1 Introduction
On July 9, 2005, a coalition of more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups called âupon international civil society organisations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid eraâ (BDS 2005). The date marked the first anniversary of the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the âLegal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territoryâ (ICJ Reports 2004). Israel had ignored the Courtâs opinion that the construction of the wall was to be halted immediately, that the parts that had already been built were to be dismantled, and that Israel was to make reparations for all damage caused by the construction. The boycott coalition called for ânon-violent punitive measuresâ âuntil Israel meets its obligation to recognise the Palestinian peopleâs inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:
Ending its occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194â (BDS 2005).1
The call has been heeded by activists and organisations all over the world (Thrall 2018). Because the Israeli government considered the global movement for BDS a major security threat, the Ministry for Strategic Affairs implemented
In 2009, the European Court of Human Rights still upheld Franceâs criminal conviction of an elected mayor who had asked the local governmentâs catering services to boycott Israeli orange juice in order to protest the âatrocitiesâ of then prime-minister Ariel Sharon (Willem c. France, par. 7). The mayor had been convicted for discriminating against Israeli producers of orange juice on the ground of their nationality (Willem c. France, par. 16). However, in 2020, the Court unequivocally recognised that calling for a boycott is an âact to provoke or stimulate debate on a topic of general interestâ that is protected by the fundamental right to freedom of expression, and that the campaign of a French BDS group handing out flyers in a supermarket had nothing to do with racism, antisemitism, hatred, violence, or intolerance (Baldassi c. France, par. 70).
In Willem c. France, the dissenting Judge Jungwiert had already objected that â[i]t is easy to imagine that in a similar case, a mayor (who is almost always a member of a political party) calls, for instance, for a boycott of products from the United States to protest against the war in Iraq, of Russian products because of the conflict in Chechnya, or of Chinese merchandise for occupying Tibetâ (Willem c. France, Dissenting Opinion of Judge Jungwiert). Although the majority of the judges were not persuaded by Judge Jungwiertâs hypothetical comparisons in this particular case, his dissenting opinion points to the centrality of comparison, both to boycotting as a political practice and to discussions
The Bundestag wants to decide [wolle beschlieÃen]:
I. The German Bundestag determines [stellt fest]:
(â¦) The model of argumentation and the methods of the BDS movement are antisemitic. Moreover, the calls for campaigning for a boycott of Israeli artists, as well as the stickers on Israeli trade products that are supposed to deter people from buying them, recall [erinnern an] the most terrible phase of German history. âDonât Buyâ [sic] stickers of the BDS movement on Israeli products inevitably awaken [wecken unweigerlich] associations with the Nazi slogan, âDonât buy from Jews!â and similar graffitiâs on storefronts and shop windows. (Bundestag 2019)3
Although the Bundestag determines in this resolution that the BDS movementâs calls and stickers inevitably awaken associations with the 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businessesânote the tension between the wilful speech acts of resolving, deciding, and determining and the alleged inevitability of the awakening of associationsâBDS in fact bears few resemblances to the Nazi boycott. Whereas the Nazi boycott was a campaign led by a powerful government against an oppressed minority, the BDS movement is a grassroots protest movement of an oppressed minority against a powerful government. This makes the BDS movement much more similar to what are arguably the five
Of course, these famous boycotts were all grassroots campaigns against colonial regimes upheld by the British Empire and its postcolonial successors, and some German intellectuals have suggested that boycotts awaken very different associations in Germany than in other contexts. For instance, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, the director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at Berlinâs Technical University, has maintained that â[i]n Germany, a boycott is a difficult form of protestâ (cited in Eddy and Marshall 2018). âHistorically,â Schüler-Springorum submitted, âit has a completely different resonance, as basically the Nazisâ first step against an ethnic minority. Therefore it is simply not acceptableâ (cited in Eddy and Marshall 2018).
