‘We need to protect the Palestinians for a shared future’ – Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm
Omri Boehm addressing the Vienna Judenplatz demonstrators in May 2023
Netta Ahituv writes in Haaretz on 14 December 2024:
“I’ve heard that there was a controversy about this talk and I have a little warning: I intend to try to disappoint everybody.” The setting was a public square in Vienna with an overflow audience as Omri Boehm began his address last May. Boehm had been invited to deliver this year’s annual “Speech to Europe” – a prestigious European platform for intellectuals. A year earlier, the speaker was the Ukrainian lawyer, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk; in 2022, the speech was delivered by the noted American historian Timothy Snyder.
Opposition to Boehm’s invitation came from members of the Jewish community of Austria, Israel supporters who viewed the Israeli-German philosopher as an “anti-Zionist” who was unworthy of the honor. They drew on comments by Boehm in the media and in earlier speeches, in which he assailed the Israeli government’s actions during the past year in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and called for the establishment of a Jewish-Arab confederation between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, a single state in which Palestinians and Jews would coexist in full equality.
During the Vienna speech, delivered in English, Boehm’s detractors held up protest signs with messages like, “Demonizing Israel is antisemitism.” Responding to that particular sign, Boehm said that while he agrees with the sentiment and had no intention of demonizing Israel, legitimate criticism of Israel must not be silenced. Cries of “You’re lying” and “Shame on you” continued to be heard from the audience. Addressing the demonstrators directly, Boehm said, “I hear you and I hope you hear me too.” One of the protesters responded: “We hear you, but we don’t agree with you,” to which Boehm replied: “That’s excellent. That is exactly the attitude we should be about.”
Adding to the emotional pitch of the event was its venue: the Judenplatz, a square that was at the heart of medieval Vienna’s Jewish quarter that today symbolizes the thriving life before the brutal extinction of the Austrian Jewish community under the Nazi regime. Boehm spoke against the background of a huge monument that commemorates the 65,000 Austrian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. In his remarks, he referred to the fact of his being a Jew who was delivering a speech in this particular square and drew the audience’s attention to the symbolic details present there. These include, for example, a bronze statue of the 18th-century playwright and philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, considered the greatest German writer of the Age of Enlightenment, a non-Jew with great sympathy for the Jews.
Omri Boehm
“Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn’s friend, was the one who established the essential connection between the Enlightenment and friendship,” said Boehm. “Reason goes hand in hand with friendship; populism and nationalism with [throwing] eggs and with shouting. Make no mistake: Eggs are meant to humiliate, and it is for this reason that they are dangerous. Choosing reason over eggs is to put the clamor aside, to stretch out the hand to those who have criticized this talk and attempted to disrupt rather than protest it, and to move on.”
Boehm is little known to the general Israeli public, but in Europe and the United States he’s an intellectual star, a well-known and highly esteemed thinker who’s frequently invited to speak, write, lead master classes in philosophy and meet with high-ranking figures in government and academia. Some even say that his success is starting to recall the rise of the Israeli historian and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari.
The acclaimed Swiss novelist and thinker Jonas Lüscher observed, in a conversation with Haaretz, how, “The Middle East discourse in Germany is extremely complicated…. [Omri] is perceived as a balancing voice, as someone who manages to think for both sides of this conflict. And I suppose it also helps that he refers to Kant. It does the German soul good when an Israeli philosopher, of all people, seems to find the solution to the Middle East conflict in the thinking of Kant.”
According to Dr. Raef Zreik, who teaches philosophy at Ono Academic College in Israel, and is a senior researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, the disparity between Boehm’s vast popularity abroad and his anonymity among Israelis stems from the fact that he left Israel at a young age and publishes mainly in English and German. “It’s my fault,” Boehm himself says when asked about this. “I wasn’t insistent enough about publishing in Hebrew, and I didn’t ‘confront’ contemporary Israeli commentators in newspapers.”
