Hamas/Israel conflict: news and discussion
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- Start date
Kevbad the Bad
Amiable Bowel Syndrome
This argument also supposes that somehow the crimes of the Nazis 'belong' to Jews more than anyone else. The systematisation of the Final Solution was indeed unique in its insanity, but the use of mass killing by the Nazis spread beyond Jews to other non-Aryans on a colossal scale. Extermination camps, concentration camps, slave labour, firing squads etc etc. Gypsies and Slavs, in particular, were deemed worthless and subhuman but anyone who opposed the Nazis was in the firing line, as well as the millions who were just in the wrong place in the wrong time.
None of that diminishes the attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, but Nazism was essentially a crime against all of humanity. It's still true that many comparisons between the actions of Israel are crass, and because of its misuse it's generally not a good idea to make the comparison too often. But it shouldn't be completely out of bounds.
ska invita
back on the other side
some interesting stats in the link about Israeli public opinion related to thisWhat I was referring to. Surely there can be no doubt whatsoever about Israel's attitude towards Palestinians.
Israel-Gaza: US condemns conference call for Israeli reestablishment of Gaza settlements
The White House has condemned a conference in Jerusalem attended by more than ten members of the Israeli government - calling for settlements to be re-established in Gaza, along with the mass relocation of the Palestinian population.www.channel4.com
Israel’s “Humanitarian” Expulsion
The Israeli right is capitalizing on the aftermath of October 7th to build support for a permanent transfer of Palestinians out of Gaza.
jewishcurrents.org
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
German art gallery cancels exhibition by artist because she signs her IG posts 'Free Palestine' without adding 'from Hamas'
Her response below
Her response below
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
So is the UK - British doctors, living in a site our government had told the Israelis were at, bombed and injured:
Israel bombed British doctors on 'de-conflicted' site in Gaza
Israel military had told UK counterparts site was marked as a 'humanitarian site' a month before strike, MPs hear
www.middleeasteye.net
... and yet its UNRWA who our government suspended money to, the day after the Israeli government was ordered to ensure that Palestinians in Gaza received sufficient supplies.
hitmouse
so defeated, thinks it's funny
Tbf, if this story doesn't end with the head of the German gallery being sacked for having ever dared to work with the artist in the first place, then Germany still sounds soft as shit compared to the UK. Although I just looked Alistair Hudson up to see what he's doing now and turns out he is in fact now working at a gallery in Karlsruhe, dunno what the odds are of him commissioning any Palestine-themed exhibitions while he's there though.
teqniq
DisMembered
This should not come as a huge surprise:
www.theguardian.com
Hamas regroups in northern Gaza to prepare new offensive
Militant Palestinian group begins to rebuild system of governance in north after being driven out by Israeli forces
This should not come as a huge surprise:
Hamas regroups in northern Gaza to prepare new offensive
Militant Palestinian group begins to rebuild system of governance in north after being driven out by Israeli forces
I haven't been this angry with the Labour party since the Iraq war. They can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned. No amount of 'outreach' can correct things now. They've shown who they are.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Yeh not content with killing a great number of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan they're determined to facilitate the killing of tens of thousands more in Palestine.
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
This should not come as a huge surprise:
Hamas regroups in northern Gaza to prepare new offensive
Militant Palestinian group begins to rebuild system of governance in north after being driven out by Israeli forces
TBF that article is appallingly written - it starts by going on about Hamas regaining control in the North and being in firm control of the South, but the argument provided appears to be that because some essential services are coming back in these ruined areas (municipal workers, aid distribution, police etc) that it means "Hamas" is regaining control. The author even points later on to the one area where some civil order exists is because the municipal services ("Hamas") remain partially functional, and to how essential that is because otherwise criminality and looting of aid is taking place.
As for describing Gaza as potentially like Iraq in 2003 (as described at the end), that just seems delusional - this is much worse than that, clearly.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Decent piece on this in recent LRB
Vol. 46 No. 1 · 4 January 2024
Memory Failure
Pankaj Mishra
Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany
by Esra Özyürek.
Stanford, 264 pp., £25.99, March, 978 1 5036 3556 2
Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust
by Andrew Port.
Harvard, 352 pp., £30.95, May, 978 0 674 27522 5
In March 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.
West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.’
Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ...You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis.
