dark cabal” in the government undermining the economy to force a “great reset” to socialism. Conspiracy theories flourish in systems of thought that have no place for systemic thinking, in which there are only individuals with agency, operating either for the good or the bad. So, when those who think this way experience misfortune, they find an external agent to blame, and devise elaborate conspiratorial connections rather than accept that collective, social problems exist.
The rejection of public health policies to mitigate Covid-19 and the January 6 insurrection are two instances that indicate the ongoing erosion of trust in social and political institutions. What is occurring is not simply a difference of opinion, but an epistemological crisis, wherein there is a wide scale breakdown of social consensus around what counts as true or false. Overt White supremacy is on the rise, but so also is covert White supremacy. The latter can be seen in the proliferation of conspiracy theories common to both new age spirituality and Christian nationalism. The likelihood of increased violent conflict as a result of these theories is high. Conspiracy theories have been a part of the worldview of every right-wing domestic terrorist incident in last 50 years (12). Over the same period, there has been a rise in stochastic terrorism, where leaders do not have to order violent action, but merely imply their desire for it. Here, violence results from individual actors who see themselves as responding to the words of leaders, rather than direct orders. The January 6 insurrectionists understood themselves to be at the Capitol in response to the words of former president Donald Trump, while he maintained a cloak of deniability that he was merely calling for peaceful protests.
Conspiracy theories motivate violence, and they are often spread by political actors in order to increase the likelihood of violence while simultaneously avoiding personal accountability. There was a political conspiracy behind January 6: a conspiracy to subvert the election of President Joe Biden by the former president Donald Trump and his allies. Conspiracy theories were spread to motivate people to take part in a violent riot to seize power by illegitimate means. “Real” political conspiracies and “conspiracy theories” work together in a dynamic that undermines democracy by exploiting people’s pre-existing beliefs, fears, ideals, values, and assumptions of a “natural” social order. A conspiracy theory explains something that transgresses those assumptions, something that therefore must be the work of an “evil” other. That other must be destroyed to restore the “natural” or “correct” social order. Because the stakes are so high, violence is justified from this point of view.
Susannah Crockford is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests cover the ethnographic study of religion, ecology, and medicine, with field sites in the southern and midwestern US and northern Europe. Her first monograph was published in May 2021 by the Class 200 list of the University of Chicago Press, titled Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona. Her next book will be an ethnography of climate change. Follow on Twitter: @suscrockford.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (German: Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas), also known as the Holocaust Memorial (German: Holocaust-Mahnmal). Photo Credit: Daniel Foster, via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
It is not easy to summarize the rich, highly nuanced, and very timely The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, by Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor. This book sets out to understand the knotted relationship between Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in the cosmopolitan city of Berlin in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It is a very important book because, as it notes, Berlin’s Palestinian community has become in recent years the largest in Europe, while the Israeli community is one of the largest outside Israel and probably the youngest (demographically). Hence the book’s attempt to present this complicated relationship systematically and “from below”—essentially by means of a series of interviews with Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians living in Berlin, which are discussed within broad political and cultural contexts—is extremely important.
In this short essay, I will not review or summarize the book, but rather “think with” it. What emerges from this engagement, at least from my perspective as an Israeli Jew reading it in Jerusalem, is a deep split in current German liberal identity. This split seems to cast some doubt on the alleged success of the big post-world-war German identity formation project of “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung).
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
On the one hand Germany (and particularly Berlin), viewed from Jerusalem, seems to be a stronghold of freedom and liberal-democratic culture and politics, and on certain issues (such as LGBTQ+ cultural and social inclusion, and climate change), even progressive. Germany’s strength and democratic stability are particularly evident when viewed (despite the rising of the AfD in recent years) against the backdrop of rising right-wing populist regimes both within and outside Europe. Germany is also seen as the unifying element in the European Union at a time of crisis in which it is in danger of breaking up. It is this liberal image of Germany (together with other more materialistic reasons) that has turned it, since the 1990s, into a desirable destination for tens of thousands of young Jewish Israeli migrants many of whom see it as a tolerant and open alternative to Israel. Generally speaking, these migrants have felt very welcome by Germany, especially in Berlin. At the same time, Germany has become an attractive destination for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers from the MENA region, particularly following the citizenship reforms that were put into place at the beginning of the 2000s. Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to take in a million refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, made Germany exemplary. And although, as the book portrays, these refugees were often met with implicit and explicit racist and Islamophobic attitudes, as the book also asserts: “Despite the significant increase in xenophobia and criticism of Merkel’s policy […] a tangible welcoming culture has emerged in Germany and more specifically in Berlin” (45). Holocaust survivor and literary scholar Ruth Kluger, who spoke at the German Bundestag to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2016, praised Merkel’s decision, calling her slogan Wir schaffen das, “we can do this” (absorb that many refugees, see 42), heroic. The connection she made to the Holocaust and the admiration she expressed were shared by many.
Meanwhile, it seems that in everything relating to the Palestinian criticism of Israel’s colonialism and occupation, Germany’s conduct—at official levels and also in civil society and even academia—is the most reactionary in all of Europe and the west. This too, as is evident in many of the book’s sections, is framed as learning the lessons of the Holocaust, lessons which have fashioned the DNA of the country’s political culture since the nineties and culminated in Merkel’s 2008 Knesset address asserting that due to its past, Israel’s security is Germany’s “reason of state” (Staatsräson) (36).
It might be enough to recall some of the events of recent years. In May 2019, the German parliament voted for a motion equating the BDS movement—which enjoys an overwhelming support among Palestinians—with antisemitism, and thus implicitly criminalizing all Palestinians as antisemites. Practically speaking, this motion made it very difficult for BDS supporters to get access to public spaces or funding in Germany (see also, 95–96). In a distortive way, the boycott of the state of Israel (a nuclear power, an occupier, an oppressor trampling the rights of others) reminds many Germans of the boycott of Jewish businesses in the 1930s by the oppressive Nazi state (see 151 – this association was explicitly included in the motion itself). Nowhere in Europe or indeed the world are anti-Israel stances or criticism of Israel identified so strongly with antisemitism as in Germany. This tendency is consolidated by, among others, Felix Klein, who since 2018 has been the federal commissioner for combatting antisemitism and strengthening Jewish life in Germany. He has done so with the encouraging support of Israeli officials. (Thus, for example the Israeli spokesperson of the Israeli Embassy in Berlin is quoted saying that it is in Israel’s “interest to maintain German guilt about the Holocaust” [150].)
