A Call For Comradeship Across Borders

The Arts & Culture Alliance Berlin (ACAB) stands, among fellow solidarity groups, at the forefront of the fight against the German government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Through activism targeting respective institutions and policy-making, the Alliance has mobilized artists, cultural workers, and activists to challenge the silencing of Palestinian voices and the erasure of Palestinian narratives, especially within Berlin’s political and cultural landscape. At the heart of this struggle lies a broader conflict over the rights to free expression, historical memory, and the pursuit of dismantling the continuity of colonial structures.

Since the chilling wave of deplatforming, withdrawal and censorship swept through the arts in Germany, following Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, and continued ethnic cleansing, forced displacement and genocide in Palestine, ACAB has sought to organise, intervene and make public the impact of this sharp turn to the political right.

This societal shift has been accompanied by the rise of neo-Nazi movements and the subjugation of conservative and liberal parties to such ideological short-circuits, most prominently in the claim of "imported anti-Semitism" that serves to legitimize federal financing of war, dislocation, dispossession and occupation. The weaponisation of anti-Semitism began to take shape many years prior to todays developments, not least in the arts and cultural worlds. We think of the denunciations of "scientific anti-Semitism" directed against Achille Mbembe in 2020. Perhaps most strikingly, we recall the exercises of a moralist mandate during Documenta fifteen (2022) by German's cultural and political establishment, embodied by actors like President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, often driven by disavowed desires for monolithic renationalisation and culturalisation. Indeed, nationalised memory culture was instrumentalised to inflame unsubstantiated accusations against the entire artistic direction of Jakarta-based artists’ collective Ruangrupa in particular and decolonial perspectives in general.

On the day of writing, The Guardian reports that the Schelling Architecture Foundation has rescinded its €10,000 prize to British artist James Bridle after they signed an open letter supporting a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions ‘that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians’. The article details how the Foundation, which was established by a former member of the Nazi Party and the SA paramilitary group—who also worked on the construction of offices for the publisher of the Nazi newspaper Der Führer—revoked the award. The decision comes just days after the German government passed a controversial non-binding resolution aimed at protecting Jewish life in Germany, a move that has prompted the Foundation to rescind the prize it had awarded Bridle. The artist themselves stated—with reference to Hannah Arendt's term of "hysterical obedience"—that "these acts are the result of individuals and organisations acting ‘as though one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys’.

It is against this background that Arts & Cultural Alliance Berlin opposes the German press and goverment’s depiction of anti-Semitism as a phenomenon of the pro-Palestinian struggle and the Arab-migrant milieu by recognizing that the so-called “denazification” project after 1945 remains unaccomplished. Instead, we should question ourselves, including racist attitudes saturated with islamophobic thought and anti-Semitic tropes that may lead to a lack of knowledge concerning the (neo-)colonial configurations in the Levant region. We refuse, indeed, to render the German case exceptional, but rather analyse the current status quo as what is possible regarding Western state repression - a context we are intimately familiar with. Through disseminating a structural understanding of the increasingly hostile climate vis-à-vis the German cultural landscape, we aim to catalyze transnational organisation within the arts.

The Surging Repression of German State Apparatuses

Both the German government and the Berlin federal state have greatly increased their use of legal and rhetorical frameworks that conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, using this false equivalence to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli state policies and suppress dissent—particularly within cultural, intellectual, and academic spaces. A major step into this direction can be located in 2019 when the German parliament adopted a nonbinding resolution that equated the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement with anti-Semitism, making such a devastating equation the basis for a de facto formal law. More promptly, in November 2024, another resolution was adopted by a broad coalition of political parties, ranging from the openly fascist AfD to Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrats, specifically tailored to the arts and culture.

A second resolution which may pave the way to intensified repression at Universities and Schools is expected to be submitted to the Bundestag on 5 December. Once again the German parliament has chosen procedures that make a thorough debate impossible. It calls for sweeping repressive measures against the rights and freedoms of students and professors, "close cooperation" between universities and German security agencies and federal infringement on university autonomy. At the German Rectors' Conference on 19 November, the HRK points out that "such a resolution is neither objectively necessary nor useful in the context of university autonomy and academic freedom". It adds that ‘the universities expect the executive and legislative powers to consider this academic freedom as a guiding principle when drafting resolutions on universities’.

While not legally binding, the three illustrated resolutions are mobilized as a form of moral source code, enabling general surveillance, expulsion from universities, and rejection of visa permits for students, individuals and organizations critical of Israel as well as high-stake deplatforming as exemplified before in the case of artist James Bridle.

These resolutions not only delegitimize Palestinian resistance but also position any critique of Israeli government actions as inherently anti-Semitic. This conflation creates a climate of state surveillance/ violence, censorship and self-censorship in all social settings, particularly for Arab and Muslim communities in Germany, as well as for dissenting Jews whose voices have been marginalized, sidelined, and deplatformed. The resolutions serve not only as a tool to silence those who dare to speak out against Israel's death-driven policies, suppress any form of concrete solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and self-determination, but also antagonise basic democratic rights for the whole of society.

Moreover, the German state’s instrumentalization of Holocaust memory is a key part of this process. By reframing the protection of Jewish life as a “Reason of State” tied to Germany's historical responsibility for the Shoah, the government has justified genocidal policies that align with Israel’s occupation of Palestine and neglect the ongoing Nakba. This manipulation of Holocaust memory not only distorts the lessons of history but also questions fundamental constitutional rights. Both the meaning of historical trauma and the existential reality of Palestinian annihilation are eclipsed by such self-contained reasoning to shield Israeli and German politicians and their policy-making from accountability.

In short, the success narrative of an Israeli citizenship, constituted as a projective figure and rendered as the positive outcome of the Holocaust and WWII, has proven dangerously central to the German national brand. This racist veil attempts and, internally, assists to amplify the resurgence of Far Right race-thinking, the normalisation of violence towards minorities, especially Muslim and Arab as well as Jewish.

Connecting Struggles in the UK, Germany and Beyond

At its core, the current struggle is about who controls the psychosocial formation of history and who shapes the narratives of oppression and resistance. It is not simply about Palestinian survival; it is about the visibility and agency of Palestinians within a global discourse that seeks to obliterate or undermine their struggle for liberation. The stakes are much larger: the fight for Palestinian dignity and justice is intertwined with the broader transnational fight for transgenerational justice and the dismantling of colonial (infra-)structures. More precisley, we engage in the fight against a historically embedded and continuous system of dispossession, dehumanization and structural violence that necessitate the mass deaths of particularly racialised people around the world. One that requires collectively re-imagining ourselves out of this disaster through explicit solidarity from all corners of the world.

The situation poses a central question: What problems do we share in our countries in the cultural context of colonial demarcation, exclusion, elimination and the political exploitation of those traumas? Put frankly, our governments made themselves vanguards in the ongoing genocide in Palestine while bolstering police violence and racist stereotypes. By extension, our domestic art institutions and universities are implicated, pursuing cultural and economic ventures with occupation-approving Israeli organisations, coupled with, albeit to differing degrees, censorship and deplatforming.

While political, cultural, historical and therefore legal contexts between the UK and Germany vary in important ways, seen from the vantage point of Gaza, actors within Northern Europe must, we assert, work together to hold those states that are so deeply complicit in these crimes against humanity to account. In this light, we propose to maintain communication, intensify comradeship and analyse these differing yet comparable contexts as a form of resistance through participation. Turning a mirror upon the current antagonistic situation, we as cultural workers have found and will continue to find new forms of solidarity working with legal experts, journalists and long-term activists in the fight for Palestinian liberation and anti-racism.