Figuring Israelis as Aryan warriors – Moshe Dayan was like Erwin Rommel, according to Bild – wasn’t a contradiction but an imperative for some beneficiaries of the German economic miracle. Marwecki writes that Adenauer made a major loan and the supply of military equipment ‘dependent on the Israeli handling of the trial’ of Adolf Eichmann: he had been shocked to learn of Mossad’s discovery of Eichmann just weeks after his meeting with Ben-Gurion (he didn’t know that a German Jewish prosecutor had secretly informed the Israelis about Eichmann’s whereabouts) and feared what Eichmann might reveal. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his closest confidant, Hans Globke, wasn’t fingered as an exponent of Nuremberg racial laws at the trial. Many sordid details remain locked up in the classified files of the German Chancellery and German intelligence. Bettina Stangneth found enough in the archives to show, in Eichmann before Jerusalem(2014), that Adenauer enlisted the CIA to delete a reference to Globke from an article in Life magazine. It is also now known that, acting on Adenauer’s instructions, a journalist and fixer called Rolf Vogel stole potentially incriminating files on Globke from an East German lawyer at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Much to Adenauer’s relief, his new Israeli allies protected Globke, keeping up their end of what Marwecki describes as the ‘exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations’: moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons. It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (‘Hitler on the Nile’), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention of decent Arabs.
In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. In December 2022, German police foiled a coup attempt by Reichsbürger, an extremist group with more than twenty thousand members, which was planning an assault on the Bundestag. Alternative für Deutschland, which has neo-Nazi affiliations, has become the country’s second most popular party, partly in response to economic mismanagement by the coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’.
Both Judaeophobia and Islamophobia have increased in Germany in the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on Gaza and the German government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on ‘unchecked immigration’. To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as ‘the major carriers of antisemitism’, as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly ‘90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.’
West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany’s ‘international standing’, adding that ‘the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.’
Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ...You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis.
Figuring Israelis as Aryan warriors – Moshe Dayan was like Erwin Rommel, according to Bild – wasn’t a contradiction but an imperative for some beneficiaries of the German economic miracle. Marwecki writes that Adenauer made a major loan and the supply of military equipment ‘dependent on the Israeli handling of the trial’ of Adolf Eichmann: he had been shocked to learn of Mossad’s discovery of Eichmann just weeks after his meeting with Ben-Gurion (he didn’t know that a German Jewish prosecutor had secretly informed the Israelis about Eichmann’s whereabouts) and feared what Eichmann might reveal. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his closest confidant, Hans Globke, wasn’t fingered as an exponent of Nuremberg racial laws at the trial. Many sordid details remain locked up in the classified files of the German Chancellery and German intelligence. Bettina Stangneth found enough in the archives to show, in Eichmann before Jerusalem(2014), that Adenauer enlisted the CIA to delete a reference to Globke from an article in Life magazine. It is also now known that, acting on Adenauer’s instructions, a journalist and fixer called Rolf Vogel stole potentially incriminating files on Globke from an East German lawyer at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.
Much to Adenauer’s relief, his new Israeli allies protected Globke, keeping up their end of what Marwecki describes as the ‘exchange structure specific to German-Israeli relations’: moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons. It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser (‘Hitler on the Nile’), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke ‘had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis’. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as ‘decent’, made no ‘mention of decent Arabs.
In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. In December 2022, German police foiled a coup attempt by Reichsbürger, an extremist group with more than twenty thousand members, which was planning an assault on the Bundestag. Alternative für Deutschland, which has neo-Nazi affiliations, has become the country’s second most popular party, partly in response to economic mismanagement by the coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation’, according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining’.
Both Judaeophobia and Islamophobia have increased in Germany in the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on Gaza and the German government’s crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on ‘unchecked immigration’. To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as ‘the major carriers of antisemitism’, as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly ‘90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.’
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Part 2
Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany’s postwar efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews. Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine. He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their valiant struggle against antisemitism. (Efraim Zuroff, a historian who has helped bring many former Nazis to trial, compared this to ‘praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South’.) More recently, Netanyahu accompanied Elon Musk to one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, just days after Musk tweeted in support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Since 7 October, he has seemed to be reading from the Eichmann trial script. He regularly announces that he is fighting the ‘new Nazis’ in Gaza in order to save ‘Western civilisation’, while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists keep up a supporting chorus. The people of Gaza are ‘subhuman’, ‘animals’, ‘Nazis’.
This vengeful rhetoric from a damaged fortress of the West is echoed in Europe and America. White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes. In Our American Israel (2018), Amy Kaplan described the way an American elite projects its fears and fantasies onto Israel. But the state-enforced philosemitism that shapes Germany’s relationship to Israel belongs to another order of convolution and ferocity.
