Germany must face its issues over Israel and the past. Silencing a Palestinian author won’t help
/Very good article by Hanno Hauenstein posted in the Guardian. Definitely worth a read.
The Frankfurt book fair’s cancelling of an award ceremony for Adania Shibli shows the risks of imposing one narrative on our cultural space
More than a decade ago, in a crowded bar in Tel Aviv, my friend and I found ourselves talking to a group of German tourists. At the time, the world was watching Israel’s 2012 Gaza operation unfold. “Most Palestinians are terrorists,” one of the Germans explained to my friend, a Jewish Israeli who opposed the attack. And: “Not supporting the IDF is betraying your legacy.” A German, whose family is, like my own German family, implicated in historical atrocities, lecturing an Israeli about what moral or political lesson she may or may not derive from that very history was a grotesque sight to watch.
In German society today, however, such views seem normalised. Support for Israel is seen as a prerequisite for a newly constructed, collective German identity. While a degree of sensitivity towards Israel seems understandable given Germany’s brutal antisemitic history, the issue has turned ever more problematic in recent years. Palestinians, artists and curators from the so-called global south and leftwing Israelis are regularly reprimanded, dismissed or cancelled for views on Israeli policies that are deemed unpalatable. Last week, the Social Democratic co-party leader Saskia Esken even called off a meeting with Bernie Sanders due to his stance on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Sanders lost many family members in the Holocaust.
Adania Shibli’s case is the most recent and perhaps most acute example of such absurdities. Shibli’s novel Minor Detailtells the true story of an Israeli soldier’s 1949 rape and subsequent murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl. Published by Fitzcarraldo in 2020 and longlisted for the International Booker prize, the book won Germany’s 2023 LiBeraturpreis, which is for female writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world. But as a result of events in Israel, it was decided by the organisers that a ceremony on 20 October to honour Shibli at the Frankfurt book fair would be postponed.
I have read Minor Detail both in English and the German version, which was published in 2022. The book is a watertight account of what Palestinians and historians refer to as the Nakba – atrocities committed by Israelis in historic Palestine during the establishment of the state of Israel. Between the third-person narration of the pained Israeli officer responsible for the action and the later first-person account of an insomniac Palestinian in Ramallah today, the story moves between two viewpoints. In the second, Shibli relates what seems to approximate her own experience: the difficulty of trying to research a historical account from the victim’s perspective in contemporary Israel. In the novel, her project leads her to embark on a risky road trip towards a site in the south of the country, beyond the boundaries permitted by her Palestinian ID card.
The entire article can be found: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/germany-israel-palestinian-author-frankfurt-adania-shibli
