Hannah Feuer: “Hundreds of Northwestern students can’t register for class because they won’t watch an antisemitism training video. Here’s what’s in it”, Forward, September 29, 2025.
It was always to be expected that mandatory anti-discrimination training in schools and universities could also be used to spread propaganda and suppress unpopular positions. Universities in the US are now using this tool to comply with Donald Trump’s executive order “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” of January 29, 2025. At the prestigious Northwestern University in Chicago, around 300 students have now been excluded from course registration because they refused to watch a mandatory “anti-bias” video that—in a slanderous and false manner—defines anti-Zionism as a denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. The video describes—again falsely—a Greater Israel as the only historical homeland of the Jewish people and equates—methodologically untenable—arbitrary and unverifiable “quotes” from “anti-Israel activists” with quotes from Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
The wave of recognition of Palestine by Western states, in which Germany did not participate, owes itself to France’s initiative. President Macron is isolated domestically, has failed in many respects and is unpopular, but his foreign policy shows diplomatic leadership. That has also contributed to the discourse in France once again being broader and more open than in Germany. In France, it is already possible to criticize something that has not yet been achieved in Germany. A group of lawyers and professors, most prominently Rafaëlle Maison, professor of international law at the University of Paris-Saclay, is concerned with the potentially negative consequences that threaten to arise from the purely symbolic recognition of a de facto non-existent state—the state’s territory is eroded by Israeli settlements, its authority is undermined, and its people are exposed to genocide. Rafaëlle Maison published an article on September 11 spelling out the pitfalls of recognition, and gave an interview to the Le Média platform on September 13 to shed light on the “shadow zones” of Macron’s plan. Any policy of recognition should be measured by whether it serves or harms the right of peoples to self-determination, which is fundamental to international law.
In the interview, Maison quotes from the letter Macron wrote to Netanyahu on August 25, 2025. Macron justifies his decision : “Our determination to ensure that the Palestinian people have a state is rooted in our conviction that lasting peace is essential for the security of the State of Israel.” The Palestinians’ right to self-determination is not mentioned in the letter. The horse is being put before the cart: the rights of the Palestinians are understood only as a function of the security of an ethnically and nationally defined Israel; not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. Diplomatic restraint towards Netanyahu alone cannot explain this. In his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 22, Macron explicitly acknowledged, unlike in the letter, the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” and spoke of “a people who draw strength from their history, their roots and their dignity.” And yet, here too, he cited French loyalty to Israel as the main reason for recognition: “Precisely because we are convinced that this recognition is the only solution that can bring peace to Israel.”
Macron’s speech suggests that recognition should lead to an end to genocide aka war. But if the rights of Palestinians are always viewed as merely instrumental, then there can be no lasting peace. Maison exposes Macron’s recognition and his commitment against violence as lip service. The “normalization” he desires for Israel, which continues to violate (mandatory) international law, is to be imposed violently, with or without a Palestinian state. This is already evident in the first half of the letter, where Macron refers at length to France’s official acceptance of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The adoption of the IHRA definition, “which condemns anti-Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism,” was one of his first official acts in 2017 and forms the basis for his policy of recognition. Macron’s interpretation of the IHRA definition, equating any opposition, however legitimate, to an exclusionary and ethnically defined state with hostility toward Jews as Jews, must automatically declare all Palestinians who have been expatriated and expropriated by Israel, and who naturally have a problem with this statehood, to be enemies of the Jews (not to mention that this equation itself is anti-Semitic). Macron’s letter to Netanyahu shows that the violent instrumentalization of the fight against anti-Semitism and the blanket defamation and exclusion of Palestinians as anti-Semites is far more than just a side effect or collateral damage of the current policy of recognition; it is inherent to it.
But Rafaëlle Maison is interested in recognition primarily from the perspective of international law. She analyzes the “New York Declaration” of July 29, initiated by France and Saudi Arabia and also signed by Germany, as well as the “New York Call” issued on the same day by the foreign ministers of 15 Western states (Germany was not among them) as a reaction and a kind of diversionary tactic to distract attention from the opinion of the International Court of Justice “on the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation policy.” Exactly one year earlier, the ICJ had ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories was illegal, that Israel must withdraw from the territories and pay reparations. On September 18, 2024, the UN General Assembly then adopted Resolution ES-10/24 by a large majority (with Germany abstaining), which stipulates a halt to arms deliveries if they are used in the occupied territories and calls for a boycott of goods from Israeli settlements. Instead of following the ICJ opinion (which everyone, including the German Foreign Office, claims to respect), France and Saudi Arabia convened the UN conference on the recognition issue for July 2025.
Rafaëlle Maison sees the results as “potentially in violation of international law as outlined by the ICJ in 2024.” The Palestinian state should, in the unlikely future that it is actually allowed to materialise, only exist under certain conditions: under the conditions that Hamas surrenders its weapons to the Israeli-controlled Palestinian Authority, which would effectively mean demilitarization (para. 11 of the declaration), the respect of anyone standing for election for the “international obligations” of the PLO (para. 22), the exclusion of Hamas, and the pursuit of a liberal reform agenda. On the latter, Maison writes: “These recipes sound a lot like a free-market program, compromising the sovereign choices of the state-to-be and requiring—incongruously in appearance, but in reality quite significantly—control over freedom of expression.” Lip service is paid to the right of return guaranteed under international law, but in fact they envision a “just solution” to the refugee problem through a “regional and international framework” (para. 39). And the future state would have to work on security arrangements that were “beneficial to all parties” (para. 20) – which, given the unequal power relations, could only mean that Israel would once again assume police and military power and authority in the weak state structure. The outcome would be a state without sovereignty, an “entity under control.”
According to Maison, the “New York Call” in particular makes it clear what is really at stake: normalizing relations between all states and Israel despite the ongoing crimes – and not, as the ICJ actually prescribes, finally responding to these crimes with consequences. Thus, conditional recognition while the genocide continues is “indeed the latest stage in the ‘war against Palestine,’ as chronicled by historian Rashid Khalidi.”
In fact, the situation will not be pacified, no matter what “solution” the international community finds to show Israel the “red lines” so that it abandons its annexation plans and finally ends the genocide; certainly not under a transitional governor Tony Blair in Gaza. Nevertheless, voices have been raised in France in recent days arguing that we should not stop at Rafaëlle Maison’s despairing analysis, but make the best of the new situation. The ongoing genocide, the daily mass deaths, killings, and murders must end immediately, and recognition facilitates the willingness to intervene. On Médiapart, Ilyes Ramdani credits the French initiative with at least putting enormous pressure on the US; the “Riviera” plans seem to be finally buried.