Atshan and Galor describe well in their book the oppressive and antidemocratic outcomes of this atmosphere. Atshan, a Palestinian from Ramallah, was himself a victim of a persecutory position of this sort when, in August 2018, his invitation to lecture at the Jewish Museum in Berlin was cancelled. These tendencies reached a grotesque level of absurdity, when, following Felix Klein’s charge of antisemitism against the German-Jewish left wing and BDS-supporting organization Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), the German Bank for Social Economy (Bank für Sozialwirtschaft) decided to close their bank account (109).
These policies effect all spheres of life and effectively shape a very biased public discourse. But perhaps the most extreme example of this German trend towards discriminatory and antidemocratic behavior, intolerance, and racism, occurred after Atshan and Galor’s book was published. In September 2021, the broadcasting station WDR decided to cancel an employment contract with the physician and journalist Nemi Al-Hassan, who was supposed to present a popular TV programme on science. El-Hassan, the German-born daughter of Palestinian refugees, was accused of antisemitism because in 2014 she took part in the Al Quds march against Operation Protective Edge in Gaza (during which according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem 2202 Palestinians were killed, 1391 of who were unarmed and 526 of whom were under the age of 18), and because she “liked” a post by the US anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace at the time of the “Guardian of the Walls” operation in Gaza in May 2021 (in which 256 Palestinians were killed, 66 of whom were children and at least 128 of whom were civilians). She was also a target of a vicious public attack led by the Bild tabloid and was subject to numerous death threats.
This then is the German split. On the one hand, it is a state with liberal-democratic and even progressive tendencies which attracts Israeli and Palestinian migrants. On the other hand, it is a reactionary state that cancels and criminalizes as antisemitic Palestinian protest and actually the very Palestinian discourse and narrative, and shields the state of Israel from any substantial criticism, even as the latter engages in occupation, expulsion, and systematic violation of Palestinians national, human, and civil rights. This split is to my understanding what constitutes the infrastructure of The Moral Triangle.
The Split between Two Global Narratives
In my mind, this split is related to a more general, perhaps global, narrative split. As the historian Charles Maier points out, the end of the twentieth century saw the development and proliferation of what he calls two great “moral historical narratives” in the west and beyond to explain modernity. Both are stories of historical catastrophe: the story of the Holocaust and the story of anti-/post-colonialism and imperialism. According to Maier, the former focuses mostly on issues of memory, whereas the latter centers on issues of (ongoing) domination and exploitation.
Most Israelis and Germans understand Israel and Zionism through the prism of the story of the Holocaust and paradoxically it functions as a story of redemption. For the Israelis, the state of Israel is the Jewish people’s decisive answer to the Holocaust and to antisemitism, the place where Holocaust survivors were able to rehabilitate their lives and their human dignity. For them, it is the only guarantee that a further Holocaust won’t happen in the future. It’s a redemptive story of “Holocaust and rebirth,” as the Zionist slogan puts it. For the Germans too—as the German-Israeli psychoanalyst Iris Hefetz has recently portrayed in a very nuanced article in the Berliner Zeitung—the story of the Holocaust is a part of a drama of redemption. The support for the state of Israel, ever since the Reparations Agreement, has been a way for the Germans to redeem themselves from their past and gain recognition as the new Germany. As a story of redemption, it is fundamental to the national identities of the two peoples, and any opposition to it is met by a very harsh response.
The Palestinians and many progressives around the world, meanwhile, understand the political reality in Palestine-Israel in the frame of the post-/anti-colonial narrative, which, like the Holocaust narrative, has also become global since the 1990s. Israel figures in this story mainly as the perpetrator of cruelty and violence in a story of settler colonialism where indigenous Palestinian inhabitants are the victims. This narrative holds that under the protection of the imperial powers, and in order to solve Europe’s antisemitism problem, Palestine was stolen from its original inhabitants, who underwent ethnic cleansing (the Nakba), becoming a minority in their homeland. These processes didn’t end in 1948 and are ongoing.
The Palestinian intellectual Raef Zreik articulated this rift very precisely: “The Europeans see the back of the Jewish refugee fleeing for his life. The Palestinian sees the face of the settler colonialist taking over his land.” These two perspectives cannot be more remote from each other than in the German case. Most Germans find it very difficult to accept the legitimacy, let alone the relevance, of the anticolonial perspective in relation to Israel, despite a prodigious historical research literature about it. For many Germans, referring to Israel as a settler colonial state, even as a historical analytic perspective, is a form of antisemitism that negates the lessons of the Holocaust. The abyss between these two historical narratives in general and with regard to Israel in particular seems unbridgeable in Germany, though the urgent challenge is indeed to bridge them. In my own work with Bashir Bashir we tried to suggest a way to bridge this rift.
Coming to Terms with the Past while Denying the Present
Recently the philosopher Susan Neiman published a much-discussed book, Learning from the Germans (2019). In it, she praised the Germans for their Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past), which includes taking moral responsibility for the past and compensating its victims. She further suggests that Germany should serve as a model for the Americans in coming to terms with their own dark past. Indeed, this national project that emerged from Germany’s politics after the war, but also from admirable grassroots activism during the eighties and nineties, seemed for many years to set a model for the whole world to show how nations should deal with their own criminal past. However, The Moral Triangle, portraying the complex situation in Germany of the second decade of the twenty first century, casts some doubt on this often-celebrated Vergangenheitsbewältigung (a doubt, which I think Neiman has recently also come to share). The various dichotomic unbridgeable gaps and splits which emerge so forcefully from The Moral Triangle are to my mind anything but an indication of a successful process of working through the past.
