On 21st October, 2024, Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan started an expulsion procedure against me from the party Die Linke. They justified it by claiming I had breached the party’s principles, referring to passages about the two state solution and “Israel’s right to exist”.
I want to first make clear that I have never assumed to speak on behalf of the party Die Linke. Nonetheless, the attack on me and my positions is not surprising. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, anti-war positions in the party have come increasingly under fire, and these conflicts have been publicly exploited. I would appreciate, on the other hand, a Die Linke which consistently stands against warmongering, militarism and rearmament, and doesn’t look away irrespective of the size of the media headwind.
As left-wing people, our position should be on the side of the oppressed and the victims of war and imperialism. We should show solidarity with the resistance against war, occupation and imperialism. This is the basis of my positions.
Unfortunately, the people proposing my expulsion have never tried to speak to me. Instead, Schubert, as former national party Chair, has already openly attacked me — simply a party member — in Der Spiegel even before the Party Conference. Since the Tagesspiegel has been reporting the expulsion procedure over the past weeks, I have decided to make my response to the expulsion proposal public.
Rising Repression
The attempt to expel me is happening against the background of rising repression against Palestine solidarity in Germany. Government support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the delivery of weapons stands in contradiction to opinion polls in which a majority of German society rejects sending weapons to Israel. The connections between Die Linke and the Palestine movement are being isolated.
As an activist and party member who is deeply anchored in the movement for Palestinian human rights, I am one of the targets of a media campaign against all anti-imperialist forces in Die Linke. This campaign must be seen in the context of the growing danger of war worldwide, German militarism and the Die Linke’s focus on the ability to form a coalition with the SPD and the Greens. Both outside and inside the party, pressure is being applied to remove positions of international solidarity against war and the arms race. This attack is an attack on everyone who is standing up for peace internationally.
It is a disconcerting development that part of the party leadership is taking administrative measures instead of carrying out a political debate and asking for a personal explanation. That they want to exclude a simple party member through the use of set or merely claimed party positions, while other party members, party functionaries and elected officials regularly ignore the “No” to weapon delivery and conscription, reveals their double standards.
Democratic votes at the regional party conference in Berlin rejected positions which had tried to apply Nazi terminology to describe Hamas and Hisbollah. This resolution was composed fully without my assistance, despite what was claimed in the subsequent media campaign against me, which was fanned by Schubert. Part of the reformist wing of Die Linke left the party because it could not push through such positions, in order that they can sustain pressure from outside the party. In contravention of party decisions, they retained their parliamentary seats.
The expulsion procedure also contained terms like “eliminatory antisemitism” and “pogrom” (one-sided excesses against oppressed, defeated minorities, tolerated or supported by state power), when referring to 7th October. This historical revisionist minority position, which infers a denial of colonialism, was never part of the principles of Die Linke, and so I could not have contravened these principles.
Neither do the people proposing my expulsion shy away from using quotes from my social media accounts which have been ripped out of context by a right wing witch hunt, like that of the Tagesspiegel. In their justification for my expulsion, they repeated these falsified quotes without checking them. The Tagespiegel has already had to correct some of their reports due to press laws.
Rebuttal
Here is my rebuttal of the allegations made in the expulsion application.
I reject the claim that I would relativise taking hostages as “teaching of ‘good manners”. On the contrary, I have argued against the relativisation of torture.
This claim is based on a falsified quote which does not exist and does not appear in any of the references listed in the proposal for my expulsion. In the real quote I argued against relativising a crime as grave as the torture of captives, and in particular of children. Such relativisation was made by someone else in the discussion.
I also stand against the kidnapping and torture of Palestinian children, which has been carried out for decades. I reject such tactics, irrespective of who is applying them. As I have personally worked with children in the West Bank, who were themselves the victims of torture, my intention was to answer a false claim, and to warn against arbitrarily trivialising and diluting the meaning of the term torture.
