After severe criticism, an event planned for Wednesday by the Goethe Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Israel has been postponed. The title of the discussion is “Understanding the pain of others – Holocaust, Nakba and German culture of remembrance”.
The State Department in Jerusalem on Tuesday expressed “shock and disgust at the brazen trivialization of the Holocaust and the cynical and manipulative intent to forge a connection whose whole aim is to defame Israel.”
The term Nakba (catastrophe) refers to the escape and expulsion of Palestinians during the first Middle East war in 1948. At that time, part of the British Mandate of Palestine became Israel. The Arab neighbors attacked the new state. During the fighting that followed, around 700,000 Palestinians fled or were displaced.
The chairman of the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, Dani Dayan, wrote on Twitter that the event represented an “intolerable distortion of the Holocaust”. It was also “unforgivable” to hold it on the anniversary of the 1938 pogrom night.
The Israeli ambassador in Berlin, Ron Prosor, wrote on Twitter: “On the commemoration of the November pogroms in 1938, the Goethe Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation decided to downplay the memory of the Holocaust. And in Israel of all places. This is unacceptable and disrespectful!”
The Goethe-Institut in Israel wrote: “We regret that the choice of date for a panel discussion has currently led to irritation. Therefore, after consultation with the speakers, we are postponing this to Sunday, November 13th, 2022.” The intention is to illuminate the topics of remembrance culture and reconciliation policy in a differentiated manner.
In the reference to the event it said, among other things: “Almost 75 years after its founding, remembrance in Israel remains a politically contested area. Jews focus on the Holocaust, while Palestinians focus on the fateful year of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of victims fled and were expelled by Jewish fighters – referred to in Arabic as the Nakba (catastrophe).” The publicist Charlotte Wiedemann, a participant in the planned discussion, pleaded on the other hand, for “a new empathetic remembrance that does justice to different sides and promotes solidarity instead of victim competition”. The Goethe-Institut is the cultural institute of the Federal Republic of Germany that operates worldwide.