Boehm was born in 1979 in the Galilee community of Mitzpeh Gilon; his parents are both lecturers in social work. After graduating from the Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University, he earned a doctorate in philosophy at Yale. He is currently an associate professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York, where he lives with his wife, Inbal, an Israeli, and their 9-year-old son.
From his American base, Boehm makes frequent forays across the globe as a guest of various forums that are interested in his thoughts and ideas. He also publishes articles in the German media outlets Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, as well as in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and from time to time in Haaretz. He is also a frequent interviewee in various media outlets worldwide, both about his philosophy and about the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The Israelis may not occupy themselves much with Boehm’s ideas, but he is much engaged with the Israelis, with Israeliness and with issues that occupy us – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Gaza, and also different interpretations of monotheism and of Jewish morality, the latter of which, he claims, is more universal than many contemporary Jewish and Israeli thinkers tend to believe. Identified primarily as a contemporary interpreter of Immanuel Kant, the 18th-century German author of “Critique of Pure Reason,” Boehm offers both his supporters and his critics a fusion of philosophy and current politics. A graphic illustration of this could be seen on one of the signs of protest that was hoisted at the Vienna event: “Israel = Kant. Hamas = anti-Kant.”
Boehm emphasizes the universalism of Kant’s thinking, which holds that we are obligated to think of human beings primarily as human beings, stripped of their other identities. That universalism is a response to the conceptual contradiction in contemporary European thought, as Boehm explained in his Vienna speech. He argues that Europe, although committed to the “concept of human dignity,” bases this commitment on feelings of guilt – the colonialist past and the past of the Holocaust. Whereas for the postcolonial left, Israel is a type of colonialist project and hence the Palestinians are deserving of their unreserved support, to the point of accepting acts of terrorism and appalling crimes like those committed by Hamas on October 7, the liberal center in Europe as well as in America sees Israel as embodying a moral response to the Holocaust and as such is ready to come to terms even with Israel’s war crimes.
A first Hebrew translation of a book by Boehm – “Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel,” published in English in 2021 – is due for release in Israel next summer. Addressing the one-state solution in the book, Boehm rejects both the right-wing solution – the conquest and occupation of the Palestinians – and the left-wing notion of two states for two peoples.
In one of many conversations we held, in person, by phone and via email, Boehm explained that, “Oslo’s two-state idea did not offer a true compromise with the Palestinians: Fifty percent of the population between the Jordan and the sea is supposed to receive qualified sovereignty over 22 percent of the territory in two separate areas – the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And we haven’t yet said a word about the issue of hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank. The idea was that if the Palestinians would refuse this ‘rotten compromise,’ they would effectively lose their right to rights altogether.
“A compromise of that sort can’t really lead to peace,” he continues, “because it’s far from seeing the Palestinians as equal partners. So its point of departure is not an assumption that we truly need to make peace with them, as a moral obligation and out of political vested interest. It’s not surprising that those who are suggesting this form of ‘compromise’ are also continuing to side with the settlements, or – like the Supreme Court – to leave the question of their legality open. It’s also not surprising that the public that proposed this compromise, the liberal Israeli left, is ready to accept in silence the awful war crimes that Israel is perpetrating against the Palestinians.”
Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac (1602). Boehm argued early on that it was Abraham’s decision, not God’s, to spare Jacob’s life.
Clearly, Boehm is not sparing of the Israeli left: “Those who fought against the regime coup and pretended that the occupation could be set aside in order to defend the Jewish-democratic idea, are talking today about a cease-fire for the sake of returning the hostages. But we haven’t seen a public outcry for an immediate stop to the policy of starvation, bombing and expulsion of the population of Gaza. There has been no call for a cease-fire from leaders who in the past called for a two-state solution, or from those who in the past were considered the conscience of the left.
“On the contrary,” he noted, “what we are seeing are a lot of complaints about the ‘global left.’ The allegations are largely justified – the discourse in the universities is troubling; I encounter it among my students and no less within the academic faculty. But in the era following the two-state solution, in the ‘Gaza era,’ the Israeli left, too, has revealed an face no less ugly than that of the global left. And there is no choice but to grasp this and to rethink the solution to the conflict.”
