Translation of Samuli Schielke's 'Censorship through intimation: Preliminary report from the Ghassan Hage case against the Max Planck Society'

Anyone who expected that a German labor court would not be a place for courtroom dramas was proven wrong last Tuesday. The Halle Labor Court met for almost five hours on December 10, 2024 to discuss the lawsuit brought by Ghassan Hage against the Max Planck Society because of his immediate, alternative, ordinary dismissal in February 2024. The decision was not in his favour. The court only agreed with him formally, but not in substance. The following are my notes from the verdict, which are not identical in wording to the verdict. The exact wording of the reasons for the judgment will be announced later in writing.

“- The employment relationship was not terminated by an extraordinary termination, but by an ordinary termination, issued on February 7, 2024 and with effect from March 31, 2024.

- The plaintiff and the defendant share the costs 50:50.

- The plaintiff (i.e. Ghassan Hage) has through his October 7 posts, published on November 7th and 16th, 2023, seriously violated his duties, so significantly that a warning would have been of no use: this was due to the lack of compassion (towards the Israeli victims of Hamas’ murders– GH) in his post on October 7th, and because in his post from November 16, Israel is referred to as a 'project,' which denies Israel's existence under international law. The Chamber is not convinced that the defendant (i.e. the Max Planck Society) made this decision out of the blue. Therefore, for formal reasons, the termination without notice was ineffective. We (i.e. the court) deliberately are not talking about anti-Semitism. The (challenging of the) constitutional statehood of Israel is sufficient ground (for dismissal) and the plaintiff should be aware of this.”

The press office of the labor court published the following statement on the day after the verdict:

“The director of the Halle Labor Court and his chamber came to the conclusion that the extraordinary termination was ineffective for formal reasons due to non-compliance with the exclusion period of § 626 BGB, but that the alternative, ordinary, termination ended the employment relationship at the end of March 31, 2024.

In the verdict that followed the chamber hearing, the director of the Halle Labor Court emphasized that the plaintiff, in particular with his posts from October 7, 2023 and November 16, 2023 and by questioning the established statehood of Israel, had violated his existing employment contractual obligations so severely that the ordinary termination did not require a prior warning.”

An amicable agreement that had almost been reached had previously failed. After long negotiations, the parties had agreed on a text in which Hage declared that he accepts that his publicly expressed views were incompatible with the interests of the Max Planck Society, and the MPG made it clear that the last paragraph of its press release of February 7th (that mentions anti-semitism – GH) does not refer to Ghassan Hage, but represents a general statement. In addition, Hage's inaugural lecture should be put online again. MPG's lawyer presented this draft to the MPG board, which rejected this clarification. The judge nevertheless repeatedly and repeatedly pushed for an agreement in which both parties declare that they have no differences of opinion, but Hage did not accept this because it did not resolve the reputational damage caused by the termination and the associated allegations.

After the hearing, I asked Hage for a statement. He commented as follows: “I am disappointed, but a part of me is not disappointed.”

I asked him what part of him isn't disappointed. He replied:
“There was a strange comfort in hitting a brick wall at the court. It’s a bit like you realise that what you are facing is a natural disaster, not a social disaster. It has at least some element of a natural disaster. Like, the unthinkingness of what I heard was, wow!”

In a Facebook post that same evening I announced a report with more details. Here it is. A longer report looking at the background and consequences of the affair will hopefully appear in Zenith Magazine next year.

 

What has happened so far

 

On February 4, 2024, with cleverly compiled passages from various posts on social media, Welt am Sonntag accused Ghassan Hage of “inhumane cynicism” and spoke of an “anti-Semitism scandal.” The text aimed to provoke a negative emotional reaction from readers towards Hage and made it clear that he was an incorrigible anti-Semite. But nowhere in the text did it explicitly say that Hage was anti-Semitic or that his statements were anti-Semitic. This omission is important, as we will soon see.

The accusation was picked up by many German media outlets, while Hage received more international support, including from colleagues in Israel. After examining the contributions, I came to the conclusion that the accusation of anti-Semitism against Hage is demonstrably false. Hage is a staunch opponent of Israel and angry about its extreme methods of warfare in the ongoing war in Gaza. He has also mourned the Israeli victims of October 7, 2023, but his sympathies are firmly on the Palestinian side. He finds resistance to Israel fundamentally legitimate, but has not advocated extreme violence against civilians. He certainly supports a one-state solution in which Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze and others live in a democratic state with equal rights. You can accuse him of idealism, but not anti-Semitism. But his positions on the question of opposition or support towards Israel are certainly incompatible with those of the Max Planck Society. The MPG has resolutely shown solidarity for Israel and mourning for the Israelis who were killed. It has shown no solidarity for Palestine and Palestinians. In a statement on October 11, 2023, the MPG spoke of “unspeakable suffering among the Palestinian civilian population,” but attributed this suffering exclusively to Hamas’s murderous initiative; as if the government of Israel had had no choice in the use of the extremely murderous means it has used in its war of retaliation ever since. Most recently, the MPG expanded its institutional presence in Israel. In early December 2024 it opened an office in West Jerusalem. It is not expected that Hage and the Max Planck Society will agree on this.

 

On leave from his professorship in Sydney, Hage came to the Max Planck Institute for Ethnology in Halle as a full-time visiting professor in 2023. The position was extended to a half-time position for 2024 with a rating of 15/6 according to the public service collective agreement, with a gross monthly salary of 3,572 euros - a bargain price for a world-famous researcher. On February 7, 2024, he received a notice of dismissal without notice, or alternatively, ordinary notice. (“As an alternative, ordinary” means that if the termination without notice is revoked, an ordinary termination will instead take place on the next legally permitted date, in this case March 31, 2024.) He went to court against this.

 

Accusation by intimation

The Max Planck Society published the following statement on Hage's termination on February 7, 2024:

“The Lebanese-Australian scientist Ghassan Hage, who is well-known and respected in the specialist community, has been working at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology since April 2023. Among the views he has recently shared on social media, many are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society. The Max Planck Society therefore separated from him in agreement with the Institute.

The freedom rights guaranteed by the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany for 75 years are an inestimably valuable asset for the Max Planck Society. They come with great responsibility. Researchers abuse their civil rights when they undermine the credibility of science with publicly disseminated statements and thereby damage the reputation and trust in the institutions that support them. The fundamental right to freedom of expression finds its limit in the mutual obligations of consideration and loyalty in the employment relationship.

 

Racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society.”

The first paragraph is in bold, followed by a green bar, and the remaining two paragraphs are formatted in a smaller font size. This creates visual and semantic ambiguity. Is the last paragraph an accusation that Hage is guilty of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, discrimination, hatred and incitement? Which of his views are incompatible with which basic values of the Max Planck Society? Thanks to the ambiguous wording and the separation of the paragraphs, the MPG's lawyer was able to deny during the hearing that his client had harmed Hage through a false accusation of anti-Semitism. However, the general public clearly understood this as an accusation of anti-Semitism. Hage also referred to this during the trial. He argued that his main concern was to repair the damage to his reputation:

That's exactly how it happened. The MPG had Hage in its press release dated February 7th. not directly accused of anti-Semitism. But the company's board of directors refused to reach an amicable settlement negotiated by its own lawyer, in which the MPG would make it clear that it did not accuse him of anti-Semitism. An explicit accusation can be proven false. Due to the enormous damage to reputation, an injunction or defamation lawsuit would have a chance of success. That's probably why both Welt am Sonntag and the Max Planck Society were careful not to make the accusation explicit. But because the MPG refused to provide clarification, the accusation remained – albeit unassailable because it was implicit. The Halle news portal interpreted the implicit suggestion clearly. It reported the day after the verdict was announced: “Halle Labor Court: Expulsion of a scientist from the Max Planck Institute because of anti-Semitic statements and HAMAS sympathies confirmed.”

