The hypocrisy of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (and the German government in general) is incredible.

Here you have a Jewish person who is a journalist and a renowned political thinker who was being given the award for being someone who "reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom".

They 100% have the position, right, and accuracy to be comparing the state of Gaza currently to the WWII ghettos.

Edit: Something else to note. The Foundation made this statement ""But Masha Gessen's views should not be honored with a prize intended to commemorate the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt".

And I can't help but laugh. Do they not know Arendt's past stance on Israel? She was literally one of the first world-renowned Jewish anti-Zionists.

She literally compared the Likud party to the Nazis!

Hannah Arendt prize for political thought

Genocide Expert Award Rescinded After Genocide Expert Compares Genocide To Genocide

Huh, the IDF is currently pushing Gazans into smaller and smaller areas by not allowing them to evacuate through their lines and forcibly removing civilians who didn't evacuate.

They also plan to maintain the blockade they've had on the strip that heavily restricts people and material from moving.

What historical parallel could there possibly be to this situation?

Oh well. Better not listen to the guy who studied it hard enough to earn the award in the first place.

I‘m German, currently living in Switzerland and when I recently visited Germany I was appalled by the amount of unconditional support for Israel, for example a HUGE (maybe 10x10m?) israeli flag on the offices of the Grünen party and official posters calling for solidarity. I don‘t even think this is stemming from (however undifferentiated and misguided) historical considerations, rather than geopolitical considerations. Also on the subject of the article, I think that‘s a pretty apt and carefully done comparison.

I wonder if in 100 years we'll be looking at Israel like we look at Nazi Germany nowadays.

Germans learned nothing from their Nazi past. Still love censorship and still love to consider some lives more important than others. They'te just acting like an Israel's colony now.

100% accurate

Honestly what timeline are we on. I wonder if they've even asked themselves "are we the baddies?".

He's not wrong. Been saying this since week 1 of this new stage of the conflict. Others have been saying this for decades.

In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

Not taking sides here, but it does seem to me like Gessen's phrasing was deliberately provocative towards those who might be offended by their comparison. I'm left thinking, "I mean, if you kick a beehive, don't be surprised if you get stung."

I'm sometimes fine and sometimes flabbergasted with this german response. Can anyone tell me if they teach about the germans killing roma people in concentration camps as they found them? The murder was mostly about one group of people, but there are things you can learn from other minorities being persecuted.

I'm sometimes fine with it because, well, at least nobody in Germany is shooting fire extinguishers at menorahs like in Poland.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A German foundation has said it will no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to a leading Russian-American journalist after criticising as “unacceptable” a recent essay by the writer in which they made a comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.

In the paragraph the HBS draws attention to, Gessen wrote that “ghetto” would be “the more appropriate term” to describe Gaza, but the word “would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews.

At the time it stated that “as an analyst of decline and hope, Gessen reports on power games and totalitarian tendencies as well as civil disobedience and the love of freedom”.

Supporters of Gessen, who is Jewish, and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were among family members murdered by the Nazis, have been quick to point out the irony of suspending a prize awarded in memory of Arendt, the German-born Jewish-American historian, philosopher and antitotalitarian political theorist who coined the phrase “the banality of evil”, in connection with the trial of leading Nazi Adolf Eichmann, which she covered as a journalist for the New Yorker.

In an interview with Die Zeit published on Tuesday, Gessen spoke of the backlash Arendt had faced as one of Israel’s initial critics, warning against establishing a purely Jewish state in Palestine and in so doing excluding the Arab population.

In an open letter written with Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals in 1948, Arendt had, Gessen pointed out, even compared the Israeli Freedom party to the Nazis after they used racially motivated violence against civilians.

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