Introduction

1In this longer (book) review-essay, I summarise Alana Lentin’s book “Why Race Still Matters” (2020) and present it from the vantage point of its importance for a German context in conjunction with questions of Palestine and the Palestinian Diaspora (see also Younes 2022a). The arguments presented unfolds in two parts. In the first part, I provide examples from Germany to the summary of Lentin’s work, for people interested in issues around Palestine advocacy or theorisations in Germany. The second part offers an elaboration on what I call white nationalist “Racial Revenge Binds.” This part builds on and transcends Lentin’s work and uses it to theorise further the Figure of the Palestinian in a German landscape. It can be read in conjunction with Lentin’s theorising and zooms in on the politics of emotions in colonially inferred modern Germany.

2For Alana Lentin, race is “a technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy on both a local and a planetary scale.” (Lentin 2020, 5) Within this local and planetary matrix, Lentin references Dr. Cheryl Harris of critical race theory (CRT) prominence, and stresses the relationality and the production of Otherness in the service of Whiteness:

Thus, race must be understood relationally as a process of racialization that attaches to various groups of subjugated peoples differently but which coheres in the service of white supremacy. (Lentin 2020, 120)

3Throughout the book, Lentin continues to highlight the fact that race as a concept has been colonially and historically configured, with its “capacity for racial logistics to adapt” (Lentin 2020, 50) leading to an ever-changing (and yet often all too similar) institutionalisation of race and its social workings that go beyond the bodily or biological. Referring to Stuart Hall’s “politics without guarantees,” she states, “I propose that difficult conversations about race are taking place among those whom it affects, and it is the responsibility of everyone to reject defensiveness, and to listen and engage” (Lentin 2020, 15). In a Feminist and Fanonian spirit, emotions are thus crucial in the generating of knowledge for Lentin:

But I also want you to get angry, because, far from a useless emotion (Lorde 1982), it is anger against the injustice that makes race still matter that will pave the way to that freedom; not a selective anger, but a relational one, an anger that, despite my appeal not to leave race behind just yet, motivates us to seek a day when we can do exactly that. (Lentin 2020, 15)

A German context: Race, critical theory, and identity politics

4Lentin’s intellectual anchor stems, on the one hand, from her lived experience of growing up as a (white) European Jewish woman in an “almost monolithically Catholic” Ireland (Lentin 2020, 3), while having been “born on colonized Palestinian land, the granddaughter of refugees from fascist Romania” (Lentin 2020, 4). Lentin’s writing style is fast-paced, clear, and filled with personal anecdotes and policy examples from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Women, people of colour, and indigenous writers, thinkers, and activists are epistemologically centred. “Why Race Still Matters” was written at a time when president Trump aimed at “interdicting” the expertise of scholars of race/racism, labelling their thoughts “un-American propaganda.” To top it off, he also shared his views that “critical race theory, white privilege, or any other training or propaganda effort [sic] that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil” shall be censored (Harris 2022). More specifically, the 22 September 2020 official executive order of the Trump administration on “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” states that such identitarian logics deflect from what is truly important for the nation, namely “our common status as human beings and Americans” (Executive Office of the President 2020).1

5In American administrative visions, the blurry concepts of “being human” and being “an individual” seemingly trump historically grown, politically reproduced, and socially managed and marginalised group identities including their stratifications in society.2 Although neither “human” nor “individual” is defined in the document, it becomes clear that anti-racists and others are marked as aggressive citizens or as threats to social cohesion and, therefore, to the state. Trump’s administration might not be representative of every Western government. Yet, partial overlaps are hard to ignore when it comes to issues of racism, for instance, and can nevertheless be observed elsewhere, too. Furthermore, what is seen as “un-American” by Trump and his allies in the United States (US), namely race critical and whiteness theories, is often seen as being very American in Europe, also in Germany.3

6In Germany, contestations to conversations about racism, critical race theory, or decoloniality are on the rise at the same time that decoloniality, intersectionality, and feminism have become buzzwords in middle class and university circles. What appears at first as a political contradiction, is also productive in other ways: Fantasies and ideas of and about Palestine serve as a vibrant conduit and pacifier for debates on coloniality, settler/-colonial rule, and population control across borders. When speaking about decolonization, the latter also shows how contradictions in a political economy serve to mark and materialize the boundaries for permissible research, speech, and politics by furthering the class chasms between different sites of power. While the economy sets the boundaries for employment, politics set the boundaries for content and speech – both work in tandem and are one and the same.

