Gaza: Conflict in the Middle East: Disposing of the Past

The slogan “Free Palestine from German Guilt” only exists on German streets, but not in German. It only works in English. With good reason. “Free Palestine from German Guilt” was primarily propagated by English-speaking people, not by German demonstrators of the last few weeks. It causes irritation. And misinterpretation. The cabaret artist Serdar Somuncu correctly locates the slogan in the context of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, but may only see it as anti-Israel bluster, which means he is in agreement with the majority media opinion. The director of the German Historical Museum in Berlin, Raphael Gross, even told “Spiegel” that the slogan that was already raised during the disputes over Documenta 15 was “perhaps the most perfidious attack on the struggle that was fought with great effort and against a lot of resistance Germany with the Holocaust«. Perhaps? Maybe not.

“Free Palestine from German Guilt” only superficially comes from the vocabulary of revisionist infamy such as “guilt cult” – a favorite term of several AfD MPs. Gross is also wrong when he goes on to say in the “Spiegel” interview that the demo saying is associated “with strange constellations, like that of Hubert Aiwanger, who today of all days warns against immigrant anti-Semitism.” According to demonstration observations, it is particularly young Israelis or Palestinians who live here who propagate this saying. He does not associate himself with right-wing revisionism, but attacks it and even sees it as a hegemonic discourse in Germany. In fact, the talk of “imported anti-Semitism” has long since reached the center of the Federal Republican party landscape, when the middle class combines restrictive migration policy with defense against anti-Semitism.

“Free Palestine from German Guilt” does not mean freeing Germany from German guilt, which is what conservative and right-wing radical actors have always wanted. The slogan also does not negate the fact of German guilt towards the Jews and other victim groups of fascism. Accordingly, it does not represent a form of defense against guilt, but rather scandalizes a shift in German guilt to another object that occurs in the German discourse space. In doing so, she calls for the rejection of cheap German positions. In fact, in the strictest sense of the word, it is “anti-German.” She attacks the exporting and dumping of originally German anti-Semitism into the Orient.

The fact that the Bavarian populist Aiwanger, who was caught with a pro-Nazi leaflet in his knapsack when he was a student, wants to identify anti-Semitism primarily among immigrants, confirms the meaning of the demonstration slogan. She reminds us that since the 1950s it has been more than convenient for the Federal Republican majority and its leading representatives, ostensibly motivated by philo-Semitism, to promise Israel any support. This was sold as a lesson from the Holocaust. The fact that a fight for land was raging in the far Middle East, in which the Palestinians – to put it bluntly – lost out, didn’t have to bother the German citizen, who sometimes still sat on the Aryanized sofa.

Angela Merkel’s 2008 affirmation that support for Israel was Germany’s reason of state only sharpened this Federal Republican logic. This way of coming to terms with the past deliberately and systematically forgot the Palestinians. It was the internationalist new left that took a front against this and at the same time encountered the strongest resistance when it attacked the personnel and structural continuities of FRG society with fascism.

For the “Bild” editor Axel Springer as well as for the first Federal Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, the connection of the “guilt of yesterday” with the courting of Israel as a bulwark of the West in a hostile environment was characteristic. While Springer wanted Germany to have a “special love” for the Jewish people and support for all of Israel’s wars in the spirit of “masculine Middle East policy”, this German Middle East policy has recently undergone a linguistic transformation in the spirit of “feminist foreign policy” – the core remains them right away. It was only very late that the German Foreign Minister spoke critically to the Israeli government regarding its conduct of the war in Gaza.

Some, with the best of their conscience, invoke supposedly anti-fascist experiences in order to discursively support an obviously cruel air and ground war against a defenseless civil society. In fact, there have been and are a number of examples that point to German actors engaging in a form of exculpation by identifying Palestinians as new Nazis. Immediately after October 7th, one could hear comparisons of the civilian population of Gaza with the German ethnic community of Dresden and Hamburg, primarily from German people who feel “left-wing,” “progressive,” and “anti-anti-Semitic.” The historically more than oblique parallel was intended to legitimize tough action by the Israeli army. Casualties among the civilian population were not only accepted, but presented as a necessity.