A current unfolding affair in Germany seems to prove this point. The Alliance Against Anti-Semitism Kassel (supported by some mainstream liberal media) accused some artists who were supposed to present in Documenta—one of Germany’s most important and prestigious international contemporary art events in Kassel—as being antisemitic. One of the “sins” attached to a Palestinian artist—Yazan al-Khalili—was that he was associated in the past with a cultural center in Ramallah named after the Palestinian intellectual Khalil Al-Sakakini. Al-Sakakini, who had fled his home in Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba, indeed sympathized (like many other anti-colonial leaders and intellectuals around the world—from Africa to India) with Nazi Germany in its war against imperial Great Britain. In fact, Al-Sakakini was a much more complex figure, but this is really beside the point. Because as Elke Buhr noted, it was not Sakakini—who died in 1953—who was invited to Kassel. Nor was it the cultural center named after him. An artist who was associated with the center was the invitee—and that was enough to declare him antisemitic and create a havoc. This does not seem to me a healthy process of “coming to terms with the past.” This looks to me more like a very dangerous ritual of exorcism, de-contamination, and scapegoating.
Personal and collective identities always hold tensions, ambivalences, paradoxes, and even contradictions. But when these become so extreme that the gaps cannot be negotiated, mitigated, bridged, or even discussed, they become a reason for deep (political) concern. To my mind, as a Jewish Israeli, this is characteristic of Zionism and of current Jewish Israeli identity. The contradiction between being “Jewish” and being “democratic” has become apparent and unbridgeable. What I have learned from Atshan and Galor’s book is that despite the nuances and complexities they portray, this can also be said, to a large extent, for Germany. Its democratic values and its alleged pro-Israelism—both lessons learned from the Holocaust—cannot be reconciled anymore.
I wish to thank Yehudit Yinhar and Prof. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum for their helpful comments. Obviously, I bare the sole responsibility for everything written in this essay.
Professor Amos Goldberg teaches Holocaust Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldberg's work is interdisciplinary in nature, combining history, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. Among his recent publications is his book Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2017) and his co-edited volume together with Bashir Bashir The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018). Goldberg is active in fighting the abuse of “the fight against antisemitism” for suppressing Palestinian rights. His recently co-authored article together with Alon Confino and Raz Segal was published in the Berliner Zeitung.
In The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians, Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor explore how Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians living in Berlin contend with violences of the past and present—most notably the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the ongoing occupation of Palestinians in Israel—in their moral and political lives. In rich ethnographic detail, the authors recount how interviewees from each of these groups understand their relationship to their own communities and to the others in this moral triangle. What readers will discern in these pages is that the historical traumas experienced by one group can occlude the realities of violence and oppression in another. This is most clearly on display in how Germans, even on the radical left, are unable to acknowledge the oppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state. (Ironically, many Israelis living in Berlin are to the left of the German left on this matter.) For many Berliners, offering unflinching support for the State of Israel even when it commits human rights violations is a way to redeem previous generations’ responsibility for the Holocaust. This comes at the expense of the Palestinian people, however, who were not responsible for the Shoah and whose experience of the Nakba is ongoing. The equation of Jewish identity with the State of Israel, is of course, fallacious and ideological. And yet, it remains a potent force in German politics and the country’s social grappling with its Nazi past. It has even led to Jews who speak out against the State of Israel in Germany being labelled antisemitic by non-Jews. Further, it leads Palestinians living in Berlin to avoid speaking out against the actions of Israel for fear of being further marginalized via the label of antisemitism.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of Atshan and Galor’s book is that it forces us to confront the moral realities of people on the ground in Berlin. As the authors note early on, their interviewees range from a psychoanalyst, to a janitor, to a teacher, to a small business owner (see page 6 for a full list of the professions of the interviewees). This range of subjects provides us a glimpse into the complex moral lives of people without the distance that academic analysis of these issues often affords. The result is a moral triangle that is threaded together by an intersectional web. Here identities sometimes overlap where we might expect them to depart (think here of the critiques of the State of Israel by both Israelis and Palestinians in Berlin) and depart where we might expect them to conjoin (think here of the inability to acknowledge the Nakba among German Berliners). The result is an empirical study that invites us to acknowledge the challenges that the lived realities of humans on the ground present to our normative positions.
The essays collected in this symposium grapple with the intersections and divergences among these groups, and their ramifications both in and beyond Germany. Amos Goldberg explores what he calls the “split in current German liberal identity.” This split, he contends, is between a liberal state that attracts migrants like those from Israel and Palestine and a state that sanctions any criticisms of the State of Israel. He argues that this split is reflective of a more general one between anti-/post-colonialism and the story of the Holocaust, where the former is focused on current oppression and the latter on memory. He concludes by noting that, unfortunately, the current oppression of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine has eroded the likelihood of bringing these perspectives together in a way that might lead to peace. Sultan Doughan, meanwhile, reflects on how the category of perpetrator has come to define what it means to be a German citizen. This category, Doughan notes, is bound up with a Protestant-inflected way of conceptualizing moral responsibility that continues to resonate, even in “secular” Berlin.
In their essay, Hannah Tzuberi and Nahed Samour contend that the German state’s “anti-antisemitism,” rather than combatting the logic of antisemitism actually reinforces it. This is because it continues to rely on the image of the Jew as vulnerable and in need of protection. Without this image, the German state’s image of itself as morally righteous could not exist. Thus, paradoxically, the Jew—and in the German political/moral imagination, the (always Jewish) Israeli—must remain a victim in order for the German state to preserve itself, with tragic results for those who suffer under oppression from Israeli state violence. The figure of the Palestinian here emerges as the crucial prism through which the multiple layers of legitimatized, moral violence in Germany must be recognized. Finally, Sabine von Mering puts her own experiences as a non-Jewish and non-Palestinian German into conversation with Atshan’s and Galor’s findings. By interweaving her own experiences of growing up as a Lutheran in Germany and of German-Jewish dialogues that took place at Brandeis in the late 1990s, von Mering shows the possibility of a German standing in solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians.
