Hissing against Israel

The antisemitism that hangs in the air today, to the point of making it unbreathable, is primarily a matter of signs that we learn to recognize. Signs that must be deciphered, but which, for those with memory, appear shrouded in the ominous halo of the obvious. The testimony that Boris Schumatsky gives us in this text reminds us that this world saturated with disturbing signs has the power to suffocate us. It therefore raises the question – what is the meaning of the fight we are waging against it?

 

 

“Jews to the ovens!” shouts a young man in the Paris Metro. Two Jews are traveling in the same car: the poet Paul Celan and his friend Franz Wurm. It is March 1970. When they get out, Wurm later recalls, they see “spray-painted on a wall, a Star of David and next to it = SS.” A few minutes later at the post office, the clerk takes our letters, stamps them one by one with the machine, throws them one by one into the basket, including the aerogram to Israel, which he slowly crumples up without looking before throwing it into the basket. And on the way back, the taxi driver rants about ‘those Jewish pigs.’

How honest, almost naive, this incitement seems when I read it today. From Paris to New York and even in Moscow, where I grew up, hardly anyone was willing to actually kill Jews at that time: the memory of the Shoah was too vivid. Today, it no longer protects anyone.

“Are you a Jew, eh?” asks the driver when he sees the kippah on the head of my traveling companion, the poet Rainer René Mueller, in the rearview mirror. An assistant has just brought him to the car in a wheelchair, and now we’re taking an Uber to his reading, from Berlin-Charlottenburg to Mitte. There are still two years to go until October 7, 2023, and the worst thing that can happen to a Jew in these neighborhoods is intrusive questions.

Back then in the subway car, Wurm writes, Celan’s face tensed, became sad, his fists clenched. Many passengers also remembered clearly how the German occupiers had behaved in the subway. Today, when a loud group wearing Palestinian scarves boards the Berlin U8 subway, the passengers immediately look back down at their phones. No disapproving glances except mine; everyone seems to understand somehow. Most people—two-thirds of those surveyed in Germany—have no sympathy for Israel in its war against Hamas.

“Hamas” rhymes well with ‘gas’ in English, German, and Dutch, but I hear slogans with this rhyme less and less today than declarations of support for a Palestine “from the river to the sea” free of Jews. People don’t say the word “gas” anymore, they don’t say “gas them,” but instead purse their lips and make a sound like poison gas flowing through nozzles hanging above their heads, reminiscent of shower heads.

When the Uber driver asks the elderly poet about his origins, my first impulse is to get out. Mueller has already had to endure enough because of his kippah; a police officer once said to him, “You are causing a public nuisance walking around like that.” Back in the mid-1950s, Mueller heard someone say at the Workers’ Welfare Association daycare center in Heidelberg, “You should all be gassed.” He replies curtly to the driver: “Yes.” – “I know we shouldn’t mix Jews and Israelis,” says the driver, “but of course I’m against Israel.”

Everyone is allowed to hate Jews. “Die Gedanken sind frei”, as they say in German – the thoughts are free. Even the unsavory ones. I know that resistance only makes sense if I direct it against words or deeds. But all I hear is hissing.

The hissing sound used as a substitute for “gassing” originated in Holland. There, fans of Ajax Amsterdam are mocked as “Jews” because their club is located in the former Jewish quarter. For about ten years now, they have simply been greeted with hissing. In 2024, Amsterdam also saw the first European pogrom against Jews in decades, after the perpetrators had agreed on social media to hunt down Israeli soccer fans. An instigator, who was later convicted, had posted a picture of Anne Frank with the caption: “Laughing gas is for the weak, I use Zyklon B.” The hissing has now spread as far as Australia.

When the driver says he is of course against Israel, Mueller replies that he was in Israel only recently. In an essay about this visit, Mueller writes about “the previously unknown feeling of being safe.” He now tells this to the driver. The driver looks lost, as if no one has ever spoken to him like this before.

Everyone is allowed to hate Jews. “Die Gedanken sind frei”, as they say in German – the thoughts are free. Even the unsavory ones. I know that resistance only makes sense if I direct it against words or deeds. But all I hear is hissing. I get reader comments like this: “Two things have no right to exist: the settler colony in Palestine and intellectuals who support Israel.” I read “Free Palestine” on the wall of the neighboring house, and no one writes “from Hamas.” The daughter of a friend ties a black-and-white checkered headscarf around her naked belly like a skirt at a party. These keffiyehs were introduced as a symbol of the struggle against the Jews by a man who had recruited Muslims for the Waffen-SS; he was also the Mufti of Jerusalem. I don’t know what he thought of unveiled women’s stomachs. 