I am against all taking of civilian hostages, particularly of children. I welcomed the hostage swap of Israeli and Palestinian children, and support a full hostage swap. I stand wholeheartedly behind the support of the petition “For a just peace in Gaza” which was supported at the Die Linke national conference, and which calls for the release of all Israeli and Palestinian hostages and those who have been illegally imprisoned.
The reality of torture in the region is close to me. International human rights organisations have reported that the Palestinian children who were freed by the hostage swap were indeed the victims of systematic torture. This applies to nearly all of the on average 700 Palestinian children who are abducted and illegally imprisoned by Israel every year.
Save the Children states that 86% of all Palestinian under-age prisoners report that they have been beaten. Nearly half (42%) have been injured at some point of their incarceration, including bullet wounds and broken bones. Some reports by international human rights organisations speak of sexualised violence and imprisonment in small cages. Studies document the torture of children, the youngest of whom is 11 years old, with the use of electroshocks, being beaten in the testicles and the head, etc. This sometimes leads to the lack of consciousness and even death.
The gruesome reality of torture in the region has been played down by false comparsions with the request to be quiet, to wait for others to take food, or to share your food with others. I do not dispute that being held hostage is a terrible experience which no child should go through. This applies to every case, even without torture.
I reject the unsubstantiated claim that I made the statement that the “status of soldier” justified crimes
The people proposing my expulsion try to make the impression, through cutting quotes in a way which distorts them, that I approved acts of violence against a female occupying soldier. This does not correspond to my opinion, nor have I written it anywhere. Rape is a crime in every circumstance.
The real context is that in reaction to a false claim in social media, I posted the correction that the story in question did not concern a civilian but an occupying soldier of the IDF who was captured after a battle in her military base Nahal Oz, from which the “remote-controlled occupation” of Gaza by military surveillance is organised. I wrote that the allegation of a possible rape should be examined by an “independent international commission”, but that Israel has refused to allow this.
Nowhere have I written that the rape of anyone under any conditions is legitimate. I reject this insubstantial and defamatory insinuation. Quite the reverse, immediately below the quote they took from me it is made clear: “if she was raped, this should be condemned in the most forthright terms — just as the proven Israeli group rape of Palestinians must be condemned.” I cannot be sure whether this part of the justification was deliberately omitted. At the very least, it reflects badly on the professionalism of the “research”.
I reject the suggestion that my fight for liberation “cannot be understood without the murder of Israelis”.
The people proposing my expulsion are here referring to a falsified published quote from a private chat which was distorted without my agreement in a right-wing media campaign against Die Linke, published in the Tagesspiegel. In truth, I argued that rather than individual killings, we should do more to build international support for an anti-colonial fight for liberation.
As a Marxist, I see individual killings as a misguided “false solution”, as I believe that real change needs something much more fundamental: namely, collective international support against colonial oppression and the structures of the capitalist system which stand behind it. I reject the insinuation made in the justification for my proposed expulsion that due to my perspective of collective and international structural changes, I would endorse individual killings.
This improper procedure has political aims. After I legally challenged the Tagesspiegel with legal support, they moved away from their original false quote and changed it. It is also worth noting that citations and distortions from private messages are illegal.
Nonetheless, the people who are proposing my expulsion are themselves working with falsified “direct quotations”. In addition, it is claimed, relating to a comment I made about 7th October, that “there is no mention of the innumerable civilians killed in the kibbuzim and at the Nova festival.” This fails to mention that my comment is in actual fact a recommendation of a video contribution by an Israeli who — in contradiction to this insinuation — deals with this and other questions in detail.
Conclusion
As a whole, the justification for my expulsion is based on selective and sometimes falsified quotes which have been ripped out of their context. It seems that the people proposing my expulsion are trying to discredit unpleasant, but legitimate and substantiated, opinions and comrades, and to spread a climate of intimidation.
At no point have I endorsed any war crime, nor have I “celebrated” one, or evaluated it as positive in any way. I have explained context, corrected incorrect assertions and used demonstrable facts in a discussion in the midst of war propaganda.