7When speaking about race in Germany more broadly, let’s consider, for instance, the order of the former German minister of interior Horst Seehofer. In 2019, he supported that the concept of anti-German hostility (Deutschenfeindlichkeit)4 was introduced into nation-wide criminal police statistics as a new (hate crime) category alongside the introduction of “xenophobic criminal acts.” According to state statistics, the category of “anti-German hostility” “Deutschenfeindlichkeit” counted 132 criminal acts that year and was seemingly predominantly executed by what these reports call “foreign ideology” (ausländische Ideologie) (BKA 2020, 6). The introduction of “anti-German hostility” as a hate crime, happened exactly two years after “anti-Muslim racism” was introduced, for the first time ever, as a statistical category in 2017. In 2016 alone, anti-Muslim racism accounted for up to 3,000 attacks (at times deadly) (Younes 2017). In the wake of the 2015 “refugee crisis,”5 Seehofer even proclaimed that “migration is the mother of all problems” (Younes 2018).

8This policy, which seemingly ac/counts for racism, ushers in a double-move, which eclipses a professed state transparency around racism at the same time it avows it. It also effaces the fact that race and racism as structural problems are executed by social, economic, legal, and political power. As will become clearer later on, this structure of talking about racism while not talking about racism will become more important for an understanding of the role the figure of the Palestinian plays in Germany.

Chapter I: “Race Beyond Social Construction”

9In her first chapter, Alana Lentin takes up the delicate and unfortunately all-too-timely question of “racial science,” which permeates white Europeanised societies through the spectre of “racial realism.” According to Lentin, racial realism is a concept that formulates popular beliefs around race as something that is scientifically provable and can thus tap into common-sense knowledge that is socially and politically valid and relevant (for instance, statistics). As a concept, “racial realism” is meant to counter the antagonistic concept of “social constructivism,” which holds on to the core idea that society is the result of historical myth-making, repeated narratives, and desires to imagine community. For Lentin, the most visible and refurbished form of such old tropes around “racial realism” crystallise around deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-testing, genetic science, medicine, and “the development of technologies of security and surveillance for the control both of ‘unruly’ racialised groups and of migrants and asylum seekers at the highly policed borders of the Global North” (Lentin 2020, 18). The spectre of “racial realism” is thus a materialising discourse that fortifies the blending together of tropes around “race” on the one hand, and “culture” on the other. If the majority of impoverished people, the percentage of criminalised bodies in prison, or the lower achievement rates in education are predominantly people of colour, for instance, “racial realism” would explain the latter due to “the culture” those people possess. Culture thus stands in for the manifest realities racial science and racism created, by making racism appear as “common-sense,” as “innate qualities,” or, simply, as the naturalised “history of a people.” Such polarisations then pose a problem for our discussions around race in society, according to Lentin. The old mantra of anti-racists that race is a social construct but has real effects, is then echoed by equally valid counterarguments from racial realists: why call ‘white’ people ‘white’, if it’s all just a social construction—isn’t it perpetuating racism to speak of ‘race’ and ‘colour’, rather than deconstructing it?

10Since arguments such as these emerge just as much from social constructionist epistemologies, they can equally be weaponised by racists or by anti-racist. Lentin alerts us to think through the notion of “racial realism” and understand that our current language to talk about race and racism is insufficient—as scholars as well as public intellectuals, we often find ourselves trapped in the “construction” vs. “biology” debates. She also argues that the large majority of people are still “illiterate” in reading and understanding race or racism as what it is, then falling victim to culturalised notions of supposed “ethnic incompatibility” given the all-encompassing nature of the system of racial realism in our society.