However, despite her insistence on the need for a historical and contextual understanding of the resonance and associations of boycott in Germany, Schüler-Springorum, like the Bundestag resolution, ignores what is indisputably one of the most important boycotts in German history. From 1933 to 1941, Jewish groups, labour unions, and other civil society organisations in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and many other countries organised a global boycott to protest the Nazi governmentâs anti-Semitism. Although there had been anti-Semitic boycotts of Jewish stores before, the April 1, 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and Jewish lawyers and physicians to which the Bundestag resolution and Schüler-Springorum seem to be alluding was, in fact, a counter-boycott against this global boycott (Gottlieb 1982, 15â24; Bartrop and Grimm 2022, 8â9). The fact that Schüler-Springorum and the Bundestag resolution do not even mention this eight-year-long, global anti-Nazi boycott is surprising because, as I will argue in the next section, BDS is much more similar to this transnational solidarity boycott than to the national anti-Jewish boycotts imposed by the Nazi government.4
In this chapter, I develop a critique of the Bundestagâs attempt to legislate the âinevitableâ awakening of associations between calls for BDS and Nazi calls
2 The Global Anti-Nazi Boycott of the 1930s and the Haavara Agreement
Less than two months after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, a small American Jewish defence group named the Jewish War Veterans called for âa strict boycott against German merchandise to serve as protest against Nazi anti-Semitismâ (New York Times 1933). On April 1, the German Nazi party organised the infamous nation-wide boycott against German Jews in order to counter the âanti-German atrocity propaganda and threats of boycottâ by Anglo-American Jews (Gottlieb 1973, 199). On the same day in Paris, the International League Against Anti-Semitism in Paris declared a boycott of German goods âuntil the downfall of Adolf Hitler or the resumption of full rights for German Jewsâ (Black 1984, 80).
The boycott movement continued to spread in May, 1933, with boycotts in Cairo, Gibraltar, and Buenos Aires; examples included a disruption of a screening of a German film in Paris; a boycott of German ocean liners in London; and boycott groups in Amsterdam who printed thousands of âboycott stampsâ with a âswastika transmuted into a four-headed snake behind prison barsâ for use on letters and packages, which soon became an âinternational boycott toolâ (Black 1984, 125). Towards the end of May, the British Trades Union Congress declared the anti-Nazi boycott mandatory for its members, as did the Dutch Federation of Trade Unions and the Dutch Labour Party. On July 20, an international boycott conference was held in the Carlton Hotel in Amsterdam, the World Jewish Economic Conferenceâa nod to the World Economic Conference held in Londonâwith delegates from sixteen countries, including the U.S., Britain and France, South Africa and Egypt, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and Latvia present, and the support of âallied Jewish organisationsâ in ten other countries (Hawkins 2022, 152). The conference resolved, among other things, â[t]hat boycotting of German goods, products and shipping throughout the civilised world is the only effective weapon for world Jewry and humanity by way of defence and protection of Jewish rights, property and dignity in Germanyâ (Birchall 1933; Gottlieb 1982, 386). Anticipating a further transnational coordination and consolidation of the boycott, various boycott movements adopted the slogan, âGermany will crack this winterâ (Black 1984, 185).
It is likewise an unbearable burden for world economic relations that it should be possible in some countries for some ideological reason
or other to let loose a wild boycott agitation [eine wilde Boykotthetze] against other countries and their goods and so practically to eliminate them from the market. It is my belief, Mr. Roosevelt, that it would be a great service if you, with your great influence, would remove these barriers genuinely to free world trade, beginning with the United States. For I am convinced that if the leaders of nations are not even capable of regulating production in their own countries, or of removing boycott agitation [Boykotthetzen] pursued for ideological reasons which can damage trade relations between countries to so great an extent, there is much less prospect of achieving any really fruitful step toward improvement of economic relations by means of international agreements. Only thus will the equal right to buy and sell on the world market be secured, indeed for everyone. (Gottlieb 1982, 346 (trans. modified) and Hitler 1939, 58)
The Germans promised to waive restrictions on taking currency out of the country for Jews emigrating to Palestine who were allowed to keep £1,000 of their assets to qualify for settlement in Palestine outside of British immigration quotas for poorer Jews going there. In return these and potential future German Jewish immigrants to Palestine placed the remainder of their capital in blocked accounts to subsidise the purchase of German goods for export to Zionist enterprises in Palestine. The savings accrued by the Zionists from this method of price reduction on needed German products were converted into cash allotments for the German Jewish immigrants who received approximately 50% of the money they had left behind in Germany. (Baron 1987, 186)
According to Baron, the agreement was an economic win both for the Nazis and for the Jewish economy in Palestine. But in signing the agreement, the World Zionist Organisation broke the anti-Nazi boycott.
