Do Europeans hate silently? Palestinian Protests through the Lens of European Antisemitism

• In Event: Politics of Hate? Crafting European Belonging through anti-Jewish Hatreds Old and New

Abstract

Since the beginning of the new millennium Palestinian and Middle Eastern communities have taken to the streets in order to protest the wars and political condition in Israel-Palestine. In Germany, a number of these protests and their passionate outbreak into violent speech triggered the question of where the line between freedom of speech and hate speech exactly was. In addition, members of the wider public asked why Middle Easterners specifically needed to demonstrate their hatred of Israel so explicitly. Was this not anti-Semitic? How could these kinds of actions just go unfiltered onto German street? Was there no sense of shame or guilt that could buffer this hate?

This paper asks what kind of speech and action are considered hateful and anti-Semitic in the context of Germany. Is hate attributed to certain words and expressions or to the form of articulation? Or is hate located in the addressee? Are certain things taboo because they refer to the historically injured group of Jews, but acceptable when they address other groups such as the Roma, Sinti, and Muslims? This presentation follows up on these questions by referencing ethnographic research about tolerance education in the classroom setting of a middle school in a Berlin migrant neighborhood.

This paper discusses how European tropes of antisemitism are transposed onto Palestinian protests in order to prompt self-reflection about hate speech among immigrant youth. Instead, students self-censor. By demonstrating how immigrant youth learn to categorize certain speech and tropes as antisemitic, the paper addresses how Palestinian protests are not only categorized as hate acts but also framed as expressions of religiously-driven Muslim hatred of Jews. The paper argues that while immigrant youth of Middle Eastern descent are socialized into policing their language as Germans do, their failure to do so racializes them once more as Muslim. While aimed at protecting an injured Jewish body, this approach to antisemitism as a universally given category transposed onto new historical settings, contexts and religious groups reifies the problem it seeks to deconstruct.

Author

• Sultan Doughan