In a statement on the day of the verdict, the MPG refrained from claiming one thing or the other, only stating:

“In February 2024, the Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle separated from the Lebanese-Australian guest scientist Ghassan Hage in agreement with the management of the Max Planck Society. The background was Hage's views on the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, which were widespread on social media and were incompatible with the basic values of the Max Planck Society. Ghassan Hage had sued the labor court in Halle against his dismissal. At its meeting today, the labor court dismissed the lawsuit and thereby confirmed the position of the Max Planck Society.”

https://www.mpg.de/21510533/stellungnahme-ghassan-hage

The head of the communications department at MPG refused to provide further explanations when I spoke on December 12th. asked for an interview in an email: “We see the verdict as confirming the position we published on February 7th. From our point of view, there is nothing more to say about it.” I wanted to ask the following question:

“In the press release and on Tuesday in court, the MPG carefully avoided explicitly accusing Hage of anti-Semitism. The verdict also reflected that. Nevertheless, the MPG has rejected an agreement in which it would state that it did not accuse him of anti-Semitism. Why?"

In the absence of a response from the MPG, I'll try to explain.

 

Tendency Bearers, Project, Moral Feeling

It is nothing new for scientists to hold views that their institutions are unwilling to support. The same Max Planck Institute for Anthropological Research in Halle from which Hage was fired also has Chris Hann, a prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin's policies and critic of Ukraine's Western orientation, in its ranks. Some of his arguments in his publications read as a veiled denial of Ukraine's legitimacy as a nation state - Hann doesn't say it himself, but allows others to say it. His views are well-known and controversial among experts. Nevertheless, the homepage of the MPI in Halle lists him as active director emeritus - and that's how it should be. Science thrives on dissent and criticism, including questionable and problematic views. Without confronting them, our analyzes and decisions are blind, a mere reflection of our own tendencies.

And that was essentially what was at issue before the Halle Labor Court: what kind of dissent and difference are scientists allowed, and to what extent are they, as “tendency bearers,” obliged to support the official line of their institution? For example, priests of a church tend to be believers and should not make public anti-religious statements. The word tendency bearer was not mentioned by the presiding judge in the oral verdict. But during the hearing he pointed out that in April 2024 (file number 5 Sa 894/23) the Berlin State Labor Court had confirmed the immediate termination of a Deutsche Welle employee because of his anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements on social media and did not allow an appeal. That employee had written, among other things, that a supposed Jewish lobby had German politics under its control. So, he really made anti-Semitic comments. Hage did not do this. What was decisive here was not the facts of the case, but rather the reasons given by the Berlin State Labor Court, according to which “the plaintiff, as a tendency bearer, was obliged not to violate the tendency, i.e. the fundamental objectives, of Deutsche Welle, both in his work performance and in areas outside of the company.”

https://www.berlin.de/gerichte/arbeitsgericht/presse/pressemitteilungen/2024/pressemitteilung.1455787.php

From the extensive evidence, the presiding judge focused his judgment on two posts that the MPG had submitted to the works council (consultation with the works council is a legal condition for termination without notice). The first post is a poem published on the afternoon of October 7th, 2023 - at a time when it was not yet known how brutal the attack was and how many people were killed. At that point, many observers were still under the impression that it was a military rather than a terrorist operation. In the poem, Hage is impressed by the Palestinians' ability to resist. The text is a romanticization of armed struggle versus Israel's warfare, but there is no glorification or justification of the extreme violence perpetrated by Hamas and its allies. Secondly, the presiding judge referred to an essay from November 16, 2023, where the expression “Zionist ethno-nationalist project” occurs. The judge pointed out that in his statements Hage described the entire territory of Palestine as occupied. However, the word “project” was central to his justification. Describing Israel as a project is a negation of Israel's existence under international law because a project means something unstable and temporary.

The word “project” only appears in one sentence in that essay, this one:

“There are, of course, those among us who, despite our opposition to the Zionist ethno-nationalist project and from the comfort of our social and geographical locations, and because of our diverse ties, have been able to mourn the victims of Hamas' murders.”

In this passage, Hage in no way denies Israel's state existence, but does identify himself as an opponent of the political project of Zionism. He also expresses explicit sadness for the Israeli victims of October 7th. The presiding judge had found Hage lacking in compassion. But here compassion is written in black and white. This was not taken into account in the judgment.

In his ruling, the presiding judge expressly refrained from discussing the question of whether these statements were anti-Semitic or not. There was a lot of talk about anti-Semitism during the trial. With reference to a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, the MPG's lawyer insisted that statements on social media could be anti-Semitic due to their effect on the audience even if Hage, who is married to a Jew, is not himself an anti-Semite. Hage's lawyer had in turn insisted on checking whether there was any anti-Semitic content at all, taking into account the surrounding circumstances, as provided for in the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and that of the Jerusalem Declaration.

If the MPG had explicitly fired Hage because of anti-Semitism, his lawyer would have been able to prove that the accusation was untrue. But by neither explicitly making nor withdrawing the allegation, the MPG gave the court the opportunity to find other reasons for the verdict.

My impression was that the presiding judge based his judgment on his own moral and political sensibilities. During the trial he said that he did not want to hear Dresden and Nazi comparisons (he was referring to a mention of Dresden in the quotes from Hage collected by the WaS), and that when one says about a recognized state that it is an occupation and a project is that the defendant (i.e. the MPG) cannot accept this. The tone and choice of words made it clear that the judge was not concerned that the views of Hage and MPG were incompatible - that was not up for debate. Rather, he seemed convinced that Hage was morally and politically wrong.

 

What the verdict means for science in Germany

The fact that the word “project” was made the decisive reason for the judgment is remarkable. After all, the word project does not have a generally negative connotation, and staunch supporters of Israel have also described Israel as a project. A political project is not characterized by the fact that it is temporary, but rather that it is unfinished, in motion. The word project applies well to Israel's statehood, because the State of Israel was first expressed as an idea and only later conquered as a territory; and its area is characterized by unfinished borders that constantly change due to wars and settlement policies, expansions and retreats. In the end, however, the judge's choice to address this word is not decisive. He could also have found another justification, and the MPG's statement on the day of the judgment only cites the poem dated October 7, 2023 as justification for its position. Three points are crucial for the impact of the judgment on science in Germany.

- The ambiguity of the accusation enabled the MPG to accuse Hage of anti-Semitism, but not to have to prove the allegation as an allegation.

- The presiding judge relied on his moral and political sensibilities and viewed Hage's position as substantively incorrect, even if the termination itself was formally incorrect.

- Due to the ambiguity of the accusation and the role of moral feeling in the verdict, the crucial question remained unclear as to which principles and guidelines of the MPG Hage's breach of duty was directed against. Accordingly, it remains vague and unclear to what extent scientific institutions are allowed to prohibit and dictate political positions to their employees.

If this interpretation becomes common practice, those working in science in Germany will in future have to expect that their institutions will prescribe and prohibit them from taking political positions. But this is the less serious part of the judgment. Many of my colleagues in Germany already have this expectation of forced political loyalty. What is more serious is the way in which the accusation of anti-Semitism repeatedly came to the fore over the course of the affair, was not openly expressed - but was not withdrawn either.