A one-state solution sounds tempting morally, but not especially realistic in the present state of affairs.
“The answer to the question of what is considered realistic or rational and what is not, is determined largely by the interests of the powerful. Many on the left have concluded that reason itself is not separate from the position of the powerful, and that is a fatal error. The only response that can be made in the face of the present power structures is utopian thinking, which is definitely realistic.”
You advocate a confederation for the two peoples under a joint government. That idea would effectively put an end to Zionism and turn the Jews into a minority between the Jordan and the sea. I don’t think the Jews in Israel or elsewhere are ready to accept that.
“On the contrary! There is no future for Jewish self-determination, and in this sense a sustainable Zionism, without that. At the moment we are in a dystopia, and it’s liable to get worse. Many people say that the two-state solution is more realistic than the one-state solution. That’s a mistake, because we are not talking about two ideals of peace, one more realistic than the other.
“The problem with the two-state solution is that it doesn’t really present an idea of peace,” Boehm explains, “and therefore the actions that derive from it in the present are not ones that promise peace, but mainly utilize the illusion of peace in order to justify actions that continue to bury its possibility. In contrast, the one-state solution, even if it’s not realistic at present, is in fact a true ideal of peace.
“By the way,” he adds, “many people think that the famous partition plan of the United Nations was based on the separation principle – ‘divorce,’ as Amos Oz called it – but it’s not so. The partition plan was based on sharing; it was called ‘a plan of partition with economic union’ and included freedom of movement across the whole of the area, a joint currency, joint institutions, even a joint judicial instance. The Declaration of Independence also refers to this unity and recognizes it explicitly. It’s not a contradiction to Zionism, but a more accurate interpretation of it.”
The two-state solution doesn’t really present an idea of peace, and therefore the actions that derive from it mainly utilize the illusion of peace in order to justify actions that continue to bury its possibility. The one-state solution, even if it’s not realistic at present, is in fact a true ideal of peace.
That’s a vision fraught with challenges, above all conceptual ones. It’s hard to see how people like Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir will accept a situation in which the Arabs have equal rights in the territory that both men see as belonging exclusively to the Jews. Not to mention the logistical difficulties and the security risks that are entailed.
“It’s the only possible moral vision. I’m not aiming for realpolitik – in other words, what is realistic now in terms of the vested interests of one group or another. I’m talking about the realism of ideals: The ideas are implementable, and the cardinal question is whether we want to solve the problem or to preserve it out of ideological motives. After all, someone once said, ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’
“In the case of Israel, instead of striving for full sovereignty determined along ethnic lines, we need to strive for a state in which the foundation is equal citizenship. Equality cannot be the result of the political act, but the assumption of the act, its point of departure. The addressees of the ‘you will it’ must be not only Jews, but Jews and Palestinians both, the inhabitants of Israel between the Jordan and the sea. It’s not only immoral but also unrealistic to think that it’s possible to go on oppressing the Palestinian people and to sell them and the world rotten compromises along the lines of the two-state formula.”
That may be intellectually alluring, but when we return to reality, we encounter a divided, violent, religious and ethnically polarized country. There is a huge distance between our lives these days and the ideal you’re proposing.
“It’s true that the sharing this equality requires won’t happen tomorrow, but the most realistic thing that it’s possible to do now is also the most moral thing: to build the political basis for that cooperation in the future. Contrary to what’s usually said, there is an excellent basis for political cooperation with Palestinian-Israeli leaders and politicians. The question is whether we want to reinvigorate the Israeli left by means of truly shared and democratic parties, or to ‘renew’ the left with old political ideas like Yair Golan [chairman of the new political fusion of Labor and Meretz].
“In order not to lose hope in the present situation, it’s essential to adopt political imagination, and what are utopias if not political imagination? We need to adopt utopian thinking in order to overcome immediate interests and to achieve better results. Full equality between Jews and Palestinians in Israel is realistic utopian thinking.”
