What Is Democratic Protest?

Roger Berkowitz

Earlier this month in Berlin I participated in a performance art show by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, “Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism).” The show at the National Gallery of the Present in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin was based on Bruguera’s original action of protest against Raul Castro’s government in 2015, where she publicly read from Hannah Arendt’s book first in Havana’s central square. After she was put under house arrest, Bruguera continued the reading from her house, using loudspeakers to have the reading blared into the street. At that point the Cuban government suddenly decided to do construction outside her house and had crews jackhammering 24 hours a day to drown out her public reading.

Bruguera has re-staged that original work of art and activism in numerous places. At Documenta in 2022 in Kassel, Germany, she created an exhibit hall covered in concrete and had actors jackhammering as museum goers read from Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem.The show last week at the Hamburger Bahnhof was imagined as a way to spur civic dialogue. One Hundred scholars and artists and activists were invited to read for one hour. We could read, but we could also talk about what we were reading and answer questions from the audience. Bruguera asked me to read on the opening night of the exhibition from the first Chapter of Arendt’s book “Antisemitism as An Outrage to Common Sense.” 
 
When I took the stage to read, there was some tension. Arendt asks hard questions. She begins by asking: Why is it that a people as small in number and politically so inconsequential should have been at the center of the ideological rise of the Nazis? Arendt argues that it is so outrageous that antisemitism should play such a role in world politics that we minimize it, and she discusses and dismisses four common explanations for antisemitism, each of which she thinks are mistaken and thus deflect a true understanding of antisemitism. These four mistakes are: 1) that antisemitism is related to nationalism; 2) that antisemitism is a reaction to Jewish power and wealth; 3) that antisemitism uses Jews as a scapegoat for unrelated problems; and 4) that antisemitism is grounded in an eternal hatred of the Jews. All four of these explanations are inadequate and make it more difficult to take antisemitism as a political ideology seriously. Instead, Arendt argues that antisemitism gains its political power because it is able to be weaponized as an ideology that imagines Jews to be the root of all political and social evils; antisemitism, therefore, has little to do with actual Jews. It is a political weapon that deploys fantasies about Jews to achieve political interests, often interests that have nothing to do with Jews themselves. Antisemitism is founded in lies, and yet for the lies to be believed, there must be some believable basis in truth. To take antisemitism seriously, as Arendt insists we must, requires that we attend to the antisemites and understand what they are saying. For Arendt, antisemitism is an ideology that seeks to undermine the government, the “system” or the “state” by imagining these institutions to be controlled by or affiliated with Jews. How and why antisemitism is weaponized is the topic of Arendt’s following chapters on “The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth of Antisemitism” (Chapter 2) and “Jews and Society” (Chapter 3). I’ve discussed these chapters in my podcast Reading Hannah Arendt that can be found here: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3. 
 
As I read last week in Berlin from Origins of Totalitarianism and explained Arendt’s argument, people in the audience moved forward. The acoustics in the Hamburger Bahnhof were not great and people strained to hear. Soon a real discussion was taking place. We were talking honestly both about Arendt, but also about why antisemitism is so prevalent today and the relation between antisemitism and anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian movements today. Is criticism of Israel antisemitic, I was asked? Of course not. Israel, like any country, is a mix of good and bad policies and it is an essential part of democratic citizenship to engage politically with the aim of building a better national consensus. Go to Israel and you'll hear widespread and angry criticism of Israel from across the political spectrum. It is silly to think that criticism of Israel is off limits. At the same time, one has to ask why it is that Israel, one of the smallest countries in the world, the one multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East, a country with seven million Jews and two million Arabs, a country surrounded by Arab states with over 100 Million Arabs who have attacked Israel twice before the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and once since then, is the subject of such widespread condemnation and attention from people around the world who have little knowledge of or real interest in Israeli politics. Most of those who criticize Israel have nothing personal against Jews. But they do promulgate ideas—that Jews are powerful, that Jews have outsized influence in world politics, that the United States helped bring Israel into existence—that are false and deeply connected to longstanding antisemitic tropes. It is not that those criticizing Israel are antisemitic, but that the disproportional hatred of Israel is inseparable from the weaponizing of antisemitism for political purposes. In this case, those political purposes are about opposing what is often called the liberal or neo-liberal world order. Understanding how anti-Israel rhetoric employs antisemitic tropes in this anti-liberal political project is part of what reading Arendt on antisemitism helps us to do. It was a rare and extraordinary public discussion of a difficult political question, very much the goal of Bruguera’s “Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism).”

