"Palestinians are the collateral damage for Germany's salvation"
Nicky Böhm on collective guilt, Staatsräson and Germany's "inherently racist" response to Israel's war on Gaza
Nicky Böhm was born and brought up in the UK and moved to Berlin in 2007. She started out working in film, including a stint as an assistant for director Jonathan Glazer, (who recently made a memorable Oscars speech after winning best international film for Zone of Interest), before moving across to the music industry to work with various labels and events. She is an industry mentor, curator and project manager, looks after community and education initiatives at Refuge Worldwide and co-presents the Flip the Script show on the radio station. I first met Nicky when investigating the toxic culture at Beatport, where Nicky formerly worked, for Vice. Throughout that process and in the years since she’s always impressed me as an extremely principled, gracious, passionate and altruistic person. Her tireless activism and advocacy for Palestine and other social causes is sincere and selfless, and she’s one of the people I admire most inside and outside of the music industry.
Thanks for doing this Nicky. What’s it been like watching this all unfold from Berlin?
The media here is shocking. I live in an area that is very, white and very German, because we moved out of the centre of town. There just isn't much resistance amongst regular people, and maybe that's to do with the very biased German media to a certain degree, and people not engaging with international opinion. But there's also a culture of obedience that runs through German society that I find really problematic, just because there’s a precedent here. I mean that’s fine during a pandemic, not so fine when authoritarianism and the AfD [a German far-right political party] are on the rise.
When I have my heated discussions, I’m like, “What you do now is potentially, in my perspective, what you would have done in the ‘30s,” and people don't want to have that conversation. Everyone just malfunctions and shuts down. I keep saying, “How do you think it happened that our grandparents’ generation allowed the Holocaust to happen?” It wasn't just this Big Bang moment. It was a collective, insidious response where society was looking away and not wanting to swim against the tide or cause a ruckus. That is something that I find terrifying, especially because I’m half-German and I’ve got kids growing up here. I said the other day, I don’t know the degree to which I want my kids to be culturally German if this kind of blanket obedience is part of the deal.
Among the general population, how much would you say the collective response to Gaza is influenced by deeply ingrained guilt about the Holocaust versus fear of punishment by the government?
Guilt and shame of course play a very prominent role within Germany’s collective guilt and Staatsräson (reason of state) mindset. Palestinians are the collateral damage for Germany’s salvation, so to speak. There’s also a very real threat of not being funded or having your funding withdrawn - just look at what happened to Oyoun [a Berlin culture centre that received funding cuts due to alleged anti-Semitism]. I think there are also plenty of white Germans who don't actually have to care about this. Whether it's Jewish person, a Black person, an Arab or any other racialized identity, their plight often doesn’t have a direct impact on the life of a white German, so there’s no incentive for them to do anything. Plus, they have the perennial excuse of not wanting to say anything that could potentially get misconstrued. They still very much hold on to this conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and to be anti-Semitic is about the worst thing you can be as a German. So they don't go there, end of story. The thing that is so fucked up about Palestine is that it's contentious to say you're against a genocide. It’s very binary and compartmentalised. You’re either speaking up for Palestinians and against anti-Arab racism and then you’re an anti-Semite, or you're not condoning Israel’s actions and then you’re a Jew hater. That’s how they always frame it here while ignoring the fact that statistically, the majority of anti-Semitic crimes are committed by white Nazis.
It’s exactly the same as what happened in the ‘30s with Der Stürmer [a German Nazi propaganda newspaper that ran until the end of WWII] when you would have all these very anti-Semitic images of Jews, and that paved the way for the normalisation of hate, bigotry and ultimately eugenics. In the same way now there are headlines claiming that there are no innocents in Gaza and the political class push this narrative of “imported anti-Semitism”. As though Nazism was just some fever dream and “it’s all the refugees we let in in 2015, they’re the real anti-Semites.” In January the AfD had this secret meeting about wanting to deport millions of immigrants and you know, I could also be on that deportation list because I'm brown, even though I have a German passport. What’s interesting is that most Germans who wouldn’t be on the list are unwilling to draw the dots between fighting the AfD and fighting Israel’s brutal military occupation, not to mention the violent criminalization of the Palestinian solidarity movement here. I often think about Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone Of Interest and how he said at the Oscars that the allegory of the film was to not to say look at what they did then, but rather look at what we do now.