Early in November, Boehm was the guest of honor of the Forum Basiliense, which invites a thinker to Switzerland to speak to the public at large each year. On the evening of the event, Theater Basel was packed with a diverse crowd – young and old, elegant and casual – many of its earnest members equipped with notebook and pen, all of them thrilled to listen to the words of the “international philosopher,” as the invitation termed Boehm.
In the talk he examined the worldviews of a number of thinkers on the matter of war. Thomas Hobbes, for example, viewed the foundation of human existence as “the war of all against all,” while Kant held war to be “barbaric,” and “the way of savages” to resolve disputes. Instead of wars, Kant proposed a continuing, universal, eternal peace, which is today considered an illusory utopia that passed from the world more or less together with the murder of John Lennon. Boehm, though, insists that eternal universal peace is in fact realistic, as long as we insist on “ideals.” Kant’s thought, he says, is relevant, necessary and also practical in its way.
Judging by the applause, the audience in Basel was persuaded. As Boehm descended from the stage, a long line of people waited to greet him. A young man in jeans and a kaffiyeh approached Boehm to hone a philosophical issue, as did an elderly man wearing a kippa.
Across the road from the theater is the auditorium where the First Zionist Congress was held, in 1897, where Theodor Herzl won over the audience to his far-reaching vision of the establishment of a Jewish state. At the time, that was a complex, unrealistic, utopian and delusional notion. Yet it materialized. Maybe utopias are possible, after all.
No angel appeared
Boehm made a name for himself in the German-speaking world when he was just 21, recently released from the Israel Defense Forces, even before he began his formal study of philosophy. His fame rested on his revolutionary interpretation, laid out in an article and then in a lecture he was invited to deliver in Basel, of the biblical story of the binding of Isaac (in Genesis 22). Later, he developed the theory into a book, “The Binding of Isaac: A Religious Model of Disobedience,” published in 2007 in both German and English.
According to Boehm, the account of the angel who orders Abraham not to sacrifice his son is actually a later interpolation in the biblical text – it doesn’t make sense that the angel would contradict the word of God. Boehm argues that in the original story, Abraham decides on his own not to kill his son.
That reading, based on philological research, is readily consistent with Abraham’s character, as it is given expression even before the akedah, the binding. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which appears a few chapters earlier, in Genesis 18, God reveals to Abraham his plan to destroy the two cities completely. Abraham argues with God’s decision to kill both the righteous and the wicked. “Far be it from You to do such a thing,” he says to God, and later repeats the words: “Far be it from You.” Abraham’s active boldness toward God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah is amazingly consistent with a reading of the akedah story as Abraham’s own disobedience of the command to slay his only son whom he loved.
Why is it important if the sacrifice of the son was not implemented because of disobedience or because the angel ordered Abraham not to do it? Because in this way it is precisely disobedience and not obedience that becomes the basis for the Jewish faith.
“In monotheistic morality,” Boehm explained in one email exchange, “although there is one God, morality is the absolute law, above God. Human beings may, even must, answer God back, argue with him, not obey. It is thanks to the fact that Abraham was a fanatic of justice, not of faith, that he became the father of monotheism. This reading distills the question of universalism, as Kant understood it: Is there a moral authority that is entitled to transcend our personal commitment to justice – a divine imperative, for example?
“His answer is ‘No,’ because if justice is universal, then even God has no authority above it. Not God, not God’s representatives on earth, and also not the state that purports to supplant God as the sovereign.”
This is a radically opposite interpretation of the story of the akedah from that of traditional Judaism, which sees Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son as a surpassing act of faith. Thus, for example, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, from the settlement of Efrat, writes on the website of Ohr Torah Stone, the educational network he founded: “The paradox in Jewish history is that unless we were willing to sacrifice our children for God, we would never have survived as a God-inspired and God-committed nation.”
