In Episode 85, Tamara Nassar speaks with writer and lecturer Abdel Jawad Omar in the occupied West Bank in a special episode about the interconnected history of Zionism, anti-Semitism and what Israel represents in the European collective imagination.
Abdel-Jawad traces the emergence of Zionism – the ideology of the Israeli state – in the historical context of the rise of anti-Jewish fanaticism in Europe at the turn of the last century.
“Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl and many anti-Semitic foreign policy voices, for example within the British Empire and even among some Germans or some French politicians, who saw the idea of a Jewish state outside its borders.” Europe was the solution to what was happening in Europe was called “the Jewish problem,” explains Abdel-Jawad.
“This is the background of Israel,” he continues. “We can view Zionism primarily as a mutation of anti-Semitism.”
Abdel-Jawad also addresses Zionism’s contradictions by examining its identity as a form of European colonialism while attempting to portray itself as a local movement.
“Zionism is the heir to the worst tendencies of racist systems of exclusion and exclusionary ideologies that existed and continue to exist in Europe,” explains Abdel-Jawad.
“Now Zionism is not only the heir to these ideologies, it is also the place where new racist systems of control and exclusion are created and then exported into the empire.”
Abdel-Jawad further explains how European guilt in the Holocaust, through complex debt politics, impacts support for Israeli crimes today.
Abdel-Jawad says: “The Germans and perhaps the Europeans as a whole are paying the Jews for the crimes they committed against the Jews.”
“An essential part of the idea of supporting the State of Israel and its existence and continued existence in Palestine, and thereby even justifying the existence of the German nation, is that by doing so we are actually paying off our debt.” This is an unpayable debt.
He also examines how portraying the Holocaust as above all other crimes actually facilitates Western, particularly German, support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
“The memory of the Holocaust was created as something so unique that nothing else can match it… ever again,” says Abdel-Jawad. “And in a way that also enables a lasting mitigation of the crimes committed in Palestine,” because the perpetrators and their supporters use this unique construction of the Holocaust as a protective shield to exonerate themselves.
Abdel Jawad Omar is a doctoral student and lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine.
Watch the full interview above or listen below on Soundcloud.
Items we discussed
Video produced by Tamara Nassar
Music by Sherif Zaqout
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Keywords
2023-12-31 18:48:39
#Podcast #episode #Zionism #Germany #debt #policy