These essays demonstrate that oppression is not static and that how we remember past oppressive violence cannot be disentangled from current injustices. An even wider lens on this situation reminds us that the forces of secularism and modernity continue to remain potent drivers of political and social strife. Concepts like the nation, religion, or the secular did not appear out of thin air. Rather they are the products of human history. As such, reckoning with their violences, and potentialities, is a collective human responsibility, one with which The Moral Triangle invites us to more fully grapple.
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
A common error in conceiving decolonial theorizing as a standard form of critical theory or as an extension of mainstream postcolonial studies is the assumption that its approach to religion or spirituality is bounded by secularism. It is often forgotten that while the emergence of postcolonial studies is connected to theories of literature and culture in the secular humanities, what is typically recognized as decolonial theorizing came into being in largely inter- and trans-disciplinary contexts that included scholars, artists, activists, and community organizers who were critical of modern western secular ideologies.[1] Some of them also openly drew from and sought to contribute to the study of religion and religious thought.
Often the result of limited engagement with only very few authors in the field, the idea of decolonial thought as an intellectual production that can only consider “the religious” or “the spiritual” through the lenses of western secularism appears to be a convenient trope in the effort to reassert the authority and contemporary relevance of certain forms of scholarship, particularly religious studies, as well as some forms of philosophy and theology. The result is a reduction in the possibilities of profound engagement between these areas and decolonial thought, even as this work has already been taking place among those of us who have been trained in or have been contributing to areas such as religious studies, philosophy, and decoloniality for more than a short time.
One would only have to take a quick look at works of senior and distinguished figures in decolonial thinking, such as Enrique Dussel and Sylvia Marcos, to identify profound critiques of secularism and sophisticated ways to approach religion and spirituality. Related critiques of secularism appear in the works of Eduardo Mendieta, who has a long trajectory of making contributions to philosophy and religious studies, and of the intelectual-militanteCatherine Walsh, who draws from African diaspora and Indigenous views in her account of community formation, decolonization, and the overcoming of the binary between the natural and the human.
It is also important to recognize the impact of African diaspora spiritualities in the works and perspectives of Afro-Caribbean decolonial thinkers such as Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso and Agustín Lao-Montes, and the contributions of the also Caribbean Ramón Grosfoguel to the enrichment of Critical Muslim Studies and the critique of Islamophobia. More recent, but already well established and leading scholars engaging religion and decoloniality include Mayra Rivera, Santiago Slabodsky, and An Yountae, among others.
The idea of decolonial thought as an intellectual production that can only consider ‘the religious’ or ‘the spiritual’ through the lenses of western secularism appears to be a convenient trope in the effort to reassert the authority and contemporary relevance of certain forms of scholarship.
My own work on decolonial theorizing, the decolonial theory and philosophy of religion, and the critique of modern western secular ideologies and the coloniality of secularism, is rooted in conversations and exchanges about related topics with friends, teachers, and mentors before and during my college years in the “unincorporated territory”/colony of Puerto Rico.[2] In conversations on the island-colony with scholars such as the late Jesuit priest and historian Fernando Picó and the theologian and humanities professor Luis N. Rivera Pagán, it was clear that the critique of colonialism could not be consistently carried out without the critique of secularism and vice-versa. I took this to be a foundation already established long before I became interested in it, even if kept in a marginal position within and by a largely secular (and Eurocentric) left, as well as the hegemonic liberal—modern/colonial and secular—arts and sciences.
I was fortunate to find a similar conviction in important teachers and interlocutors while a doctoral student in religious studies, philosophy, and Africana studies in the 1990s. They included the Caribbean and Afro-Jewish philosopher Lewis R. Gordon and Enrique Dussel. Gordon held a PhD in philosophy and was appointed in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University. He offered undergraduate and graduate courses that engaged the three areas simultaneously. Challenging the divide between “the religious” and “the secular,” while also critically engaging colonialism and antiblack racism was a given in this context. It was similar in my work with Enrique Dussel, also while a graduate student, and later on in my exchanges with Sylvia Marcos, which started when I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Duke University. At Duke, I worked closely with Walter Mignolo, who is sometimes taken as a poster person for secularism even as his work makes important contributions to the critique of western modernity, including the coloniality of its secularism, as I have pointed out elsewhere.[3]
In short, neither the critique of secularism and the concern with understanding the relevance of spirituality for decolonization, nor the effort to decolonize philosophy and religious studies as fields of study are new. Making it appear so strengthens the coloniality of the liberal arts and sciences.
Lessons from Frantz Fanon 60 Years after His Passing
It won’t be difficult to include many more references to scholars of decolonization who challenge in various ways the coloniality of the secular/religious divide, or whose work contributes to the decolonization of religious studies. Some authors are very explicit in their critique of secularism and their appraisal of the role of spirituality in their searches for decolonization—take Gloria Anzaldúa or M. Jacqui Alexander, for example—while others are less explicit or even suspicious about highlighting the links between decolonization and anything “religious.” However, one can often find contributions to the critique of the coloniality of secularism even among authors who would otherwise appear to be indifferent or critical of religion or spirituality. In this essay, I will share some reflections about contributions to the critique of secularism in the work of Frantz Fanon.
Frantz Fanon represents the FLN (National Liberation Front) and Algeria in the war of independence at the Pan African conference at the Palais de la Culture in Léopoldville, August 27, 1960, in the former Belgian Congo. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Fanon’s work is a major reference in Black and Africana studies, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thought, among other areas. His work preceded, anticipated, prepared the ground, and continues to serve as guide and inspiration for many contemporary theorists of antiblackness, coloniality, and decoloniality. One of my main arguments here is that Fanon’s work offers valuable lessons in the task of critiquing the coloniality of secularism and that these lessons remain relevant today. One important part of these lessons is that decoloniality is not simply a topic of investigation, but part of a more encompassing decolonial turn that involves the comprehensive decolonization of knowledge, power, and being.