I have recalled these basic events of the global anti-Nazi boycott of the 1930s and the Haavara agreement because of the Bundestag resolutionâs claim
When interpreting BDS historically, in a German context, it is also important to recall that the origins of the strong trade relations between Germany and Israel which calls for BDS in Germany targetâGermany is Israelâs most important trading partner in the European Unionâlie in the Haavara agreement. Indeed, due to the Haavara agreement, Germany had overtaken the United Kingdom, which was the Mandatory Power, as the first exporting country to Palestine in 1937 (Bartrop and Grimm 2022, 102). Although the Nazis did not support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, out of an anti-Semitic fear of strengthening the supposed global Jewish conspiracy (Bartrop and Grimm 2022, 102), their objective in concluding the Haavara agreement, apart from breaking the global anti-Nazi boycott, was to get German Jews to leave Germany (Brenner 1984).
3 Staatsräson, Memory, and Miracles: Taking Exception to Historical Comparison
How, then, does the Bundestag resolution intervene in the remembrance of boycott history in Germany? In this section, I interpret the Bundestagâs attempt to legislate an alternative historical resonance of boycott in Germany as an enactment of the concept of Staatsräson, which the resolution mentions twice: âA decided, unconditional no to hatred against Jewesses and Jews of whatever nationality is part of the German Staatsräsonâ; and âThe security of Israel is part of the Staatsräson of our countryâ (Bundestag 2019).
Staatsräson is a controversial concept. According to conservative Catholic constitutional theorist and Nazi lawyer Carl Schmitt, the doctrine of Staatsräson, which originated in the Italian Renaissance, used to be invoked to justify the breach of a rule when special circumstances or a state of emergency required
The first use of the concept of Staatsräson by a German government official in the context of German-Israeli relations was a 2005 article by Rudolf DreÃler, a former German ambassador to Israel (Hever 2019, 87; Michaels 2023a, 34).5 Pointing to the importance of good relations with Israel for Germanyâs global reputation and to the fact that many of Israelâs driving forces consider Germany âpolitically and economically, scientifically and technologically the second most important partner after the United States,â DreÃler argued: âthe secure existence of Israel is in the German national interest, and is thus part of our Staatsräsonâ (DreÃler 2005). The latter phrase contains a curious expansion of the meaning of Staatsräson. The concept has usually been invoked to justify the suspension of the rule of law, not when suspending the law just happened to be in the national interest, but when what DreÃler calls the âsecure existenceâ of the state was at stake. That is, Staatsräson has usually been invoked to justify not simply what is politically expedient but what is politically necessary. However, DreÃler connects the secure existence of the Israeli state to the Staatsräson of the German state without arguing that the preservation of the German state depends on the preservation of the Israeli state. He simply argues that the secure existence of Israel is good for Germanyâs global
Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel finds no equivalent in the German culture. The memory of the horror, of the oppression, of the terror, of the events characterized by destruction and mass annihilation can have no equivalent. Holocaust Remembrance Day in Yad Vashem is part of the Israeli Staatsräson. (DreÃler 2005)
By using the concept of Staatsräson in this passage, DreÃler suggests that the preservation of the Israeli state hinges on the official cultivation of the memory of the Holocaust as incomparable (without equivalent). Whereas the concept of Staatsräson has usually been invoked by states deciding that exceptional circumstances necessitate exceptional measures, DreÃler connects the exceptionality associated with the concept of Staatsräson to the content or substance of those measures. To preserve the Israeli state against existential threatsâIsrael declared the state of exception on the day of its foundation, and this state of exception has been extended ever since (Sivan and Laborie 2016, 139)âit needs to officially commemorate the Holocaust as an exceptional historical event.
According to DreÃler, Israelâs decision to invite the German ambassador to Holocaust Remembrance Day should not be interpreted as a sign of the ânormalisationâ of German-Israeli relations, because: âThe German-Israeli relations cannot be ânormalââconforming to the norm. Put differently: according to the regulations or ordinary, common or averageâ (DreÃler 2005). DreÃler associated normalisation with âSchlussstrich-Debatteâ about the Second World War: discussions that want to put a full stop behind the past and move on with a clean slate (DreÃler 2005).
