An Israeli film-maker who won one of the top prizes at the Berlin film festival has said German officials’ description of the awards ceremony as “antisemitic” has led to death threats and the physical intimidation of family members, causing him to hold off plans to return to Israel.
Yuval Abraham, 29, was on Saturday awarded the Berlinale’s best documentary award for No Other Land, which charts the eradication of Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.
Abraham’s acceptance speech, in which he decried a “situation of apartheid” and called for a ceasefire in Gaza, was one of several moments during the closing ceremony in which film-makers expressed solidarity with Palestine. It sparked an outcry in German media the following day, with several politicians alleging the speeches had been “antisemitic”.
“To stand on German soil as the son of Holocaust survivors and call for a ceasefire – and to then be labelled as antisemitic is not only outrageous, it is also literally putting Jewish lives in danger,” Abraham told the Guardian.
“I don’t know what Germany is trying to do with us,” he added. “If this is Germany’s way of dealing with its guilt over the Holocaust, they are emptying it of all meaning.”
Not exactly. That is the propaganda. The reality is that Zionism was and still is popular with antisemites, and Germany never denazified. Zionism is an antisemitic ideology that despises diaspora Jewry, victims of the Holocaust, and upholds violent colonial Zionism as Judaism’s redemption and integration into whiteness. The antisemitic conceptions of diasporic Jewry vs white ubermensch are a prominent feature in the ideology. German Zionism doesn’t signify any sort of real antifascism on the part of the country. It’s a liberal regime that is prone to fascism as they all are.