It is already well known that Fanon engaged in and contributed to the projects of decolonizing philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. I propose here that his work offers important considerations for decolonizing religious studies as well. In that sense, this essay continues a central topic in my previous contribution to this space.
I turn to Frantz Fanon here in the context of celebrating the 70th anniversary of the publication of his massively influential work Black Skin, White Masks, originally published in 1952, and of the recent commemoration of the 60th year of his passing and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon is often depicted as a thoroughly secularist author with little more than suspicion or disdain for anything religious or spiritual. This caricature makes him a good figure through which to demonstrate the limits of secularist interpretations of decolonial thought. Fanon’s work provides important considerations in the exploration of the coloniality of secularism and religious studies while also indicating the generative possibilities that emerge in challenging the strict divide between the religious and the secular.[4]
I refer to Fanon as a decolonial thinker, a designation that he did not use, because he carefully developed the concept of decolonization as a creative process of unthinking and rethinking, as well as undoing and redoing, in the path towards a new idea and practice of being human. He understood this practice as a reconstitution of the open-ended web of human interrelationalities and as the amplification of relations of uninhibited and free giving and receiving that are part of what Fanon refers to as the “world of you,” which is at the core of the idea of decoloniality.[5]
Lesson 1: Understanding the Catastrophe of Modernity/Coloniality
One important contribution of Fanon’s work to the study of religion, philosophy, and theology concerns the entanglement between modernity and coloniality. Fanon’s theorizing reflects an awareness of the overwhelming colonial dimension and effects of modernity. He was conscious that the globalization of western modernity and its connection with the rationalization and naturalization of colonialism and racial slavery represented a veritable catastrophe for societies across the world and for humanity as a whole.[6] This catastrophe has had profound impacts on even the most basic of human activities, such as linguistic and erotic relationships, as Fanon sought to demonstrate in the initial chapters of his classic Black Skin, White Masks.[7]
Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation. This means that decolonization is not simply a political practice that is separate from academic work, but the very condition of possibility for countering the coloniality of the human sciences. Since hegemonic academic disciplines, including philosophy and religious studies, are grounded on dominant views of modernity, the critique of modernity should serve not only as a preamble to any academic study, but also as an ongoing activity.
Using contemporary concepts, one might say that for Fanon, modernity/coloniality has always already shaped the subject, the object, and the context of any potential academic investigation.
Fanon’s references to “religion” or spiritual practices in his work cannot be disentangled from his insight about the active role of colonialism and the impact of modern/colonial catastrophe. For example, under modern/colonial catastrophe, the concept of religion can be used at one moment to minimize the standing of one group in one context—e.g., “you are merely religious”—while at another moment serving as a form of “whitening”—e.g., “I am also religious.”[8] Sometimes the two apparently opposite views appear in the same context but are held as true by different parties, or sometimes even by the same party. That is, Fanon never finds “religion” purely out there: he finds “religion” always in context of colonization and global coloniality; always taking unique forms in varied contexts of catastrophe.
Lesson 2: Fanon’s Decolonial Turn against the Coloniality of the Human Sciences
One implication of Fanon’s profound awareness of the impact of coloniality and its creation of shifting and multiple layers of meaning is that one cannot take at face value his statements about religion, among many other topics. Perhaps because he was a psychiatrist and a militant, rather than a traditional scholar of philosophy or religion, the theoretical dimension of Fanon’s texts cannot be disentangled from practice. As a result, what Fanon wrote at any given point is often more complex than what it appears at first sight.
Approaching Fanon’s texts as traditional works in the liberal arts and sciences is a common mistake, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the incorporation of his writings into the academy, but one that can and should be corrected. What Fanon seeks to do with his writing is connected to his therapeutic and revolutionary work and frequently different from what any specific statement in his written work indicates. Often when reading Fanon, it is as if his writing suggests that more important than what it says is the process of thinking and doing that gave birth to it, as well as the unfinished project of which it was and continues to be part. If so, the best way to engage Fanon’s texts is not by seeking to have the “right” interpretation of them—in fact, his writings often resist these efforts—but participating in the practice of decolonial thinking/doing and doing/thinking that was predominant in Fanon’s practical/theoretical and theoretical/practical work.
Pavillon de l’Administration de l’Hôpital Psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville, 1933. Frantz Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in this hospital in the 1950s before joining the National Liberation Front (FLN) and the Algerian revolution. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
This is one important dimension of the project of countering the coloniality of the human sciences, including religious studies: decolonizing knowledge is not the same as simply writing about decoloniality or decolonization. Decolonizing philosophy, religious studies, or theology is likewise not only a matter of diversifying theoretical sources or engaging new topics.
Reducing the project of epistemic decolonization to a question of diversifying topics and sources leads to a reassertion of the priorities and ethos of the modern/colonial and secular liberal arts and sciences, even in projects that describe themselves as decolonial. This is a dangerous path that privileges the position of the presumed “expert” on decoloniality over the multiple actors, agents, creators, and thinkers engaged in decolonial thinking and practice.
Fanon proposes a substantive decolonial turn, one that transcends the limits and that counters the coloniality of the established liberal arts and sciences. His work teaches that decolonizing knowledge involves not only refusing to ignore the role of coloniality in shaping the object of one’s investigation, but also redefining the tasks and priorities of the scholar and the intellectual.[9] This means that the decolonization of religious studies and other fields cannot take place without a challenge to the model of the scholar, the organization of scholars—e.g. departments, centers, institutes, and professional associations—and the training of scholars within the liberal arts and sciences.
Lesson 3: Countering the Coloniality of the Religion/Secularism Divide
A third lesson from Fanon’s work concerns the coloniality of the religious/secularism divide and the need to overcome it in decolonization struggles. Fanon fought for decolonization, understood as generative counter-catastrophic activities in the effort to create “the world of you,” a view that is connected to his conception of healing.[10] One cannot forget that Fanon was a trained psychiatrist and that his preferred method was social therapy, a form of therapy that sought to bring mental health through the process of creating normal—by which it should be understood non-catastrophic—social relations and a social environment.