Sadly, the anti-Israel and antisemitic elements of the political left quickly made themselves manifest at the exhibit. A group of pro-Palestinian activists who had been invited to read from The Origins of Totalitarianism as part of the exhibit instead decided to use their hour on stage to chant protests against Israel and hold up signs saying “Palestine Will Set Us Free.” Later, during a time slot where Mirjam Wenzel, the Director of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, was scheduled to read, the activists returned and shouted Wenzel down. For over fifteen minutes, the activists shouted “Zionists are fascists” and “Zionism is Nazism.” They screamed directly in Wenzel’s face,  “Israel is not real.” When Bruguera tried to reason with the activists, they accused Bruguera—who invited them and who has signed letters of support for the Palestinians— of being a Zionist oppressor. When Bruguera explained how she supports the Palestinian cause, the activists screamed: “You are still a white person!” and “Fuck this racist-Nazi country.” You can read accounts of the protests here in German and here in English. You can watch a video of the encounter posted by the protesters here. 
 
Bruguera herself has tried to walk a fine line in her comments on the protests against her and her exhibition. On the one hand, she decided to shut the exhibition down and was clearly upset by the protesters who showed themselves to disdain the very premise of open and civil dialogue to which Bruguera had graciously invited them. In her attempt to bring the exhibition to a close, Bruguera posted a video of herself before the Brandenburg Gate reading a line from The Origins of Totalitarianism: 
 
In the iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and makes out of many the One who unfailingly will act as though he himself were part of the course of history or nature, a device has been found not only to liberate the historical and natural forces, but to accelerate them to a speed they never would reach if left to themselves.
 
At the same time, however, Bruguera also refused to publicly condemn the protests. And according to Wenzel quoted in an article behind a paywall in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, she defended the protesters by saying, “This is democracy.”
 
To think about that question—Is this democracy?—consider a protest the same week in Biberach, a small Southern German Town. According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, protesters there shut down a Green Party meeting. Here is how the newspaper described it (my translation). 
 
Before the event began, demonstrators smashed a window in a vehicle accompanying Federal Agriculture Minister Cem Özdemir (Greens). A large pile of dung was dumped in front of the hall and a fire was also set. Some demonstrators obstructed police and emergency services. The police used batons and pepper spray. Green Party state chairwoman Lena Schwelling said that “no one was ready for a dialogue” in front of the hall.
 
For one of the leaders of the Green Party Jürgen Trittin, this protest was a “defeat for democracy and the state, if 200 violent people can prevent a political party meeting.” 
 
Clearly Tania Bruguera and Jürgen Trittin have very different ideas of democracy and protest. For Bruguera, democracy is messy and involves protest, civil disobedience, even angry and incoherent screaming of slogans. For Trittin, democracy is founded upon civility and rational discourse. 
 
For Arendt, violence is a tool. It is a means to an end. It is true that violence can, in rare instances, be employed successfully to further democratic aims. The American Revolution was violent and it did lead, over time, to both liberation and the foundation of freedom. Freedom struggles can, when they are seen to be just and succeed in overturning unjust power without descending into chaos, can deploy violence in ways that found freedom rather than destroy it. Most of the time, however, violence as a means fails. The most common result of political violence is not the foundation of freedom, but simply more violence. 
 
At a university, violence is to be excluded because the goal of the university is intellectual, not political. Violence is profoundly anti-intellectual insofar as it replaces persuasion with coercion and denies the lifeblood of intellectual inquiry, which is talking and learning from others with whom one disagrees. 
 
Politics, however, has a broader ambit. While the essence of democratic politics may be persuasion, there are times when democratic persuasion fails and where the status quo instantiates injustice. At those moments, violence is one tool amongst others that is available to the political activist. Arendt never excludes the possibility of violence in politics, but she does worry that it is overused, too often glorified, and usually counterproductive. 
 
Does this mean that the aggressive protests that shut down a Jewish speaker amidst antisemitic slogans and chants at an art exhibit is acceptable violence? Is that what democracy looks like? Clearly not, which is why Bruguera and the museum directors shut the exhibit down. It had failed, in the end, to create the kind of civic space for dialogue to which it aspired. The failure was because the activists refused to participate in the invitation to dialogue and sought to aggressively and with non-physical force to take over that space for their own ends. Did their quasi-violent methods succeed? I don't believe they succeeded in advancing their goals in support of Palestine. But they did succeed in their larger goal of de-legitimating and undermining the very idea of a democratic and civic space for dialogue.