While the concept of normalisation had played an important role in German foreign affairs since the 1970s, the concept has also been associated with the position of conservative historians in the 1986 Historikerstreit or historiansâ dispute. Comparatist Michael Rothberg summarises this dispute as follows: âAt a moment when Christian Democratic Chancellor Helmut Kohl was seeking to ânormaliseâ West Germanyâs position in global politics, [philosopher Jürgen] Habermas saw such prominent intellectuals as Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber attempting to rehabilitate a âpositiveâ national identity by
Every federal government and every chancellor before me was committed to Germanyâs special historical responsibility for the security of Israel. This historical responsibility of Germany is part of my countryâs Staatsräson. (Merkel 2008)
I could not stand before you today and speak to you as the chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany raised in the former GDR, if after the Second World War in the then Federal Republic, there had not been politicians like Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl. They believed in the power of freedom, the power of democracy, and the power of human dignity. In this way, they have been capable of making the seemingly impossible possible: the fulfillment [Vollendung] of the unity of Germany in peace and freedom, and with that the atonement [Versöhnung] of the European continent. From the experience that the impossible can become possible, we can draw the determination and the confidence that any effort will pay off that brings the Near East a big step closer to a peaceful cooperation. Or to say it with the well-known words of David Ben-Gurion: âHe who does not believe in miracles [Wunder] is not a realist.â When today, on the 60th anniversary of the foundation of the state Israel, we consider the German-Israeli relations, we know that his sentence has proven to be both realistic and correct. Yes, these are special, unique relationsâwith everlasting responsibility for the past, with common values, with mutual trust, with great solidarity with each other, and with united confidence. (Merkel 2008)
According to Merkel, the special relations between Germany and Israel originate from the exceptional violence of the Holocaust and have been redeemed by leaders who believe in miracles by acknowledging Germanyâs exceptional responsibility and by acting on it. Just as DreÃler argued that Germanyâs âspecial responsibilityâ was being accomplished by Germanyâs military cooperation with Israelâthe crew of a German warship visited Yad Vashem during a joint military exercise (DreÃler 2005)âMerkelâs speech, which made repeated reference to Iranâs nuclear capabilities, served to legitimate the supply of submarines with nuclear capabilities to the Israeli navy (Hever 2019, 87).
In 2017, then Social Democratic (SPD) leader Martin Schulz used the concept of Staatsräson in a televised debate with Merkel (Hever 2019, 87). Schulz said: âThere are for instance young Palestinian men who come to us, who have been raised with a deeply rooted anti-Semitism, who must be told in clear language: âThere is only room for you in this country if you accept that Germany is a country that protects Israel, that that is our Staatsräsonâ (cited in Fruchtman 2017).8 Schulzâs invocation of the concept of Staatsräson exemplifies the
The Bundestagâs anti-BDS resolution not only posits that the security of Israel is part of Germanyâs Staatsräson, but the resolution itself is already an application of this idea. In welcoming â[t]he fact that countless municipalities have already decided to refuse the BDS movement [â¦] financial support and the allocation of communal spaces,â the Bundestag welcomes the suspension of the fundamental right to freedom of assembly of BDS activists. German courts have so far confirmed that the refusals of municipal meeting spaces to BDS activists violate the German Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights, and in 2023, a Frankfurt court confirmed in a case finding a ban on an assembly on âPeace and Justice in the Near Eastâ unconstitutional that âthe observance of fundamental rights is not conditional on a Staatsräsonâ (VG Frankfurt 5. Kammer 2023). Furthermore, the German Federal Constitutional Court already recognised in 1958 that calling for a boycott was protected political speech in a landmark judgment about a 1950 cultural boycott against Veit Harlan, the director of the infamous anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda film Jud Süà (Lüth; Bot 2019). In determining, without any evidence, that âthe mode of argumentation and methods of the BDS movement are anti-Semitic,â the Bundestag criminalises BDS activists, suspending their fundamental right to freedom of speech.
Furthermore, in âdeterminingâ or âdecidingâ that âDonât Buyâ [sic] stickers of the BDS movement on Israeli products inevitably awaken associations with the Nazi slogan, âDonât buy from Jews!â and similar graffiti on storefronts and shop windows,â the Bundestag seeks to regulate what âinevitablyâ awakens which memories in peopleâs minds. Thus, the Bundestag resolution also suspends the fundamental right to freedom of thought.