As a paper written by Fanon and his intern Jacques Azoulay while Fanon was the Director of the Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, indicates, Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious. Indeed, even if beyond the scope of this piece, Fanon’s work with Azoulay speaks to Fanon’s multicultural and multireligious view of a decolonized Algeria, and of the ways in which the French empire approached and managed racial hierarchies in France and its colonies. This explains how a Black person from the Caribbean could be appointed as doctor and hospital director, and an Algerian Jewish person could become his first intern in a psychiatric hospital, where the Arab and Berber locals were for the most part patients and nurses.[11]
Fanon entirely rejected the thesis that there is something inherently problematic with practices or ideas that are often referred to as spiritual or religious.
For the purpose of this essay, I underscore that Fanon did not subscribe to the belief that overcoming religion is necessary for decolonization to take place, or to the notion that decolonization would lead to a religionless society. This is reflected in Fanon’s and Azoulay’s warning to psychiatrists and other scientists of epistemic arrogance and epistemic racism that “some conducts, some reactions can appear ‘primitive’ to us, but that is only a value judgment, one that is both questionable and bears on poorly defined characteristics.”[12] They were particularly referring to the idea that “genies” produced madness, a concept that was normal in Algeria as opposed to other contexts where a different perception of the world was held or where social behavior revolved around different premises.
In short, Fanon invited the critical study of human reality, including what we often call religion, with attention to the massive effects of modern/colonial catastrophe. From a Fanonian point of view, Marx’s dictum that “For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” could perhaps be reformulated as follows: “For Africa, the African diaspora, the Global South, and the entire world, the critique of modern/colonial catastrophe remains unfinished, and its critique is the prerequisite of all criticism.” Neither Fanon’s view of criticism nor his conception of a healthy individual or society imply the idea that religion or spirituality must be eradicated. Quite the contrary, Fanon believed that activities that are often called religious, like the “regular celebration of Muslim feasts” and the establishment of “a Moorish café” in the context of his work with male Muslim patients, played an important role in their healing process.[13] The other side of this practice was the rejection of the simple implantation and uncritical adaptation of European therapeutical techniques in Algeria. That is, for Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge, and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power, remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge producing activities.
Lesson 4: Fanon’s Unlearning, Relearning, and Post-Secular Epistemic Practices
Fanon not only learned about Islam and developed insights about the study of religion in the context of his psychiatric hospital and his visits to Algerian towns. He also learned about Islam from Muslim intellectuals and recognized the potential contributions of Islam to the struggle for decoloniality. His words to the Iranian thinker ‘Ali Shari‘ati are illuminating in this context: “I would like to emphasize, more than you do yourself, your remark that Islam harbours, more than any other social powers of ideological alternatives in the third world (or, with your permission, the Near and Middle-East), both an anticolonialist capacity and anti-western character” (Alienation and Freedom, 668).
Justice for All March in Washington DC, December 13, 2014. Via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
In his letter to Shari‘ati, Fanon also highlights the importance of what he considers to be the “mission” of Shari‘ati and other Muslim intellectuals to “make good use of the immense cultural and social resources harboured in Muslim societies and minds, with the aim of emancipation and the founding of another humanity and another civilization” (668–69). Here Fanon is anticipating his notes about combative decolonial intellectual activity in The Wretched of the Earth, a theme that, as the Frantz Fanon Foundation has recently made clear, is as relevant today as ever.[14]
Fanon also shared with Shari‘ati his concerns about the risks and limits of “reviving sectarian and religious mindsets,” and of any project that sought to bring populations closer to their past more than to promote the birth of an “ideal future.” While Fanon took a different path from Shari‘ati, Fanon concludes his letter by noting that he is “persuaded that both paths will ultimately join up towards that destination where humanity lives well” (Alienation and Freedom, 669).
It is also important to recognize that, while every indication is that Fanon was an atheist, his own work is infused with religious thought and contains a considerable number of religious metaphors. In Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, I reflect on and build upon the relationship between Fanon’s work and those of Christian philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers, as well as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. I seek to demonstrate that Fanon conceives of subjectivity as a gift and that he views the damnés as those who cannot give because of what had been taken from them. This means that decoloniality is about the restoration of circles of giving and receiving in contexts of catastrophe, which opens up considerable new questions and considerations, including ethical, political, religious/spiritual, and theological ones.
Lesson 5: Open Paths in Conversation with a Post-Secular Fanon
Fanon’s conception of subjectivity, damnation, and decolonization challenge the premises of Cartesian rationalism, Enlightened foundationalism, and modern western political theory—all of which serve as the basis to certain forms of western secularisms. His view of the self as a gift and his intersubjective account of healthy individuality and social relations draw from and are compatible with a large variety of sources, including so-called religious or spiritual formations. This consideration calls for more explorations of connections between Fanon’s view of decolonization and non-secular or post-secular accounts of reality, including the African diaspora spiritualities that are found in Fanon’s own island of Martinique and through the Caribbean, some of which probably informed Fanon’s thinking and worldview too.
I am aware of the argument that Fanon seemed to make concessions to Catholicism and Islam that he did not extend to African diaspora practices.[15] One could debate the extent to which Fanon’s statements about any specific religions are meant to be a description of such religions per se, or if they are meant as a critical analysis of the entanglement between specific religious practices and certain colonial projects. One could also debate whether Fanon had a specific view about African diaspora religions, or whether his approach to local religious practices in Algeria offers an example of approaching religious practices everywhere that would lead to a different conceptualization of other religions, including settings with African diaspora religious practices. This goes back to the points about how to approach Fanon’s writings that I raised earlier.
For Fanon the problem sometimes lies with the “science” or scholarly approach rather than with any specific “religion” or similar object of investigation. The decolonization of knowledge, and, along with that, the decolonization of being and power, remain at the forefront of Fanon’s knowledge producing activities.