The worldview that stems from that interpretation is that sacrifice for the redemption of the Jewish people and settlement in the land of the Bible is a leading value. In contrast to the value of sacrifice enshrined in a fundamentalist understanding of Judaism, Boehm’s interpretation sees justice and compassion as more important tenets than blind religious obedience – a line of thought that has gained him many adherents.
“What’s interesting about Boehm’s philosophy is that he reads Kant and Spinoza together with the Bible, as a totality,” says Prof. Elisabeth Bronfen, a Swiss-American literary and cultural critic. “That’s what makes him a Jewish philosopher who finds the universal side in Judaism.” In addition, Bronfen suggests, his political statements are attractive to those who want to express their criticism of Israel in a complex manner, not simplistically. He’s both a Zionist and a leftist, so he speaks to many and also gets criticized from both sides. “That’s why everyone is talking about him lately,” Bronfen said in a phone interview.
In the view of Raef Zreik, the philosopher from Ono Academic College, Boehm’s oped writing “has an important role at this time. As a German-speaking Jew who wishes to challenge the Germans, and precisely based on the tradition of the German Enlightenment, he is actually telling them that it’s permissible to be critical of the government of Israel for what it’s doing in Gaza.”
Boehm’s critics can be divided into two groups. One group disputes his philosophical approach and sees his interpretation of Kant, and adherence to the ideals and vision of universalism, as an anachronistic reversion to ideas from the Age of Enlightenment, ideas that are not appropriate today. This group includes adherents of the “woke” trend, who believe that one’s individual identity is critical – that a white man can never understand a Black woman, for example. But this group also comprises right-wing conservatives who view Boehm’s universalist ideas as a threat to the very idea of state, nationality and religion.
The other class of critics takes issue with his political views, and considers his criticism of Israel, and his call to establish a joint Jewish-Arab confederation between the river and the sea, as a denial of Zionism and even of the idea of the Jewish democratic state. Late last month, Boehm visited Switzerland again, this time for a question-and-answer session at a Zurich cultural center situated in what was formerly an impressive Protestant church. The event sold out as soon as tickets became available. Boehm informed the audience that he understands German and that they were invited to ask questions in the local language, but that he preferred to answer in English. The interviewer, Daniel Binswanger, the editor of Republik magazine, asked questions that ran the gamut of both philosophy and politics. The audience joined in with critical questions, but despite the burning nature of the issues, the discussion did not grow heated.
A man in the audience told Boehm that his ideas are “wishful thinking,” asserting that Muslims don’t recognize Israel’s legitimacy to exist, and that “children learn to hate Jews and Israel” at UNRWA schools in Gaza, where textbooks don’t mention Israel. “What about the reality of Islam?” he asked Boehm.
Boehm responded with his belief that the speaker’s view of Islam was limited, and while there are similar lines of thought among Jews as well, he “wouldn’t reduce Judaism to those ideas.” He noted that while Palestinian children learn ideas that “aren’t conducive to peace … the same is true of Israeli Jewish kids. The maps are pretty shocking. The maps of Israel don’t show the Green Line, do not show Palestinian cities…
“The group that gives me the most hope are Israeli Palestinian leaders,” Boehm added, alluding to such politicians as Ayman Odeh, Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi. “Many of them are the true exemplary leaders of what cohabitation between the river and the sea looks like. I would like to view them as genuine Israeli leaders.”
In a 2015 op-ed piece published in The New York Times, titled “Can Refugees Have Human Rights?”, Boehm referred to the philosophical tension that can exist between civil rights and human rights. The column was addressing the world refugee crisis of a decade ago, but at the Zurich event Boehm explained to the audience why it’s relevant today to the situation of the Gaza population: If they aren’t citizens of any state, where do their rights come from?
“The Palestinians aren’t citizens of any state that has any authority that is charged with protecting them,” Boehm said. “The question of human beings who are de facto treated as disposable because they are not protected by any power… troubles me. That is the urgent question. What to do about those humans who are nothing but human?”