A private man has always the liberty (because thought is free) to believe or not believe, in his heart, those acts that have been given out for miracles, according as he shall see what benefit can accrue, by menâs belief, to those that pretend or countenance them, and thereby conjecture whether they be miracles or lies. But when it comes to confession of that faith, the private reason must submit to the public; that is to say, to Godâs lieutenant [i.e. the sovereign or the state]. (Hobbes 1994, 300)
Carl Schmitt identified this passage, in his 1938 book on The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes, as â[t]he seed of death that destroyed the mighty leviathan from within and brought about the end of the mortal godâ (Schmitt 2008, 57). Indeed, Schmitt lamented: âOnly a few years after the appearance of the Leviathan, the first liberal Jew [Spinoza] noticed the barely visible crack in the theoretical justification of the sovereign stateâ (Schmitt 2008, 57, trans. modified). Allowing private citizens âthe right of private freedom of thought and belief,â Schmitt argued, erodes the stateâs vitality from within (Ibid.). In his 1922 Political Theology, Schmitt had already argued that â[t]he state of exception has a meaning for jurisprudence that is analogous to the meaning that the miracle has for theologyâ (Schmitt 2004, 43). For Schmitt, letting private citizens decide whether or not they believe in miracles completely undermines the sovereignâs position as âthe one who decides on the state of exceptionâ (Schmitt 2004, 13). According to Schmittâs antiliberal political theory, the state should dictate the belief in exceptional events. DreÃlerâs suggestion that the preservation of the Israeli state depends on official commemorations of
4 Resisting the Exception
Calls for BDS and the Bundestagâs anti-BDS resolution instantiate a conflict between two competing solidarities: a solidarity with Palestinians that activates memories of anticolonial resistance and global solidarity with the oppressed and a solidarity with the Israeli nation-state that grounds itself in memories of the Holocaust (Collins 2011, 147; Rothman and Zimmerman 2019, 9). However, while the call for BDS is a call for solidarity with the Palestinian people that is grounded in law, the Bundestag resolutionâs solidarity with Israel is a solidarity among nation-states that takes exception to the rule of law. While campaigns for BDS are attempts by civil society organisations at legal mobilisation âfrom below,â aimed at ending Israelâs occupation and colonisation of all Arab lands, the dismantling of the wall, equal rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the German governmentâs solidarity with the Israeli state is grounded in extra-legal invocations of the exceptional concept of Staatsräson âfrom the top.â While the BDS movement compares itself to a historical boycott movement with which it has a lot in common, the Bundestag resolution insists on an exceptional comparison between calls for BDS and a boycott with which it has almost nothing in common.
Various authors have argued that what the BDS movement is boycotting is ultimately the exception itself (Sivan and Laborie 2016, 137â40; Feldman 2019, 196â98). In its demand that Israel comply with international law, the BDS movement resists what Sivan and Laborie call âthe Israeli model of the permanent state of exception justified by national securityâ (Sivan and Laborie 2016, 140). It is not surprising, then, that attempts to censor the BDS movement also take the form of exceptional measures. As a âmere act of parliament,â the Bundestagâs anti-BDS resolution is not actually legally binding (Gärditz 2020). However, it may be exactly its non-legally binding status that gives this resolution its political power to censor BDS activism, like the notorious 2016 ânon-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitismâ promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA 2016), which is cited
It is important, then, to resist the Bundestagâs attempt to foreclose associations and resonances between BDS and similar historical boycotts, as well as the Bundestagâs legislation of exceptional associations between BDS and a boycott with which it has little in common, by interpreting BDS within the political history of boycott through concrete historical analysis and critical comparison. As historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti argued, such an interpretation involves a âexamining the location of boycott within broader strategies of liberation unfolding at different historical juncturesâ (Takriti 2019, 59). Takriti cautions against an â[a]nalysis of boycott qua boycott [that] tells us little about the relationship between boycott and the actual struggles it is meant to serve,â which risks â[p]rivileging the tactical form over the substantive principles underlying it, not to mention the material realities it is meant to alterâ (Takriti 2019, 59). Especially in anticolonial contexts, Takriti argues, abstract analysis of boycott, for instance in social movement theory or in the âcontentious politics
Takriti focuses on the genealogy of boycott in Palestinian politics, tracing lineages of Palestinian boycott back to boycotts in Ottoman Palestine against the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908 and against Zionist colonisation in the 1910s (Takriti 2019, 60). Takriti suggests that abstract analyses of âboycott qua boycottâ are especially problematic in the context of Palestine, because boycott was in fact âat the core of the Zionist project in Palestine,â with its doctrines of âconquest of laborâ and âHebrew labourâ that excluded Arab workers and â[shunned] Jews who did not participate in enforcing this exclusionâ (Takriti 2019, 61). According to economist Shir Hever, the practice of boycotting Palestinian labour, â[a]lthough today officially illegal in Israel, still persists in thousands of Israeli businesses, which advertise their commitment not to employ Arab workersâ (Hever 2013, 109). Takriti not only analyses Palestinian boycotts in the context of the Zionist boycott of Palestinian labour, but also in the context of the removal and subsequent denial of political rights for Palestinians.