In general, a lot of things were not expressed openly, and this was also reflected in the unwillingness of employees at the Max Planck Institute in Halle to speak to the public. My first attempts to find interviewees there were unsuccessful. People found it problematic to express themselves even anonymously because their choice of words and arguments would still make them recognizable. But what exactly were they afraid of? That was also unclear. A colleague from the institute finally shared his experience with me in an informal conversation.

He said that the WaS report and Hage's dismissal were followed by great uncertainty among MPI employees in Halle. The fragments of his posts quoted in the WaS were perceived differently. International employees often found them less problematic. German colleagues expressed different views. He said that it was easier for the latter to understand why the statements met rejection from the General public than for their international colleagues. Nevertheless, almost the entire staff at the institute was against Hage's dismissal and was dismayed by the sudden and non-transparent decision. Since then, there has been concern and uncertainty among colleagues. Are employees’ social media checked now? What is allowed and what is not? The management of the institute tried to calm the employees. However, they were unable to eliminate the feeling of insecurity. In a town hall meeting with employees where the previously published statement of February 7, 2024 was discussed, MPG President Patrick Cramer avoided accusing Hage of anti-Semitism. Referring to the statement, he said that the last paragraph was a general position of the MPG. A clarification was requested, but the President saw no reason for it.

The picture I got in conversation with him corresponds to the general impression from informal conversations with colleagues: strong but unclear and non-transparent decisions create a depressed, uncomfortable silence. An extraordinary termination is controversial and risky and often creates more conflicts than solutions. It is much easier not to extend contracts and to withdraw support for funding applications. Such censorship by innuendo is much more powerful than official red lines that can either be aligned or acted upon if one is willing to accept the consequences.

 

Afterword, with comments from the author

 

For a while I too felt like I was part of an oppressive silence. When the war began, I kept a low profile for a long time because I rejected both the mass murderous warmongering in Germany on the part of Israel and the justification of a massacre in the name of resistance and decolonization. Here and there I felt the impossibility of a conversation that would go beyond an annoyed exchange of incompatible assertions. Hage must have felt something similar when, after the verdict, he spoke of the “strange comfort” of “coming up against a brick wall in court.” He described it as the “unthinkingness” of the other side, which could perhaps be translated as “determination not to think.” lets. The presiding judge had clearly given this some thought. But his thoughts and Hage's thoughts could not meet. A solid wall of incomprehension separated them from each other, both in and of themselves coherent and complete.

Science offers humanity a critical polyphony that enables better thinking and better actions. During this war, this critical polyphony has been replaced to a dangerous extent by a brick wall of loudly expressed incomprehension and by a depressing silence of censorship through suggestion. I have left my cover and am following the case of Ghassan Hage against the Max Planck Society for two reasons: firstly, because this depressed silence threatens me and my colleagues more than the open lack of understanding; and secondly, because Hage and I share the conviction that there should be other options in this war that has been going on for decades than the subjugation or destruction of one side by the other. (At present, Israel has the means and increasingly the will not only to subjugate the Palestinian side but also to destroy it in parts or in whole. On the Palestinian side there is also no lack of will to destroy the other side, but there is certainly a lack of means. In one In other world political constellations in the future, the resources may be distributed differently. With the nuclear arsenal that Israel has as a weapon of last resort, the destruction can then extend far beyond the Palestine-Israel region I have less faith than Ghassan Hage in idealistic goals and revolutions. Where he thinks a democratic one-state solution is realistic, I think that a possible negotiated peace can only be bad and unfair, but at least it would be better than more war. Such differences of views are important. They deserve to be encouraged and promoted, not crushed and dismissed.

A summary of Professor Ghassan Hage’s arguments about Israel and Palestine in his academic work

(this text was produced by and with my German lawyers to help them with their pleading on my behalf  in my case against Max Planck on December 10. I am pleased with it as a summary/history of my arguments and think it is worthwhile to share)

Professor Hage has researched and published on various dimensions of Israeli and Palestinian society, including on anti-Arab racism and Antisemitism, for the last forty years. In his PhD submitted, in 1987, he examined the similarities, at the time of his research, between Lebanese Christians (his own community), White South Africans, and Zionists. He showed how, in the 1960s and 70s, they shared a similar conception of themselves as bastions of western civilisation surrounded by barbarian others (Muslims/Arabs/Blacks), and in need of defending themselves against those others. He explored the way these communities present themselves as western, but having to engage in violence that other westerners don’t have to engage in, and as such blame westerners for not understanding that they have to engage in horrific actions because of the special circumstances they find themselves in, that they are doing it because they have to, and that they are doing it for all westerners, despite the latter not showing enough gratitude. Hage also showed how in such situations forms of domination and expansion present themselves as ‘modes of defending oneself’.

The work he did in his PhD offered him a fresh take on ideologies of White supremacy in Australia that he explored in his book White Nation. While researching for this book, he also explored White supremacists in France and the United States. In comparing these diverse forms of white supremacy Hage developed a key analysis of the differences between racism towards immigrants (numerological racism) and antisemitism (essentialist racism). He argued, as the name indicates, that numerological racism was dependent on numbers. In being racist towards immigrants, people can say: ‘there are too many Chinese in my street.’ Hage showed that it was important to stress the difference between a racism where ‘a few’ others as opposed to ‘too many’ are acceptable. Antisemites, Hage he stressed, never say such a thing. That is what makes them essentialist: one Jew in the street is already too many.

In another book, Against Paranoid Nationalism, Hage explores the resurgence of White ethnonationalism that followed the attack on and decline of multiculturalism as an alternative form of nationalism in the West. He argues that ethno-nationalism is a form of fundamentalism whether it is Muslim or Western. It is characterised by a belief in a mono-ethnic/cultural self that thinks that it needs a mono- ethnic/cultural environment specific to it in order to thrive and ‘realise’ itself. Hage argues that both the Israeli government and Islamic fundamentalists espouse similar forms form of ethno-nationalism. He also examines how in the case of Israel and Hamas during the wave of suicide bombing that the latter initiated, archaic political affects around archaic political entities such as mono-cultural nations are coupled with ultra-modern technologies of war. As he put it: “To my mind, both the Israeli invasion and the suicide bombings constitute a kind of warped postmodern pastiche of medievally violent political affects, early modern veneration of political entities such as ‘the nation’, and late modern military technology.”

In a series of articles and talks presented between 2005 and 2013 and published in his book Alter-Politics (2015) Hage develops his concept of Narcissistic victimhood. He argues that there is a way of experiencing victimhood that fosters narcissism: because you have been victimised you don’t feel like you owe anyone anything and you feel entitled to be selfish and look after yourself without caring what happens to or how you relate to others. Hage shows that this creates a psycho-social affinity between a sense of victimhood and ethno-nationalism as an embodiment of this narcissism. He also demonstrates how the same narcissistic victimhood is exhibited by Islamic fundamentalists. Hage argues that this narcissistic victimhood contributes to a politics of resistance that is only concerned with what it is against (anti-politics) as opposed to what it wants to build as an alternative (alter-politics). This leads him to develop a critique of the way, particularly in the case of Hezbollah and in Syria, the notion of ‘resistance’ becomes an ideology of power consolidation and authoritarianism that loses sight of what it is resisting. 

