Society on the Israel-Hamas Conflict & more – 23rd Nov 2023

Hallo from BA! This is the Rorshok Germany Update from the 23rd of November twenty twenty-three A quick summary of what's going down in Germany.

Let’s kick off with what has happened in the country since the Israel-Hamas war broke out. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations were banned for a few weeks, 2.600 anti-Semitic crimes were recorded, an Islamist demonstration occurred on Essen, and public media has been criticized for obscuring civilian casualties in Gaza. Even though many nationalists and conservatives blame the rise of anti-Semitism on “Islamists” and migrants, right-wing extremists committed the vast majority of anti-Semitic crimes. These accusations and other statements by conservative politicians led to a growing alienation of the Muslim community. In contrast to other Western countries, the German debate focuses on anti-Semitism at home and abroad, which, in light of the country’s past, causes division in the country.

Friday the 17th marked the end of a controversial one-day visit to Berlin. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has left Berlin after meetings with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and president Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The state visit had sparked controversy, both among Kurdish groups and the Jewish community in Germany. Erdogan’s comments, justifying Hamas’ antisemitic terror as “resistance,” contributed to the controversy. Critics have called Erdogan’s reception in Berlin “a hypocrisy” due to the two countries’ opposite stances on the Israel-Hamas war, but also due to the democratic deficits of the Erdogan government, which continues to oppress Kurds and other ethnic minorities. Ultimately, the two leaders, Scholz and Erdogan, avoided open conflict in a joint press conference. The two statesmen upheld their respective positions and emphasized the importance of communicating in these difficult times.

The halls of government buildings were not the only place where Turkey and Germany faced each other this week. On Saturday, the 25th, the national football teams of the two states met in the Olympic stadium in Berlin. Ultimately, the game ended with a 2-3 win for the Turkish team. The celebrations and preparations surrounding the game were mostly peaceful. But there were some smaller quarrels between the police and Turkish fans. During the live reporting of the game, viewers could see one Turkish fan showing the wolf salute commonly used by the Turkish neo-fascist, ultra-nationalist organization called The Grey Wolves. Amidst tensions in Germany surrounding rising anti-Semitism and islamophobia, this certainly furthers the division of German society surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. Unlike in Austria or France, the public display of the wolf salute is not illegal in Germany.

Now, a flashpoint court case.

There’s currently a case before the district court of Leipzig regarding Jewish musician Gil Ofarim. In October twenty twenty-one, he posted a video on social media in which he said that the Westin Hotel’s staff refused to let him stay there because he was wearing a Star of David necklace. A few days after Ofarim made his initial statement on social media and reported the incident to the police, a video surfaced. However, the footage might not have revealed that the star was showing, with the prosecution dropping the case against the manager. He, in turn, sued Ofarim for slander in the beginning of November. The manager said that the Star of David was not showing. However, the main question now isn’t about whether Ofarim was visibly wearing a star of David or not, but rather whether the manager knew the musician and thus knew about Ofarim being Jewish.

Two major German party organizations, the youth section of the Social Democratic Party of Germany or SPD and a regional association of the Christian Democratic Party or CDU, have recently taken two very opposite stances on the issue of asylum law in Germany. Scholz, the SPD chancellor, recently said in an interview with the weekly magazine Der Spiegel that: “We finally need to deport in great numbers.” A statement that both his own party and the co-ruling Green Party have called a nationalistic talking point and criticized it because, in actuality, there are only 50,000 migrants who could legally be deported, while his statement suggests much greater numbers. The far- and center-right, on the other hand, welcomed this statement. A convention of the young social democrats criticized Scholz again and demanded governmental efforts to combat growing inequality instead of pitting the societal weak against each other. The CDU, in turn, demanded to abandon the right to ask for asylum across the whole EU, which would essentially mean abandoning the Geneva Convention, which guarantees the right to ask for asylum.

Next up, Germany’s fiscal policy is notorious around the world for its fear of debts. In the course of the two thousand eight recession, the then-ruling coalition of Christian democrats and neoliberals included this “fear” into the constitution and called it the “debt brake.” This debt brake only allows for a small percentage of GDP as new debts. During the pandemic, the government circumvented the debt brake through a catastrophe clause to stabilize the economy with 60 billion euros (or 65 billion US dollars) of new debt. This money was then not completely used and has been redirected into a so-called “climate-transformation fund.” On Wednesday the 15th, the constitutional court ruled that this redirection was illegal after the conservative Christian democrats filed a suit. Now, the debate surrounding the debt brake has flared up again. Robert Habeck, the co-ruling Green Party’s economy minister, and a careful critic of the debt brake, pledged that all investments would nonetheless arrive as promised. In contrast, Christian Lindner, of the co-ruling neoliberal Free Democratic Party, the financial minister and a staunch defender of the debt brake, has called for cutting funding on social welfare programs to finance the “missing” funds.

This cutting of social welfare programs culminates in the discussion around the “Bürgergeld,” a small monetary support for, among others, unemployed people. Recipients of this welfare program are children living in poverty, people who are unable to work or work but don’t earn enough to make a living, and people doing care work. In total, there are only approximately 1.6 million people who can work and receive welfare payments. The constitutional court has repeatedly ruled that this citizens’ money must be enough to cover the basic necessities, the existentially necessary minimum or Das Existenzminimun. To ensure this minimum for all recipients the budgeting parliamentary committee has approved an additional 4.8 billion Euros (approximately 5.2 billion US dollars) in funding. Conservatives see this as the precursor to “mass laziness” or as a strong incentive for people in the low-income sector to quit their jobs. In fact, this isn’t a raise of benefits for welfare recipients. It merely achieves offsetting the effects of the rising prices.

Rising prices played into the cue for this next public outcry: Railway workers went on strike. On Thursday, the 16th, railway workers of the small Union of Locomotive Drivers, or GDL, went on strike for twenty hours. The workers are asking for a small pay increase of 555 euros or 600 dollars with a three-hour per week reduction of work time, plus other demands including an increase of 5 % in the welfare payments the employer is obliged to cover. The state-owned but privately run railwork company paid its chairman of the board alone 2.24 million euros (or 2.44 million US dollars) in twenty twenty-three and had budgetary room for around 100 million euros in bonus payments for 30,000 executives. But despite these numbers, the public outcry is directed at the workers, who, according to conservative outlets, are fueled by greed and are threatening to halt the country in its tracks.

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