The logic of former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who in an interview with British broadcaster Sky News compared Israel’s conduct of the war to the bombing of Dresden in World War II, was echoed in Germany by a small section of the former left who call themselves “anti-Germans.” However, in the literal sense, they have not been articulated in every air war since the Gulf War in 1991 through the Iraq War in 2003 to the current slaughter in Gaza. It was always exactly as Bennett put it: “We are fighting Nazis.”

In Israel itself, the instrumental comparison of the population of Gaza with the German Nazi national community is a form of legitimization of war and bellicose discourse. In Germany he hits the nerve of German guilt. A historically and currently politically informed contemporary who is not driven by the need for exculpation would of course reject these parallels: the population of Gaza is far less in agreement with Hamas’ rule over Gaza than the German population was with the leader in the 1940s. Nazi Germany first reduced Guernica, Coventry and London to rubble and the Germans enjoyed the Blitzkrieg and the spoils of war all the way to Stalingrad. Comparing them with the population of the Gaza Strip, which has been cooped up for decades, is absurd. For some, however, the comparison seems to have a psychodynamic purpose, which consists in clear, unconditional support for Israel, which is intended to be a lesson from the past.

For some contemporaries, the residents of Gaza are even worse than the Nazis. The Social Democratic Health Minister Karl Lauterbach enthusiastically agreed with the statements made by the right-wing influencer Douglas Murray on the British television station Talk TV. Murray said in the interview that you couldn’t just compare Hamas to the Nazis, they were far worse because even the Nazis were ashamed of their actions: “SS battalions that spent their days shooting Jews in the back of the head and To throw them into ditches, they had to get very, very drunk to forget what they had done.” However, according to Murray, the actions of the Hamas fighters were at least as barbaric as those of the Nazis, but there was a key difference: “They did it with pleasure.”

Lauterbach’s comment is telling: “a lot is said here that is otherwise only thought.” The “Spiegel” columnist Jan Fleischhauer also declared: “That’s great.” The Schleswig-Holstein Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU) and the economics professor Veronika Grimm also commented on the X platform, formerly Twitter.

Do we really need to remind German politicians and influencers applauding hurrays about the smirking images of the murdering Wehrmacht soldiers? Of the beardless Nazi youths in uniform who, laughing scornfully, cut off the beards of old Jews from the Eastern European shtetl before they killed them? Here, Lauterbach, Fleischhauer, Prien and Grimm simply deny the sadism of Hitler’s willing executors, as the American sociologist Daniel Goldhagen called them, distort history, and relativize German guilt.

In this respect, the demonstration slogan is more than enlightening and has a subversive effect. She points out that “Palestine” is currently a projection surface for many Germans in order to cultivate a specific, not right-wing radical, but right-wing liberal form of secondary anti-Semitism as a way of shifting blame. In 2002, the social psychologists and historians Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall summarized the manipulated family memory of normal Germans with “Grandpa wasn’t a Nazi,” but there are currently a number of Germans whose need for relief culminates in attitudes that are either, like Federal Economics Minister Habeck, on the Nazi -Grandfather and derive from his anti-Semitic frenzy an unconditional support for Israel or a restrictive immigration policy that is now supposedly required or, like Lauterbach, want to consider the grandparents’ generation to be less bad than the Palestinians.

The demonstration slogan attacks this mixture of morally disguised interest politics and excessive disposal of the past. But it is wrong if it thinks that it can absolve the history of Palestine of any hatred of Jews and any anti-Semitism. From Arab pogroms against Jews in 1929 to the anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish war of 1948 to the attitude of denial of Jewish existence in historic Palestine, as bloodily ratified by the massacre of October 7, 2023, there is a reactionary tendency on the Arab side, as is the left-wing demonstration slogans would have to be fair. But that’s another topic.