Shortly before the Hamas offensive, Israel secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. The Financial Times reported in early November that German arms sales to Israel have been surging since 7 October: the figure for 2023 is more than ten times as high as the previous year. As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, Scholz reiterated the national orthodoxy: ‘Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.’ As Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the ‘accuracy’ of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.
In a more unnerving illustration of the postwar German-Israeli symbiosis, the German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which Douglas Murray, a mouthpiece of the English far right, claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. ‘Watch and listen,’ retweeted Karin Prien, deputy chair of the Christian Democratic Union and education minister for Schleswig-Holstein. ‘This is great,’ Jan Fleischhauer, a former contributing editor at Der Spiegel, wrote. ‘Really great,’ echoed Veronika Grimm, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in 2021 ‘outed’ five Lebanese and Palestinian journalists at Deutsche Welle as antisemites, with equally flimsy evidence exposed the Indian poet and art historian Ranjit Hoskote as a calumniator of Jews for comparing Zionism with Hindu nationalism. Die Zeitalerted German readers to another moral outrage: ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians.’ An open letter from Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn and other academics criticising Jürgen Habermas’s statement in support of Israel’s actions provoked an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to claim that Jews have an ‘enemy’ at universities in the form of postcolonial studies. Der Spiegelran a cover picture of Scholz alongside his claim that ‘we need to deport on a grand scale again.’
‘German officials,’ the New York Times reported – belatedly – in early December, ‘have been combing through social media posts and open letters, some going back over a decade.’ State-funded cultural institutions have long penalised artists and intellectuals of Global South ancestry who show any hint of sympathy for Palestinians, retracting awards and invitations; the German authorities are now seeking to discipline even Jewish writers, artists and activists. Candice Breitz, Deborah Feldman and Masha Gessen are just the latest to be ‘lectured’, as Eyal Weizman put it, ‘by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic’.
What then of Germany’s much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ In Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, which examines the German response to mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their ‘otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.’
This goes some way to explaining the widespread indifference in Germany to the fate of the Palestinians, and the conviction that any criticism of Israel is a form of bigotry (a stance that negates Germany’s own historic support of many UNresolutions against Israeli infractions). Port could have strengthened his argument by discussing Germany’s failure fully to acknowledge, let alone pay reparations for, its first genocide of the 20th century: the mass killings by German colonists in South-West Africa between 1904 and 1908. Port also gives too much credit to German memory culture, which maintained an appearance of success only because the German ruling class had, until recently, less occasion to expose its historical delusions than, for instance, the Brexiteers dreaming of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency.
In reality, official attempts to bolster Germany’s image in the present by denouncing its past have faced much domestic resistance. Rudolf Augstein, the founder and editor of Der Spiegel and another early patron of former Nazis, remarked in 1998 that Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial was designed to satisfy American ‘East Coast’ elites. Historical memory is too volatile to be fixed by political and cultural institutions; it always seemed implausible that a collective moral education could produce a stable, homogenous attitude across the generations. There are too many other factors determining what is remembered and what is forgotten, and the German national subconscious is burdened by a century of secrecy, crimes and cover-ups. Speaking at Weimar in 1994, Jurek Becker, a rare Jewish novelist who lived in both East and West Germany, blamed the resurgence of violent neo-Nazism in unified Germany on the Nazis who, indulged and even embraced by Cold Warriors, had continued to flourish in West Germany:
This is not the first time invocations of Staatsräson have been used to conceal democratic deformations. In 2021, for example, while pursuing defence deals with Israel, Germany challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.
This vengeful rhetoric from a damaged fortress of the West is echoed in Europe and America. White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes. In Our American Israel (2018), Amy Kaplan described the way an American elite projects its fears and fantasies onto Israel. But the state-enforced philosemitism that shapes Germany’s relationship to Israel belongs to another order of convolution and ferocity.
Shortly before the Hamas offensive, Israel secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. The Financial Times reported in early November that German arms sales to Israel have been surging since 7 October: the figure for 2023 is more than ten times as high as the previous year. As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, Scholz reiterated the national orthodoxy: ‘Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.’ As Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the ‘accuracy’ of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.
