Questions of Funding

Mohammed al-Hawajri’s Guernica Gaza is a series of collage works combining 19th and 20th-century paintings with images from the Gaza war of 2008-9. The two peasants of Millet’s Noonday Rest recline on a haystack as an IDF unit approaches on foot and a Merkava tank trails behind. Delacroix’s Liberty wears a keffiyeh around her neck and leads a charge of Palestinian children.

I first saw al-Hawajri’s work in 2022 at Documenta Fifteen. His collective, Eltiqa, had been invited to exhibit in Kassel by the Palestinian group the Question of Funding. If al-Hawajri’s work asks whether Palestinians are included in the supposedly universal humanism of Western art, the Question of Funding ‘aims to rethink the economy of funding and how it affects cultural production both in Palestine and the world’. In Germany today, state funding of the arts, academia and civil society has become a crucial tool to shape compliance with the state’s unwavering support for Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

Following the discovery of antisemitic caricatures in a banner hanging on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz, Documenta Fifteen became a national scandal. The chancellor, Olaf Scholz, refused to visit, and right-wing media depicted the exhibition, which was curated by Indonesian artists, as a spectacle of ‘postcolonial’ hatred of Israel. An inquiry commissioned to investigate the debacle found that Guernica Gaza, ‘like other works shown at Documenta Fifteen, spread the Manichean idea that Jews are profoundly evil and their victims are thoroughly innocent’.

Even before the exhibition had opened, German newspapers accused Palestinian participants of antisemitism, based largely on their alleged links to the BDS campaign. The targeting of artists and intellectuals critical of Israel, frequently Jews or people of colour, has been commonplace since 2019, when the Bundestag compared BDS to the Nazi boycott of Jews, and demanded that its supporters be denied state funding.

That parliamentary resolution, first suggested by the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), was non-binding and many institutions, including Documenta, accepted the risk of ignoring it. But the scandal marked a turning point, and the German authorities have since been far less tolerant of such insubordination. After all, the argument went, wasn’t the state paying for this?

I saw Guernica Gaza again last November at Oyoun, a queer and migrant-led cultural centre in Berlin, which hosted the twentieth anniversary of Jüdische Stimme, Germany’s branch of Jewish Voice for Peace. The 7 October attacks by Hamas and Israel’s assault on Gaza overshadowed the evening, and what had been planned as a celebration instead took the form of collective mourning. Images from the series hung from the balcony above a hushed auditorium.

Israel’s bombing campaign had already destroyed al-Hawajri’s home, displaced his family and incinerated much of his personal archive. On Instagram he posted pictures of his children taking shelter; whole neighbourhoods reduced to rubble; and a tribute to his cousin’s family, three generations of whom were killed together. Eltiqa’s gallery was hit last December. Gazans took paintings and furniture from the wreckage to use as firewood.

Around the same time, Oyoun became Germany’s first cultural institution since 7 October to be defunded entirely. When Berlin’s culture senator, Joe Chialo, announced the decision, taken against his own department’s legal advice, he spoke of opposing ‘every hidden form of antisemitism’, apparently referring to the Jüdische Stimme event.

Since October 2023, there have been punitive funding decisions in other sectors, too. German state funding has been pulled from several Palestinian NGOs, including al-Haq and Addameer. Two women’s centres in Berlin closed after the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg stripped their funding because a pair of managers posted pro-Palestine statements on social media and attended an anti-war conference. When hundreds of academics signed a public letter in May to protest against the Free University of Berlin’s decision to have police violently evict a student encampment, the federal education ministry examined whether signatories could lose their public funding.

Such measures are supported by parties across the floor of the Bundestag, much of the media, Germany’s (non-Jewish) antisemitism commissioners, the Israeli embassy, the Central Council of Jews and lobby groups such as the German-Israeli Society. Many of the strongest proponents are themselves state-funded.

At a conference convened in June by the Tikvah Institute and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, both of which are state-funded and pro-Israel, speakers discussed legal strategies to restrict the awarding of culture and non-profit grants. ‘Antisemitism must not be an “opinion” that the state supports financially,’ said Daniel Botmann, the managing director of the Central Council of Jews. He called for the IHRA definition of antisemitism, widely used to suppress critics of Israel, to be made legally binding.

