A decisive part of the trauma experienced by Palestinians in Germany comes not only from its being rendered taboo, but also from what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic violence. The term describes the violence of those discourses that normalize and legitimize systemic violence…. Symbolic violence justifies the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in various ways: the violent act of expulsion is trivialized, presented as controversial, accidental, or self-inflicted – or even “undone,” which is to say, annulled. By denying the existence of Palestinians in historical Palestine or their connection to the land, the reality of violence is erased.
Sarah El Bulbeisi
The Holocaust and the Nakba—the expulsion of Palestinians from historical Palestine, which has been ongoing since the end of 1947—are deeply intertwined. The Nakba is, among other things, a direct consequence of the Holocaust. Yet it is excluded from German collective memory, its relationship to German history only legible negatively in the representation of Israel as a safe haven for Jews. The nation’s once-lauded “memory culture” never links Israel’s self-conception as a Jewish state to the systematic expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians. The violence experienced by Palestinians must remain unspoken, taboo. When made visible, it becomes threatening—something that competes with the Holocaust and contaminates the German culture of remembrance. This is why the violence against Palestinians cannot be acknowledged as a continuation of European anti-Semitism. Doing so would force Germany—home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe—to confront the ongoing present of its history and to acknowledge that the nation’s moral rehabilitation is incomplete.
The taboo on the Palestinian experience of violence is so powerful that it necessitates socially rejecting Palestinianness itself. The Palestinian experience is so unpleasantly close to the Jewish experience, that sometimes—according to Edward Said—one cannot even pronounce the word “Palestine.”1 This closeness of the Jewish and Palestinian experiences renders Palestinian visibility embarrassing, even for Palestinians themselves. Traces of this fear of Palestinian visibility can be found in the representation of Palestinianness as deviating from the moral norm, as one-sided, ideological, radical, violent, and riddled with anti-Semitism.
In my book Tabu, Trauma und Identität: Subjektkonstruktionen von PalästinenserInnen in Deutschland und der Schweiz, 1960–2015 (Taboo, trauma, and identity: Subject constructions of Palestinians in Germany and Switzerland, 1960–2015), I explored how Germany’s selective remembering and forgetting—the institutionalized remembering of the Holocaust and the institutionalized forgetting of the Nakba—affects its Palestinian immigrants and their children, second-generation Palestinian-Germans born there. The social taboo surrounding their collective experience of displacement repeats and deepens this violence and trauma—leading to the dissolution of the self, to melancholia, and to feelings of invisibility, absence, guilt, and shame on the inside and to self-negation on the outside. But while first-generation Palestinians remain caught in their trauma, their children have begun to transform it into agency, reclaiming their socially discarded identity and history and replacing self-negation with a politics of visibility….
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/el_bulbeisi_sarah_08_august_2024.php
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