Legislating the Historical Resonance of Boycott in Germany: Memory and Staatsräson in the Bundestag’s 2019 Resolution against BDS

This chapter develops a critique of the German Bundestag’s 2019 attempt to legislate a historical resonance between calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel and Nazi calls for anti-Jewish boycotts. First, it compares BDS to a boycott that the Bundestag resolution fails to mention but which shares many similarities with BDS: the global boycott against the Nazis. Then, it analyses the genealogy of the controversial concept of Staatsräson that the Bundestag resolution invokes twice. Finally, it argues for a critical comparative engagement with the political history of boycott, to resist the Bundestag’s legislation of exceptional associations between the global campaign for BDS and a national boycott with which it has little in common, and to explore associations and resonances between BDS and similar transnational solidarity boycotts. The chapter both interrogates and challenges the German state’s attempt to change, by means of legislation, the memory of a political practice that already carries its own, primarily emancipatory memories, as well as the German state’s attempt to rehabilitate a political concept tainted by a deeply anti-constitutional and anti-democratic genealogy.