A matter of state: The politics of German anti-anti-Semitism

By Wolfgang Streeck

First published on December 5, 2024

In part:

Sloppy language can be a strategic tool. The limits of speech (Volksverhetzung, incitement to hatred) are set in Germany by the Criminal Code; these, however, are clearly not meant here. In line with the notorious IHRA definition of May 2016,8 Habermas defines anti-Semitism as a set of “sentiments and convictions” that, while normally “cultivated” (?) in the privacy of people’s living rooms, may come to the fore, in the form of condemnations of the Israeli mass killings in Gaza suggesting that such killings might turn into, or might in fact already constitute, genocide. But who decides if a suggestion to this effect, if made, is or is not an expression of secretly “cultivated” anti-Semitism? How do Habermas and his co-inquisitors distinguish a suggestion that the Gaza war amounts to genocide made by a decent man or woman from the same suggestion made by an anti-Semite, the former to be admitted to civilized political discourse and the latter to be excluded, given that what makes the anti-Semite an anti-Semite—his or her “behind all kinds of pretenses” secretly “cultivated … sentiments and convictions”—cannot easily be observed by laypeople? The answer is, simply, that no such distinction is possible, so the solution in practice, if not in the theory of communicative action, is to cease looking for signs of anti-Semitism in observed anti-Israeli utterances but, for the sake of simplification, take such utterings themselves as signs of anti-Semitism. One can be sure that this kind of de-bureaucratization of the “free speech problem” can only be to the taste of officials in state agencies of all sorts who must be grateful to the philosopher for having provided them with a handy tool to convict those not in line with Staatsraison of having “cultivated” unacceptable state-subversive “sentiments and convictions.” At the same time, and conveniently, the Habermas denunciation machine leaves no defense to those accused of anti-Semitism for finding the Israeli conduct of the Gaza war to amount to genocide (“Some of my best friends are Jews” is unlikely to do the job.). As a result, to avoid falling into the Habermas trap, those holding critical views about the Israeli state and the German state’s “solidarity” with it and the United States on the Gaza mass killings will, in order to be on the safe side, keep their mouth shut, refrain from “communicative action” and refuse to contribute to a Habermasian collective search for collective reason in the Middle East and in Germany.

Read full article here:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13684310241300838

 

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