It's kind of a convenient excuse as well for a lot of Germans to be able to sit it out. Those who might have felt pressured to participate performatively, now they don’t even have to pretend that they give a shit. They can just say, oh well, we’re not allowed to protest anyway.
I think it is changing slowly. Now, the thing I find quite shocking is the brainwashing that goes on in Germany and with German kids — and that's another reason why my kids come on the marches and they're very much indoctrinated with “free Palestine” [laughs]. At the beginning of the year a leaflet describing the Nakba as a 'myth' was distributed in schools here, so you see the school system and everything here is Zionist. There are parallels with the conversations I’ve had with anti-Zionist friends in Israel who tell me they’re essentially taught to believe from the moment they’re born until they join the army that they [Palestinians] are their enemy. In Germany, it's the same in many ways, it’s like, our ancestors committed this heinous crime, therefore it’s Israel til we die. It doesn't matter what Netanyahu does, it doesn’t matter what he says…his genocidal intent was there all along as we all know, even before the ICJ case, but it doesn't matter. The current world order is built on the foundations of genocide. All the Western powers were founded on the back of genocide and violent settler colonialism. So of course they're not going to then go, “Oh, no, this is bad.”
Have you experienced any sort of censorship or punishment or has your activism had any impact on your work opportunities?
Yeah..I mean, it’s dramatically affected everyone in Germany really. I’m grateful for Refuge [Refuge Worldwide radio station], and places like Oyoun, Spore, 90mil and the Barenboim–Said Academy but for the most part safer spaces are few and far between. I don’t want to be unnecessarily obtuse but I can’t really go into too much detail. I think the thing that I noticed — and maybe there are some parallels between this and the BLM stuff — is that the whole thing has a lot to do with privilege. Being able to strike or risk losing your job is tied to financial privilege and the extent to which you can be publicly vocal about Palestine and risk being arrested is also tied to passport privilege. Having said that, there are lots of people here from marginalised groups who have risked everything to put their head above the parapet. And to be fair there are also some incredible white Germans who are speaking out against this state-funded genocide. But I do take issue with some of the silent white Germans who are trotting out their Martin Luther King quotes and have James Baldwin posters on the wall. They can afford to say something. And they choose not to. Netanyahu made it clear that he thinks Gaza is “the city of evil” and that this is “a battle of civilisation against barbarism”. Well, at least we all know where he stands. However revolting the man is, you can't accuse him of being duplicitous because he's just like, “Yeah, these are my genocidal intentions, deal with it.” I'm fully aware that a lot of people can't publicly do anything even if they are privately bearing witness. That's why it's incumbent on the people who can do something to do something. I can get behind Palestine more because I'm not Palestinian. It doesn't take as much emotional energy for me because I don't have my family being slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank right now.
When you talk about people who can say something versus people who perhaps can't say something, what do you think defines the kind of person who is able to speak out?
I think that it is someone who has financial privilege, someone who has passport privilege and someone who has emotional labour privilege. So if you’re a straight white cis-het able-bodied male…your experiences with structural discrimination are pretty marginal, pretty much zero I would say. These are all the things that we spoke about ad infinitum during BLM. All of the reading lists and workshops, all this stuff about understanding privilege and how to be an ally…it feels like I’m just going a bit mad because it's like, what happened to all of that?
See, this is what has pissed me off. Clubs like Nowadays in New York, — it’s not the only venue that has been quiet, but Nowadays is or was one of the most famously progressive clubs in the world. You get a whole Safe Spaces speech that you have to listen to before you walk into the club. And they’ve held fundraisers for Ukraine and BLM and trans communities and have historically been super vocal about a bunch of different causes. And they have said absolutely nothing about Palestine. I mean they eventually held a fundraising party back in February, but there’s only been one as far as I know, and it was organised externally. Equally annoying and disappointing to me is that no one has been calling them out. Why not? Because people still want to go to their fucking favourite club. I get it, they have some of the best lineups and one of the best sound systems in New York, but I’ve been so confused by their silence and their patrons’ silence. I’ve been scared to call them out because everyone loves Nowadays so much and I don’t want people to turn on me for it, but that’s such a petty concern compared to what’s happening in Gaza. At this stage it feels disingenuous not to say something. I’ve heard people put forth various reasons as to why the club hasn’t spoken out but none of them have seemed very valid or convincing to me. I just feel like someone needs to address the gigantic elephant in the room.