Boehm frequently references Hannah Arendt, the German-American historian and philosopher who, like him, taught in the New School, and in the same department. One of the points he’s borrowed from her appears in an article she wrote in 1943, “We Refugees.” She explains that the fate of the Jews in occupied Europe was determined because they had been stripped of their status as citizens. “She’s right,” Boehm says. “In a world in which the right, the center and the left all effectively came out against the concept of the human being, there is no more dangerous fate for a person than to be nothing but a human being.”
He probes this issue thoroughly in his 2022 book “Radical Universalism,” which was a hit in German-speaking philosophical circles. The book was the recipient of the prestigious 2024 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, whose jury explained in its decision that the prize was going to Boehm “for his uncompromising defense of the core values of humanistic universalism and the obligation to recognize the equality of all human beings without relativizing in any way.” The jury added that “Boehm’s groundwork on humanistic universalism is of significant political relevance” and that his books “simultaneously defend and challenge liberal democracies.”
The speakers at the prize-giving ceremony included the German chancellor and the country’s minister of culture. Their speeches were interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters in the audience who shouted that the officials were responsible for genocide in Gaza and that their hands were covered in blood. In his remarks, Boehm chose to refer to the interventions by emphasizing the importance of protest, as long as it does not constitute “cancellation” of the other. The German media leaped on the tempest and gave it wide coverage.
People are drawn to Boehm’s thinking, Bronfen explains, because he offers them a way out of both right-wing identity politics and from left-wing wokeness. He is restoring the essence to man, in contrast to those others, who see the essence in one’s identity: woman, Black, Asian, victim of colonialism or victimizer of colonialism. Bronfen adds that Boehm is part of a current tendency that wants to reclaim the left from wokeness.
Indeed, said Boehm, in one of our conversations, “The Democratic Party in the United States is making a mistake by straddling the line between progressive identity politics – women, Blacks, gays, Latinos – and a call for conservative-patriotic liberalism. It could have given its voters hope along the lines of the American Declaration of Independence, which speaks of human equality uncompromisingly and irrespective of whether people are citizens.
“But the identity-based progressives, the woke movement, are opposed to the Declaration of Independence, because in their view it was written by slave owners and as such represents them. In contrast, the conservative liberals avoid mentioning it because its principle of equality could, in their view, lead toward socialism. The last person who used the Declaration of Independence effectively was Martin Luther King, who evoked it both in order to dwell on civil rights and in order to take a stand regarding world politics and to oppose the Vietnam War. In my opinion, America’s tragedy lies largely in forgoing that source.”
According to your utopian approach, what should the Israelis do tomorrow?
“I’ll tell you what should have been done already yesterday, and many months ago: to shout out for a cease-fire, not only to obtain a hostage deal – that is critical, of course – but also to protect the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. David Grossman asked immediately after October 7, ‘Who will we be when we rise from the ashes?’ He added, ‘And what do those who brandished the absurd notion of a “binational state” say now?’
“Already then the answer was that the espousers of the binational state idea said very quickly that it’s essential to stop shooting and to protect the residents of Gaza as though they were citizens of Israel. They did so when most of the two-state adherents kept silent at best, or at worst claimed for months that a cease-fire would undercut Israel’s right to self-defense, even after the dimensions of the catastrophe in Gaza were already apparent – starving the people and preventing humanitarian aid. They pretended that they were against Ben-Gvir, [Bezalel] Smotrich, the ‘Generals’ Plan’ and the expulsion, but most of them didn’t say a word to truly safeguard the conditions that would prevent all of that and prevent the utter annihilation of life in Gaza.
“We need to protect the Palestinians in the name of a shared future, even if that causes a crack in the Israeli ‘us.’ Action of that kind, in the name of a common future, is the concrete expression of action in the name of human dignity, and it is also not separate from preserving the possibility of peace, which so many in Israel have to all intents and purposes given up on.
“So, who will we be when we rise from the ashes? The ‘we’ in Grossman’s question are the Jews, not all the inhabitants of the land; we have already seen, in October 7 and its aftermath, where that ‘we’ led us.”
This article is reproduced in its entirety