Palestine Between German Memory Politics and (De-)Colonial Thought

Abstract

The “Mbembe fiasco” started when Felix Klein attacked the Cameroonian philosopher and postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe, and called for him to be disinvited from the 2020 Ruhrtriennale in Bochum. Klein acted in his federal government capacity as Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism. He referenced the 2015 anti-BDS resolution of the German Bundestag when he argued that Mbembe must be forbidden from participating because of his supposed relativization of the Holocaust and denial of the State of Israel to exist (Existenzrecht). Klein centred his criticism on Mbembe’s 2016 essay “The Society of Enmity” and the foreword he wrote for the 2015 publication Apartheid Israel: The Politics of Analogy. The commissioner pointed to Mbembe’s assertations that the colonial occupation of Palestine was worse, indeed “far more lethal” than Apartheid South Africa, and that the occupation of Palestine was the “biggest moral scandal of our times.” Mbembe pointed to the “most dehumanizing ordeals,” the Palestinian experiences of “carnage, destruction and incremental extermination” caused by Israel, and called for its global isolation until it respected international law. As might be expected, Mbembe rejected the claims of antisemitism or of trivializing the Shoah. While many scholars wrote in Mbembe’s defence, none of the German-language articles defended Mbembe’s thoughts on the colonial occupation of Palestine as the “most accomplished form of necropower,” the colonial management of life and death, and “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material