Post #3853995

❞ The best demonstration I have seen of the internal mechanics of this displaced guilt, well before its public hardening, came at a meeting I attended years ago in Germany. Long before the book fair cancellations and the protest bans – when the underlying architecture of displacement was still veiled by the pregenocidal status quo – its psychic foundations were already set. This meeting involved politicians, journalists and think-tank representatives. Nothing that we presented to them was incendiary. It was just the basic lexicon of daily survival in the West Bank: the matrix of checkpoints, land confiscations, permit regimes, and the slow suffocation of ordinary movement. It did not go well. Many of those in attendance sat distracted, their attention divided between their phones and the ritual performance of being there. At the end, almost predictably, came the German refrain: “We have our history.” The phrase was uttered as a form of closure, a shield against engagement. Palestine was received as something perpetually displaced by Europe’s unresolved past. It was as if acknowledging Palestine required confronting both Israel and Germany’s own ghosts – a task they were unwilling to take up. This was a revelatory encounter, because it offered such a raw view of the affective substrate that gave rise to today’s bureaucratised censorship. It revealed a deeply ingrained reflex of self-referral, where every Palestinian claim is instantly converted into an anxious question about German identity. The conversation is permanently stalled in the anteroom of European conscience, fundamentally barred from ever arriving at its ostensible subject. ❝ https://www.equator.org/articles/moral-stupidity-gaza-palestine-abdaljawad-omar