The irony of Masha Gessen almost not being awarded the prize because of their writings on Gaza is almost too thick to cut
  • SLfgbOP
    10·
    10 months ago

    The controversial Gessen quote is featured in Nachdenkseiten -> https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=108755

    Masha Gessen schreibt [transl. writes]:

    "For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time – in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America, but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.

    The term ‚open-air prison‘ seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of occupied Europe, there are no prison guards – Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‚ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”

  • library_napper
    00·
    10 months ago

    No, the fact that Masha Gessen won the award and was consistently supported by the prize givers suggests otherwise.

    • SLfgbOP
      10·
      10 months ago

      Reading the article in Nachdenkseiten, it is my understanding that the local council cancelled the venue and wrote an open letter, followed by the local branch of the foundation pulling support. The Berlin branch of the foundation then took it upon themselves to still host an award-ceremony for Gessen in a secretive location for a small crowd. Hence the headline referring to a back-alley.

      • library_napper
        00·
        10 months ago10 months ago

        Yes, again they didn’t let the venue bully them and they supported Gessen the whole time.

        So, yes, Arendt would have received this award in 2023 because of the people behind the award and their commitments.

        • SLfgbOP
          10·
          10 months ago10 months ago

          I think that’s debatable. I don’t get the impression that Gessen would have won the award if she had written her Gaza article before her winning it was decided by the jury. The fact that the original ceremony was cancelled from political pressure speaks to that fact. Credit to the Berlin crew to throw host another ceremony event albeit a small one.

          Masha Gessen in Berlin: Der Versuch, mich mundtot zu machen, ist misslungen https://web.archive.org/web/20231218235218/https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur-vergnuegen/debatte/masha-gessen-in-berlin-der-versuch-mich-mundtot-zu-machen-ist-misslungen-li.2169713 Masha themselve said at the event that

          Dieses öffentliche Gespräch sei nicht auf Einladung der Böll-Stiftung zustande gekommen

          transl.: This public forum today is not on invitation of the Böll-Foundation.

          So I don’t think it’s at all obvious that Hannah Arendt would today qualify for the ‘Hannah Arendt prize’ in Germany, given her body of work that is critical of the creation of the State of Israel.

    • vormadikter
      00·
      10 months ago10 months ago

      Maybe read the article before posting. Then you would know that the headline is quite right.

      • library_napper
        00·
        10 months ago

        Maybe watch an interview with Masha Gessen. Then you’d know the article is quite wrong.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    00·
    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    This past weekend the prominent Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize for political thought under police protection in Germany.

    But the event, which was to be a grand ceremony hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in the city hall of Bremen in north-west Germany, almost did not happen at all after Gessen published an essay in the New Yorker comparing Gaza before 7 October to the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe.

    The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation of the event altogether.

    The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

    Gessen’s comparison was more light-footed than Arendt’s, whose reflection appears eerily prescient, but their rhetorical tact wasn’t enough to stop the censors at the gate in Germany who police what one can and cannot say about Israel, cowing the Foundation into compliance.

    But her position shifted after she escaped to America in 1941, after she attended the Biltmore Conference in 1942 in New York City where she condemned David Ben-Gurion’s call for a Jewish state in Palestine.

    The original article contains 1,884 words, the summary contains 256 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!