On September 24, Ardi Imseis, professor of international law at Queen’s University in Canada, spoke to French MPs at the initiative of lawyer and member of the French National Assembly Gabrielle Cathala, and gave a lecture at the Sorbonne the following day. He advocates a “realistic,” “pessimistic” stance, insisting that both the legal fact of recognition and the fact of continuing legal obligations established by the ICJ opinion can be used to make demands on governments. It is a bitter reality, he says, that almost all countries in the world do not care about the survival and right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. The Palestinians themselves have no resources to defend themselves against the occupation. But when it comes to statehood, Imseis sees the glass as half full, where others see it as half empty. Almost independently of the situation on the ground, international law has also created its own reality over the years and decades. “It is clear that today, the State of Palestine already exists as a matter of both state practice and law, with or without recognition by France and other Western states.” Palestine was already recognized by 160 states before France’s initiative, was admitted to UNESCO as a full member in 2011, and can be a party to multilateral treaties. Precisely because attaching conditions to recognition conflicts with international law, it is possible to fight against these conditions. Recognition would make it easier to put pressure on states to correct their relationship with Israel and to respond to the occupation, apartheid, and war crimes with sanctions. In his analysis of the New York Declaration, Imsais thus comes to a very different conclusion than Maison: The Western governments that have recognized Israel are well aware that states are sovereign and that it is not possible to impose conditions on statehood; accordingly, their statements are formulated in a soft and ultimately non-binding manner. “Sovereignty is a curious thing. But as France so intimately knows (…), states have the perfect right to do whatever is not prohibited by international law.”
Maison concluded her text with the fear that governments would use the UN General Assembly “under cover of the recognition of a Palestinian pseudo-state” to further undermine international law by disregarding the ICJ opinion, and that international law as a whole would be buried here. Imrais’ realism, on the other hand, sees “the contingency and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian Arabs” as enshrined in UN law itself, together with the “so-called two-state framework” of the 1947 partition plan. In the absence of other resources, the Palestinians could and must now work with this law.
On Monday (September 29, 2025), Ardi Imseis and Rafaëlle Maison will talk to each other in the Jean Jaurès amphitheater in Paris. In Germany, one should listen carefully. Admittedly, the discourse has shifted in Germany as well, with the federal government distancing itself significantly from Netanyahu’s government. It is now even almost possible to say “genocide” without being slandered as anti-Semitic. But the totalitarian “Staatsräson” and the media’s windmill battles in its shadow still obscure the actual lines of conflict. The fruitless pros and cons of German provenance basically revolve around whether Israel should be allowed to do as it pleases or whether it should be forced to do what is best for it; whether the failure of Oslo gives Israel carte blanche or whether Israel must be brought back on the path of Oslo toward “peaceful coexistence.” And whether Germany is isolating itself internationally or whether the world “understands” Germany’s Sonderweg. What is still hardly debatable is the question of recognition in light of the failure of Oslo, from the perspective of what is right and just. In retrospect, Oslo was a serious mistake—a policy of appeasement that ignored all the important issues, shirked international legal obligations, and, in the long term, shifted the balance of power increasingly to the detriment of the Palestinians. This applies to the settlements, it applies to apartheid, it applies to the right of displaced Palestinians to return and to compensation for stolen property.
Germany has decided against recognizing Palestine and, as always, will try to compensate for its lack of responsibility with financial payments. But it is also paying another price: that of ignorance, in Arendt’s sense. In the end, there might even be a case for saying that international law itself, through the partition plan, makes lasting peace impossible. But this discussion is also more likely to take place in France than in Germany.
Statement “Refusal on grounds of conscience. For human rights and compliance with international law,” https://uppsaladeclaration.se/germany/.
While the systematic and targeted starvation of the population in Gaza, with Western and especially German support, is making the genocide of the Palestinians an undeniable fact for more and more people, the question of a boycott of Israel is still taboo, especially in Germany. The so-called BDS movement, co-founded by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), was launched in 2004 in response to the failure of Oslo and the question of what nonviolent options for action remained against occupation and disenfranchisement. In Germany, it is indiscriminately considered antisemitic and partly watched by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a “suspected extremist case.” But now even the German government can no longer avoid dealing with sanctions and the suspension of cooperation in certain areas. And an increasing number of international scientists are signing letters calling on their governments and employers to stop ignoring the consequences of the situation in Gaza for scientific work – most prominently the letter from more than 1,000 physicists and scientists to the leadership of CERN.
In early summer, Swedish scientists, and scientists working in Sweden, published the so-called Uppsala Declaration, in which they commit themselves, on grounds of conscience, to no longer cooperate with Israeli institutions that have made themselves complicit in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other crimes under international law. This declaration has well over 2,000 signatures.
The German version has now been published on the same website and is identical to the Swedish version in form and many of its formulations. It explains the decision to boycott Israeli institutions in great detail, citing overwhelming evidence of Israeli universities’ involvement in crimes, and formulates the same principles:
“1. We will not support cooperation with the State of Israel or with its institutions that bear responsibility.
2. We will not promote or publicly support institutionalized exchange with Israeli institutions that bear responsibility.
3. We will not participate in activities organized and/or co-organized by the State of Israel or its complicit institutions.”
In addition, it also addresses the situation in Germany, citing examples of how German universities are disregarding their obligation to comply with international law, institutional links, and how existing cooperation is even to be expanded. And it clarifies at the end: “We explicitly do not call for severing relations with individual Israeli academics. Rather, we firmly reject cooperation with Israeli institutions involved in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other violations of international law on grounds of conscience.”
I myself hesitated for a while before signing the statement: firstly, because I do not wish to cooperate with non-Israeli institutions that are involved in violations of international law, either, and would prefer to adopt a general demand for universities to commit themselves to human rights. Like the Human Rights Policy of Ghent University in the Netherlands: “In a nutshell: Ghent University does not cooperate with organizations involved in serious or systematic human rights violations, nor does it want projects to lead directly or indirectly to human rights violations.” Secondly, I can imagine ethical dilemmas in which it is unavoidable to enter into undesirable cooperation. However, my main concern at this point is to put pressure on German institutions, the German government, and the German public to immediately cease all military and police cooperation with a state led by right-wing extremists, and to save Palestinian lives and the lives of the hostages. That is why I am signing this letter.
Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War, ed. by Ostap Sereda, Balázs Trencsényi, Tetiana Zemliakova, Guillaume Lancereau, Ithaka/London (Cornell University Press) 2024.
It is a global phenomenon: Universities around the world are under massive pressure—from defunding, subjugation to market logic, the elimination of entire departments, political interventions, and attacks on academic freedom and freedom of teaching, to the targeted physical destruction of university buildings, the killing of scientists, and “scholasticide” when the aim is to strike at an entire people. Since 2022, the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) has been offering online courses for Ukrainian students to help them work through their war experiences and the genocidal threat posed by Russian aggression, using innovative academic methods; almost 1,000 students have benefited from the courses so far. The collection “Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War,” published just under a year ago, features very moving personal contributions from students and professors at the highest level of reflection in the Ukrainian context, showing what one would wish for in any other context: a new, honest, unreserved way of generating knowledge at the university.
“The need for uncommon institutional responses to the autocratic pressure on higher education has been a recurring topic of discussion since the late 2000s,” write Ostap Sereda und Balázs Trencsényi in the introduction; as early as that, the “Western” model of university education had already lost credibility in Eastern Europ. “The Invisible University was also a response to this crisis of academia, experimenting, under the pressure of an unprecedented situation of mass dislocation of students and scholars, to relink the educational, research, and civic components in unconventional and innovative ways.” The Invisible University does not see itself as a solitary entity, but rather as part of a cross-temporal and cross-spatial network, connected to other similar initiatives in the 20th and 21st centuries, in a history that is briefly and impressively traced in the introduction.