I had met Masha Gessen long before the current war, but later we lost touch. Two months after October 7, everyone was suddenly talking about Gessen’s essay in the New Yorker, in which Gaza was placed on a par with the Warsaw Ghetto. I read a sentence in it about Jews killing children, and all the expensive red wine we had drunk at Masha’s dacha near Moscow almost came back up.^[1]

Not liking Jews does not make you an antisemite. What matters is not what Gessen feels, but what Gessen writes. Antisemitism is not hatred, but incitement: words or deeds intended to destroy Jews. Adorno defined it as the rumor about Jews; today I would say that antisemitism is a narrative. It is in its nature to constantly reformulate itself, to develop ever new, viable mutations. Rumors about Jews bleeding Christian children to death for their rituals live on today in anti-Zionist narratives. Of course, it is not enough to mechanically replace Jews with Israel. Masha Gessen solves this very cleverly, sometimes with a subordinate clause: Israel’s head of government criticizes Hamas because he is looking for a justification for “killing children”.

The anti-Israel cult owes part of its success to the fact that its beliefs are cleverly hidden. Many adopt the sect’s slogans or adopt its symbols because they are simply against evil, against genocide.

Jews like to kill children—this has been told differently at different times and to different audiences. Francesca Albanese of the UN says today that when Israeli commandos free hostages, they do so with “genocidal intent.” For the New Yorker audience, this may be a bit crude, which is why Gessen’s text works with dog whistles, code words, and innuendo. Even outside the anti-Israel bubble, many people do not notice how the age-old blood libel is being smuggled into their heads; after all, children are really dying in Gaza.

Our driver still seems to be searching for a quick-witted response. Mueller asks him, “And where are you from?” Mueller explains that his mother and grandmother also had to flee during World War II. The driver remains silent, and I wait for his next question, which always comes at some point in conversations like this.

“Why don’t you say anything about Gaza?” The tone in which this question is asked already gives the answer. The voice trembles slightly, rises, then falls, then there is a pause like a minute’s silence. Shock mixes with holy anger, as if the questioners had been replaced—a colleague, a friend, or that literature professor I was so enthusiastic about as a student. Back then, he championed non-conformist literature from Eastern Europe; today, he writes poetry himself.

“The only / democracy in the Middle East / wages war so democratically. / Let the children burn, / more children into the fire! / Democracy loves burning children.” The professor also denounces the “aggressive expansionist” Jewish state and its “war terror” in Gaza in prose.

The narrative about child-murdering Jews and their victims is spreading today in much the same way as QAnon, with the difference that Palestine’s Witnesses do not remain in their echo chambers and internet bubbles. They influence international politics and public opinion worldwide. Like chemtrails or flat Earth, this cult has no center, no priests; it is a network in which Judith Butler and Hamas leaders are equal influencers. It is also so successful because its beliefs are cleverly hidden. Many adopt the sect’s slogans or adopt its symbols because they are simply against evil, against genocide.

“Oh genocide, oh genocide / how long will you continue?” was written on the slips of paper recently distributed at a Christmas market in Berlin-Neukölln, to be sung along with “O Tannenbaum” (a German Christmas song). Instead of “Silent Night,” young people wearing Palestinian scarves and Santa hats sang, “Holy land in fascist hands / Let’s drive out the fascists together / Freedom for Palestine, Freeeeeee Palestine.” The many “Es” were written like that on the slips of paper, but I can’t laugh about it.

During the taxi ride, I actually wanted to discuss the rundown for his reading with Mueller. Now I’d rather keep quiet before the driver adds to it. Fortunately, the poet remains calm. Later, he will tell me about a traffic cop who asked him during a ticket inspection what kind of “bug” he was wearing on his head. That, too, was surely criticism of Israel, solidarity with Palestine, or whatever it’s called today. We drive down Große Hamburger Straße, where there are so many stumbling stones for murdered Jews that it looks as if the street had been completely emptied of its inhabitants back then. Mueller is supposed to read at the stones for Johanna Klum and James Deutsch in a few minutes, and we are running late. The driver is understanding, drives fast, and when he swears, it’s only about the traffic.

Paul Celan experienced the cult of Palestine in its early days; today it is at its peak. It follows the path of all fanaticism and begins to devour its own people. Among the first is Masha Gessen. In another article in the New Yorker, Gessen questions the rapes of October 7. The article presents sexual violence in wartime as normal, saying it “always happens.” However, the text finds insufficient evidence for the suffering of Israeli women, because “most of the victims were dead.”^[2] It does not directly deny the acts, but provides deniers with sophisticated arguments. And yet the anti-Israel bubble explodes with rage. People there live in a world where rape never happened. Anyone who does not explicitly deny it is a heretic, a renegade. “Isn’t Gessen herself of a Jewish background. No surprise this kind of thing would get peddled,” they write on platform X, or “Masha Mossad Gessen” or “Zionist scumbag” and so on in hundreds of posts. In this scene, you always know who is Jewish.

