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Read the article on censorship of Palestinian solidarity pulped by a German
union publication under pressure from Zionist organizations
Christoph Glanz on September 16, 2016 2 Comments
Christoph Glanz
Editor’s note: What follows is an article written about the efforts to suppress
Palestinian solidarity activism in Germany by Christoph Glanz, a high school
teacher and activist in Oldenburg, Germany, who is now teaching refugee
children. Glanz informs us that several hundred copies of the teachers´union
magazine containing the article have just been shredded.
The article was meant to be published in PaedOL, a local magazine of the GEW,
Germany´s most powerful educational union. Titled, “Documenting injustice and
demanding justice- impossible in the town of Oldenburg?”, the article
highlights the Nakba, which is unknown to most Germans, and the ongoing plight
of Palestinians and the result, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions call of
2005. Glanz– who had adopted the pen-name Christopher Ben Kushka so as to
preserve his ability to visit Palestine — then related some of the attacks on
freedom of speech and pro-Palestinian activism, including his own, and what
that means for German society.
Even before publication, the article got into the hands of the German-Israeli
Friendship Society (DIG). Glanz says that everyone who had access to the
ready-for-print article, a circle of fewer than 10 persons including the editor
in charge and GEW board members, denied forwarding it to the DIG. Within hours
the head of DIG, Klaus Thörner, initiated a campaign against the article,
accusing Glanz of anti-semitism for endorsing BDS and the GEW for publishing
it, and demanding the publication of the article be halted. Several players
became involved, Glanz reports: the American Jewish Congress in Berlin, the
Israeli Embassy, higher echelons of the German union itself, journalist
Benjamin Weinthal from the Jerusalem Post and even some members of the German
parliament such as Volker Beck (Greens).
The GEW then bowed to the pressure, and issued a statement declaring the
article a “grave mistake on our side”, and apologizing to the broader public,
described Glanz and BDS as being in the spectrum of racist, revisionist
movements. GEW decided to pulp magazines that had by then been printed with the
article in it. (The shredding has been covered by several newspapers among them
most notably the aforementioned Jerusalem Post here and here. Most of these
accounts have sought to characterize the article as anti-Semitic equating it,
counter-factually, with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, when Glanz
himself has been outspoken about Germany’s Nazi past.) But: Read it for
yourself! Our translation is by Glanz himself.
Documenting injustice and demanding justice- impossible in the town of
Oldenburg?
Prelude: Personal experience meets “ethnic cleansing.”
During my civil service in an institution for adults with special needs
situated in Israel, I used every minute off work to explore the country.
Hitchhiking was the preferred means of transport. I remember one moment which
had all attributes of Marlboro kitsch: there I was, sitting on the loading area
of a pickup truck, hair flowing in the wind and heading northbound from Tel
Aviv while the sun set over the Mediterranean.
In that moment I had a sudden and somewhat displaced thought: “Strange somehow.
You’ve been to a number of Mediterranean countries before. What you´d expect
here, were smaller and larger fishing villages, old settlements, ports,
cutters. After all, the sea is a natural source of food.” But even though the
highway led us North as the crow flies and always followed the shoreline- no
such thing was in sight. Instead many Jewish settlements in which the oldest
buildings were maximally a few decades old.
The answer to the unasked question distilled in this moment is in abbreviation:
they were there once, the old fishing villages. They did exist. And the fact
that they don´t exist anymore is not the result of chance nor the voluntary
abandonment of these Palestinian villages. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé
documented this comprehensively in his opus “The ethnic cleansing of Palestine“
and it was this book -among others- that opened my eyes. Massacres on the
beach, targeted intimidation campaigns in order to produce panic, the
destruction of more than 500 villages and many city quarters and finally the
expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians – more than 80% of the total population! –
from their homeland. This, and the systematic denial of the return of the
refugees implemented both by force and by legislation, are cornerstones of the
foundation of Israel. Who, except the victims, is aware of that here and today?
For the last few years, I´m trying to contribute as an activist to a peace
based on justice. When I get the chance to spend time in historic Palestine, I
try to do something to this effect via practised soldarity- always aware of the
very humble impact this has. Our group is dedicated to absolute non-violeece.