These initiatives, whether online or offline, have and always had a few things in common: a transnational, global perspective that combines global and regional perspectives and transcends national boundaries; a radically democratic approach that seeks dialogue rather than hierarchies; and a connection between the academic and the existential dimensions. The Russian war against Ukraine is the immediate catalyst for the Invisible University for Ukraine and the conditioner of its tensions, specifically: Although the IUFU works against Eurocentrism and uses postcolonial tools, it sees itself in a struggle that is, in addition to survival, about insisting on common “European” values. It must endure the fact that its civil engagement can conflict with the survival imperatives of war when it becomes critical of its own government. And it faces the (resolved) dilemma of how to deal with Russian colleagues as its main goal is to work toward a non-Russocentric understanding of the post-Soviet space and as it consistently boycots all Russian state institutions.
The individual contributions show how the existential and the academic can be integrated and convey different, complementary lessons from the war. It is above all the dramatic changes in the concept of time brought about by the war – the altered temporalities – that have a profound effect on knowledge. The contributions spell out what this means in concrete terms: in the daily struggle for survival with the “sobering absurdity of death” (Denys Tereshchenko), where sacrifices are demanded and one makes them, or one doesn’t; in dealing with the media side of the war, the “digital witnessing” in the face of a volatile global public, and the ignorance of even well-intentioned reactions; but above all in readjusting the relationship between participation and observation in research and teaching. Only through honest dialogue can a future remain conceivable with new ideas – “my war is about creating spaces of dialogue” (Balázs Trencsényi). The feeling of “professional failure,” of “should have known” (Diána Vonnák), “wading through unmetabolized experience and a cacophony of guesswork, motivated speech, misinformation, and rudimentary analysis,” is made fruitful as a lesson in epistomology: “We could call it a fog of war in the epistemic sense, but if we flip this around, this fog is ever-present, the stuff of fieldwork, and navigating it is a predicament of any contemporary empirical research.”
The anthology ends with an overview of all the courses that IUFU has taught since 2022 and the very moving and sometimes also funny short biographies of the contributors in the shadow of war. Tetiana Zemliakova, for example, who, apart from the IUFU, can only focus on the ontology of time: “She always knew she was living through the last days of historical humankind, but she could never guess these would be so stupid.”
On June 4, 2025, the Federal Association of the Research and Information Centers on Antisemitism (RIAS) presented its 2024 annual report in Berlin at the Federal Press Conference. RIAS is an organization that continuously monitors antisemitic incidents in Germany, on the basis of which government agencies and politicians take measures to combat antisemitism. It emerged from the “antisemitism-critical” contexts of a strongly victim-centered fight against racism in the 2000s, when the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and other so-called “antideutsche” players abandoned power-critical analyses, succumbed to the temptations of state proximity, and began to participate in the state’s instrumentalization of the concept of victimhood.
According to the RIAS 2024 report and statistics, the number of antisemitic incidents in Germany has risen dramatically, as in previous years. No one can doubt that antisemitism, even in its narrowest sense—as hostility toward Jews because they are Jews—has increased and continues to increase. Nothing would be more necessary than careful statistics, a reliable database, and appropriate monitoring to better understand the forms, causes, extent, and locations of contemporary antisemitism, regardless of its political camp, and to combat it more effectively.
However, RIAS works with premises and under conditions that conflict with good scientific practice—and this is not remedied by the president of the German University Rectors’ Conferenceembracing it. The association uses a definition of antisemitism—the IHRA working definition—that is legally and academically controversial, if not rejected as unsuitable because it conflates things that should be differentiated. Instead of in dubio pro reo, it operates on the principle that a finding of “Israel-related antisemitism” is justified even in cases of strong doubt – in the alleged interest of the actual, supposed, or potential victims. It equates any form of anti-Zionism with antisemitism almost without hesitation, dehistoricizes and essentializes it, and imposes often bizarre interpretations on ambiguous and debatable statements. And it does not reflect on the fact that by deciding who or what is antisemitic, it exercises power and can destroy lives without granting the possibility of appeal.
I will quote here from the 2024 annual report just two passages that, in my view, show how irresponsibly RIAS handles this power and how little it cares about empirical evidence and accuracy:
“RIAS classified just under 7% of all [antisemitic] gatherings as having a left-wing anti-imperialist background. On the occasion of the so-called Nakba Day—a Palestinian and Islamist campaign day against the founding of the State of Israel—the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) held a rally in Erfurt in May. One speech stated: ‘Israel is no longer the land of persecuted Jews, but a great power […]. Israel has become the perpetrator.’ In the spirit of an antisemitic perpetrator-victim reversal, Jews are denied their status as victims of the Shoah and instead accused of comparable crimes. With reference to the accusation that Israel is committing genocide, the Shoah was relativized: “If you take the definition of genocide so narrowly that the entire people is destroyed, then there was no genocide against the Jews either.” RIAS includes accusations of genocide against Israel as antisemitic incidents according to the IHRA working definition if they deny the Jewish right to self-determination, if they use symbols or images associated with traditional antisemitism, or if they draw comparisons between current Israeli policy and Nazi policy.” (p. 23)
The contradictions and distortions of fact are obvious: 1) Nakba Day may be misused in some contexts, but the Nakba – the expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Arab Palestinians in the wake of the founding of the State of Israel and the Palestine War (1947–1949) – did happen, and it can and should be remembered. 2) It is a fact that Israel as a state, and not just with its current government, is a major power and, since 1967, has also been a “perpetrator” under international law. 3) The incriminated sentence does not relativize the Shoah, it clearly acknowledges it as a genocide. Nor does it rule out that it was more than genocide, that it was singular even. 4) One may not find the statements particularly sensitive, but they neither deny the Jewish right to self-determination, nor do they use traditional antisemitic symbols or images, nor do they compare Israeli policy with National Socialism.
A second example: “Meanwhile, German politics seems to respond to the outlined increase in antisemitic incidents in particularly political contexts in 2024 with increasing habituation to antisemitic incidents and their normalization. For example, it took over a year for the Bundestag to pass an antisemitism resolution that was not supported by all democratic factions and groups.” (p. 6)
On the one hand, the criticism of the Bundestag’s antisemitism resolution had well-considered, substantive reasons that RIAS fails to mention. There was an alternative resolution drafted by a group of renowned professors that the Bundestag did not admit to the vote and that some members of parliament would have liked to support, who then abstained from voting. On the other hand, the fact that the Bundestag resolution—passed, unfortunately, by an overwhelming majority—received two handfuls of abstentions and not 100 percent approval, indicates above all that there is a normalization of authoritarian discourse and a growing acceptance of authoritarian politics. 100 percent approval in votes and elections may have been the norm in the totalitarian GDR, but it should not be expected from a free parliament.
One cannot help but get the impression that such passages in the RIAS reports are not solely attributable to intellectual weakness and institutional irresponsibility. Rather, a straw man is being constructed. The “Israel-related antisemitism” that RIAS has declared war on is largely an insinuation and primarily serves to stigmatize the growing protests against Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and to justify authoritarian policies in Germany. The straw man argument works all the better as indeed genuine Israel-related antisemitism does exist.