11Germany: The racial realism described by Lentin also exists in Germany—albeit not only through Seehofer’s statistics. The mainstreaming of anti-Muslim racism between arguments around “construction” vs. “biology” became a vital force governing society when Thilo Sarrazin, then member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), published his book called Germany does away with itself/ Deutschland schafft sich ab in 2010. In that book, he propagated amongst other things the philo-Semitic trope that Jews are inherently smarter than the average (white) German, whilst Muslims are inherently more stupid, primarily producing “headscarf-girls,” “döner shops,” or “vegetable stands,” as he stated. In a public environment like this one, where the most radical counter-arguments revolved around “racism is a construction,” statistics were weaponized by the other side: Sarrazin argued with social statistics that “Muslims” are inherently less intelligent by quoting datasets that do not explain context. Arguments such as these motion toward an in-assimilability of Muslims, Blacks, Africans, Arabs, etc., and eventually lead to, i.e., fantasies of “ethnic replacement,” where Muslims, will “over-populate” and thus “erase” native (white) Germans (Bracke and Hernandez 2020). The way to argue against such racial realism was to “re-read” said statistics by a team around Prof. Naika Foroutan (2010) that pointed out the racist work involved in “reading” statistics without context. In her book, however, Lentin argues that “race” has never had any scientific grounding and can therefore not be argued with or even refuted solely on so-called “scientific grounds”. Lentin instead calls upon academics “to be better at explaining what race does” (Lentin 2020, 28), adding that

Focusing our arguments on whether race is or is not about biology is meaningless outside of academia because ‘underlying socioeconomic structural racism is unaltered.’ (Lentin 2020, 32)

12Hence, while even academics cannot really pinpoint what race is precisely, Lentin’s main critique counters “back-and-forth debates” around i.e., “statistics” with an analysis of social “il/literacy” when it comes to understanding what race does and how it appears in a given time and space. Utterations of “race being social construct” is thus nothing but a “conservative goldmine” for race apologists, for it is unable to give an account of what race actually is. This predicament makes it harder for anti-racists to even argue in public against racial realists, such as Sarrazin. At the end of the day, in the “racial state” (Goldberg 2002) debates like that finish on matters of “opinion.” They were also not able to stop the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA) or the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in their rise to power only a few years later. What one is left with then is an inevitable trap in responding to polemic arguments, instead of being able to explain structures and what “is social about race” (Lentin 2020, 31).

13In this first chapter, Lentin wove together how a “race illiterate” public can fall prey to arguments of race realists, because of the insufficient understanding of race per se and the way we as academics have communicated counterarguments. In times of white supremacist identitarian politics in the globalised West, the old colonial trope of population replacement is thus the logical conclusion re/surfacing, due to collective non-knowing. Sarrazin, for instance, not only alluded to biological notions of race and culture (he positively cited the TheBell Curve as explaining how the virtue of intelligence is bestowed on Jews but less so on Muslims), but also essentially argued that “Germany will do away with itself” (reminders of colonial replacement theories and white death anxieties), if native (white) Germans do not stop the take-over by such undesirable subjects—an argument that still today falls on fertile ground in the “marketplace of ideas” (Lentin 2020, 50). Giving an account of Sarrazin’s racial realism and his anti-/ and philo-Semitism therein, Sander Gilman (Gilman 2012, 59) argued that it is primarily Sarrazin’s anxiety about Muslims that shapes his argument about (smarter) Jews. Thinking with Lentin’s argument, such racial and mental logistics to understand society adapt through time and space. It stands to reason that, today, the figure of the “Muslim” in Germany is used as a bargaining tool to negotiate the relationship between white Germans and Jews writ large (Tzuberi 2020; Younes 2020).