What does it all mean concretely? As international activists we go to one of
the many areas of tension. European and US-American passports grant us a
certain degree of protection that Palestinians don´t enjoy. We are eager to use
this privilege to their favour: we are regularly present at checkpoints,
document events with our cameras, intervene when Palestinians are again victims
of a show of might by the occupation forces or settler violence. We issue
related reports and publish them; the (not so new anymore) media play an
important role here. Yet more often than not we are helpless. Based on the
feedback of many Palestinians, I tend to believe that the perhaps most
important impact is the experience of solidarity they draw from our presence.
They, the Palestinians, do get the message. “We haven´t forgotten you. What is
happening here, must stop.”
Glanz with filmmaker Emad Burnat in Bil’in
The settlers hang “wanted posters” with photos of activists in the streets and
call on the (Jewish-Israeli) public to treat “these antisemitic anarchists
appropriately“. We get spit at, beaten, harassed. When I was there last fall, I
got to feel my share of abuse too.
Much more drastic than that was: we experienced that two Palestinians were shot
dead by Israeli soldiers within 24 hours and right in front of our door step. A
journalist of The Guardian and a co-worker of Amnesty International visited us
and recorded testimonies of eight international activists. Amnesty
International, even though it is considered rather restrained as an
organisation, has since then spoken regularly of “extra-judicial executions“
committed by the Israeli army. What do you call it when unarmed people are shot
with machine guns? Both victims we saw bleeding on the street, were shot in the
back.
Israeli soldier in occupied Hebron
What has this got to do with Oldenburg and the GEW union?
For once, I would hope we´ve not yet come to be victims of our self-medicated
privatisation entirely. “How could this possibly not affect us?“ is the real
question. Also: as members of an educational union we can not stand by
apathetically when those who bear the main plight of suffering are children- as
always. They are running to school through the vapor of teargas, surmounting
checkpoints on their way. They are being harassed by settlers and soldiers. A
volunteer from the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem recently recorded
with her video camera how a soldiers stopped an 8-year-old girl on her bike,
chased her away and threw the bike into the bushes. It is not rare that minors
are taken into “administrative detention“. That means: no prosecution, no
charges, no visits by parents or lawyers. Youth and children are exposed to
solitary confinement, brutal interrogations and beatings. These are mere
splinters of the actual situation.
BDS- a human rights campaign in Oldenburg
Eleven years ago a broad association of Palestinian civil organisations
published the BDS call. It calls upon righteous people worldwide to boycott the
Israeli state and all profiteers of the occupation (Boycott!); to withdraw
money from the Israeli state and all profiteers, for example portfolios, stock
exchange, pension funds (Divestment!); and finally the S (Sanctions). I was
scheduled to give a talk on BDS at the Evanglische Studierenden Gemeinde (ESG;
protest student association) nearby the Oldenburg university. This triggered a
shit-storm by the so-called “Friends of Israel”: the ESG was flooded with
emails, in which the human rights campaign was labelled as “Hamas propaganda“
and counter-factually equated with the boycott of Jewish businesses under Nazi
rule. One student demanded as a member of the university senate, the cancelling
of the event, on the grounds that BDS was an “anti-Semitic organisation” and I
am a “known anti-Semite“. After she declined all options for a non-judicial way
of setting this record straight, she was sentenced on June 20 by the
Landgericht Oldenburg (local court) under threat of punishment not to ever
repeat this denunciation again. She is currently appealing this ruling.
By the way, following this campaign, the ESG did cancel the talk. This couldn´t
be changed by a petition signed by Israeli citizens, lots of positive messages
received in writing in favour of BDS and myself, nor by appeals to protect free
speech, such as from Rolf Verlege, former member of the Zentralrat der Juden in
Germany (central board of Jewish communities).