That is why it is important to insist on differentiation: it is not antisemitic to address the problematic genesis of the State of Israel – and thus also the problems of its “existence”; rather, the crimes of the current right-wing extremist government in Israel cannot be understood without knowledge of the State’s fundamental problems. On the other hand, it is very much antisemitic to shift the blame for this problematic genesis onto “others” – onto the Israeli citizens alone, not to speak shifting it onto the Jews. Instead, it must be recognized how our state system as a whole bears responsibility––and especially Germany. It is equally antisemitic to reduce Jews to an exclusive and expansive state defined by ethnicity and religion; yet this is precisely what the RIAS report suggests.
At least RIAS seemed to be adapting to the small changes in discourse and the shift in sentiment that the German government showed temporarily in the first half of June. At its press conference on June 4, RIAS moved away from categorizing it as antisemitic without further ado when Israel’s occupation is described as “apartheid” or Israel’s warfare in Gaza as “genocide.” Now, it says, context should be the determining factor. However, the 2024 report shows that talking about “Israeli apartheid” was included in the statistics without taking into account the context. The slogan “No Pride for Apartheid” was counted as an antisemitic incident, even though it explicitly referred to repression in the West Bank and Gaza. One can only speculate whether in the 2025 annual report, accusations of “apartheid” and “genocide” will still appear as antisemitic incidents or not. However, rather than inconsistently and tacitly abandoning untenable positions, it would be better to abandon the IHRA definition’s short-sightedness altogether or to open up a balanced discussion of different definitions and ensure transparency in monitoring. RIAS should also apologize to those who have been and continue to be defamed as antisemitic without justification, especially Palestinians and “left-wing” Jews.
A few days before the presentation of the RIAS report, probably not by chance, the Jewish organization Diaspora Alliance published a counter-report by Israeli journalist and data analyst Iltay Mashiach. It is the only systematic investigation and critique of RIAS as an institution, and of its reports to date, but only covers the years up to 2022, as it was completed in September 2023. The massacre of October 7, with all its consequences, which also affected Iltay Mashiach personally, made it impossible to publish it earlier. The fact that the German discourse is unable to criticize RIAS and once again leaves the criticism to outsiders, may also have contributed to the long delay in publication.
The counter-report shares the RIAS reports’ diagnosis of growing, threatening antisemitism and supports the basic aim of the monitoring. However, it criticizes RIAS’s methods, in particular the decontextualization of “incidents,” the lack of transparency in data collection, and what it calls an “eternalist” understanding of antisemitism. This refers to the essentializing and ahistorical assumption that antisemitism is always the same everywhere—and potentially equally dangerous—and that intention plays no role. As an example of the absurd results of this approach, Mashiach reconstructs in the introduction an “incident” classified as antisemitic by RIAS, namely a speech given by Israeli-Jewish historian Moshe Zimmermann on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2020 before the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt:
“Zimmermann’s lecture to German parliamentarians that day examined the 200 years of what he termed ‘the twisted road to Auschwitz.’ It aimed to show that it is the early moments of looming atrocities––those moments that are hard to discern in real time because developments are too slow and their accumulation too gradual––that should really alarm us. ‘Never again Auschwitz? This is too obvious,’ Zimmermann said. It is rather, he continued, the modest beginnings that could eventually lead to Auschwitz that deserve the warning never again.’ He further emphasized that his speech, being about ‘ubiquitous human behavior and universal history,’ applied to the entire world, including Israelis––and, in their case, ‘not only from a victim perspective.’” (p. 9)
In the RIAS Report 2020, this speech was anonymized as an incident because it suggested an equation of “Israeli policy toward the Palestinians with the antisemitic policy of National Socialism.” RIAS spokesman Daniel Poensgen recently confirmed in an interview with the taz that this misinterpretation was not a slip-up: “Here, in a German parliament, only Israelis were mentioned as a group that must be careful not to repeat German crimes. We gave particular weight to the context of the statement [made before a German parliament] and included this situation in the statistics as an incident.”
RIAS claims that Zimmermann referred “exclusively to Israelis,” even though he explicitly had addressed his speech to the “whole world” and had applied his conclusions “also to Israelis”, as part of the world. The mechanism that makes such disregard for evidence possible is a victimization that has been made compatible with state and power interests. RIAS wants to strengthen the “perspective of Jews,” and reduced it to a victim’s perspective. The perspectives of Jews who do not share RIAS’s premises—Moshe Zimmermann, the Diaspora Alliance, Iltay Mashiach, and many others—are not only ignored, but are inadvertently placed on the other side, the side of the perpetrators. Moshe Zimmermann’s speech became an “antisemitic incident” because its universalization of the lessons of Auschwitz, before a German parliament, questioned the victim’s perspective as the only possible perspective for Jews. With this understanding, even non-Jews who defend this mono-perspectivism can become “victims” of antisemitism. The fact that Moshe Zimmermann, as a universalist and, incidentally, a descendant of Holocaust survivors, is certainly not an antisemite was irrelevant to RIAS: “In principle, the intention behind antisemitic statements does not play a major role in our assessment,” Poensgen said in the interview.
From there, we can also explain the discrepancy that, according to RIAS, German universities are allegedly a hotbed of antisemitism, with a disproportionate number of “antisemitic incidents”; although a study by the University of Konstanz in April 2025 came to the opposite conclusion that “antisemitic attitudes are less pronounced among students than in the general population.” According to the Konstanz study, 20 percent of the population exhibits “general antisemitism,” but only six percent of students do. The proportion of “Israel-related antisemitism,” as defined by the IHRA, is 10 percent of the population and seven percent of students. However, RIAS does not care whether the students are actually antisemitic or not. It suffices to count a high number of red triangles and Intifada slogans, and to combine them with the serious assault on Lahav Shapira by a fellow student, to create a murderous scenario that is seemingly highly dangerous for all Jewish students.
Mashiach works through all the methodological problems of RIAS’s reports and their consequences: the disregard for intentions and the “eternity argument”; the “overemphasis on Israel-related antisemitism in external communication”, without that emphasis being supported by the data; the bias in the interpretation of Israel-related statements or symbols; the thin and one-sided justifications; the decontextualization and lack of transparency; the unresolved question of how the power of interpretation in “decoding antisemitic codes” can actually be legitimized and made accountable; the discrediting and stigmatization of Palestinian narratives and the general suspicion against them; and, as the flip side of this, the strengthening of the nationalist Israeli settler narrative and the concealment of political and propagandistic objectives by branding protests against it as antisemitic; and finally, the promotion of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian racism.
RIAS has not yet commented on the content of the Diaspora Alliance’s counter-report, but has merely defamed it as a baseless and malicious attempt to discredit its findings. It is apparently unable to respond to the points of criticism in a factual and substantive manner. Indeed, it is not even able to spot the minor inaccuracies in the counter-report that it could exploit. At one point, the counter-report refers to a foreword by Josef Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, in the 2021 annual report of RIAS Bavaria, which allegedly contained anti-Arab or anti-Muslim statements. However, Schuster’s statement, which was slightly misquoted, came from an interview in 2015.