Yeah, most people are just fickle. As we know, it's self-serving, it's transactional. But if we look at all of these social justice movements in history, most people didn’t speak out at the time, it came later. And then there was more of a groundswell. Martin Luther King, I mean, he wasn't popular when he wrote “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”. People thought he was a terrorist in the same way that Mandela was on the terrorist watch list until what, 2008? It’s only with history and with time that people come around. If you were to ask people now if they agreed with apartheid South Africa they would say no, but most white people did then because they benefited from it. I went to South Africa a couple of years ago and there’s not political apartheid anymore but there’s still economic apartheid. Why do people not question the fact that the indigenous people for the most part have a worse life than the settlers? Because they benefit from it. Because you go there and you have a nice time. I have friends from home who live in Cape Town and they have a nice life there, but why do they have an amazing life? Because it's on the Black and brown people to look after their kids and clean their swimming pools. I say this as someone who is half-white and who had an incredibly “white” upbringing. I also benefited from a lot of these racialized structures in many ways. Often when I have these conversations, people can get quite defensive and the way I try and contextualise it is by talking about ableism. Anyone who’s able-bodied is kind of by default ableist. They may not be actively prejudiced against people who are wheelchair users for example, or they might be in favour of there being more accessibility, but just by virtue of being able-bodied and not having to think about how to get from A to B, it’s a kind of ableist existence. We live in an ableist world in the same ways that we live in a white supremacist world and unless you’re directly affected by it, most people aren’t bothered. Most just want to get on with their daily lives and come home to watch Netflix and chill. But then they can’t be surprised when they [governments] come for our other rights, whether it’s reproductive rights in America or whatever it might be, because it's all on a spectrum. There's this sort of incremental creep where it means that other rights can also be taken away, especially in a country like Germany — just look at its pretty recent history and everything that happened with the Stasi and then the [Berlin] Wall went up…
I feel more passionate about people's apathy in a country like Germany because of the recent history and the obedience thing. The whole conformity before conscience thing that Sophie Scholl and the White Rose resistance movement took issue with back in the early ‘40s. I know that shit things happen everywhere in the world, but I feel like in other countries there is more civil disobedience, more “good trouble”. Look at what happened in France and Kenya recently. There are state elections this September in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg and everyone just seems resigned to the fact that the AfD will win by a landslide.
Have you lost friends the past few months?
I wouldn't say that I've lost friends, but I've definitely re-evaluated certain friendships. My mum was and always will be my biggest hero because she was very engaged in lots of things — I guess you could call it activism. She was very empathic but she wasn’t preachy about it and she was also super fun. She really cared about what was going on in the world and wanted to make it a better place. One of the buzzwords that has been around for ages, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality came up a lot, quite rightly, during BLM. There were loads of people of colour who were shouting from the rooftops about BLM. It’s a cause that affects them, but when it comes to this, they’re quite quiet. It's just like, to what degree do you have to be personally affected by something to give a shit? A lot of people are getting judged purely based on their social media. That is one way of showing solidarity, but there are a gazillion different ways to get involved and do stuff. There’s also this crabs in a bucket syndrome where a lot of people in activist circles start tearing each other down, and everyone's competing about who's wearing the hairiest shirt. I think that’s counterproductive. On the one hand, you have people saying that silence is violence and at the same time you can be accused of centering yourself if you speak up. People might say, “Why don’t you make space for Palestinian voices?” But a lot of Palestinian people who speak up will face harsher repercussions than other people. As with all things, there are so many layers. This can also often be intimidating for people who are wanting to make their first activist move.
