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BANNED BY GERMANY  
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Yanis Varoufakis
April 30, 2024
Project Syndicate
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_ Germany prohibited a Palestinian Congress from taking place,
arrested its Jewish supporters, and barred one of its organizers,
former Greek finance minister, from entering the country: Powerful
evidence Germany's pro-Israel Consensus is breaking down _

, Kiril Kudryavtsev /AFP via Getty Images

 

ATHENS – Three weeks ago, I was banned
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entering Germany. When I asked the German authorities who decided
this, when, and under what rationale, I received a formal reply that,
for reasons of national security, my questions would receive no formal
reply. Suddenly, my mind raced back to another era when my
ten-year-old self thought of Germany as a refuge from
authoritarianism.

During Greece’s fascist dictatorship
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radio broadcasts was banned. So, every evening, at around nine, my
parents would huddle under a red blanket with a short-wave wireless,
straining to hear Deutsche Welle’s dedicated Greek broadcast. My
boyish imagination was propelled to a mythical place called Germany
– a place, my parents told me, that was “the democrats’
friend.”

Years later, in 2015, the German media presented me as Germany’s
foe. I was aghast; nothing could be further from the truth. As
Greece’s finance minister, I opposed the German government’s
monomaniacal insistence on harsh universal austerity
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not merely because I thought it would be catastrophic for most Greeks,
but also because I thought it would be detrimental to most Germans’
long-term interests. The specter of deindustrialization
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today casts a depressing shadow across Germany is consistent with my
prognosis.

In 2016, when choosing a European capital to launch DiEM25
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helped to found, I chose Berlin. At Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre,
I explained [[link removed]] the reason:
“Nothing good can happen in Europe if it does not begin in
Berlin.” To reinforce the point, in the 2019 European Parliament
elections I chose symbolically to be DiEM25’s candidate
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in Greece (where I could win easily) but in Germany.

Given my lengthy relationship with the land of Goethe, Hegel, and
Brecht, the German center-left government’s decision to ban me is
more bewildering than even my nearest and dearest can imagine. I shall
leave to my lawyers the legality of being denied the right to know the
rationale behind the ban, and I will set aside the threat to my safety
from the reckless insinuation that I am, somehow, a threat to
Germany’s national security. Nor will I delve into what my ban means
for a European Union where free movement and association are singular
virtues. Instead, I want to focus on the ban’s deeper significance.

The trigger for banning me
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a Palestinian Congress co-organized by DiEM25’s German party
(MERA25), various Palestinian support groups and, crucially, the
German organization Jewish Voice for a Just Peace. But the writing had
been on the wall well before that.

Last November, Iris Hefets, a friend and member of the aforementioned
Jewish organization, staged a one-woman protest
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Berlin. Walking alone, in silence, she held a placard on which she had
written: “As an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.”
Astonishingly, she was arrested for anti-Semitism. Soon after, the
bank account of her organization was frozen – by officials unable to
grasp the irony, indeed the horror, of the German state seizing Jewish
assets and arresting peaceful Jews in Berlin.

In the run-up to our Palestinian Congress, a coalition of political
parties representing almost the entire German political spectrum
(including two leaders of my former comrades in the Left party) took
the extraordinary step of creating a dedicated website
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First, they branded us as “terrorism trivializers” vis-à-vis
Hamas’s October 7 attacks in Israel. It was not enough for them that
we had condemned as war crimes all acts of violence against civilians
(regardless of the identity of perpetrator or victim). They wanted us
to condemn resistance to what even Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad
director, described
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an apartheid system designed to push Palestinians either into exile or
into permanent servitude.

Second, they claimed that we were “not interested in talking about
possibilities for peaceful coexistence in the Middle East against the
background of the war in Gaza.” Seriously? All participants in our
Congress are committed to equal political rights for Jews and
Palestinians – and many of us, taking our cue from the late Edward
Said, support a single federal state
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the solution to the conflict.

Dismissing their groundless accusations, let me home in on the central
question: How could almost the entire German political class embrace
this denunciation, which prepared the ground for the subsequent police
action? How could they remain silent as the police arrested
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Raz (another Jewish comrade), prohibited our conference and, yes,
banned me from entering Germany – even from connecting via video
link to any event in the country?

Their most likely answer is the German state’s official
semi-rationale, or _Staatsräson_
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the protection of Jewish lives and Israel’s security. But the German
state’s recent behavior is not at all about protecting Jews
(especially my friends Iris and Udi) or Israel. The purpose is to
defend Israel’s right to commit any war crime its leaders choose in
the process of enforcing an agenda whose goal is to render impossible
the two-state solution that the German government claims to favor.

If I am right, something else is behind the current political
consensus in Germany. My hypothesis is that Germany’s political
class has a penchant for national catechisms that unite its members
behind a common will: net exports as Germany’s strength; China as
German industry’s playground; Russia as its source of cheap energy;
and Zionism as proof that it has turned a page, morally.

Once such a catechism is established, debating it rationally becomes
next to impossible. Moreover, the fear of being denounced for
abandoning it motivates the concerted denunciation of any apostate who
questions it.

A silver lining here is that young Germans, seeing the bodies piling
up in Gaza, are not afraid that they will be denounced if they
challenge a catechism that has jeopardized German democracy, the rule
of law, and basic common sense. This is why, despite the ban, I am not
giving up on Germany.

_YANIS VAROUFAKIS, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of
the MERA25 party and Professor of Economics at the University of
Athens. _

_PROJECT SYNDICATE produces and delivers original, high-quality
commentaries to a global audience. Featuring exclusive contributions
by prominent political leaders, policymakers, scholars, business
leaders, and civic activists from around the world, we provide news
media and their readers with cutting-edge analysis and
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500 media outlets – more than half of which receive our commentaries
for free or at subsidized rates – in 156 countries._

* Germany
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* War on Gaza
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* two state solution
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* war crimes
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