Chapter II: “Not RacismTM”

14Lentin’s next chapter jumps directly onto the “marketplace of ideas” where racism has become a matter of opinion. Therein, she confronts those who argue against “multiculturalism” whilst claiming to not be racist. Accordingly, Lentin takes us on a policy journey through Australia, France, the United Kingdom (UK), and the US to exemplify the relationality of race and the discursive and performative regimes it follows when denying and reproducing itself. In the French context, she sets out to defend antiracist decolonial writer and activist Houria Bouteldja who, in 2011, was legally charged with anti-French racism and has since been treated like a “witch” in French society (see also Mechaï 2020). For Lentin, the perversion of notions such as “anti-white racism” can only be explained as an act of revenge on behalf of the state in the context of a rising “movement of autonomous antiracist intellectuals” (Lentin 2020, 61). Such politics of revenge against the weak in the racial state are, according to Lentin, exemplified in not allowing non-white citizens the same right to “bandy words about or make puns like any other French person” (Lentin 2020, 60). I read such politics as revenge politics, built on the perpetual fear (and its incumbent empire logic) of losing control over global and national narratives:

The question of who can control the definition of racism has grown in importance almost as a function of the lack of control that many racialized people have over the determination of their life course. (Lentin 2020, 59)

15In my reading of Lentin’s work, historical perversion thus come together with revenge-politics in the intricacies of such narrative control. The all too known mantra of the white “lone wolf” shooter, narrated as troubled, but not as racist, is elaborated on by Lentin as a foil upon which social narratives are lived out:

First, racism is characterized as an excessive ascription. Second, alternative definitions or racism that diverge radically from what most people on the receiving end of racism understand it to be are offered in its place. The (re)definition of racism as universal, ahistorical, and a question of individual morality, rather than being structurally engendered, is the linchpin on which ‘not racism’ hangs” (Lentin 2020 63)

16But it does not stop there. Lentin goes further in analysing the old realisation that European anti-racism can exist without anti-colonialism (aka: anti-racism ≠ anti-colonialism). Lentin explains that the de-linking of anti-racism from anti-colonialism was possible because “racism” for Europeans was first discovered and talked about in Europe when discussing antisemitism and fascism in the 20th century—colonial atrocities and domination were not understood as racism per se, nor has antisemitism been seen as a European product of colonial racism.

17Lentin additionally argues that if racism happens in Europe, it is still predominantly understood as an exception to the norm and not as constitutive of Europe. This then adds another dimension to said predicament: if antisemitism happens, its threat is understood to come from the racialised and former colonised Other (Africans, Arabs, Muslims, anti-Zionist Jews, the anti-imperialist Left, and queer politics) instead of white supremacy. This will be further elaborated on in her chapter on the “Good Jew/ Bad Jew” (see also Younes 2022a).

18Germany: The Halle-shooter that stormed a German synagogue on Yom Kippur in 2019 is a good example for this argument. Calling his manifesto “Techno Barbarism,” the man wrote in English to communicate to his internationally organised white supremacists through today’s lingua franca:

So why, you may ask, did I choose this target. It’s the nearest location with a high population of jews, simple as that. Even then, I need to drive 45 minutes, which is quite a lot of time to get detected and intercepted. I originally planned to storm a mosque or an antifa “culture” center, which are way less defended, but even killing 100 golems won’t make a difference, when on a single day more than that are shipped to Europe. The only way to win is to cut of the head of ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government], which are the kikes [Jews, derogatory]. If I fail and die but kill a single jew, it was worth it. After all, if every White Man kills just one, we win. (Halle Shooter Manifesto, 2019)

19The white supremacist fantasy that Jews undermine white European societies by bringing in colonial subjects and left-wing ideas is an old one that was over the past years again mobilised by the overwhelming majority of publicly orchestrated antisemitic attacks in North America and Europe. However, said stereotype also hinges on the fact that Jews were treated like colonial subjects in Europe, exterminated and worked to death equal to their counterparts in the colonies once Germany decided to turn Europe into its Lebensraum enterprise post-World War One (Young 2001, 2). The fear and projective fantasy that Jews would “undermine” white society, changing it to a more multicultural/cosmopolitican/etc. society, is presented through a falsifying white supremacist narrative and paranoid lens of the loss of “white culture,” which in turn makes Jews responsible for “white genocide”— the latter narrative unfolded in Pittsburgh or Poway, USA, or in Halle, Germany, attacks in 2019.