If the simple mention of freely available facts has become grounds to bring a left-wing party to defamatory accusations and administrative expulsion attempts in order to push through someone’s own positions after they have been rejected by a democratic vote, then we in Die Linke have reached a bleak point.
We need to clarify whether for us as the left, human rights apply for everyone, independent of ethnicity and religion, and whether we as Die Linke support the secularisation and democratisation of Israel/Palestine or want to maintain the existing apartheid system and ethnic segregation.
I am for the complete secularisation and democratisation of the region and for a form of society without the system which currently exists in Israel/Palestine, and which all relevant human rights organisations refer to as apartheid in legal terms. I stand up for a society in which Palestinian and Jewish people are fully equal and enjoy the same rights.
International law allows the right to resist for a people under occupation. I find it gratifying that the main resolution passed by the National Conference of Die Linke also recognised Palestinians’ right to defend themselves. I believe that making this universal right dependent on the ethnicity or religion of the occupiers or the occupied is a racist position. The universal right to self-defence under occupation according to international law is also not just valid for people who share my socialist beliefs.
Nonetheless, I criticise non-socialist orientations, because their perspective of liberation is not integrated. I criticise a military strategy for the liberation of Palestine, as can be read in my article Strategies for liberation: old and new arguments in the Palestinian left. With regards to oppression, I am also critical of individual acts of violence, which offer no perspective for a solution. Instead I emphasise the necessity of international solidarity, support, and mass movements.
Despite this I can name, explain, and interpret cause and effect, without having to excuse or endorse anything. I agree with the Zionist movement (Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Zabotinsky, etc) when they describe themselves as “colonial” and when they call their own objective in the current Israeli Nation State Law as “colonisation”. I recognise that this colonial relationship is one of the root causes of the violence in the region, and I would like to see an end to this. Stating such facts in a sincere and measured debate using scientific criteria must be possible in left spaces without bureaucratic expulsions.
Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan, who are proposing my expulsion, seem to be contradicting this base of evidence, and instead want to describe the situation in the region in an unhistorical manner. Phrases like “exterminatory antisemitism” and “pogrom” move and simplify the debate into the realm of Nazi fascism.
With the belief in full democratisation, equality and for a peaceful and just cohabitation, I, like hundreds of other party members, support a position which diverges from the party program’s support for an ethnically segregated “Two State Solution”. This is no longer viable, as has been officially rejected by the Israeli government and senate, who have practically buried it, while government ministers have announced the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza following the official state annexation of East Jerusalem.
For many governments, the “Two State Solution” only serves as a meaningless phrase and fig leaf, used to dodge a confrontation of Israel’s right-wing government. An alternative which orientates itself on the local realities should be possible in a pluralistic left-wing party, and sustain a lively discussion.
A resolution of the Die Linke Bundesaussschuss [federal committee] of 2015 said: “DIE LINKE stands up for a Two State arrangement, but finds that the debate about alternatives to this solution is legitimate”. If the people proposing my expulsion want to ignore this, they must consequently first be able to justify their basis for doing so.
My own background from Gaza, where an openly announced genocide, as confirmed by the United Nations, is taking place, was — like the loss of my own family by the Israeli army’s bombing of Gaza in 2014, and once more in the current genocidal war — at no point even mentioned in the proposal to expel me. This is a testament of an absolute lack of empathy for the victims of Israel’s politics of occupation and expulsion.
I reproach myself that in some contributions I underestimated the malice of actors, who intended to hurt me. But ultimately it is indefensible to use such a reversal of perpetrator and victim in order to make victims out of a media campaign which uses falsified quotes and unsubstantiated allegations against the culprits.
The witch hunt which has been kicked off against me has led to racist statements and threats against me, including demands for my deportation, and the defamation of my family members who were murdered by the Israeli army. The approach of the people proposing my expulsion stands as a cancellation of solidarity with the oppressed and left-wing principles.
This is a translated and shortened version of a text which was originally published in German. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permission.
