Director Miraz Bezar (L) and festival curator Mary el-Qalqili (C) speak with Ismail Khalidi (on screen), playwright of ‘Tennis in Nablus.’ (Photo by Anna-Esther Younes)A celebration of Palestinian arts and culture in the city
of Berlin has sent a few German journalists and local politicians
over the edge. “After
the Last Sky” is a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary and
international festival of contemporary Palestinian artists. Over the
course of September and October, the festival sought to “transgress
the boundaries of Palestinian life and identity,” and to do so
through theatre, cinema, performance, literature, spoken word, music,
dance, visual art, panel discussions, and more.
In a particularly
vile article in the Tagesspiegel daily newspaper,
journalist Johannes Bockenheimer accused the Palestinian and Jewish
presenters of incitement, that is, being too critical of Israel.
Showing no interest in the artistic program, his article attacks the
curator Anna-Esther Younes and other organizers and presenters
personally, for what he assumes to be their “proximity” to
non-violent struggles for Palestinian rights.
Furthermore, Bockenheimer accused the Berlin Senate of supporting
“anti-Israeli” activities, in an attempt to compromise the
festival and its venue’s funding. Repeatedly referring to Israel as
“Judenstaat,” the Jewish state, he equates Israel with Jews and
manipulates any critique of Israel to appear essentially anti-Jewish.
Accusations of anti-Semitism are familiar to every person in
Germany who is supportive of Palestinian rights. Being Jewish doesn’t
help much, and in fully absurd situations, Jews like me are accused
of anti-Semitism by Germans if we are not patriotic enough for their
taste.
In the same spirit, Klaus Lederer, the head of the Left Party in
Berlin, claimed
that using terms like apartheid and colonialism should disqualify
cultural events from public funding. He argued that such negative
depictions of Israel would feed anti-Semitism.
People like Bockenheimer and Lederer don’t like words like
apartheid and colonialism. I don’t like them either. People living
under the weight of their violence every day, like them even less. We
use these words because we believe they describe the harsh reality in
Palestine/Israel most accurately.
Clearly, this is not just about money, but about legitimacy and
power. The threat to withdraw cultural funding is a threat to strip
people of the power to describe their past and present, to attribute
meaning to it, and to explore it by artistic means. Nonetheless, the
sovereignty to define Palestinian past, present, and future belongs
to the Palestinians. It does not belong to German politicians and
journalists, and cannot be held hostage by their “issues” with
us, namely the Jews.
These men are not isolated examples; they represent a very real
segment of German society. It is tragic that some Germans’
self-described
“love affair” with Israel translates into a need to silence,
delegitimize and erase Palestinian narratives and identities. That
type of twisted logic locks Jews and Palestinians in an eternal
zero-sum game, advancing nothing but oppression, violence and
injustice in the Middle East.
The curators of “After the Last Sky” understand the depth of
this problem all too well, asking in their opening
statement: What can we understand about our universal human
condition through the example of Palestine and Palestinian
narratives?
They identify the destructive logics and racist fantasies
underlying the anti-Muslim racism in Europe:
the figure of the Palestinian became a vessel for several
racist fantasies about the Other: the stateless sponger, the criminal
foreigner, the potential terrorist, the sexist Arab, the homophobic
hyper-masculine Oriental, the eternal Anti-Semite.” These
modes of representation, they recognize, exceed the Palestinian
experience. “Indeed, this racist image potentially includes
everybody who is mis-/recognized as “Arab”, “Muslim”, or even
every other subject that is in solidarity with Palestinians due to
similar experiences or opinions. [opening statement]
Through its diversity of contents and voices (see full
program here, and the
art exhibitions), the festival has offered a critical engagement
and transgression of these modes of representation, towards
emancipatory visions of the future. It presents visions co-created by
an array of artists across identities, encompassing Palestinians,
black people and people of color, Jews, and many others.
That a representative of the German Left would support the
anti-democratic, right-wing infringement on the free expression in
this festival will likely come as no surprise to anyone even
distantly familiar with the public discourse in Germany. Whereas
everywhere in the world social movements and the Left align in
solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for decolonization and
liberation, Germany is the stubborn exception.
Here, automatic support for Israel is a simple and convenient way
to deal with the Nazi past. No need to interrogate your family
history. No need to draw universal lessons. No need to resist modern
forms of racism in one’s own society. Keep calm and support Israel.
Even if this means sending subsidized nuclear submarines, and
supporting a half-century military occupation and wars that kill
thousands of Palestinians and dozens of Israelis.
Israeli Minister of Culture Miri Regev recently made headlines by
attempting to withdraw funding from cultural activities and
institutions she deems to be insufficiently nationalistic and
patriotic. This correlates well with her earlier career as the
Israeli army’s chief military censor. According to her worldview,
which has made her one of Israel’s most popular politicians, the
very existence of Palestinian identity and culture is anti-Israel. It
is alarming, frightening and depressing to see those dangerous trends
echoed in Berlin.
The personal and political attack against the curators of the
festival is an attack on all of us, on all who wish to speak out
freely about the reality in Israel and Palestine — whatever
terminology we use — in order to change it for the better.
This article was first published in +972 Magazine on
October 25, 2016.