Other experts questioned whether adding restrictive clauses to budgetary rules or funding applications would be legal or even desirable. In January, Chialo had been forced to walk back a legally unworkable ‘antisemitism clause’ that required all applicants for culture grants in Berlin to accept the IHRA definition. Article 5 of Germany’s constitution, which guarantees the right to free expression, remained a stubborn obstacle.

An opportunity to square this legal circle has appeared in the form of a long-planned parliamentary resolution, entitled ‘Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany’. The declaration was jointly conceived by the three governing parties and the opposition Christian Democrats to address an increase in antisemitic incidents in Germany since 7 October. The surge in ‘anti-Jewish hatred and Israel-related antisemitism’, the text says, is attributable not only to the far-right and Islamists but also to left-wing anti-imperialists and ‘immigration from countries in North Africa and the Middle East’.

The resolution calls for immigration, asylum and criminal law to be tightened to combat antisemitism, and for universities, where antiwar activists have occupied buildings and set up encampments, to be granted wider powers to discipline and expel students. All levels of government are asked to prevent the financial support of projects and organisations – Documenta is mentioned as an example – that ‘spread antisemitism, question Israel’s right to exist, call for a boycott of Israel or actively support the BDS movement’. The IHRA definition is to be considered ‘authoritative’. The new resolution cites the 2019 BDS text as its model, ignoring a parliamentary assessment from a year later, which found that if that resolution had been formulated as legislation, it ‘would not be compatible with the fundamental right to freedom of expression and would therefore be unconstitutional’.

In August, dozens of Jewish artists signed an open letter that called the text ‘a malicious distortion of reality’ for conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel and suggesting that the most urgent threat to Jews in Germany comes from migrants and leftists. Fifteen Israeli NGOs said it ‘would be instrumentalised to attack and constrain German funding for our human rights work’. Several legal scholars have said it would be unconstitutional.

Wrangling over the final text delayed the resolution for months, until the parliamentary party leaders convened in private to push it over the finish line. Its demands and the opaque negotiations provoked rare criticism from the media and several members of the government. Hours after Scholz sacked his FDP finance minister, bringing an end to the governing coalition and heralding new elections, the Bundestag passed the resolution this morning by a large majority.

The AfD also voted in favour. Its deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch (a scion of the royal House of Oldenburg whose maternal grandfather was Hitler’s finance minister), paid thanks to the parties behind the resolution, in particular the Greens, for following the AfD’s lead in linking antisemitism to immigration, the left and Islam. ‘Reality has caught up with them,’ she said. ‘The proposed solution in their motion also goes in our direction … Put Muslim antisemites on the plane and back home.’

If the measures now demanded by the Bundestag were introduced as legislation, they would probably be overturned by the courts. With a non-binding resolution, recipients of state funding will be drafted, willing or unwilling, as enforcers. Curators, convenors of academic conferences and charity administrators will be expected to screen and blacklist any partners or collaborators who could be seen to violate the IHRA guidelines. An old social media post or a signature on a petition could result in funds being withdrawn.

Al-Hawajri and his family, who had been sleeping in a tent in Rafah, escaped Gaza in April, shortly before the IDF invaded the city. In a recent interview, he spoke of how his family risked their lives to rescue his artworks from their ruined home, dragging the rolled-up canvases on the ground so they were not mistaken for weapons by Israeli soldiers. ‘I can’t allow the Israeli occupation to completely erase my story,’ he said.

The Bahnhof Langendreer arts centre in Bochum planned to display Guernica Gaza last month, to ‘open discussions’ around the Israel-Palestine conflict. Instead, under heavy political and media pressure, the exhibition was pulled before its opening. Bochum’s Green Party, citing the Documenta report, called the work antisemitic for comparing the IDF to the Luftwaffe, and said it contravened the city’s resolution to protect Jewish life, which it passed in December. The SPD head of the city council agreed, and said it was urgent to debate ‘whether such a venue should continue to be financially supported by the city to the extent that it currently is.’