For years, the same sad spectacle repeats itself in regular intervals: as soon as the so-called “Middle East conflict” escalates, so does antisemitism on the streets of Vienna. Led by associations whose sole purpose is to wipe out the only Jewish state, an alliance of “left-wing” anti-imperialists, Islamist fundamentalists, neo-Nazis and Turkish right-wing extremists is formed, who see that an opportune moment has come to finally deal the death blow to the hated “Zionist entity”. The anti-zionist agitation against Israel is not just a criticism of the state and the nation. Quite the contrary. Not coincidentally, does it project all the atrocities of modern statehood only on the one single Jewish state, which serves as an anti-semitic object of projection to distinguish good from evil rule, instead of wanting to abolish all oppression.
Those who claim “Palestine solidarity” are not concerned with the liberation of Palestinian civilians from the conditions in which humans are degraded, enslaved and abandoned. Rather, they replicate this bondage in the name of “national liberation” or trivialize Islamist terror as anti-colonial resistance. The supposed commitment against the suffering and for the rights of the Palestinians is only put forward as long as it can be used as an accusation against Israel. And thus, in these circles, people like to keep silent about the inhumane practices of Hamas or the Palestinian Authority against their own population. Silence is kept about the suffering of those who are held in tent cities for generations as refugees without rights and as bargaining chips against Israel. Silence is kept about the other Nakba, the expulsion of 450,000 Palestinians from Kuwait in 1991, in revenge for the PLO’s commitment to the mass murderer Saddam Hussein. Silence is kept about the situation of the Palestinians in Jordan or Lebanon, who have to live there under inhumane conditions. Silence is kept about the instrumentalization of Palestinian suffering by reactionary movements and regimes like Turkey, Iran or Syria. These movements feed on the imagined cohesion against “the Jewish oppressor” and in the same breath express fantasies of extermination against other minorities, such as Êzidis, Alevis, Armenians and Kurds.
What happened in Israel on Saturday, October 7, was the worst attack on Jewish life since the Shoah. Since then, never have so many Jews been murdered in one day as on this Saturday. The murderers proudly filmed their acts and in some cases broadcast them via livestream. People were shot en masse, raped, abducted. Families were tortured and murdered along with their children. What transpired on that Saturday was an anti-semitic pogrom. Hamas has put into practice what it has formulated as its political program for decades: The destruction of Jewish life.
It demonstrated to us what the destruction of Israel would mean: The end of Jewish life in the Middle East. This pogrom was significantly financed by the Iranian Mullah regime and its allies. What began in Germany and Austria as National Socialist work of extermination finds its continuation as eleminatory anti-semitism in the charter of Hamas, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories circulating everywhere and the threats of extermination of the Iranian regime against Israel. The massacre in southern Israel was as if the darkest epoch in human history had reached across time into the present and torn people out of it.
The ideology behind it is wreaking its bloody havoc throughout the region; in addition to minorities, it is primarily women and queer people who are the first to suffer. They are victims without a lobby who attract the punishment and persecution of those who choose to subordinate themselves to God or fatherland. We witness it in Iran, where protests of people fighting for their freedom and against the terror of the guidance patrol, patriarchy and oppression are bloodily suppressed. We witness it in Afghanistan, where under the renewed terror-reign perpetrated by the Taliban any emancipation is nipped in the bud. But we also witness it in Gaza, where Hamas is in power, where any emancipatory organizing, like those in unions or as social protests, are brutally crushed. Where thousands of civilians are now dying in a war that the reactionary rulers in the Middle East are keeping alive because pointing the finger at Israel serves to maintain their power.
In solidarity with all the people who are fighting for real liberation in the Middle East and around the world, we want to march on Saturday. Our thoughts are with all those who were murdered or abducted, with their relatives and friends, with Jews in Europe and elsewhere, who now have to fear that the wave of anti-semitic violence will spread here as well. Our thoughts are with those people in Gaza who find themselves in a situation not of their own choosing, who are exposed to the military strikes of the Israeli army as well as the terror of the Islamist rulers.
Our thoughts are with all those who are now affected by racism and violence. For it is precisely those states in Europe that demand more deportations and police after Islamist attacks, that at the same time profit from trade with Islamist regimes externalizing their own anti-Semitism and projecting it onto migrants. No matter how irreconcilable European right-wing extremism and Islamism may seem, they are two sides of the same coin and they feed on the racist division produced by the dominant discourse.
Our thoughts are also with the people in Rojava, who are currently exposed to the war of aggression of the Turkish regime, a close ally of Hamas, far away from all media publicity.
Our solidarity goes exactly to those who stand up for life and against death, who wish for a world without violence, without domination, coercion and oppression, without anti-semitism, racism, nationalism and islamism – whether in Israel, Palestine or elsewhere! Because, as the feminist revolution in Iran has already shown us: Freedom is not Eastern or Western, but universal!