Miriam Peretz and Ronnie Barkan (r) on Israeli Channel 10
The BDS Initiative Oldenburg then invited the Israeli activist Ronnie Barkan to
give a talk with the same title as originally planned with me at the ESG. I
rented a larger room at the PFL (a large community center run by the
municipality). The event was cancelled by the Kulturbüro (office for cultural
affairs) of the Municipality of Oldenburg only four days prior to the talk for
“security reasons“. Police, co-workers of the municipality and Staatsschutz
(police for political crimes) told Ronnie and me in a personal meeting that
violent interruptions by the ultra-left/autonomous scene (self described) were
to be expected. They dissuaded us from setting up a demonstration in place of
the original event. The most logical solution– protection of the event by the
police– was regarded as absurd. That way the “Friends of Israel“ successfully
prevented the presentation by a Jewish Israeli in Oldenburg.
Is this actually the way we want to see public debate being handled in this
town?
The English–and more powerful– version of [the German] Meinungsfreiheit
(literally: right to one´s own opinion) is “freedom of speech“. Freedom of
speech contains the right to speak in public and to promote one´s views with
arguments. But it is precisely this right that is undermined to the public by a
——— network of actors including pseudo-anarchists, the bourgeois center,
members of the university, municipality and police when it comes to anything
“Israel”.
My claim is: only people who do not want to see their sectarian world views
shaken by facts and arguments act like this. Perhaps I´m the one who is erring
here. One could find this out in a publicly perceivable debate weighing the
Pros and Cons of this issue. But: this is precisely the discourse the opponents
of freedom of speech and human rights are trying to prevent with all their
might.
Actually, Why?
Editor’s afterword: Christoph Glanz is currently chiefly teaching German in a
classroom of refugee kids called „Willkommensklasse“ (welcome class). His
political activism besides Palestinian solidarity includes feminism,
anti-racism and global economic justice, values he tries to instill in his
students. He speaks basic Hebrew and has been co-organising events
commemorating the atrocities committed by the Nazis since age 16. He is
struggling to learn Arabic. His last word today on the current situation:
“Zionists are effectively trying to shut us up. They won´t succeed. We are well
aware of the harrassment going on in other parts of Germany, Europe and the US.
Their efforts are in vain because we know how the Palestinians suffer on a
daily basis. Every attempt of silencing, even though successful at first glance
and temporarily, helps us to reach out to the interested public and helps to
build new and stronger networks with conscientious world citizens.“
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Read the article on censorship of Palestinian solidarity pulped by a German
union publication under pressure from Zionist organizations
Activism
Christoph Glanz on September 16, 2016 2 Comments
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Christoph Glanz
Editor’s note: What follows is an article written about the efforts to suppress
Palestinian solidarity activism in Germany by Christoph Glanz, a high school
teacher and activist in Oldenburg, Germany, who is now teaching refugee
children. Glanz informs us that several hundred copies of the teachers´union
magazine containing the article have just been shredded.
The article was meant to be published in PaedOL, a local magazine of the GEW,
Germany´s most powerful educational union. Titled, “Documenting injustice and
demanding justice- impossible in the town of Oldenburg?”, the article
highlights the Nakba, which is unknown to most Germans, and the ongoing plight
of Palestinians and the result, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions call of
2005. Glanz– who had adopted the pen-name Christopher Ben Kushka so as to
preserve his ability to visit Palestine — then related some of the attacks on
freedom of speech and pro-Palestinian activism, including his own, and what
that means for German society.
Even before publication, the article got into the hands of the German-Israeli
Friendship Society (DIG). Glanz says that everyone who had access to the
ready-for-print article, a circle of fewer than 10 persons including the editor
in charge and GEW board members, denied forwarding it to the DIG. Within hours
the head of DIG, Klaus Thörner, initiated a campaign against the article,
accusing Glanz of anti-semitism for endorsing BDS and the GEW for publishing
it, and demanding the publication of the article be halted. Several players
became involved, Glanz reports: the American Jewish Congress in Berlin, the
Israeli Embassy, higher echelons of the German union itself, journalist
Benjamin Weinthal from the Jerusalem Post and even some members of the German
parliament such as Volker Beck (Greens).
The GEW then bowed to the pressure, and issued a statement declaring the
article a “grave mistake on our side”, and apologizing to the broader public,
described Glanz and BDS as being in the spectrum of racist, revisionist
movements. GEW decided to pulp magazines that had by then been printed with the
article in it. (The shredding has been covered by several newspapers among them
most notably the aforementioned Jerusalem Post here and here. Most of these
accounts have sought to characterize the article as anti-Semitic equating it,
counter-factually, with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, when Glanz
himself has been outspoken about Germany’s Nazi past.) But: Read it for
yourself! Our translation is by Glanz himself.