Hage argues that Israeli and Palestinian narcissistic victimhood as they are present in the Israeli extreme-right and in Hamas makes them unable to face and come to terms with what he calls ‘the relational imperative’: that the very nature of the post-colonial world entails the inevitability of co-existence and living together. Hage argues that there are two forms of resistance: eliminationist resistance and reparative resistance. Slaves’ resistance against slave owners is a case of eliminationist resistance: the idea of slaves and slave owners co-existing is inconceivable, slave owners as a category has to be eliminated. Feminist resistance on the other hand is largely a reparative resistance: it does not aim to eliminate males but to transform them to create better relations with them. Hage argues that anti-colonial resistance in the twentieth century was primarily imagined as an eliminationist resistance: the colonisers had to be eliminated. But with the transformation and success of South African anti-colonialism a reparative anti-colonialism that highlights ‘the relational imperative’ has become a necessity.

 

In 2017 Hage publishes ‘Is Racism an Environmental Threat?’ in which he argues that the anthropocentric desire to subjugate nature and make it serve human needs, and the ethno-nationalist desire to subjugate a national space and make it serve the needs of a single ethnic/cultural group are part of the same mode of inhabiting the world. What Hage refers to as ‘generalised domestication’. Both are animated by fantasies of omnipotence over their surroundings. Hage argues that fantasies of omnipotence are often considered as unrealistic and mainly work as an aspirational guiding horizon. But in some cases, people believe in the actual imminent possibility of omnipotence. In such cases the fantasy becomes particularly destructive. It was the case until recently with the human domination of nature. Hage argues that Zionist ethno-nationalism is also propelled by a destructive fantasy of omnipotence believed to be imminent and possible. This destructive fantasy took shape in the aftermath of the 1967 war where Israel showed itself overwhelmingly superior to all the countries around it as far as military might and capacity of destruction is concerned. Ever since, Israeli governments take this overwhelming superiority as the norm below which Israeli power should never fall. The close and many-faceted relation between the western ‘military-industrial complex’, that is, weapon manufacturers, and Israel has worked to keep this fantasy of omnipotence alive. It is the single most important factor that makes Israel’s willingness to think of an alternative to subjugating its surroundings non-existent. This is why, Hage argues that while the political/military forces grounded in Palestinian narcissistic victimhood remain in need of being critiqued, any politics that wants to create the conditions of co-existence between Israelis and the Palestinians has to be a politics that restricts Israel’s capacity and desire to use overwhelming military power as a way of solving unsolvable problems.

There has been no other work on Israel/Palestine since 2017, as Prof. Hage concentrated on finishing his ethnography of the Lebanese Diaspora (The Diasporic Condition, 2021) and his theoretical work on the social phenomenology of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Being, forthcoming 2025).

 

 

Surprised, Outraged and Can’t Understand What is Going On

 I used to have a ritualistic argument with my partner concerning her affective politics. Whether she is talking about coal mining, abortion, Zionist colonialism, or opposition to bike lanes in the city, she always expresses her principled positions against right wing politics doused with a strong sense of outrage. ‘I can’t believe they still believe x or y!’, ‘how outrageous is it that they have voted for z!’, ‘how can they act against their own interest like this?!’ I, on the other hand, having inherited from Bourdieu Spinoza’s ‘do not be outraged… just try and understand’ mode of dealing with things would always critique her outrage and try and provide a social explanation as to why this or that happened and why it made sense.

Slowly, I have been dissatisfied with myself doing this. I felt that by replacing her ‘outrage’ and ‘surprise’ with my ‘understanding’ I was banalizing what was genuinely outrageous about what we were talking about. I also felt that by continuously claiming to be ‘unsurprised by this’ and ‘unsurprised by that’ I was engaging in those immature fantasies of omnipotence of knowledge that marked my hyper-Marxist student days. The idea that ‘I understand it all’ meant that I had some power over the events I was understanding rather than letting them surprise me and outrage me. I could feel that it was a particularly male fantasy of power/knowledge.

When I had my visiting professorship terminated by Max Planck over my opposition to Zionist politics. I used to say to many people ‘what has happened to me has happened to so many others in Germany so it is not surprising really’. But then I started feeling a little bit irritated by the number of friends, even very close friends, who would say to me: ‘Sorry this happened to you but it is not surprising’. The irritation was strange given that I was saying it to myself really. But somehow, when people started directing it at me, I felt my experience was being banalised. My feeling was: “I don’t really want to know about how amazingly knowledgeable you are such that you are not surprised.” I really wanted to hear people say to me that this was totally surprising, outrageous and unacceptable, rather, than ‘ah well, this is how it is.’ I wanted to hear it even though I knew that it was indeed ‘unsurprising.’

I reflected on the fact that maybe I needed to hear that it was surprising just for my own psychological well-being. But I wondered to what extent we often use ‘this is not surprising’ also for our own psychological well-being, to protect ourselves from what is precisely surprising and unexpected in an event.

As an anthropologist, I know very well that things do not have to be either surprising or not surprising, just as an encounter with a foreign culture does not have to be either familiar or not-familiar. But I also know that just as an excessive highlighting of what is unfamiliar about such an encounter can dissimulate certain similarities, an excessive highlighting of what is familiar and unsurprising can dissimulate certain genuinely unfamiliar and impenetrable things that we need to explore. This is where I felt that an excessive usage of ‘this is not surprising' does.

I am writing this today as we have spent many hours with friends watching the American election results unfold on TV and having many discussions. Sure enough, just as we inundated ourselves with outrage and indignation, we were also copiously offering each other a good deal of ‘there is nothing surprising here because x, y and z.’ The elephant in the room was the rise and rise of anti-cosmopolitan right wing culture everywhere.

This is where something quite definite dawned on me: I have been studying this right-wing culture since its emergence in Australia in the mid-1990s. I have also researched it but to a lesser extent in France and in the US since that time. But I have to say, I am genuinely over ‘not being surprised by it’ because it is continuously surprising me. I am over not being outraged by it because this de-civilisational process is bloody outrageous. And, despite my own research and having read the research of many other, I definitely can’t say that I understand what is going on here in any way that I consider satisfactory. I feel that we've been scratching surfaces and all the work is ahead of us.

Symbolic Violence, Trump and Biden/Harris (Excerpts from the Concluding Chapter of Pierre Bourdieu's Political Economy of Being (Duke University Press, forthcoming)

...

As the above highlights, in conceiving politics as the politics of making and un-making reality, Bourdieu argues that every domination involves both a struggle to dominate and an attempt to institute and better still institutionalize one’s domination. And this is where an important transformation occurs: the more the dominant institutionalize their dominance, enshrine it by law and by habit, among other things, the more their struggle moves from merely winning against someone to ensuring that the game and its rules are their game and their rules. Here, their gaze turns into a top-down gaze rather than just a horizontal gaze. From an imaginary of war, where the horizontal “I’m fighting you in this game” gaze prevails, we move to an imaginary of policing, where the top-down “I am protecting the whole game” gaze is dominant. Symbolic violence occurs at the most intense point of the process whereby the dominant, rather than being seen as fighting for their interests, become seen as—and indeed in practice become—the protectors of “the order of things.” This is where the group that the dominants are struggling to subdue becomes a policing problem rather than a competitor/adversary. 

A shift between warring and policing is very crucial in the fluctuation between states of orthodoxy and states of symbolic violence. We can briefly take the difference in the international politics of Donald Trump’s Republican Party and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Democrats. The period following World War II was the apex of a belief in the United States—not as a state pursuing its own interest alone, but—as a protector of an international order marked by democracy and the rule of law. It can be said that during that time, the dominance of US interest approximated a state of symbolic violence. But this international legitimacy has been in decline ever since. Today, US dominance in world politics has been more and more recognized for what it is: the US fighting to realize its own interests under the guise of protecting a world “order of things.” 

