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Anti, anti, anti – for a queer movement critical of racism and anti-Semitism!

Berlin BDS-supporter: Projections filled with hatred
The Radical Queer March Berlin was disrupted and sabotaged by a concerted action of anti-Zionists on 27 July 2019. It was frightening to see the ideological aggressiveness of the BDS supporters on the demo and on various Facebook pages before and after the event. Slogans like “Palestine from the river to the sea”, blood and soil-rhetoric á la “the blood spilled of my [palestinian] people” and the continuous waving of Palestinian flags were accompanied by comments like “Israel is a fascist state that commits a slow genocide on palestinian people. The only thing missing are the gas chambers.”[1] or the omnipresent stereotype of Israeli “apartheid”, “zionist lobby” and Israeli “crimes against humanity” (by the way, a term coined for the deeds of the Nazi Germans)[2]. The latter quotations come from Leil-Zahra Mortada, one of the spokesmen of the BDS block. Even more clearly in the area of secondary antisemism moves Majed Abusalama from the “Students for Justice in Palestine”, who also fired the agitation against the Radical Queer March, and in another place talks about Gaza as an Israeli “concentration camp”[3]. Abusalama, together with Ronnie Barkan, also disturbed an event with a Shoah survivor at Humboldt University – Barkan, another supporter of the BDS block at the Radical Queer March, adorns his Facebook profile with a personal greeting from Brazilian graphic artist Carlos Latuff, who won second place in a Holocaust cartoon competition of the Iranian regime in 2006. In addition, a PFLP solidarity poster was carried in the BDS block – the PFLP for example murdered four rabbis and one policeman in 2014 [4].

The international BDS movement: uncritical pact with anti-Semitic murderers
The queer anti-Zionists describe BDS – in sharp contrast to Israel, which is consistently described as the perpetrator – as a peaceful movement of civil society. Not only the slogan “from the river to the sea” shows that the BDS is by no means concerned with an illusory ‘peaceful coexistence’ within the framework of the nation state, but with the complete destruction of the only Jewish state in the world [5]. Hamas-related groups and the PFLP were already involved in the founding of the BDS movement; they are still represented on the Coordinating Council today – murderous groups whose daily practice is the murder of Jewish civilians and, in the case of Hamas, the articulation of open anti-Judaism [6].
The BDS’s stylization of Israel into THE Western front state, THE land of settler colonialism, is absurd because it exaggerates completely one-sidedly a section of Israeli reality – racism [7] and formal military superiority over Palestinian para-state structures. All other aspects of Israeli history and present – the Shoah and centuries of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, the anti-colonial resistance of the Israeli founding phase, the illegal immigration forced against the British colonialists, the integration of hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states, the legal equality of the non-Jewish Arab Israelis etc. – are faded out. Only by blanking out these obvious facts can the distorted image of the white, imperialist Israel be drawn.

Moral vehemence instead of social criticism
This is also how the ranks of Berlin BDS supporters articulate a mixture of a peculiar, post-modern pseudo-anti-racism and an antiquated old-school anti-imperialism that was believed to have been overcome long ago. Traditionally, anti-imperialism draws a subcomplex, Manichaean image of the evil West and the good insurgent colonized. Whereas in the past there was still a broad socialist movement in some parts of the Trikont, the fantasy of a “revolutionary Palestine” articulated by the BDS supporters is particularly absurd and ahistorical in today’s times, in which no rebellious movement of subalterns can be identified. Of course, reactionary currents in post-colonial states such as Islamism and Arab nationalism are not even perceived by BDS, let alone criticized. A serious analysis of the connection between capitalist rule, state violence and (post-colonial) exploitation cannot be found among BDS supporters. A critique of the form of the nation, which also in its liberation-nationalist variant always entails the rule of a bourgeois elite, the exploitation of the proletariat, the drawing of borders and the proliferation of nationalist myths and aggressions, is also no longer conceivable for these leftists. Instead, without any positive left perspective, a content-empty fetish “Palestine” is paid homage to, which is to be “liberated” – from what and for what purpose remains unclear. The anti-imperalistic world view and the identity delusion (“Lets celebrate our Identities”), unfortunately increasingly widespread in queer circles, come together in a positive reference to a so-called “oppressed people” who are being romanticized. The renewed destruction of an important queer and antipatriarchal initiative becomes particularly drastic and absurd when it is carried out in the name of “Palestine” – i.e. a society structured almost universally homophobic, especially in the Gaza Strip, in which queer people are confronted with forced marriage, torture or murder in the event of an outing [8].