But instead of burdening a freelance Israeli journalist with the hard work and responsibility, researchers in Germany should take on the job, critically examine the work of RIAS and ensure that a viable data set is finally created using open, debatable definitions of racism and antisemitism. We must put an end to an understanding of antisemitism that uncritically and indiscriminately subsumes anti-Zionism under antisemitism and denounces criticism—even fundamental criticism—of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Above all, transparency must be established, and intransparency must not be justified with alleged victim protection: 80 percent of the “incidents” recorded by RIAS in 2024 were not directed against individuals; there is therefore no reason not to publish them. Fears that criticism of pro-Zionist institutions––be it Israel, the Central Council of Jews in Germany, RIAS, or the antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein––might negatively affect the protection of Jews must be addressed in ways other than authoritarian, reality-distorting assertions. For while human rights violations and serious war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank are taking on genocidal proportions, but continue to be supported by Germany with weapons and propagandistic justification, antisemitic conspiracy theories are indeed also proliferating. The dubious methods employed by RIAS feed these theories, rather than combat them.
A. Dirk Moses: Nach dem Genozid. Grundlage für eine neue Erinnerungskultur [“After genocide. foundations for a new culture of memory], Berlin (Matthes & Seitz) 2023, 160 S.
“After Genocide” – it is difficult these days not to relate the title of the heavily abridged German version of Dirk Moses’ groundbreaking 600-page work ‘Problems of Genocide,’ to Gaza, where Palestinian life is likely to soon cease to exist. But it is precisely in relation to Gaza that the other, actual meaning of the title makes sense: that the accusation of genocide itself is not sufficient to prevent these crimes and that it obscures rather than clarifies them. While the realization is beginning to sink in that Israel’s actions in Gaza are indeed genocide, it is already too late for tens of thousands of people who have been killed, and one senses that the fixation on the genocide paradigm itself may have contributed to this. The institutions of international law are collapsing, and in the moment of their decline, their birth defects are becoming visible.
Unlike the full English version, Moses’ German book makes almost no mention of Palestine. The contemporary case studies are primarily Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but also Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, and China. It was completed before October 7 and probably also takes German sensitivities into account. However, even without explicit reference to Palestine, its main thesis is incompatible with Germany’s state-driven culture of remembrance. In a nutshell: The 1948 Genocide Convention claimed that crimes such as the Holocaust were to be prevented in the future. However, its surgical distinction between military and genocidal intentions (the former aimed at defeat, the latter at destruction) allowed genocidal warfare to escape the narrow definition of the Genocide Convention. Moses says that genocidal and other forms of mass violence against civilians are driven by a pseudo-rationality, namely the pursuit of “permanent security” by preventing anticipated attacks. This is expressed in the unbounded use of terms like “security,” “prevention,” “final solution,” etc. The pseudo-rationality of permanent security normalises genocides but also justifies mass killings and sieges of civilians in non-genocidal or not yet genocidal wars which react to resistance as well as anticipate future threats: with carpet bombing and drone strikes, with the use of nuclear weapons, with starvation and slow death, with colonial crimes of all kinds. In practice, military and genocidal logic and intentions very often go together and are intertwined.
The fact that every child can become a terrorist and every innocent person a “human shield”, in conflicts where the ultimate goal is to combat resistance, makes horrific crimes possible. These then become, almost imperceptibly to the viewer, ethnically and racially charged and escalate into genocide. The targeted populations know from the outset, of course, what criminal dynamics they are exposed to. But the perpetrators, the bystanders, the accomplices can rationalize the crimes by referring to defense and permanent security. Thus “Never again Hamas” inevitably results in the destruction of Gaza, the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, and ethnic cleansing, under the ‘humanitarian’ pretext that this is also done in the interest of the victim population.
The German majority society—in the media, politics, and in academia—has still not forgiven Dirk Moses for exposing the “catechism” of their state-sanctioned memory culture by simply describing its components. With his intervention, Moses had merely suggested getting rid of the ethnic assumptions of the German memory culture and developing it further so that it becomes inclusive of victim memories that are obscured by the singularity thesis with its fixation on ideology.
The German “Historians’ Dispute 2.0,” or whatever one wants to call it, is now unfortunately tainted by, among other things, the fact that Dirk Moses continues to be regularly defamed and associated with Holocaust deniers and relativizers. A discourse analysis of the self-contradictions and empirical falsehoods with which his reputation has been destroyed in the German media is still pending. The May issue of Sehepunkte [points of views], a widely read review journal for historical sciences, recently again alleged in passing that “Moses and others refuse to recognize any special qualities in the Shoah or in Nazi anti-Semitism that fundamentally distinguish the National Socialist mass murder of Jews from colonial genocides,” —and no German colleagues are coming to Moses’ defense. It should go without saying that Moses is aware of the “special qualities” of the Holocaust and the differences between it and colonial genocides. But he analyzes them in their historical context, with the particular temporality that the Holocaust had:
“They planned the elimination of enemy groups in advance. Unlike ‘classical’ imperial violence, much of their violence was deliberately planned. They tried to set the course of history. Seen in this light, the Nazi Reich and its notorious extermination policy mark the culmination of centuries of empire building and the destruction of enemies, both domestic and foreign, whether real or imagined. This imperial project was characterized by a ‘redemptive imperialism’ [Erlösungsimperialismus] because, as Hitler said, it would lead to the historical ‘solution of the German question,’ for which ‘there can only be one path: violence.’ The ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’ [Erlösungsantisemitismus] of the National Socialists was an integral part of this project; after all, the extermination of ‘the Jews’ also represented a fundamental answer to ‘the German question’ for them.” (pp. 104-105)
The contradictory, spiteful, and uncomprehendinginsinuations that have been leveled against him in Germany were refuted in part elsewhere, but this work might be futile. German memory culture must first free itself from nationalistic misinterpretations of the “lessons of the Holocaust.” A new mass murder of Jews, such as that which took place on October 7, 2023, will not be prevented with the German “Staatsräson” [reason of the state] and its illusions of permanent security. Instead, Germany will become increasingly entangled in war crimes and ongoing genocides. As is now the case in Gaza. That is what Dirk Moses is concerned about.
Alexandra Senfft: Ignorierte Opfer. Sinti und Roma kämpfen weiter um die Erinnerung an den NS-Völkermord [Victims ignored. Sinti and Roma continue to fight for remembrance of the Nazi genocide], Forum Wissenschaft (2025) 1, 29-32.
Germany’s commitment to remembering the Holocaust and its historical obligations to the Jews has become a largely ritualized part of its political discourse. However, these German commitments apply far less to the other group of victims whom the Nazis sought to exterminate completely, the Sinti and Roma, even though they were disenfranchised and murdered with the same brutal systematicity as the Jews. After the war, there was a long delay in recognizing the genocide against the Porajmos. To this day, they experience racism, exclusion and discrimination, and are usually marginalized in collective commemorations – if they appear at all.
Alexandra Senfft describes the controversy surrounding the memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten, which commemorates the Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazi regime, as a particularly revealing case. It was only in 2012 that it was finally inaugurated, after long institutional resistance and tenaciously stalled on the part of politicians. It was designed by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan (1930-2021), who created an architectural structure composed of sound, sculpture and nature, surrounded by trees. Since 2020, however, the Senate and Deutsche Bahn have been planning a new S-Bahn line, “S21,” whose second phase of construction will tunnel under the memorial. Originally, the memorial was to be completely demolished and then temporarily removed. In the end, a solution was found that will leave the architecture itself somewhat intact, but it is expected that the surrounding trees, which are an integral part of the concept, will be cut down. For many Sinti and Roma, this is a desecration of the site.