In a more unnerving illustration of the postwar German-Israeli symbiosis, the German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which Douglas Murray, a mouthpiece of the English far right, claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. ‘Watch and listen,’ retweeted Karin Prien, deputy chair of the Christian Democratic Union and education minister for Schleswig-Holstein. ‘This is great,’ Jan Fleischhauer, a former contributing editor at Der Spiegel, wrote. ‘Really great,’ echoed Veronika Grimm, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in 2021 ‘outed’ five Lebanese and Palestinian journalists at Deutsche Welle as antisemites, with equally flimsy evidence exposed the Indian poet and art historian Ranjit Hoskote as a calumniator of Jews for comparing Zionism with Hindu nationalism. Die Zeitalerted German readers to another moral outrage: ‘Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians.’ An open letter from Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn and other academics criticising Jürgen Habermas’s statement in support of Israel’s actions provoked an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to claim that Jews have an ‘enemy’ at universities in the form of postcolonial studies. Der Spiegelran a cover picture of Scholz alongside his claim that ‘we need to deport on a grand scale again.’
‘German officials,’ the New York Times reported – belatedly – in early December, ‘have been combing through social media posts and open letters, some going back over a decade.’ State-funded cultural institutions have long penalised artists and intellectuals of Global South ancestry who show any hint of sympathy for Palestinians, retracting awards and invitations; the German authorities are now seeking to discipline even Jewish writers, artists and activists. Candice Breitz, Deborah Feldman and Masha Gessen are just the latest to be ‘lectured’, as Eyal Weizman put it, ‘by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic’.
What then of Germany’s much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ In Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, which examines the German response to mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their ‘otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.’
This goes some way to explaining the widespread indifference in Germany to the fate of the Palestinians, and the conviction that any criticism of Israel is a form of bigotry (a stance that negates Germany’s own historic support of many UNresolutions against Israeli infractions). Port could have strengthened his argument by discussing Germany’s failure fully to acknowledge, let alone pay reparations for, its first genocide of the 20th century: the mass killings by German colonists in South-West Africa between 1904 and 1908. Port also gives too much credit to German memory culture, which maintained an appearance of success only because the German ruling class had, until recently, less occasion to expose its historical delusions than, for instance, the Brexiteers dreaming of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency.
In reality, official attempts to bolster Germany’s image in the present by denouncing its past have faced much domestic resistance. Rudolf Augstein, the founder and editor of Der Spiegel and another early patron of former Nazis, remarked in 1998 that Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial was designed to satisfy American ‘East Coast’ elites. Historical memory is too volatile to be fixed by political and cultural institutions; it always seemed implausible that a collective moral education could produce a stable, homogenous attitude across the generations. There are too many other factors determining what is remembered and what is forgotten, and the German national subconscious is burdened by a century of secrecy, crimes and cover-ups. Speaking at Weimar in 1994, Jurek Becker, a rare Jewish novelist who lived in both East and West Germany, blamed the resurgence of violent neo-Nazism in unified Germany on the Nazis who, indulged and even embraced by Cold Warriors, had continued to flourish in West Germany:
Many well-placed men worked to compromise West Germans’ understanding of their complicity in the Third Reich. Franz Josef Strauss, a veteran of the Wehrmacht in the ‘bloodlands’ of Eastern Europe who became Adenauer’s defence minister and later prime minister of Bavaria, thought that the ‘task of leaving the past behind us’ was best accomplished by defence deals with Israel. Ralf Vogel, who claimed that ‘the Uzi in the hand of the German soldier is better than any brochure against antisemitism,’ now seems an early exponent of this mode of leaving the past behind – what Eleonore Sterling, a survivor of the Shoah and Germany’s first female professor of political science, was by 1965 calling ‘a functional philosemitic attitude’ that replaces ‘a true act of understanding, repentance and future vigilance’. Frank Stern’s unsparing diagnosis in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge (1992) holds true today: German philosemitism, he wrote, is primarily a ‘political instrument’, used not only to ‘justify options in foreign policy’, but also ‘to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and right-wing extremist phenomena’.
This is not the first time invocations of Staatsräson have been used to conceal democratic deformations. In 2021, for example, while pursuing defence deals with Israel, Germany challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that ‘Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.’ German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that ‘German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.’ But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.
Gramsci
Well-Known Member
What a pleasant organisation UKLFI are. ( UK Lawyers for Israel)
BMA send a letter to government about their concerns over Gaza and UKLFI are all over it.
Counter letter by UKLFI states this:
UKLFI, which also sent its letter to Lord Cameron, explains that when it comes to disregarding international law, it is Hamas that is guilty of this rather than Israel.