What is interesting about Trumpian international politics is that it involves accepting this state of affairs and dropping any pretense of being responsible for policing the world order. It involves abandoning the American commitment to international bodies that provide a semblance of world governmentality and the US unequivocally presenting itself as fighting for US interests before anything else. The Trumpian Republican gaze on international politics can be said to be more horizontal than top-down. It looks at international competitors eye-to-eye and says, “I am going to win against you.” In this, it can be seen as far more of a realist about the state of US domination and legitimacy than the Biden/Harris Democratic Party gaze. The latter is still grounded in a fantasy of symbolic violence. It still struggles to portray US international politics in terms of an international order that it is caring for and policing. But reality is not on its side and it finds itself increasingly unable to do so and reluctantly doing what Trumpian politics does wholeheartedly: abandoning a commitment to international bodies and presenting US interest as above international law.

"Zone of interest" as an Ethnography of Indifference

I saw 'Zone of Interest' when it first appeared. Like many, I came out thinking that I have just seen one of the best movies I have been to in a long time. As I watched Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz's concentration camp, his wife, Hedwig, and their children, live the life of their dreams in the house of their dreams, while only being separated from the exterminatory furnaces by a mere wall, it was hard not to keep thinking: this is all of us now in the shadow of the mass murders committed in Gaza, living in cultures that have banalised evil. But the thought did come to me that maybe it was just me projecting my Middle Eastern sensitivities and obsessions into the film. When I came out of the theatre and started talking to others it was clear that I was hardly the only one to think this. Later, the director's courageous Oscar acceptance speech, Naomi Klein's incisive reflections on the film's significance, and my colleague Marcelo Svirsky's comments about the politics of the 'never again' in which the film intervenes, all reinforced the view of the film as offering what Foucault would call a history of the present, a view of the past that is also about our everyday lives in the now.

This perspective allows us to capture a rich dimension of the story that would otherwise be missed if we merely read the scenario as an attempt to chronicle the past. But it also encourages discussions of the overall moral and political relevance of the film at the expense of some of its micro elements. Most people I know who have seen the film have also been taken by the incredible attention to the minute details of the everyday life of the household depicted in it. I later understood that this was achieved by the positioning of the cameras such as to create a 'reality TV' effect: 'Big Brother in the Nazi house' as Naomi Klein quotes Glazer saying about his film. I felt throughout the film that the scenes were played out as if informed by an account of someone who has had deep knowledge of how daily life unfolded there. It is this ethnographic dimension of the film that I want to think with here. I hasten to say that this ethnographic dimension does not contradict the generalist politico-moralist dimension. On the contrary, it speaks to it, enriches it and continually reinforces it. Nonetheless, it is a dimension that is often being eclipsed by the focus on the general message and the discussions it is generating.

With this in mind, I decided to go and see the film again and consciously concentrate on its attention to behavioural details. As expected, I found this second viewing very rewarding, and I recommend it to all those who have appreciated what the film has to offer. If nothing else, this viewing highlighted the way the exterminatory devil was present in the details, as it were. I can now say with more confidence: I would be happy to recommend this film to anthropology students as an introduction to an ethnography of necropolitical indifference. Centring on this indifference points not only to a history but also to an ethnography our present. It shows how the film provides us with material that helps us ask enlightening questions: How are indifferent-to-the-death-of-the-other subjects constituted? What is indifference as a social phenomenon? How is indifference enacted in everyday life? What are the factors that make this enactment possible? Seen from this perspective, the film teaches us an importance truth: necropolitical indifference is not a result of racism but rather one of its key defining features.

First, a point about the kind of racism manifested in Nazi antisemitism that helps us understand a crucial dimension of the film - and I can't help but add: something those Zionists who are freely distributing 'antisemitism', mindlessly, all over the place at the moment should pay attention to. That is, if they really cared about antisemitism, and not just about justifying their disastrous murderous politics. 

I must ask the reader to bear with me here before we get back to the film, as this needs to be explained a bit more carefully than the film review genre usually allows for. 

While all racisms share some things in common, they can also differ in fundamental ways. Most importantly for us here, not all the phenomena referred to as 'racism' involve a perception of the racialised other as 'exterminable'. For someone like me who started thinking about 'White racism' in the context of Australian multiculturalism, it took me some time to fully understand the degree to which colonial racism towards Indigenous Australians was of an entirely different kind to racism towards Italian or Vietnamese or Lebanese immigrants. The latter was not just less virulent than the racism towards Indigenous people, it was a different kind of racism altogether. I would say anti-Indigenous racism was viler. And part of its vileness was precisely its articulation to intimations of 'exterminability': for racists, the indigenous others were as exterminable as cockroaches and as disgusting to be in the proximity of. While it shows up in odd individual cases, this kind of seriously vile racism was not directed in any significant structural way towards European and Mediterranean immigrants. It showed its face at the height of racism against 'Asians' in the nineteenth century, and in more recent times towards Muslims.  

This difference between forms of racism was not only important in Australia. As further reading and research helped me understand, despite some important similarities, there was a fundamental difference between the racism that manifests itself in slavery and colonialism, and the racism towards immigrants that comes from an unease in the face of cultural difference or in competition over jobs. To be sure, sometimes the two overlap. But it is the difference that is important to highlight here because Nazi anti-semitism was more in the vile tradition of slavery and colonialism rather than anti-immigrant racism. This is where I found the film to be exceptionally insightful. It gives us a clear sense of how, for all its (rightful) association with extermination, Nazi anti-semitism was always like slavery and colonialism, a mix of extermination, disgust, exploitation and appropriation. Throughout the film, the furnaces of Auschwitz, the sound of guns being fired and the sounds of victims shouting as they face their death are shown to be continuously accompanied by practices of exploitation of Jewish forced labour (including sexual exploitation), and by the appropriation and cross class distribution of Jewish property. Given the colonial genealogy of this cocktail of practices, it is not surprising that the racism that animated it also had strong resemblances to the racism that animated slavery and colonialism.

It is common knowledge in anthropology that 'belonging to the human race' and believing in a categorical biological and moral difference between humans and non-humans is a distinctly modern phenomenon. There are pre-modern tribal cultures where the humans of the tribe feel a sense of together-ness with the animals and plants that surround them far more than with the 'humans' of another tribe. In the modern era where it becomes taken for granted that 'humanity' and 'the human race' are one, such a lack of belief in the one-ness of humankind comes across as fundamentally discordant and incompatible. Many racisms solve this incompatibility by creating gradations of human-ness. Nazi anti-semitism, however, replicates certain elements of the tribal culture refers to above. While those in themselves are not racist, they become so in a modernity positing the unity of 'humanity' (see Note). It posits a human (Aryan) one-ness with nature, often referred to as eco-fascism, in opposition to a oneness with other humans (the Jews). This is powerfully and systematically portrayed in the film. The attachment that Höss and his family exhibit towards the natural environment stands out in its opposition to the lack of care for the Jews surrounding them, those that are being exterminated 'next door' as it were and those working as forced labourers in their homely space. The most intense 'love scene' in the movie is Höss saying goodbye to his horse. And there is a macabre moment where Höss is admonishing the killers and executioners of the Jews in the death camp for mistreating the camp’s flowers. 

This essentialist and radical banishment of the figure of the Jew from the sphere of sympathy and care is in Lacanian terms both the symptom and the condition of possibility of the culture of indifference that appears to protect the family's homely jouissance from the continuous processes of dehumanisation and extermination to which the Jews are subjected. It colours and shapes the practices of necropolitical indifference that make up most of the movie.

