As the war in Gaza continues, Germany’s unstinting defence of Israel has unleashed a culture war that has just reached Australia

By Matt Fitzpatrick, Flinders University

Globally renowned Australian intellectual Ghassan Hage has devoted his career to unpicking the nature of racism in multicultural Australia and elsewhere – with the kind of bravura and theoretical flair that either attracts or repels readers, according to type.

His work led him to being offered a stint at Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

On February 7 2024, however, after an article in the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag accused him of “hatred of Israel”, the Max Planck Society issued a terse statement ending its “working relationship” with Hage.

This came less than two months after the Max Planck Foundation, with war in Gaza raging, had announced “additional funding for German-Israeli collaborations”.

The Melbourne-based academic was accused by the Institute of having “abused his civil liberties” and his “fundamental right to freedom of opinion”. The organisation insisted that “racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, discrimination, hatred and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society”.

The implication was clear – Hage’s trenchant criticism of Israel’s war, particularly on social media, had seen him fired. As he wrote in his statement:

What to me is a fair, intellectual critique of Israel, for them is “antisemitism according to the law in Germany”.

A political ideal

So what is Hage’s position on Israel? As he succinctly writes:

I have a political ideal that I have always struggled for regarding Israel/Palestine. It is the ideal of a multi-religious society made from Christians, Muslims and Jews living together on that land.

His criticism of current Israeli policy, he insists, stems from the Netanyahu government’s determination to “work against such a goal”. But it is also a critique he extends to Palestinian organisations that similarly rule out co-existence.

In this, Hage’s position is not unlike other anti-racist visions of a multicultural Israel/Palestine, either as a single state or as a confederation of two states with freedom of movement between them.

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