Yesterday in Berlin, the Russian-American Jewish writer Masha Gessen reproached Germany for the widespread attitude among politicians, media and cultural institutions of staunch defense of Israel, a result of the historical memory of the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust, despite the thousands of Palestinian civilians. deaths that the Israeli army is causing with its military actions in Gaza.
Gessen, winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought, received it in a discreet event with a small audience on Saturday in Bremen, after the City Council of the Hanseatic city and the Heinrich Böll Foundation – linked to the Greens party – canceled the solemn ceremony scheduled on another date in the imposing municipal Gothic building. Reason: an article by Gessen in The New Yorker magazine titled In the Shadow of the Holocaust, in which he stated that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany,” a ghetto that “is being liquidated.”
In a conversation before a large audience on Monday evening at the Berlin headquarters of the Heinrich Böll Foundation – which thus wanted to correct its withdrawal from the initial handover ceremony – Masha Gessen defended this comparison, which the foundation considers “unacceptable.” The author recalled that, in the Holocaust, “not all Jews were murdered in the gas chambers, 1.3 million died of hunger and disease; and Human Rights Watch has verified that Israel uses hunger as a weapon in this war; “This is a war crime.” According to Gessen, the big difference with the Nazi ghettos in Europe is that “many people in Gaza are still alive and the world still has the opportunity to do something.”
Masha Gessen (Moscow, 1967), a transgender and non-binary person, moved to live in New York in 2013 due to the growing hostility of Vladimir Putin’s Russia towards the LGBTI community. Precisely because of the dissident Gessen’s challenge to the Kremlin’s narrative and for denouncing in her writings the massacres of Ukrainian civilians due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Hannah Arendt Prize jury, meeting this summer, decided to award her.
Gessen insists that Germany’s memory of the Holocaust stifles free and open debate about Israel. In Germany, the political and cultural class generally shows unwavering support for Israel after the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7 with its hundreds of deaths, and denounces the resurgent anti-Semitism, putting it in relation to the presence of Muslims with Palestinian sympathies. in German society.
In Berlin, Masha Gessen assured that “the Israeli army has orders not to take prisoners; people who are not armed, people who surrender, are shot,” in reference to the death of three Israeli hostages, unarmed and carrying a white flag, who were shot by the army. Gessen also stated regarding the low profile of the award ceremony in Bremen: “The attempt to silence me failed and achieved the opposite.” At the Berlin audience, her sentences were sometimes received with applause and other times with discomfort.