To call these 'practices' of indifference is to highlight their nature as a form of labour; something that involves a conscious or unconscious working-on-the-self to achieve. This is important because not all types of indifference require of us to work on ourselves. In the dictionary indifference is defined as 'having no particular interest or sympathy, being unconcerned.' One does not need to work on oneself to have no particular interest or sympathy towards, or be unconcerned with, something. To be sure, to be indifferent to x is not the same as to be oblivious to the existence of x. The indifferent subject is always aware of what it is they are being indifferent to. But being indifferent is not the same when we are being indifferent to something we have casually encountered and that has no particular significance to us, and being unconcerned with something that is an integral part of our affective space. It is in the latter case that indifference requires a form of work on the self. This is crucial to understand the racist necropolitical specificity of indifference. Racism is a relation with people that brings them into our space of being. Even extreme racist dehumanisation brings some people into the space of our being as dehumanised. We do not casually encounter the people we racialise. They are a structural part of our lives. Hating and despising x is a relation that brings x into our affective sphere even if it is to hate it and despise it. How to be indifferent to something or someone we despise is not an easy matter. On the face of it, one cannot say at the same time: I hate and despise chocolate and I am indifferent to chocolate. Yet this is precisely what racist indifference aims to achieve. It is what makes the labour of antisemitic indifference to the extermination of the Jews far more demanding than meets the eye.

Throughout the movie, Höss' family is exposed to manifestations of the macabre processes of extermination happening right next to them: the gunshots, the screams, the smoke, the light from the furnaces, the wall itself. All these are metonymies of the exterminatory process that is unfolding. That is, they are a small part of the process that they signify it in its totality. It can be said that while metaphors use one order of reality to re-present another order of reality, metonymies consist of an order of reality presenting itself through one of its fragments. As such, saying that the above-listed manifestations are not metaphors of the concentration camp but metonymies of it is to say something that is on one had somewhat evident ,but on the other, something whose importance is overlooked:  the manifestations listed above are not representations of the exterminatory process but the exterminatory process itself presenting itself through these manifestations. They are continual intrusions of the un-homely space of the camp and what happens in it into the homely reality of the family's lifeworld. 

I am dwelling on this point because it is significant to our understanding of the type of indifference we are dealing with here: one is not indifferent towards a metaphor of extermination the same way one is indifferent towards a metonymy of it - in the way, today, we find it harder to be indifferent to a raw video of the death and destruction of Gaza posted on social media than to a sanitised written account published by a mainstream newspaper in the West. There is a particularly important scene in the movie where Rudolph Höss and his children are enjoying fishing and swimming in the river up to the point where he realises that the ashes and remains of the incinerated bodies are thrown in the river and coming towards them. Höss rushes to remove his children from the river and they all subject themselves or are subjected to a long bath where all traces of the ashes of the dead are thoroughly scrubbed off their bodies. The indifferent subject knows that they are face to face with an unbearable reality whose presence and impact in their lives needs to be minimised. One can guess that, after that first encounter, Höss will make sure to regulate when the ashes of the dead are thrown into the river so as to avoid swimming there during such times. This is the labour of indifference. 

In a number of commentaries on the film, what I am calling a labour of indifference is referred to as 'disassociation'. There is no doubt that physical and emotional disassociation are part of the labour of indifference but it does not cover all the forms that the latter takes. Indifference can be a form of de-sensitization. This is what is referred to popularly as ‘developing a thick skin’. The Lebanese say about a man who is indifferent and unaffected by his surrounding 'hayda m-tamsah' (this man has become-crocodile). This i in reference to the thickness of the crocodile's skin. The 'thickness of the skin' of the coloniser to the plight of the colonised is acquired historically as part of a colonial habitus. One can think of this as a political dermatology.

Indifference can also be a form of de-intensifiying the presence of something in our surrounding. Unlike with de-sensitisation where we learn to see but not feel, here we learn not to see or hear or smell, etc. As Bourdieu's concept of illusio invites us to see: our relation to reality creates a differential of intensities within that reality that depends on one's interest and desires. Here the technologies of indifference work on the fashioning of one's surrounding reality more so than on fashioning one's self and one's sensitivity and 'skin' as happens in de-sensitization. As noted above in relation to disassociation, one can learn to un-see the metonymic fragment or learn to un-see the connection between the fragment and the whole. In the film, it is not clear whether the Höss family had learnt to un-see the flames of the furnace or had learnt not to associate the flame with the exterminatory process of which it is a part.

At its simplest, indifference can be acquired through strategic avoidance. The subject knows where they will be exposed to the reality they want to shield themselves from and refrain from moving in spaces where they are most likely to encounter it. A more important strategy of avoidance is that of total blockage. In the film, the wall itself is of course the most important technology of blockage, stopping the unbearable reality of what is happening in the camp from flowing onto the space of the home.

I am only separating these types of indifference for analytical clarity since, in real life, and as well depicted in the movie, they come jumbled and fused with one another. This can be seen in the case of the presence of Jewish forced labour in the space of the home. As I have already noted, an important aspect of the film for me is how it makes clear the way extermination and the exploitation (including sexual exploitation) of forced labour go hand in hand. This entanglement is shown to be a feature of the household's everyday life as much as it was a governmental pre-occupation. At one point we see a Nazi commander order Höss to exterminate an obscene number of people, then turn to another commander and tell him something like 'don't worry he won't kill everyone. You’ll get your labourers'. In the way it shows the labourers as if zombified and occupying a space between the dead and the living, the film alerted me to something I hadn't thought of before: in the midst of a genocidal process, those who are spared death to perform labour are nonetheless living metonymies of the exterminatory process itself. The family learns to both unsee this forced labour and unsee its connection to the process of extermination in which it is embedded.

The movie leaves us in no doubt that all these successful techniques of indifference come at a price. It takes its toll on the psyche and the body. The indifferent subject is not constitutionally indifferent to its indifference. Every member of the family without exception exhibits pathological symptoms that the movie director wants us to see as the cost of their existence in this culture of necropolitical indifference. Rudolph Höss who on the face of it is the quintessential Nazi subject. His 'classical' Nazi antisemitism is shown in the business-like way he discusses the efficiency of the technologies of death he is introducing into his concentration camp, and in the paradoxical scene where he is sexually exploiting a camp inmate, instrumentalizing her for his pleasure but at the same time exhibiting his disgust for coming to contact with a Jewish person. Witness the scene where he is endlessly washing and scrubbing himself after his 'bureaucratised' sexual assault. This takes us back to the other scrubbing scene referred to above where the ashes of the dead are being scrubbed after the accidental river encounter. Yet for all his de-sensitisation to the suffering and the death of the Jews, Höss is shown to be suffering from what appears to be something of the order of severe stomach cramps. Hedwig seems to be the prototype of the petit bourgeois Nazi, her antisemitism structured around her envy and resentment towards the middle class Jews for whom, in pre-Nazi time, her mother worked as a cleaner. Determined to enjoy her upward social mobility, she appears as the most resolved of all the family members to not let any unbearable reality ruin the homely space she has managed to climb to. She wants her mother, the ex-maid, to enjoy and be part of her social climbing and success, but is left deprived of her company as the mother, finds living in the vicinity of the camp unbearable. Towards the end of the film Hedwig appears as unable to experience any joy or excitement: drowning in the meaninglessness of her life and the amoral abyss she has dug herself into. The children are also shown to exhibit all kind of pathologies from sleeplessness to behavioural disorder. There is little doubt then that one of the key themes of the movie is that indifference comes at a psychological cost. For if one can take a bath and scrub off the traces of extermination that stick to one’s body, how does one scrub off the traces of the extermination that have stuck to one’s psyche?