My suggestion here is that even if negative comments about African diaspora religions proved to be definitive about Fanon’s interpretation of these practices at any given point in time, this does not entail that parts of his thinking were not positively impacted by the Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices on the island of Martinique. I doubt that only Catholicism influenced Fanon’s sensibilities, but even if that were true, this also does not mean that there are not elements in Fanon’s thought that are significantly enriched when approached from African diaspora epistemologies and spiritualities. The thought of an author is often richer than the various opinions of the author. An exploration of the various ways in which Fanon’s thought might be and could still be entangled with African diaspora views would require work with practitioners. That is, practitioners of African diaspora spiritualities who have mobilized Fanon’s thought in their struggle against racism and colonization might be the best teachers here. The path is thus open for a continued post-secular process of unlearning and relearning as part of the unfinished project of decolonization, and Fanon remains an important companion.[16]
The author wishes to thank Atalia Omer for the invitation to contribute and thank both her and Joshua Lupo for their editorial suggestions.
[3] I expand on my view of Mignolo’s contributions to the decolonial theory of religion in “Religion, Modernity, and Coloniality.”
[4] Others have commented on Fanon’s conception of religion as it appears in his writings. Perhaps the most systematic account is Federico Settler’s 2009 doctoral dissertation at the University of Cape Town, entitled “Religion in the Work of Frantz Fanon.” Settler’s main arguments in the dissertation also appear in his 2012 article “Frantz Fanon’s Ambivalence Towards Religion.” My analysis here is based primarily on texts that appear in Fanon’s Alienation and Freedom, which was published after Settler’s dissertation and article, but this is not where the main difference between his careful study and my reflection here lies. This essay approaches the question of Fanon and religion in terms of the contributions of Fanon’s thinking to decolonizing religious studies and to critically engaging the religious/secular divide. In that sense, it does not aim to be an analysis of the various ways in which Fanon referred to religion in his work, which is Settler’s main focus. I am interested in the possibilities that Fanon’s thought opens up or invites the reader to consider more than on whether Fanon himself believed something or other to be the case. This is what I have taken to be a project of Fanonian meditations, which is different from scholarship on Fanon. This does not mean that this scholarship cannot make contributions to such Fanonian meditations.
[8] Lilia Ben Salem’s notes that a course that Fanon offered in Tunis included the following sentence in the context of discussing racism in the United States: “Religion is often conceived as a way of ‘becoming-white’.” See Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 524.
[9] I thank the Aymara militant-intellectual Esteban Ticona Alejo for his acute observations about this many years ago. Ticona Alejo is the author of various works on Fanon and the “father of Indianism” in Bolivia, Fausto Reinaga, as well as the editor of Bolivia en el inicio del Pachakuti: la larga lucha anticolonial de los pueblos aimara y quechua. I also thank Walter Altino and members of the Atitude Quilombola movement in Brazil, with whom I learned important aspects of this lesson in theory and practice.
[11] Citing an interview with Azoulay in 1998, Alice Cherki writes that: “Almost fifty years later, Jacques Azoulay reports that as an Algerian Jew he only became aware of Algeria ‘in Blida, while working with Fanon. That’s when I realized that there were Muslims—Muslims and a Muslim culture’” (Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 51). In an interview in 2007 with Numa Murard, Azoulay adds that “He [Fanon] sought first to inform himself about the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and that “he was very active, I less so, although he dragged me along to ceremonies for treating hysteria in Kabylian villages, in which women having cathartic fits were chained down for entire nights” (quoted in Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 191). Azoulay also stated that “Fanon’s intellectual approach enabled me to apprehend a content that I would otherwise have considered folkloric, and from the moment of that realization, I understood it wasn’t” (Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, 52). Azoulay’s severed disconnection with the Algerian Arab community recalls Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s analysis of “how France forced Arab Jews to adopt the European persona of Jew as citizen and see Arabs and Muslims as others” (see “Algerian Jews Have Not Forgotten France’s Colonial Crimes,”) and her thesis that, “The conversion of Algerian Jews into French citizenship destroyed thousands of years of Jewish life in North Africa” (“Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues”).
[13] See Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 371. Azoulay reported that Fanon was “very active” in getting to know “the specific culture of Algerian Arabs” and of Algerian society, and that the organization of the Moorish café “provoked sarcastic criticism from the other doctors” (Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, 191). Numa Murard, who interviewed Azoulay in 2007, notes that “Fanon permet aussi de redonner vie aux pratique religieuses, que l’hôpital…a tendance à détruire.” See Numa Murard, “Psycothérapie institutionnelle à Blida.”
[16] Learning about this with and from these practitioners will be part of my own efforts in a project that I am leading with Carter Mathes on “Understanding Spirit: Black Religious Practice and the Search for Racial Justice,” hosted by the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies and funded by The Henry Luce Foundation. The three-year project starts in May 2022 and will include the participation of Arts for Art in New York, Nana Sula Spirit in New Orleans, and Corredor Afro as well as the Corporación Piñones se Integra in Puerto Rico. There may be another example here of decolonizing religious studies (as well as philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology) in theory and practice, which could provide material for one or more reflections that continue the discussion in “Religious Studies and/in the Decolonial Turn” and this entry.
In the course of my recent research in Iran, I read informative studies of mysticism in Iran and found Ata Anzali’s history of Mysticism in Iran (see Anzali’s contribution to this symposium here) especially compelling. His and other studies led me to ask: How should we think about modern ideas that were thought up by poets, writers, theologians, scholars, and scientists who lived in pre-modern times? What kinds of blind spots has this division of modern/pre-modern created in our thinking? I would say that there are possibilities that we do not think about because our whole intellectual edifice is so invested in a version of western modernity that is eloquently and methodically critiqued by Robert Orsi in his book on History and Presence.
One of the major blind spots has to do with the rather impoverished way in which we have come to think of language. We make certain kinds of assumptions that prevent us from understanding the many ways language shapes experience. For example, we assume that the relationship between form and meaning always holds, is always relevant, is predictable, and is constant regardless of the kind of text and kind of activity that we are engaged in; that semantic meaning is of utmost importance in our encountering of texts; that memorization, repetition, and regular recitation that result inevitably in internalization make no difference in how language transforms experience. In short, we have an implicit but very consequential idea of the modern sign that is in part a result of how we imagine a modern religion to be.