People are scared to get involved in the same way that I know a lot of white people are scared to ask me if I wear sunscreen. They're like, “Oh well, I might get it wrong. And maybe someone will think I'm a racist or something.” Of course, no community is a monolith. If you are talking to someone in a wheelchair, some people will be fine with you crouching down next to them and some people will find it infantilising. I think you have to roll with the punches a little bit. Sometimes people are gonna give you shit and you just have to take it on board as part of the learning and unlearning experience. Sometimes you realise that it's coming from a place of pain so you’re like, “Ok, I hear what you're saying,” but you don't need to take it too personally. A lot of people ask me, “What can I do, where do I start? It's all so much.” I totally get that feeling of overwhelm. But sometimes it can be a bit of an excuse as well, and people are just like, “Oh, it's so complex. It’s so complicated.” It’s not, actually. You can dive deeper into the history and look at which Accords came up when and which intifada started when, but that information is not central to your human response to people being slaughtered. You don’t need to know the whole history of the Arab region to know that people under rubble is a bad thing. I see a lot of infighting going on as well, which I think is a real shame. And there’s also this sort of hero complex where some people feel that they need to be the figurehead of the movement or something.
Yeah. It’s tricky. At the same time, we do need some of those people. Movements need leaders. Even someone as problematic as Shaun King — you can’t deny the amount he did to promote the Palestinian cause, especially in those first few months before he was banned from social media.
It’s true, he galvanised a lot of people. This is a kind of silly correlation but if you look at something like EDM, most people who have been into electronic music for a long time would say that it's horrible. But as entry level dance music for people who haven't had any other type of exposure to it, it’s like, why not? It doesn't mean that you can't be critical of aspects of him [King], but this kind of binary that someone is either all good or all bad, is very unhelpful, in my view. And this idea that you can't hold competing thoughts in your head at the same time is just as ridiculous. So you can admit that some of the things he's done in the past are problematic. At the same time, you can totally concede that he has had a galvanising impact on liberals. A lot of people who wouldn't have known anything about this now do as a result of his posts.
What has it been like for you watching the response from the dance music community and comparing it to something like BLM? That was already disappointing in itself, but compared to BLM the response to Palestine has been abysmal.
It’s disappointing and hypocritical. People don't want to back contentious issues. I mean, right at the beginning, people were saying, “Oh, this is self defence.” I do think that most people within the dance community are pro-Palestine. Unless they’re diehard German institutions, which is this whole other story that we spoke about earlier, but most people within artistic communities have spoken up against Israel’s actions. For me it's McCarthyism that's happening. It's not necessarily that people don’t think and feel these things, it’s that they're being defamed and deplatformed for talking about it.
I do think in the case of a lot of the clubs and venues themselves, the silence is more out of consideration for their bottom line. These people who have been vocal about other issues in the past but who won't say anything about this — I’m talking outside of Germany, in places like New York and London, I think it’s more out of not wanting to offend a portion of their clientele or their financial backers or whoever it might be.
Oh, for sure. I do think there is still a sort of inherent racism with Black and brown bodies being devalued. You see the difference in response to what happens in Ukraine and what happens in Gaza. As it was so brilliantly outlined at the ICJ trial, this didn't start on October 7th. This is a contentious opinion in some circles, but I think it's racist to think that it did. I was having this discussion with someone else the other day and all this “Do you condemn Hamas” type stuff came up and it’s just like, uh, do you condemn white supremacy? Do you condemn colonialism? Do you condemn the occupation? Why was October 7th the moment that grabbed the world's attention in comparison to all of the other periods of intense violence that have gone on in Palestine, all of the child prisoners who were taken in the West Bank and put into detention and beaten the shit out of —that never makes the news. Why is that? On a broader level, you can talk about why no one — except in very niche circles — talks about what's going on in Congo, in Sudan, in Tigray…it’s like, why? Millions of people displaced, they’re also genocides. But even the term genocide has historically excluded the mass killing of Black and brown people for the most part. Ten million-plus people were killed under King Leopold II. October the 7th was horrific, of course it was, but when the Likud party charter states “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”, meaning that all of Palestine will belong to Israel, it’s fine. If Palestinians who have been under military occupation for 76 years say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” it’s a genocidal call. Why is it ok if a white person says it, but not if a brown person who has been oppressed for decades says it? That's just deeply racist to me. It’s the same with BLM, everyone thinks that it all started with George Floyd but there was a movement going on way before that. George Floyd was a lightning rod for the movement because it got filmed by an outsider, but there were a gazillion George Floyds before that and no one cared about them. BLM galvanised a whole planet, but the organisation itself came under criticism for a lot of the things going on with some of the people involved with it.