Dani Karavan, who died in 2021, supported the Sinti and Roma protest in 2020, deploring that “the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (opened in 2005) would never have been treated in this way”. Senfft describes how Karavan had already noticed while working on the memorial “that Romani-speaking people were considered second-class victims: ‘As a Jew, I can say that. Nobody is interested in the Sinti and Roma.’” In July 2024, Karavan’s family co-initiated a letter of protest against the S-Bahn line, which was signed by numerous artists and cultural figures. So far, however, it seems that the risks of damage to the memorial are not being taken seriously – although we should probably be glad that things have not turned out even worse.
I find this case particularly interesting for two reasons that are not reflected in the article: First, the Karavan family’s involvement demonstrates a solidarity across victim groups that can be observed in many other contexts. Relatives of Holocaust victims use their positionality to help relatives of Porajmos victims. Even today, Jews and Jewish Israelis stand up for Palestinians; Ukrainians show solidarity with Palestinians, as do Roma; Palestinians show solidarity with Sudanese, and so on. The shared experience of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and threatened or actual genocide gives rise to resistance to attempts by the majority society to pit victim groups against each other and to privilege some over others.
On the other hand, the case also points beyond this. The fact that Dani Karavan was Jewish certainly helped to establish and maintain the memorial for the murdered Sinti and Roma in the German culture of remembrance, and may even have been decisive. But this use of Jewish-Israeli positionality in German remembrance culture is full of ambivalence. Karavan’s first major piece of memorial architecture was a monument to the Palmach Brigade in the Negev Desert near Beersheba, built between 1963 and 1968 – an ensemble of concrete, desert acacia trees, water, and wind chimes. The Palmach was a moderate Zionist paramilitary force that collaborated with the British before the creation of Israel, establishing and defending settlements on the one hand, and fighting the extremist Zionist terrorist organizations of the Irgun on the other. Had the Battle of El Alamein been won and Nazi Germany invaded Palestine, the Palmach would have defended the Jews living there from certain death in the Holocaust. Instead, they fought in the War of Independence against the Arab states and played a key role in the Nakba. In the Negev, where Karavan’s memorial to the Palmach is located, they carried out the ethnic expulsion of the Palestinian Bedouin from their villages; they were given 48 hours to move to Gaza. When Karavan began work on the memorial in 1963, it had been only 15 years since the entire Arab population of Beersheba had been expelled or killed in massacres.
From a narrow anti-Zionist perspective, Karavan’s position and his acceptance of state commissions such as the Palmach memorial might disqualify him from creating a memorial to the murdered Sinti and Roma. But I see it differently: I would like to see a holistic examination of these issues of memory politics and memory culture. The memorial in Tiergarten is important to the Roma and Sinti community and is accepted by the victims’ relatives as a place of remembrance – whereas the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe”, in the words of Paul Spiegel, was always intended to be only “the official memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany” and not a “memorial to the Jews in Germany”. The Roma wish for a respectful, i.e. non-ritualized, non-bureaucratized and non-politicized approach to the memorial must be respected. At the same time, we should reflect on the price that must always be paid for the state’s recognition of the victim’s status in the official culture of remembrance, which in this case is once again being paid by the Palestinians. This is the only way to prevent solidarity between victim groups from becoming exclusive and, in turn, marginalizing others.
Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, Gespräch mit Karen Attiah, Bookstore Politics and Prose, Washington DC, February 25, 2025.
Here I am picking an interview with Beinhart, conducted with Karen Attiah, on February 25, 2025 in a crowded bookstore in Washington DC, which I find particularly moving. Beinhart struggles for concrete answers to concrete ethical questions in the face of the destruction of Gaza and the ongoing genocide in Palestine – based on his Jewish faith and his understanding of Jewish tradition. He sees the self-definition of so many Jewish communities in terms of Zionism and the state of Israel and the legitimation of apartheid and genocide as necessary to protect Judaism as an expression of spiritual poverty and the trivialization of Jewish tradition. Almost always, he says, the history of the Jewish people is told only as a story of victims and self-assertion: the Jewish people in a struggle for survival with absolute evil, with “Amalek.” This ignores the fact that in the biblical stories, Jews are also perpetrators and capable of committing mass crimes – like any people. Awareness of the possibility of being a perpetrator is important for spiritual practice and ethical-religious education. He calls for a Judaism in which Jews need and claim equal rights wherever they live, and not the supremacy of a state that denies self-determination and human rights to the members of another people.
Beinhart talks about Jewish friends and relatives, “loved ones”, who have broken ties with him because of his clear stance on genocide. They are silent or turn away from him because they cannot face sincere discussions and do not want to listen. It is impressive that, despite his passionate claims, Beinhart never becomes morally overbearing or hardened. He rejects instrumentalization of the hostages and avoids professions of “empathy”. The empathy he shows to the hostages is all the more credible, including a deep sense of a shared belonging to the Jewish people.
In a longer passage in the conversation he talks about his experiences in South Africa, where a supremacist elite, fearing the violent resistance and revenge of the ANC, also could not imagine the abolition of apartheid. The histories of South Africa and also Irelands teach us that security increases when repressive regimes come to an end, because then terrorist resistance becomes superfluous. Beinhart wants to apply this lesson to Israel/Palestine. Yet, it’s best if you listen for yourself:
Syria, a few months after the fall of the Assad dictatorship: well over 100,000 victims of regime kidnappings are still missing and new mass graves are discovered almost every day. Most of them tortured to death; at least the relatives of the disappeared must assume this. Tens of thousands of those involved in the torture and murder, enabling the “politicide”, are still at large. For “transitional justice” – be it court cases or truth tribunals – resources, strength, structures remain unavailable for the foreseeable future. Most of the population, oppressed and plundered by Assad for decades, lives in indescribable poverty. The West maintains its sanctions, and no one protests against Israel’s invasions and bombings in violation of international law. Assad supporters who have lost their privileges repeatedly carry out attacks on the new regime’s security forces. The new regime is unable or unwilling to prevent its own people and rival gangs from exacting revenge on the communities from which Assad’s supporters mainly come. And even if new massacres are stopped, a new genocide is looming on the horizon, this time against the Alawites.
Germany has offered refuge to over a million people from Syria, but Germans have no idea about the political situation in the country. They are quick to settle for the most convenient explanation: Syria being a multi-ethnic state in a civil war that is sometimes latent and sometimes open. After all, the Assad regime has allegedly long offered minorities a certain degree of protection, but now the Sunni majority is threatening Alawites, Christians and Druze in an “unprecedented Islamization”. This explanation fits with the justifications for Germany’s failed Syria policy, which as early as 2013 refused to take a stand against the murderous regime, pointing to “jihadists, terrorists and extremists in Syria” and how they are endangering “Alawites and Christians”.
But Syrian intellectuals and students who supported the democratic resistance against the Assad regime in 2011/12 and fled to Europe after 2013 tell a different, more complicated story; a story in which Europe and the USA have always been entangled. They speak of “sectarianism” and see the causes of it not, or at least not primarily, in the claim to dominance of Sunni Islam, but in the techniques of domination that the Assad regime has perfected over more than 50 years. These can be read in detail in a black book of Assad‘s regime, published in French in 2022.
