An Egyptian visual artist has returned a top German award, citing Berlin’s “complicity” in the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza and hoping his move would “awaken” people’s conscience.
Mohamad Alba returned on Wednesday the German Goethe award he received in 2022, over “Berlin’s complicity in Israel’s aggression in Gaza.”
Issued by the Goethe-Institut, the award is an official decoration of Germany and is considered the most significant honour issued by the European state.
“It doesn’t make sense that the German government speaks about equality and justice and at the same time ignores the plights and rights of Palestinians and helps arm Israel,” he told Middle East Eye.
He hoped that by returning the medal “everyone’s conscience is awakened.”
Alba has called on other artists to take action through various means against the “apparent injustice” in the Gaza Strip where more than 30,800 people, mostly women and children, have been killed by Israeli strikes since October.
He also slammed US aid airdrops on Gaza into the sea, saying it was “the most painful thing for him” seeing people “running into the water to get their hands on it.”
“I’ve also been impacted by seeing all the children in Gaza looking for their parents and families under the rubble. It hurts to see protests around the world and not be able to take part in them myself in Egypt,” he added.
In a separate act of protest, a South African author who was the first woman to receive the Goethe medal, rejected the award earlier this week.
“I thus find myself unable to stay silent or keep an official decoration from a government that is this callous to human suffering,” Zukiswa Wanner said.
In a statement, she said that rather than being vocal in condemning genocide since the Holocaust, Germany has instead emerged as one of the largest arms exporters to Israel.
The writer and editor said that months before the start of the war, she was in the occupied Palestinian territories and traveled to different cities, including al-Quds.
“As a writer coming from a country with a history of apartheid, what I experienced shook me and resulted in my writing a long essay, ‘Vignettes of a People in an Apartheid State’,” she said.
“One did not need to be from a country with a history of apartheid to see the daily injustices and indignities visited on Palestinians.”
Germany’s government was considering the delivery of tank ammunition to Israel in January amid the genocidal war against Gaza, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported.
Israel requested Germany in November to approve the delivery of around 10,000 rounds of 120-millimeter precision ammunition manufactured by Rheinmetall, according to the report.
The Israeli ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor had thanked the German government for its unrelenting support it has shown.