A modern religion is one where hermeneutic activity with regard to scripture and all similar texts dominates. It is the most important factor in understanding “belief.” Interaction between such texts and individuals is an intellectual give and take where meaning is only the semantic/interpretive one; and believers must operate in their vernacular as opposed to a sacred language associated with their religion (hence Islam and Judaism are not modern).[1] Believers must engage with scripture in their vernacular because they must “understand” what they read. This is all very Protestant, though when we actually look at Protestant church services, for example, and their recitation of Psalms, we realize that we are living with a stereotype of modern religion that even Protestants do not follow. Monique Scheer addresses this point while asking what a modern religion is in the first place, a question close to my heart.
Ferdinand de Saussure, who grew up in Calvinist Geneva (with a few years in Paris and Leipzig), is repeatedly referred to as the “father of modern linguistics.” What in particular was “modern” about his intellectual contribution was that, for him, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Language is a system where everything coheres, according to him. It does not matter where the sign is located; in the Qur’an, the Torah or in psalms, or poems and prayers. Nor does it matter how we use the sign; that relationship is still arbitrary. The problem is that this view does not help us understand why centuries-old texts come to have such a sway over believers, reciters, performers, listeners, spectators, and interpreters. The arbitrariness of the sign leaves us with no answer to this question. That the relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary, not logical, nor natural, is true but where does this take us? It could be objected that de Saussure did not set out to theorize language from the point of view of the speaker and her experience, but what he called “the nature of language.” This is true but we are heirs to his conception of language, a conception that has been fed by the Protestant Reformation leading to the idea that any text can be translated and the experience ought not to matter because, whether in or out of translation, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. If there are important texts, it is their interpretation that matters. Bringing what Orsi says, that modernity is premised on absence to bear on this discussion, one could say that the thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign is premised on the speaker’s absence, on the absence of a voice (whether divine or not) (62).
In the Saussurian framework, language leaves religion intact because in the performance of religious rituals and in engaging with religious texts, the dominance of the idea of the modern sign and the singular centrality of the semantic/interpretive does not allow for a different imagination of what language can do to the experience of religion.
One other crucial factor in our implicit assumptions about modern religion is that only when we use our own words to pray and talk to God is it possible for us to be sincere in that act. But if we use someone else’s words in the form of a prayer or poem, that language lies outside of us and sincerity is harder to achieve if not impossible (Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns elaborates on this view). How can we use others’ words to address God and still be sincere? Here there is also an idea of “freedom of speech” that is lurking in the background. If we recite a prayer that we have not authored, our freedom is somehow constrained because we have agreed to use the constraints of someone else’s words.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others and matters other than semantic meaning give meaning to and shape such experiences. Kabir Tambar’s piece articulates this point quite well. Hence, when we carefully examine what happens in the recitation of prayers, poems, the psalms, and so on we see that so much of what I just described is wholly inadequate to an analysis where repetition, recitation from memory, and embodiment are at the center of what we are trying to understand and analyze.
One of the major discoveries I had during my fieldwork that truly shook my thinking had to do with what I was told about the recitation of the obligatory ritual prayer, namāz, whose verses are from Qur’anic suras (chapters) that are recited 5 times a day (varying in length) everyday. I was told by many of the women whom I talked to that each time one stands to pray, all kinds of factors affect what one ends up actually communicating to God. I had started out by asking whether doing the namāz is communication and everyone showed surprise at the question. Of course it was communication, they said. Becoming adept at doing this prayer while making efforts not to treat it as a rote activity means in large part to use the words that belong to God to tell Him what the reciter wants to communicate, what she has in mind—questions, worries, gratitude and so on. Hence, the relationship between form and meaning in the act of namāz is not necessary, predictable, or constant. It is crucial to incorporate this into our efforts to understand the work of rituals. In short, the namāz, like many other rituals that involve language, is a recitational act, not a hermeneutic one.
When we recite, in time we come to embody the language of the recitation. We hear our own voice and at times that of others and matters other than semantic meaning give meaning to and shape such experiences.
A related matter brought up by Amy Hollywood has to do with formality and its association with what she calls “religion of the heart” vs. “religion of the law.” Perhaps if we were to change our idea of formality, we would not associate it with law. Namāz is formal in that it has prescribed body postures, has a set sequence of acts, and the words are from the Qur’an. Yet, because individuals use the words to tell God what they want, and because it unfolds in time so that its outcome (degree of concentration, feelings of closeness or distance with God, and so on) is unpredictable, it is not perceived as rigid. This unpredictability is part of the challenge and the attraction of doing the namāz so that its formality does not foreclose the involvement of the heart.
Both Amy Hollywood and Ahoo Najafian bring up the matter of the relationship between religion and literature. I cannot agree more with what they say. We are moved by language, reach various difficult to account for understandings, and experience heightened awareness without being able to categorize these as “secular” or “religious.” I find this to be the promise of the world of poetry and of literature more broadly. Without paying attention to such adjacent and overlapping worlds to religion, we are stuck with the binary of religious and secular as Joshua Lupo puts it, and we isolate religion from neighbors that it clearly exchanges with, albeit often in challenging ways.
Related to the two pieces just mentioned is Brenna Moore’s discussion of Islamic mysticism and making Muslims’ forms of religiosity understandable without orientalizing them. Finally, I agree with Setrag Manoukian, as I elaborate in this piece and in my book, that what we have paid little attention to is that language is not always there for “communication” purposes between a sender and a receiver. Both prayer and poetry show this quite well.
I am grateful to all the authors of the blogs on my book. Each brings up points that I would like to discuss at greater length. I also want to thank the editors of Contending Modernities for organizing this symposium on my book and offering me much food for thought.
[1] Although Latin was not the original language of the Bible, it came to be regarded as sacred for many centuries and so as many other scholars have pointed out, the use of Latin figures prominently in Catholicism being regarded as a “backward” religion.
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In the course of my recent research in Iran, I read informative studies of mysticism in Iran and found Ata Anzali’s history of 