Like the progagandistic self-image of the BDS as a peaceful grassroots movement, the self-image of the Berlin demonstrators is that of peaceful, thoroughly good people – they always present themselves as victims of the others, who only called the police out of bad faith. But their oh so noble appearance is based on a moral rigorism that ignores all contradictions, a perception of the world as strictly good or bad, in which one can only play the role of the good ones. The own aggression, to hijack a demo with a justified queer request for a completely different program, to dominate it and to drown out speech contributions about transophobia with Palestinian slogans, is faded out – a complete loss of reality.
It should not be concealed that among the BDS supporters who sabotaged the Radical Queer March were some Israelis and people from the Palestinian territories or surrounding states, some of whom have certainly gained their own experience in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the case of people who are biographically involved in the conflict conducted by military means, an understanding of a particularly critical reception of Israeli government policy can be raised from a left perspective [9]. In general, however, it is completely absurd to dominate queer demos in Berlin with the Palestine theme – as if there are not dozens of military conflicts on earth, which often proceed much more murderously.

Identitary Shitstorms
However, it is not merely a mental aberration or a coincidence that parts of the left and queer scene are stuck in such an ideological impasse. Rather, the anti-Zionist identity policy is to be interpreted as an expression of a social crisis in which reflection is increasingly replaced by reflexes. This is symbolized by the form of the shit storm in the social media, in which the counterparts retreat into their own trenches and pseudo-communication serves only to confirm their own rights and moral superiority. Utopias of a completely different world beyond today’s bleak society are becoming increasingly unthinkable – identity in one’s own “community” becomes the surrogate so that people do not feel completely worthless, can feel at home and secure. Those who have nothing still have an identity. Thus, as in the whole of society, in parts of the left scene identity (Theodor W. Adorno: “pure identity is death”) and actionism – see also the spreading self-designation activist instead of communist or anarchist – are increasingly replacing analysis, reflection and the demand for (material) needs. In the USA, this identitary process is currently taking place in the split between the nativist-racial white right and the liberal democratic deputies around Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have been attacked by Trump in a racist manner. The latter, in turn, position themselves identitarian-antiracist and anti-Zionist when, like Ilhan Omar, they introduce a pro-BDS resolution into the US Congress – parts of the Black Lives Matter movement act similarly with their slogan “From Ferguson to Palestine”. Thus also on the left side a false, unreflected victim myth is cultivated, which – so our thesis – obviously attracts quite a few marginalized and racist excluded people. As in the case of the queer Berlin BDS supporters, actual experiences of domination and powerlessness seem to mix here with sometimes understandable bitterness about the German dominant society, the desire for moral superiority and clear conditions, as well as a false, personalized analysis of society, and to harden extremely. This mixture is apparently compatible with the anti-Semitic victim myth surrounding the weak, defenceless and oppressed, but morally integre “Palestine”. It is probably no coincidence that the only leftist organizations – apart from “Berlin against Pinkwashing” and similar structures close to the BDS – that welcomed the Palestine bloc on the Radical Queer March were hierarchical K-groups such as the Trotskyist “Klasse gegen Klasse,” the “SAV – Sozialistische Alternative Voran,” or people from the Jugendwiderstands-sphere. This strange alliance between queer anti-Zionists and homophobic peasants from the antiimp spectrum has already been observed on several demos in Berlin. The mixture of constant victim rhetoric and aggressive appearance also seems to attract authoritarian characters, independent of their anti-Semitic content, as they are represented in the K-groups, but apparently also in the queer scene.

