The slated talk was to be delivered by the US-based academic Sa’ed Atshan who said in 2014: “We all know Israel is an apartheid state and should be boycotted.”

Jeremy Issacharoff, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, complained to the head of the Jewish Museum in Berlin about a hardcore anti-Israel speaker, prompting the museum’s director to pull the plug on the academic’s July talk.

The slated talk was to be delivered by the US-based academic Sa’ed Atshan, a Swarthmore College professor of Peace and Conflict Studies in Pennsylvania, who said in 2014: “We all know Israel is an apartheid state and should be boycotted.”

Ambassador Issacharoff told the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung that he welcomed the decision of the museum to cancel Atshan’s talk. “Atshan is very closely connected with BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions]” and “he is not a person who wishes to build bridges of understanding with Israel.”

BDS is a campaign that advocates diplomatic, cultural, political and economic warfare against Israel.

Atshan, who was born in Ramallah, was scheduled to give a talk called “On Being Queer and Palestinian in East-Jerusalem” as part of the museum’s ongoing exhibit “Welcome to Jerusalem.”

Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and lecturer in the Center for Religious Studies at Ruhr University in Bochum, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that when the items about Atshan’s support for BDS on the Internet are accurate – including calling Israel an apartheid state – “it was right to disinvite him.” Beck, who is a leading figure in the German LGBT movement, added that he “who himself belongs to a boycott movement, should not complain when he is boycotted.” Beck said a speaker like Atshan “has no place in a publicly funded institution and has nothing to do with a critical dealing with Israel’s policies and the fight for the rights of Palestinians.”

DR. ELVIRA Groezinger, the chairwoman of the German branch of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told the Post that: “The decision of the Jewish Museum in Berlin to cancel the talk by Sa’ed Atshan is justified, as the speaker is a renowned anti-Israel activist supporting the BDS groups aiming at the destruction of what Atshan regards as an apartheid state.” She added that “It is a good signal for the Museum, which gave the impression of an Anti-Jewish Museum in past years, especially after the heavily criticized recent Jerusalem Exhibition there.

Read More: Jerusalem Post