Documenting injustice and demanding justice- impossible in the town of
Oldenburg?
Prelude: Personal experience meets “ethnic cleansing.”
During my civil service in an institution for adults with special needs
situated in Israel, I used every minute off work to explore the country.
Hitchhiking was the preferred means of transport. I remember one moment which
had all attributes of Marlboro kitsch: there I was, sitting on the loading area
of a pickup truck, hair flowing in the wind and heading northbound from Tel
Aviv while the sun set over the Mediterranean.
In that moment I had a sudden and somewhat displaced thought: “Strange somehow.
You’ve been to a number of Mediterranean countries before. What you´d expect
here, were smaller and larger fishing villages, old settlements, ports,
cutters. After all, the sea is a natural source of food.” But even though the
highway led us North as the crow flies and always followed the shoreline- no
such thing was in sight. Instead many Jewish settlements in which the oldest
buildings were maximally a few decades old.
The answer to the unasked question distilled in this moment is in abbreviation:
they were there once, the old fishing villages. They did exist. And the fact
that they don´t exist anymore is not the result of chance nor the voluntary
abandonment of these Palestinian villages. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé
documented this comprehensively in his opus “The ethnic cleansing of Palestine“
and it was this book -among others- that opened my eyes. Massacres on the
beach, targeted intimidation campaigns in order to produce panic, the
destruction of more than 500 villages and many city quarters and finally the
expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians – more than 80% of the total population! –
from their homeland. This, and the systematic denial of the return of the
refugees implemented both by force and by legislation, are cornerstones of the
foundation of Israel. Who, except the victims, is aware of that here and today?
For the last few years, I´m trying to contribute as an activist to a peace
based on justice. When I get the chance to spend time in historic Palestine, I
try to do something to this effect via practised soldarity- always aware of the
very humble impact this has. Our group is dedicated to absolute non-violeece.
What does it all mean concretely? As international activists we go to one of
the many areas of tension. European and US-American passports grant us a
certain degree of protection that Palestinians don´t enjoy. We are eager to use
this privilege to their favour: we are regularly present at checkpoints,
document events with our cameras, intervene when Palestinians are again victims
of a show of might by the occupation forces or settler violence. We issue
related reports and publish them; the (not so new anymore) media play an
important role here. Yet more often than not we are helpless. Based on the
feedback of many Palestinians, I tend to believe that the perhaps most
important impact is the experience of solidarity they draw from our presence.
They, the Palestinians, do get the message. “We haven´t forgotten you. What is
happening here, must stop.”
Glanz with filmmaker Emad Burnat in Bil’in
The settlers hang “wanted posters” with photos of activists in the streets and
call on the (Jewish-Israeli) public to treat “these antisemitic anarchists
appropriately“. We get spit at, beaten, harassed. When I was there last fall, I
got to feel my share of abuse too.
Much more drastic than that was: we experienced that two Palestinians were shot
dead by Israeli soldiers within 24 hours and right in front of our door step. A
journalist of The Guardian and a co-worker of Amnesty International visited us
and recorded testimonies of eight international activists. Amnesty
International, even though it is considered rather restrained as an
organisation, has since then spoken regularly of “extra-judicial executions“
committed by the Israeli army. What do you call it when unarmed people are shot
with machine guns? Both victims we saw bleeding on the street, were shot in the
back.
Israeli soldier in occupied Hebron
What has this got to do with Oldenburg and the GEW union?
For once, I would hope we´ve not yet come to be victims of our self-medicated
privatisation entirely. “How could this possibly not affect us?“ is the real
question. Also: as members of an educational union we can not stand by
apathetically when those who bear the main plight of suffering are children- as
always. They are running to school through the vapor of teargas, surmounting
checkpoints on their way. They are being harassed by settlers and soldiers. A
volunteer from the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem recently recorded
with her video camera how a soldiers stopped an 8-year-old girl on her bike,
chased her away and threw the bike into the bushes. It is not rare that minors
are taken into “administrative detention“. That means: no prosecution, no
charges, no visits by parents or lawyers. Youth and children are exposed to
solitary confinement, brutal interrogations and beatings. These are mere
splinters of the actual situation.