For me, Palestine has really revealed the kind of inherent racism that is still prevalent in white supremacy, the colonisation of everyone's minds. You can talk about everyone's artistic practice to some degree and it might touch upon decolonisation practices, but you can’t mention the P word [Palestine].
There’s a saying — a liberal is someone who opposes every war except the ongoing one and supports every civil rights movement except the one that's currently going on. Cognitive dissonance probably best describes how I feel about this whole thing. The West’s response to refugees fleeing the Ukrainian war was great. I think that's exactly how we should proceed. Suddenly, you don't have to find refuge in the first safe country, you can get on the train. And countries can start schemes where we welcome refugees into our lives. But if you're Black or brown and you’re fleeing from Sudan, Syria, Eritrea — as a direct result of Western foreign policy — you drown in the sea. Suddenly, there are no safe routes. The only conclusion I can draw from that is racism. Racism doesn't mean that you use the N word or that you're a signed up member of the Ku Klux Klan. Racism also means that you're inadvertently benefiting from all the racist structures that pervade our lives. It means never having to have the chat with your children that every person of colour has to have and teaching them that they have to behave in a certain way in certain spaces. It doesn't matter how nice you are or how clever you are or how hard you work, there are going to be some people who will not like you or who will be mean to you or even worse, purely because of the colour of your skin. White people don’t have to have those conversations. My children are totally white-passing, even though I hate that word. But that also gives them massive privilege that is not lost on me. Being mixed [race], I've had loads of privilege as a result of my closeness to whiteness, and it affects everything. Yemen gets bombed and no one calls it a terrorist action and everyone’s up in arms about protecting shipping lanes in the Red Sea, but we will not allow aid into Gaza.
It’s fucked. It’s so fucked.
It really is fucked, but you have a lot of people who do not see it as fucked. They really don't.
That is also hard for me to get my head around. I’m aware that I can be a bit righteous, I don't mean to be but I know that I can be. I get frustrated when people aren’t as outraged as I am and I know it’s unreasonable to expect that everyone will feel the same way I do. But with some of these clubs and venues and artists that are exposing their hypocrisy, I feel like, why are we continuing to support these places and people? I know some people are rolling their eyes. They just want to escape and have fun and forget about it and it makes me mad.
It’s the same thing with me. I have these conversations a lot with other…I don't even like the word activists, but people who care, who are, I’d say, empathic. I think there are two types of people in this world. There are people who care and who kind of empathise and then there are other people who don't, and ignorance is also bliss. I think if you have the knowledge and the empathy, then you have to do something about it, and I don't think that is being righteous, I think it's just being a decent human being. When people are like, get off your high horse or stop being so sanctimonious, you’ve got to bring it back to recent history in Germany. Everyone would love to say, “Oh yeah my granddad was part of the resistance,” no one wants to say, “Oh my grandparents were indifferent Nazi pieces of shit,” which the majority of them were. But if more people were righteous and gave a shit in the ‘30s, then all of this wouldn’t have happened. The industrial murder of 6 million Jews wouldn’t have happened. And let’s not forget all the queer, disabled, Sinti, Roma people and the political prisoners who were also murdered and who are often simply left out of the discourse. All of it wouldn’t have happened. Everyone should be a bit more fucking righteous because it's so horrific. I don't care how many memorials you build, if part of that selective memory culture is fine with partly destroying the Sinti and Roma Memorial in order to build a new S-Bahn line, it doesn't mean anything. Now is your chance to do something. Now is the time to stop it so that these memorials don’t need to be built in the first place.
Thank you ❤️
"a culture of obedience that runs through German society" says Nicky Böhm to Annabel Ross. https://politicsdancingxyz.substack.com/p/palestinians-are-the-collateral-damage?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYvTBp9VxVLR2UafBpV3uVgBTCKMCjaTc5STynHcYG3G1auopdB77TgAqM_aem_gwZnIdtPUhmxv31ROrsh8A&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true