- Michelle
Source: The Jerusalem Post
By Benjamin Weinthal
BERLIN - Israel’s embassy in Germany on Thursday sharply criticized Berlin’s Jewish Museum for hosting an anti-Israel US academic, who urged an audience of roughly 700 people to boycott the Jewish state.
Stressing the importance of the protest, the diplomatic statement was posted as the top notice on the Israeli embassy’s electronic newsletter, stating: “We regret that the Berlin Jewish Museum decided to hold a discussion event, which posed the question, about the identity of the Jewish state. Similar discussions are not conducted about any other state on the planet.”
The Israeli embassy continued that it was “astonished that exactly this museum would provide a stage to a person who called for an academic and cultural boycott against Israel…In the name of freedom of opinion the Jewish Museum offered a forum to a person who supports a boycott against Israel and therefore calls for Israelis to be boycotted because they are Israelis.” The embassy added that it hoped that the Berlin museum, with a view toward the future, would invite speakers who refrain from calls to boycott Israel.
According to the Israeli statement, the speaker, Dr. Judith Butler, uses “anti-democratic methods against the Israeli government” to make her points.
The Jewish Museum’s decision to host a pro-boycott Israel event with Butler on Saturday prompted Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the head of the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor, to term the cultural institution the “Berlin anti-Jewish museum.”
Butler, a professor in the rhetoric and comparative literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley, told a sold out audience in the courtyard of the museum the she advocates a“version of a boycott” against Israel, and repeatedly cited her support for the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) movement targeting the Jewish state. She expressed ideas about creating a bi-national state and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, which would lead, according to critics, to the dismantling of the Jewish state. The mainly non-Jewish German audience expressed euphoria for her ideas.
The embassy wrote that the “Berlin Jewish museum decided at the end of the Jewish year 5772 to hold a podium discussion on the topic of ‘Does Zionism belong to Judaism ?'"
“The Shoah, which led to the murder of six million Jews across the world, is the clear proof that there must be a Jewish state whose most important goal is the security of the existence of the Jewish peoples,” noted the embassy statement. Israel’s diplomats added that “Zionism as an expression of the Jewish striving is the guarantee of the continuation of the Jewish people. Without Zionism and its realization in the form of the State of Israel, Jews worldwide as Jews and communities could not continue. The question, whether Zionism belongs to Judaism, is answered by history on a day-to-day basis."
Writing on his micro-blog twitter feed, Jeremy Newmark, a prominent British Jew and CEO of the Jewish leadership council in the UK, wrote ”Judith Butler calls for destruction of Israel at Berlin Jewish Museum in Germany.”
The embassy added that because of the fact that ”Israel sees the responsibility to secure Jewish life in the diaspora, Jews in the world can live in peace and quiet.”
The Jewish museum spokeswoman Katharina Schmidt-Narischkin told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday that the museum would post a video on Sunday of the Butler event on YouTube. The spokeswoman declined to return repeated Post queries about the video, suggesting that the event is a great source of embarrassment for a museum devoted to 2,000 years of German Jewish history, including documenting the boycott movement against Jewish businesses that started in Germany and led to the Holocaust.
In an email to The Jerusalem Post on Friday, Werner Cohn, who was born in Berlin in 1926, wrote "I am a Jew who fled Germany with his parents in 1938. My father was a physician in the Wedding district. I went to both public and Jewish schools in Berlin, and have kept up my interest in the city of my birth by visiting it occasionally, the last time last October. And it was in October that I last visited the Jewish Museum.”
He continued “I cannot express how deeply hurt I am by seeing this museum give a platform to someone who agitates against Israel, and indeed urges a boycott against Israel. I remember the Nazi-organized boycott of Jewish businesses in April of 1933. I was only seven at the time, but I can never forget the Nazis, in uniform, standing in front of Jewish shops and terrorizing the Jewish population. We did not know it at the time, but it was a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust.”
Cohn added that, “Obviously, Ms. Butler has a right to voice her opinions as she sees fit, but I can see no moral right of an ostensible Jewish institution to give her this platform. As I wrote to the museum, they will not see me again on their premises.”
