Israeli-born philosopher Omri Boehm posed a challenging question in a speech to commemorate the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp 80 years ago.
The question originates with the Jewish-American historian Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi: “What if the opposite of forgetting is not remembering – but justice?”
Boehm never got the chance to pose Yerushalmi’s question in Buchenwald, where the Nazis imprisoned 280,000 people and about 56,000 died, including 11,000 Jewish people. He was uninvited as a speaker after protests from some Jewish groups and pressure from the Israeli embassy. Ambassador Ron Prosor said afterwards he was “proud to have shown the red card” to Boehm, a long-time critic of the Israeli government and what he calls its instrumentalisation of Holocaust history and memory. Last year Boehm said that “anyone who calls what my country is doing in Gaza ‘self-defence’ deeply shames my identity”.
Rather than allow the row overshadow the official Buchenwald event, attended by elderly survivors, memorial director Jens-Christian Wagner pulled the emergency brake. Afterwards, Prof Wagner described the pressure to uninvite Boehm as “the worst thing I’ve experienced in 25 years of memorial work”.
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The row over Omri Boehm broke just as two Berlin-based Irish pro-Palestinian activists, Bert Murray and Shane O’Brien, went public with orders against them to leave Germany by April 21st.
Officials from Berlin’s state government say O’Brien and Murray have taken part in Gaza solidarity demonstrations that “crossed a red line” on “hatred, incitement and especially anti-Semitism”. O’Brien described plans to remove him and Murray, rescinding their European Union freedom of movement in Germany, as a “feeble attempt to intimidate those who stand up against the genocide” and a “distraction” from Germany’s politics towards Israel.
The horrors of the Holocaust created a permanent, indelible link between Germany, the Jewish people and the state of Israel.
Those horrors also informed the two first and founding articles of Germany’s postwar Basic Law or constitution: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.”
So how is that going in the 18 months since the October 7th Hamas-led attacks, and Israel’s subsequent military response? Germany faces a growing dilemma over what its postwar vow of “Nie wieder”, or never again, actually means in practice.
Is “Nie wieder” a universal commitment to human dignity and human rights, or an exclusive commitment of protection to the Jewish people and Israel? In the speech he wasn’t allowed to deliver, Boehm – a grandson of Holocaust survivors – makes the case for “radical universality”, where the former includes the latter.
Many disagree with this, seeing a unique and implicit commitment evidenced by decades of quiet transfers of funds and arms to Israel.
Berlin-based Middle East analyst Peter Lintl argues that, since October 7th, Germany has faced what he calls a growing, fundamental ‘ontological dissonance’ in its postwar commitments to international human rights and Israel
In 2007, Angela Merkel made the implicit explicit, amid rising fears of Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its vow to wipe Israel from the map. She told the United Nations that year – and Israel’s Knesset a year later – that Israel’s security and existence were part of Germany’s Staatsräson or reason of state. In her memoir last year, Merkel wrote that the term Staatsräson reflects Germany’s “closer connection to Israel than many other states in the world”.
In the post-October 7th world, she added, this means challenging those who “give free rein to their hatred toward the state of Israel and Jews abuse constitutional rights to freedom of expression and assembly. This abuse has to be punished and stopped by every means available according to the rule of German law.”
There are echoes of Merkel’s arguments – and assumptions – in the exclusion orders issued by the state of Berlin against O’Brien and Murray. Both are known to police, but neither has any criminal convictions. A police assessment cited in the order against Murray says “no prognosis can be given at present” if they are part of “a violent group of the so-called pro-Palestinian scene”.
Berlin officials insist the orders are justified given the nature and frequency of as-yet unproven claims against the two, which, in turn, make likely future violent attacks endangering public order and security.
In addition, the actions and utterances of Murray and O’Brien “in effect” amount to support of Hamas in Europe and contradict German “Staatsräson”.
The former relies on a federal interior ministry order from November 2023 declaring Hamas a terrorist organisation and every utterance of “from the river to the sea”, a slogan it uses, as a show of support to be penalised. Germany’s highest courts have yet to rule on this order, however, leaving a trail of competing and contradictory rulings from lower courts on whether the context and intent of uttering the phrase play a role – or simply the perception of local police and prosecutors.
The latter, Merkel’s Staatsräson, has popped up everywhere since October 7th 2023: in Bundestag resolutions, government statements and even last Tuesday’s new coalition agreement. But the Bundestag’s own parliamentary legal service notes how, though it may inform German legislators and legislation, Staatsräson is absent in the Basic Law and the German statute books. It is a political idea that “creates neither a legal obligation nor any other legal consequence. Violations of reason of state remain without legal consequences.”
So how to explain the legal action against O’Brien and Murray? Some see it as a warning against intemperate activism, motivated by a deep sense of responsibility to Israel and Jews living in Germany. Others see an emperor’s new clothes logic at work: Berlin officials shutting down outsiders who question the status quo, rather than face the status quo’s own internal tensions.
Berlin-based Middle East analyst Peter Lintl argues that, since October 7th, Germany has faced what he calls a growing, fundamental “ontological dissonance” in its postwar commitments to international human rights and Israel.
“German elites have to do a better job of explaining how one can be made agree with the other,” said Dr Lintl of the SWP think tank. “Many people here are exhausted because they simply don’t know how to deal with Israel now.”
On Friday lawyers for O’Brien succeeded in pausing his looming expulsion ahead a of full hearing. Even if Berlin’s state government’s expulsion cases succeed, they could fall victim to the law of unintended consequences and even trigger a case before the European Court of Justice: German historical responsibility and sensitivities versus EU citizens’ fundamental rights. Grab your popcorn.