BDS- a human rights campaign in Oldenburg
Eleven years ago a broad association of Palestinian civil organisations
published the BDS call. It calls upon righteous people worldwide to boycott the
Israeli state and all profiteers of the occupation (Boycott!); to withdraw
money from the Israeli state and all profiteers, for example portfolios, stock
exchange, pension funds (Divestment!); and finally the S (Sanctions). I was
scheduled to give a talk on BDS at the Evanglische Studierenden Gemeinde (ESG;
protest student association) nearby the Oldenburg university. This triggered a
shit-storm by the so-called “Friends of Israel”: the ESG was flooded with
emails, in which the human rights campaign was labelled as “Hamas propaganda“
and counter-factually equated with the boycott of Jewish businesses under Nazi
rule. One student demanded as a member of the university senate, the cancelling
of the event, on the grounds that BDS was an “anti-Semitic organisation” and I
am a “known anti-Semite“. After she declined all options for a non-judicial way
of setting this record straight, she was sentenced on June 20 by the
Landgericht Oldenburg (local court) under threat of punishment not to ever
repeat this denunciation again. She is currently appealing this ruling.
By the way, following this campaign, the ESG did cancel the talk. This couldn´t
be changed by a petition signed by Israeli citizens, lots of positive messages
received in writing in favour of BDS and myself, nor by appeals to protect free
speech, such as from Rolf Verlege, former member of the Zentralrat der Juden in
Germany (central board of Jewish communities).
Miriam Peretz and Ronnie Barkan (r) on Israeli Channel 10
The BDS Initiative Oldenburg then invited the Israeli activist Ronnie Barkan to
give a talk with the same title as originally planned with me at the ESG. I
rented a larger room at the PFL (a large community center run by the
municipality). The event was cancelled by the Kulturbüro (office for cultural
affairs) of the Municipality of Oldenburg only four days prior to the talk for
“security reasons“. Police, co-workers of the municipality and Staatsschutz
(police for political crimes) told Ronnie and me in a personal meeting that
violent interruptions by the ultra-left/autonomous scene (self described) were
to be expected. They dissuaded us from setting up a demonstration in place of
the original event. The most logical solution– protection of the event by the
police– was regarded as absurd. That way the “Friends of Israel“ successfully
prevented the presentation by a Jewish Israeli in Oldenburg.
Is this actually the way we want to see public debate being handled in this
town?
The English–and more powerful– version of [the German] Meinungsfreiheit
(literally: right to one´s own opinion) is “freedom of speech“. Freedom of
speech contains the right to speak in public and to promote one´s views with
arguments. But it is precisely this right that is undermined to the public by a
——— network of actors including pseudo-anarchists, the bourgeois center,
members of the university, municipality and police when it comes to anything
“Israel”.
My claim is: only people who do not want to see their sectarian world views
shaken by facts and arguments act like this. Perhaps I´m the one who is erring
here. One could find this out in a publicly perceivable debate weighing the
Pros and Cons of this issue. But: this is precisely the discourse the opponents
of freedom of speech and human rights are trying to prevent with all their
might.
Actually, Why?
Editor’s afterword: Christoph Glanz is currently chiefly teaching German in a
classroom of refugee kids called „Willkommensklasse“ (welcome class). His
political activism besides Palestinian solidarity includes feminism,
anti-racism and global economic justice, values he tries to instill in his
students. He speaks basic Hebrew and has been co-organising events
commemorating the atrocities committed by the Nazis since age 16. He is
struggling to learn Arabic. His last word today on the current situation:
“Zionists are effectively trying to shut us up. They won´t succeed. We are well
aware of the harrassment going on in other parts of Germany, Europe and the US.
Their efforts are in vain because we know how the Palestinians suffer on a
daily basis. Every attempt of silencing, even though successful at first glance
and temporarily, helps us to reach out to the interested public and helps to
build new and stronger networks with conscientious world citizens.“