BMA letter likely to stir up racial hatred
Doctors are "horrified" at a letter the British Medical Association (BMA) has sent to Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron condemning Israel. The BMA's letter claims Israel is disregarding "international humanitarian law" and "the principles of medical neutrality". It fails to mention the October 7 massac
www.uklfi.com
So there you have it. BMA have got it all wrong. I looked to see the letter. Added it as pdf. Letter is totally reasonable. I think the problem for Israeli apologists like Jewish Chronicle and UKLFI is that BMA are calling for a ceasefire.
Jewish doctors denounce BMA over Gaza ceasefire letter
Letter sent to Lord Cameron says Israel has been breaking international humanitarian law
Posted up by The39thStep about Germany but way decent organisations like BMA are targetted by Israeli apologists in this country is quite nasty to say the least.
Saying basically they are Hamas supporters for calling for a ceasefire.
Though to be fair its just about what Starmer argues.
Reason this country has not gone down the road of Germany is not because we are that different. It because ordinary people have been out on the streets despite all the shit thrown at them. Hate marches and all the rest of the shit leveled at people for supporting Palestinians.
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Gramsci
Well-Known Member
Finally the Starmer lot are starting to get nervous about the Muslim vote/ and the rest of us who support ceasefire.
Good to see them starting to change from these people don't matter to wondering how to get them back onside.
Surprise surprise for the Labour leadership those people going out on the marches cannot just be dismissed.
www.theguardian.com
Good to see them starting to change from these people don't matter to wondering how to get them back onside.
Surprise surprise for the Labour leadership those people going out on the marches cannot just be dismissed.
Labour acts on fears Muslims will not vote for party over Gaza stance
Exclusive: Party launches outreach effort amid concerns it is losing support of normally loyal voters
Johnny Vodka
The Abominable Scotsman
Finally the Starmer lot are starting to get nervous about the Muslim vote/ and the rest of us who support ceasefire.
Good to see them starting to change from these people don't matter to wondering how to get them back onside.
Surprise surprise for the Labour leadership those people going out on the marches cannot just be dismissed.
Labour acts on fears Muslims will not vote for party over Gaza stance
Exclusive: Party launches outreach effort amid concerns it is losing support of normally loyal voters
But does Starmer genuinely care about the Muslim population and their concerns or is he just cynically after their votes?
andysays
Love and solidarity
Does Starmer genuinely care about anyone's concerns about anything, or is he just cynically after their votes?
I think we all know the answer to that one
andysays
Love and solidarity
Why would they want to change anything about it?You'd think Starmer, Reeves and Streeting and the like would have joined the tory party to try to change it from within rather than taking over Labour
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Younger voters are being 'radicalised' by seeing genocide play out in front of their eyes?Finally the Starmer lot are starting to get nervous about the Muslim vote/ and the rest of us who support ceasefire.
Good to see them starting to change from these people don't matter to wondering how to get them back onside.
Surprise surprise for the Labour leadership those people going out on the marches cannot just be dismissed.
Labour acts on fears Muslims will not vote for party over Gaza stance
Exclusive: Party launches outreach effort amid concerns it is losing support of normally loyal voters
We really do live in an upside-down world when Labour are worried about the young caring about injustice. Why won't they think of their mortgage rates ?
We're at a dangerous moment for democracy in Europe.
PTK
Paul Kegan
Are there such moments? As in, a brief time in which things go one way of the other? Is it not a continous process?
At some point, the 'English Labour voters have nowhere else to go' strategy is going to come a cropper.Does Starmer genuinely care about anyone's concerns about anything, or is he just cynically after their votes?
I think we all know the answer to that one
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
If only there was democracy in europe
Yes but there are many Labour voters who will vote because they always do who'll keep voting Labour until the straw breaks the camel's back. (And the straw's going to be different for different people and yes, many of those people will not vote rather than vote for anyone else.)
There are folk on here who pretty much hate Labour but will likely vote for them anyway. I mean I don't get it but it certainly happens.
It says 'acts on fears' but 'act' seems to mean 'getting an article in the Guardian to say we're doing something but actually we're not'.Finally the Starmer lot are starting to get nervous about the Muslim vote/ and the rest of us who support ceasefire.
Good to see them starting to change from these people don't matter to wondering how to get them back onside.
Surprise surprise for the Labour leadership those people going out on the marches cannot just be dismissed.
Labour acts on fears Muslims will not vote for party over Gaza stance
Exclusive: Party launches outreach effort amid concerns it is losing support of normally loyal voters
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