In this sense, while the film, as Naomi Klein and Marcelo Svirsky point out, does indeed make us think about the question of active and passive complicity, of the 'where are you and what are you doing while the genocide is unfolding,' it also makes us think about another equally pertinent question. One that is at least pertinent to those of us who live in those countries where indifference to what is happening in Gaza has been hypocritically made into a higher morality (apparently, to struggle against necropolitical indifference, to care enough to want to stop the ongoing slaughter, is to support Hamas). This question goes something like this: what kind of pathologies are we, the inhabitants of these lands, silently developing as we are forced to live through the unbearable nightmare that is Gaza in a space where indifference to it is encouraged and routinised? What somatic disorders will our bodies and psyche begin to exhibit as we consciously or unconsciously work on taming the unbearable into something bearable?

Note:

I have added this sentence. and changed 'one-ness' above with 'togetherness' in response to the following critical comment made by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

"I read your post with the interest and admiration I always give to everything you write. That's why I can't help but disagree with the parallel you draw between Nazi racism and the ethnocentrism of extra-modern peoples. In particular, I disagree with the following passage:

Nazi anti-semitism, however, replicates the tribal culture refers to above. It posits a human (Aryan) one-ness with nature, often referred to as eco-fascism, in opposition to a oneness with other humans (the Jews).

One fundamental difference is that the extramodern (or tribal) peoples I know, at least the Amazonian ones, may indeed consider neighboring peoples as not completely "human". But they have no problem adopting (by marriage, kidnapping or any other means) an individual from these other peoples and considering him or her an integral member of their society. This is something that, I suppose, would be unthinkable in the relationship between Nazis and Jews. Moreover, alliances and mergers between peoples who were previously enemies are very common phenomena (and the reverse is equally true). Because "tribal" ethnocentrism or "racism" has nothing biological about it, it doesn't assume that individuals from other peoples are naturally - that is, immutably, essentially - inferior or non human. These peoples' concept of "human" has very little to do with our modern concept (shared, incidentally, by Nazis and non-Nazis alike). Likewise, the "oneness with nature" that the so-called animist cosmologies show is very different from Nazi eco-fascism. It's not about oneness, in fact, but equality or pan-sociality, in the sense that non-human beings are considered people (different people, I should add) — which doesn't necessarily make them friendly (kinspersons, for example), quite the opposite. "

To which I replied:

"I agree with both the point you make about kinship etc… and concerning the differences between the Nazi and the pre modern tribal relation to nature (one-ness is clearly the wrong term for the latter I need to replace it with together-ness). 

At least in part, what your critique highlights is more the point where analogies become a problem.

I think I need to re-write what I have written so as to ensure it is not interpreted as a claim that the Nazis and the pre or as you call them extra modern people share a similar ‘racism’ or that, as you put it I am drawing parallels between them. I think racism is only possible with the rise of the modern belief in ‘humanity’. I simply wanted to use the comparison to convey the radical exclusionary nature of Nazi racism that is more radical than any other racism. Still what makes Nazi anti-semitism racist is not that radical exclusion but that exists in conjunction with that dominant modern belief in ‘humanity’."

References:

Naomi Klein, The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities - including Gaza, The Guardian, 14 March 2024.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/14/the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-gaza-genocide

Milan Solly, The Real History Behind 'The Zone of Interest' and Rudolf Höss, Smithsonian Magazine, January 4, 2024

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-history-behind-the-zone-of-interest-and-rudolf-hoss-180983531/

Marcelo Svirsky, Perpetrators: Israel under the Zone of Interest, Arena Online, 19 March 2024.

https://arena.org.au/perpetrators-israel-under-the-zone-of-interest/

The Metamorphosis of Daniele the Zionist

When I first met my partner Caroline and learnt that her father was of Italian-Jewish background, and that he migrated to Australia to escape Mussolini’s black shirts, I expected that, when I get to meet him, we will probably end up arguing about Israel. I wasn’t particularly worried. I had a long experience with my own Christian Lebanese anti-Palestinian family of going into intense arguments about Palestine without having to take it as far as severing family ties. As it turned out Caroline’s father had very little attachment to Israel.

 

It was not until we visited Rome, from where the family originated, and met Caroline’s cousins, that I got to encounter family members with a strong investment in Israel. Some had even done a full pilgrimage, gone there, lived on a Kibbutz, and trained with the IDF, before returning to Rome. Those were seriously committed Zionists. Chief among them was Daniele (not his real name). A tall, softly spoken, chain-smoking man with an incredible knowledge of Rome and its art, Daniele was a seductive character. I immediately liked him. I was also primed by Caroline to tolerate his Zionism for, among all of the family members, he had had the most traumatizing experience of Italian fascism in World War Two: when the Mussolini’s Blackshirts climbed up the stairs of their apartment to round up whoever was left of the family, his grandmother hid him under the bed’s mattress and asked him not to leave until she told him to do so. The fascists took his grandmother away and Daniele remained under the mattress for three days. I’ve never felt it to be good productive politics, and certainly not decent human behaviour, to strongly criticise the investments that people make as a result of such experiences.

 

Nonetheless over the fiteen years or so that I knew him (he died in 2016), Daniele’s views about Israel changed considerably. I like to think that maybe it’s because of my influence, but it’s probably more a growing clash between his political and ethical sensibility and the increasingly reactionary and intolerable social and cultural environment that has become pervasive throughout the country. 

 

I remember the first time I met Daniele, he openly and carelessly told me how worried he was about the son of a relative who was an Israeli soldier fighting in Lebanon. It didn’t seem to bother him that I was Lebanese or that I might be worried about any Lebanese people at the receiving end of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I was already writing about the relation between victimhood and narcissism at the time, and, thought to myself that he would make a good case study. But what he said did initiate the first of many later arguments we had about the ‘who is right and who is wrong’ of the war. While strongly disagreeing with him, it was through these arguments that I got to like him more and more, chain smoking and calmly making his point without a hint of aggression.

 

Around the mid-2000s I began noticing a very distinct change in Daniele’s attitude. He was feeling increasingly alienated from Israeli society as it was evolving and mentioned a couple of friends that he no longer talked to. While he continued to be invested in Israel, he nonetheless found it hard to justify why he was. He adopted a kind of ‘I don’t like what they are doing but we Jews don’t have much choice but to support Israel’. On one occasion, I told him a story related by Edward Said. I can no longer find the reference so I might have changed the story a bit. I think it was about an intellectual who was a reluctant Zionist, but that Said liked and respected, nonetheless. In explaining why he supported Zionism despite not having any affinities with it, this intellectual said something like this: if your son steals all your money and bets it on a horse, you might not like what you son has done and you might not even like the horse, but would you want the horse to lose the race? Daniele really liked that story. He thanked me for it and said it really captured how he felt.

 

In 2014, however, two years before he died, Daniele surprised me. We happened to be visiting him and his wife in Rome, in the midst of what became known as ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ This operation, in many ways, prefigured the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza in its exterminatory deadliness, and its indifference to civilian life. Daniele was upset by it. As we were watching the violence unfurl on the news, he got particularly agitated watching a clip of two Israeli soldiers leading away a handcuffed young boy. He sighed heavily, and turned to me and said: ‘I no longer care if this horse wins anymore. It’s like, as they say in English, “flogging a dead horse”.’ I did not dare say anything triumphant as it would have cheapened the moment, and disrespected what he must have experienced saying this.