20The disguised neoliberal taboo of labelling racism as “not racism” or “not white supremacy” then leads to the extension of such narratives to those who want to talk about race or racism. Accordingly, it is non-white intellectuals or groups that are accused of furthering race and racism in Europe by way of talking about it, whereas white identity politics are understood as, for instance, German cultural self-interest against foreign invasions or cultural take-over. “Racial self-interest” on race-realist-terms are best exemplified as calls for the maintenance of German culture in mainstream German politics, as well as, on its more pronounced and vocal fringes.

21Interestingly, Lentin finishes the chapter on critiquing white academia, which still rather promotes “migration studies.” The latter understands human movement predominantly within “post-racial” epistemologies, which does not connect its investigations to race critical literature or racial capitalism, as Lentin remarks. Although Black Panther intellectuals have already highlighted and coined the term “institutional racism,” Lentin points out that our race critical knowledge about institutions6 has not led to successful engagements with breaking said structures. Instead, Lentin points to the contradiction of a culture endorsing anti-racist buzzwords, whilst maintaining the structures that led to the need for the former:

A Eurocentric concept of racism advanced by a structurally white academy is unable to fully encapsulate colonially constituted racial domination, leaving us with a situation where, despite the competing existence of a ‘black analytics’, racism remains ‘more objected to than understood’. (Lentin 2020, 74)

22Furthermore, the separation of anti-racism from anti-colonialism is epitomised in Germany when speaking of Israeli politics. The conflation of anti-racism with colonial attitudes leads to an erasure and silencing of Palestinian voices (and existence), and a demonisation (but not a silencing) of anti-Zionist Jewish narratives on the ticket of antisemitism accusations (Zuckermann 2010; Fischer 2016; Younes 2020).

Chapter III: “Making it About Race”

23The next chapter tackles how “not talking about race” permeates the entire political spectrum—regardless of political affiliation. From the so-called “Left” to the “Right,” Lentin stipulates that when it comes to arguing for race, gender, and sexuality (and more) it is predominantly seen as a “reduction” of very “complex” political issues to “identity politics” (Lentin 2020, 96). Discussions on race, gender, sexuality are thus not seen as contributing to a debate but as hindering, leading de fact to a deflecting from the actual issues at stake. Next to that, antiracism is caricatured (Lentin 2020, 95) by those opposing it, depicting its intellectuals and writers as springing from a post-modern university elite, who seemingly understand themselves through (self-serving) victim narratives.

24Lentin also tackles the Left, where, as she observes, racism and race are often seen as an “educated middle-class” topic, which in turn is pitted against the aforementioned “more complex” problems of economic hardship of the working classes. Therein, ironically, self-conceived class interests are ostensibly figured as white only:

The desire to silence talk of race with the aim of encouraging greater interethnic unity, while commendable in theory, is impossible if it involves the denial of facts. Yet these facts are drowned out when talk of race is heard only as an accusation of racism rather than a critical analysis of how racialized power structures operate through class, nationalism, citizenship and gender. (Lentin 2020, 102)

25Thus, when race critical scholars nevertheless insist on using Whiteness as an analytic and then get caught up in accusations of furthering identitarianism, Lentin cuts right through and asks:

With this in mind, I want to ask, what if talking about identity politics as a distraction from antiracism were not itself a distraction from antiracism? (Lentin 2020, 109)