These techniques of rule, based on division and repression, and the simultaneous instrumentalization of identities, were accompanied by systematic, inventive torture as a ubiquitous possibility. Since the early 1970s, torture had gradually taken hold of Syrian society in “Suriya al-Assad”, the totalitarian police state identified with Assad, and since the beginning of the revolution in 2011, it could affect anyone, including women and children. The embodied knowledge of torture and its omnipresent possibility, in the Assadian form, came to Germany with the mass exodus from Syria starting in 2013. When I had my first encounters with Syrian refugees in 2015, what most profoundly changed my view of the world – including my world in Germany and Europe – was the confrontation with the omnipresence of the possibility of torture in their stories and in their bodies. Syrian students told me nightmares that I will never forget. Film producer Orwa Nyrabia showed the documentary Silvered Water.Syria Self-Portrait, which uses countless cell phone recordings not only of bombings and war scenes, but also of prison torture, to create a work of art; at great personal risk to herself, Syrian-Kurdish documentary filmmaker Wiam Simav Bedirxan and the director of the film, Ossama Mohamed, who fled to Paris. Later, I read Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical novel The Shell House.
An outstanding witness and thinker of this state terror is the political author and journalist Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. In 2023, Matthes & Seitz published a German translation of his book about torture in Syria and its representation at a time when the Assad dictatorship, which called itself “eternal”, seemed to be more firmly in the saddle than ever. But the fact that Assad is now a thing of the past does not make the book any less relevant. The texts compiled into a unified work in the book had initially appeared in Arabic in different contexts. They show connections between torture, confessionalism and Salafism that are still in effect and also point to the so-called West. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh was himself tortured during his 16 years in prison (between 1980 and 1996, under the rule of Assad’s father), convicted of being a member of a communist party. The torture he was subjected to was not so severe as to cause irreversible damage; he was able to overcome it. But he witnessed the most terrible and horrific torture used to break the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood: torture from which no one can return to life.
The book offers nothing less than a political anthropology of torture. Saleh differentiates between torture that does not preclude survival and torture that inevitably results in death; death under torture and death by torture; torture committed against individuals and torture that affects a collective. The book is full of such distinctions, which allow for a systematic understanding of torture. Saleh probably developed the concepts and typologies during his detention and after his release in order to process his experiences from a political and social science perspective. He is a well-read autodidact who is not part of the academic community, but he is also not a journalist in the strict sense. His writing is not reporting or commenting, but always analytical, organizing, conceptual. He wants to encourage his readers to face the ubiquitous possibility of torture coolly and soberly and to understand it as an extreme manifestation of political violence that, through the collective implicit knowledge of it, sets in motion a cycle of destruction.
He distinguishes phenomenologically between three types of torture in terms of the boundaries they transgress and their intended effects: firstly, the classic investigative or interrogative torture, which transgresses the boundaries of the tortured in order to extort confessions or information. In this case, submission and betrayal help to end the torture. Secondly, there is humiliation and revenge torture, or deterrence torture, which is arbitrary and unpredictable, designed to teach an unforgettable lesson, aimed at society as a whole, to instill unconditional obedience and break any resistance. And thirdly, there is extermination torture, which not only crosses the boundaries of society, but also the boundaries of humanity, where there is no longer any room for discretion, and where an organized murder industry is required. For this kind of torture it is enough to be an offense that the tortured person even exists.
Saleh also differentiates between the various levels of torture: the level of the relationship between the torturer and the tortured, where the act of torture takes place; the level of the apparatus, the organisation required for the torture; the system level – torture as state and as economy; and finally the level of the world that allows the torture to happen, is aware of it and is destroyed by the torture. The intimate knowledge of how torture worked in Assad’s Syria and what it does is revealed in the book in numerous observations that vividly depict the horror of torture without ever going into gory details. Saleh describes the psychology of torture, where the fear of the tortured faces the hatred of the torturer. Both are dehumanized, with the torturer becoming God-like through his power over the body, while the tortured person becomes an object. In order for the torturer to stand firm in the torture relationship and to muster cold or hot hatred for the tortured person, he must accuse them of a crime, and that crime lies in deviating from the will of Assad. To deviate from the will of Assad, it is enough to be human. The torturer claims unconditional love for Assad, is totally identified with Assad and demands a submission that is never enough. Paradoxically, torture allevaites the guilt of the murderer; Saleh quotes Primo Levi: “Before the victim died, he had to be humiliated so that the murderer would not feel the weight of his guilt so much.”
The aim of destroying communities, making human lives dispensable, and destroying worldliness in general is a common feature of all genocidal regimes. Saleh describes Assad-Syria’s killing machines below an industrial level, a “manufacturing system”, not impersonal and systematic as under the Nazis, but carried out with devotion, creatively, requiring direct physical contact, combining routines and reinventions. While the Nazi death economy was capitalist and irrational, the Assad one, also highly bureaucratized, served the rentier economy of a family dictatorship, taken to its extreme consequence. Torture, including in the form of starvation and denial of access to essential goods, as well as in the form of aerial bombardment and the arbitrary infliction of pain through attacks directed against civilians, has a curious relationship with genocidal extermination. At first glance, extermination torture seems to be unnecessary, since the victims will die either way; its purpose is to make the community that is to be exterminated know that torture is worse than death. But it also recognizes that it is dealing with people who must first be dehumanized before they are killed. By contrast, torture was not a necessity for the Holocaust, even if it occurred frequently: “the Nazis felt no need to torture the Jews, since their racist theory asserted a priori that they knew the Jews’ malicious nature, thus excluding them from the outset from any equality and considering them ‘like lice’, so unequal and already dehumanized that they were not worth the trouble of torture, so to speak.”
Saleh also writes about the connection between torture and rape: Both give absolute power over the body. The torture of men in Syria was driven by the same chauvinism, took place in the same macho gender order as the rape of women, with an idea of masculinity that seeks to eliminate the male competitor through torture and to possess the woman without limits through rape. Rape is part of genocidal annihilation; it is intended to make the community incapable of reproduction, as a “deferred murder”. Saleh sees two variants of systematic rape in the IS and the Assad state: While in the IS, religiously veiled, one man owns and rapes many women, in the supposedly secular terrorist state many men assault one woman. (Whether these distinctions are always empirically tenable is another question; they must be understood as ideal types.) In any case, the gradual increase in the veiling of women in Syria since the 1970s is not only a concomitant of increasing Islamization, but also a reaction to the growing threat of rape in a state that practices torture.
Saleh sees the Syrian revolution in its early days as a struggle of the Syrians for the “dignity of their bodies”: to set limits to a state violence that was capable of violating the dignity of bodies in every way and then demonstrated precisely this in excess in its fight against the revolution.
The so-called West, North America and Europe, has largely stood idly by and watched the brutal suppression of the Syrian revolution. The “red lines” that Barack Obama drew in 2012 in the event of the use of chemical weapons were crossed in 2013 with the sarin attacks on Ghouta and with many other chemical attacks, without the US even setting up a no-fly zone over Syria. But the “West’s” role in creating and stabilizing the Assad regime goes far beyond merely standing by and watching war crimes. The destabilization of young democracies in the Middle East after the Second World War, came as a result of Western colonialist and imperialist power politics and wars. The Nakba, the successive mass refugee movements from Israel/Palestine, and the insistence on a confessionally bound Jewish state, which was allied with Western interests, undermined the legitimacy of the constitutional and democratic aspirations in the Arab countries. Since 1946, Syria had been a non-sectarian republic in both name and constitution. Sectarian affiliations and identities were denied and suppressed. It was precisely this alleged secularism that made Syria and its rulers acceptable in the West after the end of the Cold War. Since coming to power in 1970, the Assad family had filled the Syrian security apparatus and most important positions with loyal Alewites, systematically pitting the denominations against each other, fueling confessionalism and using it as a weapon. After the generational change from father to son Assad, it was precisely this form of “minority privilege” and the dual state that made the Assad regime under the London-trained Bashir al-Assad appear modern and potentially open to the West.