 

It was an important moment to me. As I noted above, while I always considered the linking of the Holocaust and Israel’s right to exist as an ethno-national entity intellectually untenable, I nonetheless understood the people who have been traumatised by the Holocaust and who experienced the relation between it and Israel as sacrosanct. I always refrained from engaging  with such people critically. That moment when Daniele referred to Israel as a ‘dead horse’ helped me break the aura of sanctity that surrounded the nexus between the Holocaust and Israel. After all what has happened and has been happening, I increasingly see in the people highlighting this nexus as self-serving ideologues whose collapsing of the idea of ‘being at home in the world’ with the idea of ‘defending an ethno-national state’ is both politically and ethically untenable.

 

English Translation of 'The Ghassan Hage Scandal', Written in German by Samuli Schielke (Published in Zenith, 23/02/1957)

A renowned visiting researcher expresses his anger on social media about the Gaza war and its victims. The Max Planck Society throws him out the door and makes accusations of anti-Semitism that, upon closer inspection, are unfounded.

 

The Lebanese-Australian scientist Ghassan Hage, born in Beirut in 1957, is considered a luminary in his field; His 1998 book “White Nation – Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society” is one of the standard works in anthropology and ethnology. His latest book, “The Diasporic Condition,” published in 2021, is a milestone in the anthropology of migration. The German, publicly funded Max Planck Society was proud when it appointed Hage as a visiting scientist at its institute of the same name in Halle in 2023. As an intellectual, Hage regularly speaks out in interviews about the Middle East conflict and has long propagated the idea of a one-state solution for Palestinians and Jews.

 

Since October 7, 2023 and the subsequent outbreak of war in Gaza, he has been writing a lot on social media or on his blog on the Internet. Some of it is characterized by anger and lacks scientific sophistication. On the day of the Hamas attack on Israel - at a time when very few people had a clear picture of the true extent and brutality of the attack - he published a poem entitled "The endless Dead-End that will not end". It's about the cyclical violence in Gaza. In the end, it says that despite all the military superiority, the "resistance of the Palestinians" is endless - they can even "fly over walls." Critics saw this as a glorification of Hamas.

 

Hage likes to advocate provocative viewpoints that are not popular in either the West or the Arab world. On December 30, he wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “I have no doubt that Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state. It will cease to exist by dissolving back into what it was as Palestine: a multi-religious space [...] with all its ups and downs.’’ With this sentence he speaks against Islamists and Arab nationalists as well as against Israel's Western supporters. According to a report in Welt am Sonntag published on February 5, 2024, the proof was provided: Hage was preaching hatred of Israel, anti-Semitism and trivializing the Holocaust because, for example, he called methods of Israeli warfare in Gaza "similar" to those of the National Socialists: for example, the systematic humiliation of the Palestinians in Gaza. It would be bad if a member of the Max Planck Society had spread hatred of Jews. But is it even true?

 

As someone who has been researching the Arab world for decades, I know the Arab version of anti-Semitism well. It is shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but also uses thought patterns, themes and slogans from European and National Socialist Jew-hatred, disguised with religiously based resentment. In short: I know more about it than I would like.

 

Anyone who examines the Hage case and leaves the final word to expert analysis cannot confirm the accusation that Hage is an anti-Semitic and spreads anti-Semitic propaganda. His writings are not anti-Semitic. They do not denigrate Jews or Israelis as people or as a religious or ethnic community; neither are his statements. They are polarizing and polemical. They are directed primarily against Israeli politics and the idea of ethnic nationalism, which he sees as embodied in Israel's political project. Only those who equate criticism of Israel and the occupation with hatred of Jews can see anti-Semitism in this.

 

There is a lot of discussion and writing about this tendency in the media and politics. However, there was no anti-Semitism scandal at the Max Planck Institute. The “termination of the collaboration”, i.e. the dismissal of Hage by the Max Planck Society in response to criticism of his statements, is the actual scandal as it affects the freedom of science and expression of opinion.

 

In its short press release on February 7th about the Hage case, the Max Planck Society accused Hage of having “damaged science” with his statements. Loyalty to the employer is just as important as the legally guaranteed right to freedom of expression. The Society’s president ended the message with the memorable sentence: "Racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society." The Max Planck Society did not explain what exactly Hage had committed. On February 23, Hage announced that he would take legal action against his dismissal. So this question is still being discussed in court.

 

For anyone who wants to make their own judgment, I recommend his English essay “Gaza and the Coming Age of the Warrior” from November 2023, published online on Allegra Lab. There, Hage calls the terror against Israeli civilians by its name. He also discusses why many people outside Europe did not want to share the grief for the Israeli victims: this is perceived as exclusive and does not apply equally to the Palestinians who were killed in Gaza by Israel's "punitive expedition" (Hage) - with Europe's blessing and the western world. Of course, the same can be said about many Arab voices who ignored the suffering of Israelis. But wrong twice stays wrong. Hage is someone who feels horror and sadness for the suffering of friends and opponents. That's why we should listen to him when he demands the same from others.

 

Not only sadness, but also anger is permissible and understandable: about the cold-blooded killing of almost 1,200 Jewish Israelis as well as foreign tourists and guest workers. About the no less cold-blooded killing of over 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza by Israel's army. Which of these should scare us more? In war we are partial; we are more affected by the suffering of some people than that of others. That is difficult to change. But a minimum of decency requires that we do not forbid others to express their sadness and anger over the killing of so many people. Especially if we know Ghassan Hage's work: In it he doesn't just stop at anger - he thinks more often about the events and speaks into our conscience.

 

It is arguably legitimate to criticize or be angry with Hage's point of view, just as he criticizes and is angry with others. All of this is clearly within the scope of freedom of expression within the meaning of the Basic Law. And the media and science have to endure it accordingly. Hage supports the idea of the controversial movement “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS), which wants to force a policy change through a boycott against Israeli institutions. That's why he doesn't travel to Israel himself, but, as he himself explained, he works with Israeli colleagues. A group of Israeli scientists recently confirmed this in a public statement in support of him.

 

Hage has since commented on the allegations on his blog: "If some right-wing journalists who don't like my politics pick out my criticism of Israel from everything I've written and accuse me of anti-Semitism, I expect my "My employer knows about it or at least examined my file and defended me against such accusations." He still stands by his statements: He represents a political ideal "that I have always fought for with regard to Israel and Palestine. It is the ideal of a multi-religious society in which Christians, Muslims and Jews live together in this country.

 

The path towards a plural society also requires pluralistic discussions that give space to viewpoints that are initially irreconcilable. The Max Planck Society's decision is a sad statement about the future of Germany as a science location. For many colleagues at home and abroad, the debate within Germany, in which any discussion about the Middle East conflict can be cut off with accusations of anti-Semitism, is difficult to understand.

 

And why should they come to Germany if they also have to fear becoming the target of a politically motivated campaign? Especially when they are biographically linked to a region that is far removed from German sensitivities and culture of remembrance, but is directly affected by an armed conflict in which Israel plays a central role.

 

I, myself, emigrated to Germany because, in addition to good working conditions, I also found a more critical spirit and diversity here than in my Finnish homeland - a culture that I found to be free, but also small-minded and nationalistic. Today I wonder if I would make the same decision again. The Max Planck Society was given the choice: to continue the tradition of critical discourse and cosmopolitanism - or to wall itself in under pressure from some activists and the media and de facto censor one of its most renowned scientists. They chose the latter.