Utopias instead of trenches
The events surrounding the Radical Queer March show that a materialistic critique of murderous anti-Semitism, which is always a fetishization of capitalist society and its rule and therefore one of the greatest enemies of emancipation, urgently needs to be spread again. The anti-Zionist fetish of queer pseudo-antiracism, however, should not tempt to a counter-reaction in the same identitarian paths. As little as a position is correct simply because it is represented by POC, as little should anti-racism per se be put aside. Especially in times of a massive racist dynamic in Germany with escalating Nazi terror and ongoing attacks on refugees and migrants, it is important to fight anti-identitarily against all power structures. The dynamics of the increasing anti-intellectual ideological trenches, formed on the basis of identitary categories, must be broken through. In the sense of queer as a non-place, as an open category, there is no safe place to which we can refer, but only a constantly renegotiable confrontation in the scuffle, in which we promote the utopia of a liberated world society beyond gender, wage labor, people, nation and state rule.

gruppe 8. mai [berlin – hamburg – new york]
achtermai.blogsport.de

Footnotes:
1: https://www.facebook.com/events/2356989967878298
2: See https://www.leilzahra.com/?p=997. For criticism of the racist theft of the term apartheid see Africans for Peace: Reclaiming the word Apartheid: “For black South Africans, apartheid was more than just systematic discrimination against our people. It was a project that aimed to rob a specific race of its history, culture, dignity, and humanity. Those who apply the term “apartheid” to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse are guilty of perpetuating that same theft, by denying the uniqueness of the racism and hatred that we faced, and which we have overcome with much blood and tears. While the challenges that face Israel and her neighbor Palestine may result in one group feeling discriminated against by the other, it is very different from the legally-blessed racism, based on the discredited idea of white supremacy, that once reigned in my country.” https://africansforpeace.com/reclaiming-word-apartheid/
3: “Abusalama equated […] the inhabitants of Gaza with the victims of the National Socialist extermination practice: “I would go further than the formulation ghetto, but ultimately say [that] it is literally a concentration camp” http://antifaelf.blogsport.de/2017/06/29/protests-against-bds-event-in-oldenburg/
4: See RIAS: “At least one person carried a poster with the inscription “Solidarity with Khaled Barakat”. Barakat is an official of the terrorist organization “People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP). Only in 2014 two PFLP members had murdered four rabbis and one policeman in a synagogue in Jerusalem, another rabbi died as a result of the attack. The PFLP confessed to the act and described it as a form of resistance that needed to be intensified.“ https://www.facebook.com/notes/recherche-und-informationsstelle-antisemitismus-rias/israelfeindschaft-und-antisemitismus-zur-pride-week-2019-in-berlin/2389828441338830/
5: Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS, also openly advocates a position against the two-state solution time and again, cf. here: https://electronicintifada.net/content/boycotts-work-interview-omar-barghouti/8263
Barghouti is also openly in favour of “resistance by any means, including armed resistance”: https://spme.org/anti-semitism/omar-barghouti-ucla-echoes-1930s-europe/16720/?fbclid=IwAR1jMxr1fE_Vo8oWk3B1p8tqAkhAqcpAdIkDMeoUgMghv0EySbCpWukqPiU
Why BDS is anti-Semitic has been proven very often – see for example here: https://engageonline.wordpress.com/2016/06/01/why-bds-is-antisemitic-david-hirsh/
6: See IIBSA: Die antisemitische Boykottkampagne BDS: “With the BDS National Committee (BNC), the BDS campaign has had a coordinating body since 2007. The Council of Palestinian National and Islamic Forces is listed first among the members of the BNC. This is an association to which the terrorist groups Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the People’s Front belong. All these organisations are on the EU terror list. In Germany, too, representatives of the BDS campaign often appeared in the presence of these terrorist groups. For example at anniversary events of the terrorist organisation PFLP in Berlin or at a European conference of Hamas supporters in Berlin 2015” https://iibsa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Die-antisemitische-Boykottkampagne-BDS-Eine-Handreichung_IIBSA.pdf.pdf
7: We do not see racism as a specific feature of Israel, but as a basic category of capitalist socialization.
8: See for instance this current report: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/.premium-pride-and-prejudice-the-hellish-life-of-gaza-s-lgbtq-community-1.7403501
9: However, they should also be criticized for their anti-emancipatory conceptual apparatus, which does not stop at anti-Semitic stereotypes, as well as for their lack of sensitivity regarding their place of speaking in a racist AND anti-Semitically structured society such as Germany.