The “war on terror” since 9/11 gave the Assad regime’s fight against the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists a real boost. Even though it was Iran and Russia that provided the military support without which the regime would not have been able to hold out in 2013 and without which it promptly collapsed in December 2024: The anti-Muslim racism produced in the West helped the regime to establish and maintain the murderous kleptocracy. For kleptocracies, ethnicity, affiliation and religion are only a tool to divide the population and curry favor with external powers; a pretext for suppressing any stirrings of freedom and plundering the subjugated population. The Assad regime has done this through extortion, hostage-taking and robbery on an unprecedented scale. The kleptocratic regime was able to present itself to the outside world as a protector of minorities, that were privileged and, for this reason above all, hated by the Sunni majority, as intended from the outset. The anti-Muslim overtones of the fight against terrorism and the omnipresent racism in the Western world provided Assad with international legitimacy or at least tolerance for his crimes: as a well-shaven and well-dressed mass-murdering Bashar al-Assad with his pretty, English-educated wife still seems more “civilized” than a bearded Islamist, who can be heard shouting Allahu Akbar even without TV sound.
Yassin Al-Haj Saleh calls this the “confessional-racist complex”: “the world of identities and origins” that forms the environment for genocide. The book makes clear that the Assad state was not just an exceptional case, but has a “structural equivalent” in international relations. International law itself shows its asymmetrical side here, finding arrangements with dictatorships on the periphery of the powers that uphold it. The Assad regime’s tortures can flourish anywhere. These tortures are only the last consequence of a “modern” attitude that ruthlessly and predatorily enforces its own interests, and uses racism to do so. They are ultimately a new version of the torment and torture of colonialism, while the remaining ties to any notions of justice dissolve. Islamism reacts to this development by “salafizing” itself and forging its own confessional-racist complex. The history of the Assad torture state can teach those of us who do not – or not yet – have to fear torture to no longer externalize torture as the problem of others, but to understand it as the signature of a dysfunctional modern (nation) state that has been taken hostage by an “elite”/gang of robbers.
The last text in the book, and perhaps the most interesting, is devoted to the problem of representing torture and communicating pain. Only representation can make pain collectively, and thus politically, processable. Saleh understands representation as a “combination of expression (the axis of experience and ideas) and formation (the axis of tradition)”. Formation, or composition, formal creation, is not possible without a tradition in which it can be inscribed. But tradition itself cannot provide the new forms of representation needed to express new experiences. The “representation of the terrible” is dependent on existing forms of political-social thought on the one hand, but on the other hand it must creatively develop them further. How can contemporary Arab political thought achieve this? Saleh sees the real problem of Islamism here: like every traditionalist ideology, it is certainly capable of formation and composition, but its expression, its subjectivity, is limited to conflict and negation. It cannot give meaning or expression to the experience of suffering, of being tortured, of trauma, because that would challenge the Islamist understanding of tradition. Ideology demands that everything suffered must only be expressed within the framework of tradition, it is not allowed to go beyond the scope of that framework. Saleh quotes the Moroccan philosophers Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri and Abdallah Laroui: In Arabic thought, there is a special mechanism that always measures the “hidden”, the “unsolved”, the “problem” – all those things that makes one suffer – against a “proof”. “In Islamic jurisprudence, the ‘proof’ is a topic on which a religious judgment already exists.” This thinking in analogies validates all experience only on the basis of an existing, authoritative text. If there is no suitable text for an experience to be processed, the experience becomes a deviation and must be abandoned and marginalized. A “refusal to represent”; and Laroui had assumed that it “originates from a historical trauma perceived as unbearable.” Laroui speculated about a historical disaster dating back to pre-Islamic times, a “disgrace and humiliation” associated with the emergence of the Sunna itself. In Old Arabic, the Sunna is the customs, practices and norms that are supposed to hold the scattered Arab tribes together. Islam has given them a religious dimension: the “Sunna” of the Prophet is the second source of Islamic law after the Qur’an.
Saleh sees, in line with Laroui, the history of the Arab world as full of failed representations. He also sees his own adherence to communism, from which he only broke away during his imprisonment, as a case of this failure. And today? “It seems that we are once again confronted with enormously hurtful events, which this time are again causing strong defensive effects with the purpose of self-protection.” The Sunna is breaking apart once again. The collective identity of Sunni Muslims is only held together by an extremely violent ideology that ignores reality. All the suppressed experiences and events of generations are released in the break-up, “they emerge as formless beasts, demons and monsters, which in turn are not contained by any Sunna.”
What would it take for political thought in Germany and Europe to turn to this chain of traumas and crises of representation in the Arab world, caused also by Western influence, with love, listening, and humanity? And to stop contributing to its continuation through our racism? Saleh describes – without ever resorting to easy psychology – the psychological situation of Islamism as a hopeless state of amorphousness, “a naked, extremely painful existence”. He refers to Hannah Arendt’s reflections on thinking: only through the inner dialogue of the thinking individual with themselves, the creative thought process, the beginning of representation, can the self discipline itself and develop a conscience. In Sufism, Islam has developed traditions for this. At the other end of the scale of possibilities offered by Islam between humanity and inhumanity is the “extreme case” of “homo islamicus, that Islamists strive to mass-produce: a robot that does not think and whose operating system is called Sharia,” and that only finds expression in killing. Another extreme case is the Auschwitz invention of the “Muselman” tortured to death, who wastes away in Assad prison and who, in complete self-abandonment, “has nothing human left.”
At one point, Saleh does make a cultural comparison: ”The Arab cultural heritage offers fewer options for representation than Western modernism with its multilingualism and wealth of forms (…).” The extent to which the “West” offers ways out of the crisis of representation and the extent to which it is responsible for the suffering and the crisis of representation was hotly debated among the tortured and imprisoned in Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical novel. The betrayal that Muslims and Arabs who fled to Germany and Europe from Syria and other Arab countries have to endure in the West is all the more bitter. It is one thing to see the Western plans for the real estate “riviera” in Gaza, the helpless and dishonest hand-wringing, the Western support for and participation in the genocide of the Palestinians, and the unchallenged toleration of the invasions and bombing raids in Syria. But equally bad is the threat to the possibilities of representing this horror itself. The possibilities for representation and processing are being increasingly curtailed by political interference in science, art and culture and the failure of the public. The “shame and disgrace” and the “trauma perceived as unbearable” at the root of the crises of representation in the Arab and Muslim world do have their counterparts with us in the Western world – and perhaps, if we are serious about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they are even more shameful and disgraceful than anything that could ever have happened in pre-Islamic or Islamic Arabia. Assad is gone – but the horror remains. We can learn from Yassin Al-Haj Saleh how to face it and remain human, or become human.
