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Award ceremony suspended after writer compares Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos

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"A German foundation has said it will no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to a leading Russian-American journalist after criticising as “unacceptable” a recent essay by the writer in which they made a comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Masha Gessen was due to be presented with the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought on Friday. But the award ceremony will now not take place as planned after the Green party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) said it was withdrawing its support."

"Supporters of Gessen, who is Jewish, and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among family members murdered by the Nazis, have been quick to point out the irony of suspending a prize awarded in memory of Arendt, the German-born Jewish-American historian, philosopher and antitotalitarian political theorist who coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, in connection with the trial of leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which she covered as a journalist for the New Yorker."


The irony here is that Hannah Arendt was one of the earliest outspoken critics of Israel's racist policies, even comparing the Israeli Freedom Party to Nazis due to their use of racially motivated violence against civilians. If Hannah Arendt were alive today, she wouldn't be eligible to win her own award.
 
It should make any rational person cringe when these leftists take up the Hamas propaganda lines....
 
Lol to be awarded an award named after Arendt, also be Jewish, and have this done to her is one of the ultimate examples of the absurdity of Zionism.

Anyone who continues to insist that anti-semitism = Anti-Zionism (or therefore that Jewishness = Zionism) is either massively brainwashed or acting in complete bad faith.
 
The essay was a pretty interesting one, and the retraction of this award is in line of what she wrote about in the essay HBS is objecting to. What's been detrimental intellectually in the discussions around the current Israel/Gaza conflict is the immediate reactions to anything that is critical of Israel or in support of Gazans as being anti-Semitic, which is the height of intellectual laziness.
 
The worst part of all this is it stands in the way of honest assessments and discussions of the actual problems, because we spend time reacting to the reactions rather than analyzing the problems. Equally terrible is the incorrect classifications of positions based on binary choices that are actually far more complex.
 
ElChupacabra said:
Have you read the essay in question? I suspect not given your response.
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I guarantee not. This is the perfect opportunity for the right - trash Muslims and the left to cover for their antisemitism by showing support for a Jewish fascist. It's a win-win!
 
j-mac said:
It should make any rational person cringe when these leftists take up the Hamas propaganda lines....
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Rational people are against apartheid genocide, and settler colonialism, and military occupation/oppression.

Rational people aren't like right wingers, who screech loudly about never trading freedom for security when it comes to guns, but support the systemic state oppression of brown people because they're scared of Muslims.
 
Gessan said something prophetic in that essay: "after I walked from the haunting video of Kibbutz Be’eri to the clanking iron faces, I thought of the thousands of residents of Gaza killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews killed by Hamas. Then I thought that, if I were to state this publicly in Germany, I might get in trouble."
 
Excerpts of importance: "In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (I.H.R.A.), an intergovernmental organization, adopted the following definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” This definition was accompanied by eleven examples, which began with the obvious—calling for or justifying the killing of Jews—but also included “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”"

That's an odd, and at it turns, consequential construction. As Gessen points out, "Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler."

The question is, was this construction intended to protect Jews, or Israeli and German politicians? And which ones?
 
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Rumpel said:
gaza is not like a Nazi ghetto
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Why not? From what we know, Israel is rounding up the Palestinians into a small contained areas. We also know that there is insufficient food, medicines, services etc etc. I hadn't thought of it before seeing this thread, but the comparison seems pretty stark unless I am missing something?
 
"In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants."

Does that sound familiar?
 
Gaza is a ghetto.

But the ADL can’t have anybody using the word.

Lest anybody notice how similar both the Jewish ghettos and Gaza are. Gaza isn’t a staging area for an extermination camp. But it’s an area they are confined to because of who they are, not anything they’ve done.

I need to look up the Warsaw ghetto incident, see if Germany called them terrorists. If they killed any German non-combatants.

That would make it even more critical to avoid the comparison.
 
"In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”"
Arendt, after whom the prize is named, would have been denied the prize.

"The occasion for Arendt’s letter was a planned visit to the United States by the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis, added his signature. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Another half century later, in Berlin, the philosopher Susan Neiman, who leads a research institute named for Einstein, spoke at the opening of a conference called “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” She suggested that she might face repercussions for challenging the ways in which Germany now wields its memory culture. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a scholar of memory and morals. One of her books is called “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.” In the past couple of years, Neiman said, memory culture had “gone haywire.”"

Isn't it ironic that the charge of "antisemitism" is being wielded as a cudgel against Jews, against Israelis, and against descendants of Holocaust survivors?
 
I've no intention to broad-brush anyone, but this situation cries out for a close intellectual examination of how words are used, and how they can be abused by those with ill intent.
 
Ghetto: noun "a poor urban area occupied primarily by a minority group or groups."
adjective "resembling or characteristic of a ghetto or its inhabitants (especially with relation to African American culture)."
verb "put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated area or group."
 
Rumpel said:
israelis are no Nazis
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How not? You're being evasive and vague. (And, yes, I'm going to keep after you for answers.)

By the way, you might want to read the essay before you answer.

I recognize you may be intending to be provocative, but I'd like to dig into it.
 
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"Netanyahu has compared the Hamas murders at the music festival to the Holocaust by bullets. This comparison, picked up and recirculated by world leaders, including President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s case for inflicting collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Similarly, when Putin says “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so dangerous that Russia is justified in carpet-bombing and laying siege to Ukrainian cities and killing Ukrainian civilians. There are significant differences, of course: Russia’s claims that Ukraine attacked it first, and its portrayals of the Ukrainian government as fascist, are false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical power that attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we cannot yet fully comprehend. But do these differences matter when the case being made is for killing children?"
....
"Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever."
....
"For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety."
 
I recognize, too, that Gessen' essay is long - even the excerpts I'm posting - but it is a good essay and is the trigger for this thread, so its details, I think, are important.
 
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