Censorship of the Censor

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN GERMAN: Zensur des Zensors - Review by Jüdische Allgemeine

In a 2021 op-ed in the Guardian, English composer Brian Eno complains that he is one of many artists suffering “blacklisting and exclusion” thanks to the passing of a 2019 German parliamentary resolution that designates the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel to be antisemitic. It further advises cities and states to deny public funding to any institution that “actively supports” the movement or questions the right of the state of Israel to exist.

The following year, in 2020, 32 artistic institutions in Germany wrote an open letter in which they rejected the BDS movement on the one hand, but on the other hand, argued that the counter-boycott triggered by the Bundestag is a danger to freedom of expression.

With all this discussion about boycotts and counter-boycotts, the facts on the ground are getting lost.

Artists who support the cultural boycott of Israel are championing censorship of other artists. They are trying to stop international artists from performing in Israel and international venues from hosting Israeli artists. BDS proponents attack artists who do not share their ideology and attempt to browbeat them into submission with assaults on their reputations and careers. Like totalitarian governments, they are using intimidation tactics to come between the artist and a willing audience to advance their own political agenda.

BDS advocates have long claimed that they urge a boycott of Israeli artists who receive even the smallest sponsorship from the Israeli government. They turn a deaf ear to pleas from Israeli artists who say that they, like artists from many other countries, need some government sponsorship to survive. They ignore the infringement on freedom of artistic expression.

Now some of these artist-activists, many of whom have publicly dragged their brethren through the mud for performing in the Jewish homeland and have berated international venues for hosting Jewish Israeli artists, don’t like how the shoe fits when it’s on the other foot. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Moral equivocations between the boycott campaign against Israel and the anti-boycott resolution are a pretense. The parliamentary resolution seeks to make it clear that the German government is not endorsing a political movement that supports the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state – a people and country to whom it owes a tremendous debt.

While Germany is focused on the dangerous impact of the artists’ personal political advocacy, BDS is focused on the cover of their passports. The first is public policy; the latter is discrimination. Artists are clearly responsible for their own actions and clearly not responsible for the actions of their government which, in some cases, they passionately denounce.

Germany’s prestigious art institutions and others appear to be arguing that censoring the censors is censorship – a line of reasoning straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. If these institutions truly care about freedom of artistic expression, and I believe they do, I am deeply troubled that they are so non-conflicted about giving platforms to artists who advocate for the censorship of other artists.

A 2020 piece in the New York Times notes that the anti-BDS resolution kicked off a “public debate [in Germany], in which the relationship of genocide and colonialism to the Holocaust, and Germany’s special relationship to Israel, all came into question.” I am floored and disgusted by any comparison between the predicament of Palestinians and the victims of the Holocaust. The comparison itself is Holocaust minimization and appropriation.

BDS demonizes Israel and is stirring up Jew-hatred worldwide. Germany cannot erase its past; it can only determine its future. It has every right, and in my opinion, the moral imperative, to make sure that the persecution of Jews never finds footing on its soil again.