26The latter argument builds the background for her next argument, which takes on Asad Haider’s book “Mistaken Identity – Race and Class in the Age of Trump” (2018). There is unfortunately neither enough time nor space to eloquently represent Haider’s argument.7 What can be said, however, is that he sets out to trouble movement politics in his US-based California homestead. Embracing a performativity analytics where identity-making happens through interpellated social interactions that are repeated, but open to change and not fixed to biological bodies, Haider falls short to give an account of how to translate that into a material critique of the anti-racist movements he describes in California. Although Haider is arguably “on to something” with his definition of “identity politics as the neutralization of movements against racial oppression,” it is sometimes not quite clear what he understands as identity. He then also writes: “Race, gender, and class name entirely different social relations, and they themselves are abstractions that have to be explained in terms of specific histories” (Haider 2018, 11). This is where Lentin’s critique comes in to take on Haider’s issues with “Afropessimism” and, what she views as Haider’s main concern, namely his take on the “primacy of victimhood in antiracist rhetoric” (Lentin 2020, 127). Given the limitations of this text, I want to focus on Lentin’s argument which claims that Haider unjustly reads “Afropessimism” as the culprit for failed or identity-coopted movement politics (Lentin 2020, 115). Although Lentin also critiques Afropessimism for its analytical statism (i.e., the immanent social death of the black body), she nevertheless believes Haider’s critique of identity politics—similar to debates in France and Germany as discussed above—struggles with the often-times crushing and crushed materialisations of demands for social justice amongst progressives. Lentin therefore asks its (most likely) academic readership the following:

We have to ask why debates that take place within universities have come to stand for problems in antiracism writ large. We might also ask where this leaves antiracists who are not students or academics. (Lentin 2020, 114).

27Lentin continues to argue for a race analytic that is global-yet-local in reach, process-oriented and moving between the concepts of biology (i.e., colour) and the more sociocultural (i.e. Du Bois’ racial “badges”). Whilst remaining locally rooted in any understanding of racism, it is not always easy (neither for movements, nor for intellectuals) to straddle the lines in a global system that has often appeared to the many as a “catch-22.” The more one tries to get out of it, the more one realises one is trapped between political choice and the social constraints imposed by our own subjectivity and location. One of the outcomes of a structural debate that views race, gender, and sexuality as defective of “real politics” also most likely produced a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) optics which then put “black identity extremists” (aka Black Lives Matter, see Speri 2019) on the US terror list. Victimising the powerful and blaming the victim via the tropes of an “angry” identitarian or even “reverse-racist/ anti-White” mob then becomes especially important for her last chapter.

28Germany: Again, this can be applied to German structures, in particular on the so-called Left: Marx-21 (Marx21 2020), a network of people in the party “Die Linke” (The Left) that is still on the radar of the intelligence services, has also been nicknamed “Muslim21” by antagonist fractions inside Die Linke due to its anti-imperialist stance and support for Palestinian rights. Marx-21 is also regularly mentioned by the public internal German intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz, VfS) since 2011, due to their (amongst other things) supposed “entrism.” “Entrism” here names an ideology that is aimed at the infiltration of antagonistic groups/parties with the goal of changing an (institutional) ideology from the inside (BMI VfS 2011, 192). The surveillance and attendant “muslimization” of supporters of Palestinian human rights in Germany (Qasem 2020) is a discursive trope present throughout all political spectrums and clearly shows the conflation of anti-imperialism/decolonisation with (anti-state) conspiracy theories (see also Zia-Ebrahimi 2018).

29A Facebook post from said “left-wing” internal antagonists illustrates their anti-Marx21 posture in just a few polemic sentences:

If you’re tired of regressive [average] people like marx21 and want to puke your guts out about Islamism-appeasers, Israel haters, and other dolts who got stuck in the class struggle, then you’ve come to the right place. Against all fascism, racism and antisemitism, progressive approaches for the critical handling of fascists of all colors and a lot of bullshit, trashtalk and punchlines against various leek revolutionaries. (Anti marx21, 2018)

