STRIKE GERMANY launched its call at the beginning of 2024 in response to Israel’s unmistakable genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the intervening months, Israel has ceaselessly continued its campaign of extermination, murder, and starvation against the Palestinian people. Israel’s campaign of terror has expanded; it has bombed Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Israel was able to carry out these attacks with the sycophantic support of allies in Germany, the US, the UK, Canada, and beyond. 

With each passing month, Germany has revealed what was already clear: the entire state apparatus is committed to the destruction of the Palestinian people, unwavering in its support of Israel, and unabashed in its underwriting of each new battlefield in the ever-expanding war. With its muddled and racist “Erinerrungskultur”, Germany’s inability to reckon with genocide comes as no surprise. Its unrelenting commitment to violence demands an unrelenting response. Germany’s cultural sector sustains itself with funding from the same German state that supplies Israeli bombs. Art institutions take state funding on the condition of excising Palestine from the cultural sphere. At the same time, powerful actors of the cultural sectors continue their personal anti-Palestine campaigns to eliminate dissent. 

It is time to STRIKE GERMANY now more than ever.

German repression of Palestinians and wider Arab and Muslim communities has intensified even further. Across Germany, there are regular deportations of particularly vulnerable groups, constant and severe police violence at every protest and increasingly frivolous lawsuits targeting public expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. 

Germany’s new right-wing government has hardened its material and ideological support of Israel. As death tolls in Iran rose from Israel’s attacks, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, a racist and Islamaphobe, stated “This is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us,” in unequivocal support of Israel's reign of terror in the region. This callous statement was accompanied by Merz’s public call for regime change in Tehran and for Israel to “go all the way.” Merz echoed a framing widely circulated by German media across the entire political spectrum. An article in one of Germany’s largest conservative media outlets proclaimed that “Israel was also fighting for us” and that the attacks costing hundreds of Iranians their lives constituted a “liberatory strike” for “Western civilization”. 

Israel is now engaged in wars of aggression with five states while completing its annexation of the West Bank and carrying out a brutal genocide in Gaza. 18 months after the initial call to STRIKE GERMANY, the German art world at best equivocates.  

Those rare public institutions that have moved on from denial now offer a bizarre hollowing out of the political program of Palestinian liberation. Throughout the pallid cultural landscape are talks of ruins, fugitivity, the underground and strategic lacunae—in a slick display of ironized, self-referential, aestheticized “awareness.” As Rheinmetall's stock price rises, the Bundeswehr’s budget inflates and governments across the country cut cultural funding in lockstep, the German art world offers rare coded platitudes at best, and a full-throated commitment to Zionism at worst. Germany’s official line in support of Zionism and so-called anti-anti-semitism have metastasized in the highest levels of the state apparatus. Philosemitic and Zionist cultural policies and officials have systematically undermined all space for Palestinians and solidarity for Palestine in the cultural sphere. 

Strategies that emerged in the crisis nearly two years ago remain relevant; STRIKE GERMANY calls now for new and lasting modes of resistance. The call to refuse participation in state-funded cultural programs in Germany remains unchanged. However, it is no longer enough to simply refuse; the cornerstones of German soft power must be rendered irrelevant. From the start of STRIKE GERMANY’s campaign, artists have withheld their labour in order to pressure the German art world to meet the campaign’s initial and basic demands. Nearly two years later, it is clear that this strategy has proved insufficient.

Not one of these spineless public institutions met the demands despite thousands committing themselves to the strike. 

The first phase of STRIKE GERMANY was focused on international arts and culture workers leveraging their labour power against their would-be employers in support of the demands. Moving forward, STRIKE GERMANY will expand its operational focus to targeting specific institutions, organizations, and festivals in sustained long-term campaigns. Cultural workers must commit themselves politically to the end of German support for Israel; they must turn their backs on institutions that offer little more than milquetoast compromise. STRIKE GERMANY commits to building a militant cultural front. The campaign will last as long as the project of Zionism does, and it will act as a cultural auxiliary to the movement for Palestinian liberation in Germany and until Palestine is free. 

Now is the time to STRIKE back.