October 7 –
“For life, against death”
Rally of the Feminism Unlimited alliance
Start: 18:00
Mariannenplatz in front of the Bethanien (Kreuzberg)
One year after the massacre on October 7th, we would like to organize an explicitly antifascist and feminist rally to give space to our shared grief –
Grief over the lives lost and kidnapped since then, grief over the antisemitic discrimination, the status quo of the war, general grief over the future has darkened this past year. At the same time, we would like to use this occasion to express our solidarity, hope and antifascist defense of life, and thus formulate a fundamental response to all life-destroying ideologies.
Our rally on this day will be dedicated to the victims of the massacre, their families and other victims of the Islamist and nationalist cult of death.
One of Hamas‘ battle cries is: “As our enemies love life, so we love death”.
Just under a year ago, the terrorist organization made its contempt for Jewish and Israeli life, and by further consequence Palestinian life, real in an unprecedented way. Its lust for destruction is directed at Israel, the Jewish state, and passes over the lives of individuals as if they were gravel on the road to power.
The terrorist group’s antisemitic massacre was accompanied by specific misogynist sexualized violence. The 7th of October was the most devastating attack on Jewish life since 1945.
With the deliberately cruel attack on Israel and the abduction of the hostages, Hamas inevitably brought about an Israeli war strike and deliberately used the suffering of the civilian population under its control. Nevertheless, it is not the attacked and wounded Israeli and Jewish communities, it is not the remaining Palestinians who, despite massive repression, are standing up against the Hamas dictatorship and for Palestinian-Israeli reconciliation, who were able to rely on the solidarity of the international community in the months that followed. The opposite is the case: antisemitic hatred has reached a new global high since the 7th of October. Palestinian and Muslim voices that speak out against the Islamist tenor are being fought and threatened. The commemoration of the Shoah seems to have been emptied and all but abandoned within the left. Today, the reality of eliminatory antisemitism is denied rather than acknowledged.
There remains no room for mourning in all of this.
Especially not for collective forms of mourning. And yet, especially in times of accumulating crises, we need shared spheres of emotionality that are not under attack. Gatherings of solidarity that do not deny the collectively attacked and threatened any kind of human emotion and reaction, but support them. As the antifascist left, we too need spaces and opportunities for solidarity in which vulnerability is welcome and experiences of pain and loss can be mourned. Without such collective mourning, the reservoir of life-affirming experiences from which we can draw strength and hope for our necessary struggles will also dwindle. And it remains necessary to stand up against political and contemporary adversities, against antisemitism and all other forms of misanthropy. It is becoming increasingly necessary to fight against Islamist and fascist forces and push back their advance.
As antifascists and feminists, on the evening of the 7th of October we want to oppose every ideology hostile to life with a moment of solidarity with Jews and those persecuted by Islamists and fascists. We want to stand up for a liberated society of the future – a society in which we can be different without fear, so that we can become equals – and strengthen our conviction that such a society is possible despite the atrocities of the prevailing conditions. We want to remember this one certainty of the antifascists:
“For life, against death.”
Kind regards,
Feminism Unlimited Alliance
*We explicitly distance ourselves from actors who use such commemoration to legitimize racism and reactionary ideologies or to give them space.
As anti-fascists, it is also important for us to emphasize that anti-Semitism is not a unique characteristic of Islamists, but that Islamism and German anti-Semitism are historically and ideologically closely intertwined.