30In Germany, throughout the political spectrum, such anti-Muslim racist narratives on the Left have a genealogy. In this vein, Leandros Fischer reminds us that left-wing—or formerly left-wing intellectuals—are indeed often revered in mainstream discourses due to their “expert status” in a given topic/field. That is especially true when it comes to discrediting other competing left-wing narratives (Fischer 2016, 84). The pacification of the more radical fringes of left-wing thought, or else the mainstreaming of left-wing thought is thus the logical conclusion of pitting left-leaning narratives against each other. Fischer observes a paradigm shift whereby accusations of antisemitism—formerly directed at the German Right for its historical revisionism—are directed today at Muslims and the radical (anti-imperial) Left, in the guise of a “New antisemitism” due to the “criticism of Israel that is prevalent among these two groups” (Fischer 2019, 34; and Fischer 2014). According to Fischer’s work on the subject of antisemitism as a political tool and narrative amongst the Left in Germany, the pluralisation of white left-wing debates, along with the stigmatisation of its more decolonial and anti-imperialist arguments amongst them, then also directly correlates with the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Germany and Europe in general, following the beginning of the so-called “War on Terror” in the early 2000s.

Chapter IV: “Good Jew/ Bad Jew”

31For a German context, Lentin’s last chapter might be the most interesting and indeed most needed intellectual input (see also Younes 2022). Lentin sets out to interrogate the pronounced binaries between what is structurally interpellated as “good Jews” and “bad Jews” in white (supremacist) narratives. Lentin argues that Jews in a post-Holocaust and post-racial time are hyper-humanised—a typical philo-Semitic trope—which Lentin directly connects to “state philosemitism” (Lentin 2020, 164, citing Houria Bouteldja). The latter philo-Semitic structure then in turn constructs what Lentin calls the “good Jew vs. bad Jew” binary. In this matrix of interpellating favourable minorities, and then splitting the latter into the “good and bad” apples, is paradigmatic for Lentin when she talks of antisemitism being weaponised by white supremacy against other minorities (Lentin 2020, 136). She argues, “[t]he political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them.” (Lentin 2020, 137) In a third step, Lentin points to the hierarchy of race and racism in this matrix. Lentin continues to argue that a white antisemitism optic is used as a “technology of and to rule” racialised Others. That same optic uses “cipherization, its availability to racial rule and the proxification of antiracism as well as the attendant construction of good and bad Jews as intrinsic to the re-/production of antisemitism (Lentin 2020, 168).

32Adherent to such perverse yet productive libidinal fetishisation is thus the silencing and invisibility of living white Jews, an almost complete historical erasure of Jews of colour, as well as of anti-Zionist Jews writ large. Such silencing of a living Jewish body that rejects notions of victimisation and suffering (Lentin 2020, 169) is thus sidelined for a narrative of Jewish life that continues surviving the concentration camps. Such continuously racialising historical developments need to be read through the prism of a white European post-Holocaust narrative, as well as through the prism of political Zionism (Israeli nation-building). Finally, Lentin thus attests that “by constructing a figure of the ‘innocent Jew’ (Assoun 2019), the complexity of Jewish existence is flattened” (Lentin 2020, 167).

33However, next to flattening the existence of what it means to be Jewish in relation to the state, Lentin also sees a binary system of “good antisemitism” vs. “bad antisemitism” at play in this overall discourse on what antisemitism comes to mean today. The former (the “good antsemitism”) is the philo-Semitism of the white racial state that weaponises Jewish survival and suffering to re-structure borders, minority rights, and imperial ventures. The “bad antisemitism” in this matrix is reserved for the figure of the Muslim/Arab or anti-colonial antisemite, the far right, or else, the anti-imperialist Left. Another way for Muslims (and others) to clear their “name” of this interpellation is to join the war against “bad Muslims” that are antisemitic, whilst the general suspiciousness of Muslims remains. In this vein, it is important to highlight Mahmoud Mamdani’s scholarship:

Judgments of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ refer to Muslim political identities, not to cultural or religious ones. For those who have difficulty thinking of cultural (and now religious) identity as distinct from political identity, don’t forget the predicament faced by earlier conscripts of Western power. Was not the secular Jew, first in Europe and America and then in Nazi Germany, compelled to recognize that Western modernity had turned ‘the Jew’ from just a cultural or religious identity to a political one? Was not historical Zionism the response of secular Jews who were convinced that their political choices were limited by this political identity imposed upon them? (Mamdani 2004, 15)

34The flattening categorisations into good and bad political Jewish identities, as well as the misuses of antisemitism as described by Lentin, are thus the necessary prelude for the weaponisation of antisemitism for white political purposes in the racial and imperial nation-state.