The son has cancer, the parents are desperate, the doctor says the malignant tumor has already spread. I see this scene a few weeks after the Hamas massacre in a video that is still going viral on Arabic-language networks. The doctor says no medicine can help in the long run, there is no other way: only resistance! The son, a young man, shaves his head, wraps a Palestinian scarf around his shoulders and declares: “I am ready.” “So are we,” and the doctor puts his hand on his shoulder: “We’ll start on October 7.” The mother rests her hand on her son’s other shoulder.

Jews are a foreign body in the Middle East – this dogma of the Palestinian cult has already been unconsciously accepted by the public. “We Germans should just take all the Israelis back,” I now hear from people close to me who are above any suspicion of hatred toward Jews: “We should give the Jews a federal state in the east!” That’s how well-intentioned the old fantasy of extermination comes across today.

The Palestinian cult is also deadly for the Palestinians themselves. People from Gaza who are speaking out against Islamist terrorists and for peaceful coexistence with Jews are threatened as Zionist traitors, not so much by Hamas as by elementary school teachers from Spain or DJs from Ireland.

Paul Celan called the jargon of the Nazis “death-bringing speech”; today it is more a matter of images or codes. The terms from racial doctrine have been replaced by all the “settler colonies” of fashionable theories, and there is no need to spell out what must happen to the Zionist cancer on the healthy body of Palestine. This new antisemitism no longer constantly shouts “gas” or “oven”; it is enough for it to hiss quietly and fold its fingers into a triangle.

The red triangle of Hamas leads as surely to its goal as old, obsolete symbols. In some British primary schools, Jewish children are now greeted with hissing. Jewish students are hissed at and called “Zionists.” The Palestinian cult is also deadly for the Palestinians themselves. I follow people from Gaza online who are speaking out against Islamist terrorists and for peaceful coexistence with Jews. They are threatened as Zionist traitors, not so much by Hamas as by elementary school teachers from Spain or DJs from Ireland. There can be no peace with cancer, even if the diagnosis is “Zionist entity.”

It is already dark on Große Hamburger Straße. Nearly twenty people stand in a semicircle. Mueller reads from a piece of prose about his childhood: “Years, years: . . . I saw under the armpit of my father, who was not my father, the blood type symbol [of the Waffen-SS].” This stepfather, who had married a Jewish woman after the war, abused the little boy. Decades later, Mueller saw this archive photo: a Jew in front of a mass grave, a pistol to his head in the outstretched hand of a German soldier, Mueller’s stepfather. And years later, already in our century, his neighbors yell out of their windows: “There goes the Jew, the rat,” or “The light is still on in the bunker,” or another neighbor threatens to shoot the poet if he walks past his balcony. The state security service found a pistol in this neighbor’s possession.

In a pub where I always meet the same friend and always sit in the same chair, I always read this faded slogan on the wall: Me, then heart, then Hamas. After October 7, I complained at the bar. The bartender just replied, “That’s Thomas.” Since then, when I write about Hamas and its supporters, I always have to be careful that it’s not just Thomas.

Persecuted people often suffer from paranoia, but I am not being persecuted. I don’t have the courage to make myself recognizable like Mueller. I, who have never worn a kippah in public, have not received any direct threats. At most, a package of marzipan and chocolates that I sent to Israel comes back torn open, all the sweets crushed and inedible. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Today, there are so many better ways to show what you think of “Zionists” and “genocide advocates”.

The post office clerk who crumpled up Celan’s letter had far fewer such codes at his disposal. The accusation of genocide had already been invented, in Moscow, incidentally; it had not yet reached Paris. Paul Celan tried to defend himself against the antisemitic persecution. Some friends accused him of paranoia. Celan was repeatedly admitted to psychiatric treatment. Once, Franz Wurm recounted, Celan woke his other friend, the poet René Char, from his bed. Two men were watching his window from the doorway opposite, and he asked Char to come. Char arrives and, the giant that he was, demands to see their ID cards. Both men were former concentration camp guards.

When memory dies, nothing stands between me and violence. For a long time, nationalists demanded a “Final Solution”; now critics of Israel are calling for “forgetting”, a “new, better world” in which “Palestine would be freed from German guilt.” As this text is nearing completion, Rainer René Mueller writes to me: “In any case, after October 7, I avoid any unnecessary trips into the city.” That’s how he feels in quiet Heidelberg, and in Berlin it’s easier for me to put up with the hissing when he refuses to take off his kippah despite everything.

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Boris Schumatsky

This text appeared under the title “Zischen gegen Israel” in the FAZ on April 5, 2025. It is also available in German on Boris Schumatsky’s website.