Israel’s ambassador convinces Berlin’s Jewish museum to cancel BDS speaker

Jeremy Issacharoff, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, complained to the head of the Jewish Museum in Berlin about a hardcore anti-Israel speaker, prompting the museum’s director to pull the plug on the academic’s July talk.

The slated talk was to be delivered by the US-based academic Sa’ed Atshan, a Swarthmore College professor of Peace and Conflict Studies in Pennsylvania, who said in 2014: “We all know Israel is an apartheid state and should be boycotted.”

Ambassador Issacharoff told the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung that he welcomed the decision of the museum to cancel Atshan’s talk. “Atshan is very closely connected with BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions]” and “he is not a person who wishes to build bridges of understanding with Israel.”

BDS is a campaign that advocates diplomatic, cultural, political and economic warfare against Israel.

Atshan, who was born in Ramallah, was scheduled to give a talk called “On Being Queer and Palestinian in East-Jerusalem” as part of the museum’s ongoing exhibit “Welcome to Jerusalem.”

Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and lecturer in the Center for Religious Studies at Ruhr University in Bochum, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that when the items about Atshan’s support for BDS on the Internet are accurate – including calling Israel an apartheid state – “it was right to disinvite him.” Beck, who is a leading figure in the German LGBT movement, added that he “who himself belongs to a boycott movement, should not complain when he is boycotted.” Beck said a speaker like Atshan “has no place in a publicly funded institution and has nothing to do with a critical dealing with Israel’s policies and the fight for the rights of Palestinians.”

Dr. Elvira Groezinger, the chairwoman of the German branch of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told the Post that: “The decision of the Jewish Museum in Berlin to cancel the talk by Sa'ed Atshan is justified, as the speaker is a renowned anti-Israel activist supporting the BDS groups aiming at the destruction of what Atshan regards as an apartheid state.” She added that “It is a good signal for the Museum, which gave the impression of an Anti-Jewish Museum in past years, especially after the heavily criticized recent Jerusalem Exhibition there.

“Let us hope, the Museum’s anti-Zionist orientation has finally come to an end,” she said.

The museum director Peter Schäfer’s decision to cancel Atshan’s talk is a potent new setback for BDS in Berlin and anti-Israel employees at the museum. BDS has been viewed as adding to a growing hatred of Jews in the capital city.

Israel’s embassy complained previously in 2012 to the museum’s management for hosting a US academic, Judith Butler, who supports BDS and praised the US-classified Islamic terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah as “progressive.”

The embassy said at the time: “We regret that the Berlin Jewish Museum decided to hold a discussion event, which posed the question about the identity of the Jewish state. Similar discussions are not conducted about any other state on the planet.”

 The Israeli Embassy continued that it was “astonished that exactly this museum would provide a stage to a person who called for an academic and cultural boycott against Israel… In the name of freedom of opinion the Jewish Museum offered a forum to a person who supports a boycott against Israel and therefore calls for Israelis to be boycotted because they are Israelis.”

The embassy added that it hoped the museum, with a view toward the future, would invite speakers who show different views other than calls to boycott Israel. The museum took the complaints of the embassy in 2018 seriously.

Writing last year in the Jewish Exponent, Asaf Romirowsky, the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, called Atshan “a well-known advocate for BDS” who “has also been active with SJP [Students for Justice in Palestine], whose parent organization, American Muslims for Palestine, was recently shown to be connected to the same American Muslim Brotherhood supporters who funded Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation, and which has trained its activists in ‘Countering Normalization of Israeli Oppression on Campus.’’’

In September 2017, Berlin’s mayor Michael Muller committed to “continue emphasizing my clear stance for Israel and against antisemitism and racism” and equated BDS tactics with “standing with antisemitic signs in front of Berlin shops” that recall “the intolerable methods used in the Nazi era.” He added that “We will do everything in our power to prevent the use of our venues and funds for BDS anti-Israel incitements.”

Israel has stepped up its educational campaign to convince European banks, governments and companies not to support and enable BDS. In February, Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan demanded that the German Bank for Social Economy close an account that enables a BDS organization to raise funds to boycott the Jewish state and spread antisemitism.

“As minister of strategic affairs, I am leading an international campaign to defend Israel from the BDS movement’s hateful attacks against Israel’s right to exist. This stance against BDS has been adopted by our close friends in Germany, including the CDU [Christian Democratic Union] and municipalities such as Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich. I call on the Bank for Social Economy to join the many German institutions, leaders and citizens who are uniting to reject the discriminatory and antisemitic boycott movement against Israel,” Erdan told the Post at the time. The CEO of the bank Harald Schmitz has defended the BDS organizations who raised money with the accounts.

Benjamin Weinthal reports on human rights in the Middle East and is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @BenWeinthal.

Follow the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.