35Germany: Next to the racist “flattening of Jewish identity” as it unfolds in German politics today (Tzuberi 2020, Younes 2020), the framing of Jewish identity through a desired “muscular Judaism” (Presner 2007) as a core and at the same time marginal Jewish identity in Germany, forecloses political and historical inquiries into whether Jews could also be both: subjects (victims) and agents of (European) empire. In a similar vein, Sarah Stein argues that the reason this differentiation is so often avoided is due to the fear of (perpetuating) antisemitism, which then results in what she calls the “three intellectual allergies”: a historical focus on Jewish colonial intentions that is reduced to looking at the modern Jewish colonial project in Palestine; an essentialising image of ‘Jewish powerlessness’; and finally, a decoupling of Jewish subjectivity from imperial ventures and economies of the historical past (Stein 2005, 15). However, over the past two decades (arguably even longer, see Fischer 2016, 72-78), German policy did not tire in producing public scandals that bring together said binaries of good vs. bad Jew, or good vs. bad antisemitism, thus relegating historical questions of coloniality, Jewish subjection and agency in empire politics, and questions of power to the anti-Semitic borderlands of internal and external Europe and, finally, to questions of im-/migration. Yet, it is precisely in inflicting and participating in white colonial violence (Davis 2012; Presner 2007) abroad or in the settler colony itself, as James Baldwin provocatively argued (Baldwin 1967), that Whiteness is (conditionally) bestowed upon certain (racial) minorities (i.e., European Jews) whilst others remain or are being excluded from it.

Building on Lentin: Racial revenge binds and Germany

36In this book-review essay supplemented by my own comments and readings of Lentin’s work, I hopefully showed why Lentin’s concepts mirror racial developments in Germany. Following, I will extend aspects of her work and zoom in on the figure of the Palestinian in a German colonially produced context in which Palestinians are not only met with an economic punishment when being too vocal about pro-Palestinian advocacy, but also one of psychic projections.

37In a seemingly binary world framed as situated between Western pro-Israelism and non-Western anti-Palestinianess, German Palestinian scholar Sindyan Qasem observes emotional convergences in Germany where the “idea of Palestine [is] tied to feelings of danger” (Qasem 2020, 71). Qasem uses Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisation of “sticky relations” (Ahmed 2011; 2014) in the wake of the war on terror, in which Ahmed uses this notion to understand how Islamophobia operates within the ‘war on terror’ through repeated semantic proximity: through the repetition of associations (i.e., with Islam and Terrorism), ideas of terror, violence, and danger get “stuck” to particular groups of people, entrenching and essentialising the racism they face. Qasem draws on Ahmed’s optics and through them reads public policy documents and public intellectual contributions that converge on figuring the idea of the Palestinian and Palestine as an immanent terrorist threat to Germany. This figuration of Palestine and Palestinians then serves as a vessel propelling general anti-Muslim racism further, including their allies that are—at the same time—“muslimized” (Qasem 2020). In this historically grown enmeshment, which converges around said figurations, Qasem also draws our attention to the public proliferation of the idea that “post-colonial theory” is seen as anti-Semitic, too (as example see Deutsch 2020 and his attack on Dr. Achille Mbembe). Palestinians, the anti-imperial left, and people of colour allies are put in proximity to Islamism and Terrorism via post-colonial theory (Qasem 2020, 86-87) as a seemingly epistemological beginner’s drug for the former. It is here where Judith Butler comes to mind, arguing in Frames of War, that such historically repetitive and harmful stigmatisation practices “work both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inquiries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation” (Butler 2004, 4). Such analytics, I claim, mirror Germany’s national governance through antisemitism work, as well as, through “non-racism” (see Lentin 2020).