This genealogy is important to recall because, as I mentioned at the beginning, BDS is a Palestinian-led movement that started with a call by more than 140 Palestinian civil society organisations. The Bundestagâs attempt to legislate a German national resonance for calls for BDS disavows the fundamental transnational or global nature of the BDS movement. Against this attempt to legislate an exceptional national boycott memory, critical comparison can open up space for foreclosed transnational resonances between BDS and boycotts against anti-democratic regimes elsewhere.
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Reinbothe, Roswitha. 2019. Deutsch als internationale Wissenschaftssprache und der Boykott nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rothberg, Michael. 2022. âLived Multidirectionality: âHistorikerstreit 2.0â and the Politics of Holocaust Memory.â Memory Studies 15, No. 6: 1316â1329.
Rothman, E. Nathalie and Andrew Zimmerman. 2019. âEditorsâ Introduction.â Radical History Review 132 (May 2019): 1â24.
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On the global campaign for BDS, see generally Barghouti 2011, Thrall 2018, and the edited volumes, Wiles 2013 and Estefan, Kuoni, and Raicovich 2017.
On the role of comparison in boycott politics, see the special issue on âThe Politics of Boycottâ of the Radical History Review, especially the introduction (Rothman and Zimmerman 2019) and Takriti 2019 on âlineages of boycott in Palestine.â See also Bot 2019.
All translations of German texts are mine unless otherwise noted. For an informative overview and analysis of the attempts to censor BDS in Germany, including the Bundestag resolution, see Hever 2019. For an in-depth analysis of the discourse on fighting anti-Semitism in Germany over the past two decades, see Younes 2020. For analyses of the Bundestag resolution, see Wetterau and Benz 2020, 59â64 (in German) and Asseburg 2019.
In the German context, BDS is also more similar to the transnational post-World War I boycott of German scientists and scholarly organisations because of their role in spreading war propaganda, a boycott that led to the demise of German as one of the main languages of science (Reinbothe 2019). BDS is also more similar to the transnational anti-apartheid movement that had a prominent presence in both West and East Germany (Brede 2016, 359). And in his monograph on boycott in the context of organised labor in Germany, Gerhard Binkert mentions ânumerous cases of boycott in the late 19th century,â including blacklisting and consumer boycotts (Binkert 1981, 23).
Michaels finds one precedent in a 2001 article in Die Welt by a journalist: Michaels 2023a, 34.
Ralf Michaels notes that Merkel had already used the concept in the context of German-Israeli relations in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2007, but that this speech received little attention (Michaels 2023a, 33).
Shir Hever points to the theological stance towards the Israeli state of the Evangelical Church, Germanyâs biggest church, as an important influence on German-Israeli relations (Hever 2019, 3). See also historian A. Dirk Mosesâ critique of âGermanyâs Catechismâ in Dirk Moses 2021.
On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas killed, took hostage, and kidnapped hundreds of people in Southern Israel, German Chancellor Scholz also equated the security of Israel with Germanyâs Staatsräson altogether: âIsraelâs security is German Staatsräsonâ (Scholz 2023).
In contemporary jurisprudence, freedom of thought still appears, for instance, in cases about proselytism, such as Kokkinakis v. Greece before the European Court of Human Rights.
âAccording to the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. Beyond that, the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity, can also be the target of such attacks.â (Bundestag 2019)