Middle East war – hate clashes with hate

The murderous war that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas and other groups attacked southern Israel from the Gaza Strip has been going on for over a year. The horror of that day “is, on the one hand, unique – and at the same time represents the horror that Israel/Palestine has been experiencing for decades,” writes Michael Lüders in his new book “War Without End.” When you open it, you first look at a map. Top left Greece, bottom right Oman, top right Turkmenistan, bottom left Chad. And between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt lies Israel. How small this country on the Mediterranean actually is – at around 21,000 square kilometers, about the size of Hesse. However, the heartland has gradually expanded, adding occupied or annexed areas such as the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Strictly speaking, the entire state was created on foreign territory, on the territory of historic Palestine, where the UN partition plan of 1947 envisaged an Israeli and a Palestinian state.

Michael Lüders, renowned political and Islamic scholar, long-time Middle East correspondent for “ZEIT” and president of the German-Arab Society in succession to the late Peter Scholl-Latour, illuminates the background and causes of the confrontation between Jews and Arabs in both detail and tension. He meticulously traces the lines of conflict that repeatedly led to escalations and also takes a critical look at German politics. Supporting Israel is “reason of state”? This disciplinary term alone does not fit a society that calls itself free and democratic.

Growing up in the GDR, Israel’s right to exist was never in question for me. A capitalist state and US ally, what the heck. On Saturdays at eight my mother turned on the Berlin radio. We listened reverently to the Sabbath celebration with senior cantor Estrongo Nachama. My son brought back the strongest impressions from a school trip to Jerusalem in the 1990s. If he had known that you could do community service there (like Michael Lüders) with the “Aktion Sühnezeichen”, he would have done it. And we would have been afraid of the terrorist attacks that people there had already become accustomed to…

Conflating criticism of Israeli politics with anti-Semitism – Michael Lüders deals with this in detail – seems so outrageous to me that I can at best explain it as a guilty conscience that the roots of the Nazi dictatorship in the Federal Republic of Germany have not been thoroughly dealt with have. The fact that Hans Globke, co-author and commentator of the Nuremberg racial laws, was head of the Federal Chancellery under Adenauer from 1953 to 1963 and controlled the BND and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is just one example of how former Nazis achieved rank and dignity. Unlike in the GDR, many people in the West only learned about the extent of the mass murder of Jews through the US television series “Holocaust,” which was broadcast in 1979.

Hate collides with hate. And Germany is adding fuel to the fire.

Even as a small child, the horrors of the Nazi era didn’t let me sleep. However, I only found out about the Nakba, the violent expulsion of Palestinians between 1947 and 1949, later. Back then, writes Michael Lüders, 750,000 people lost their homes. After the Six-Day War in 1967, 350,000 were added. The brutal way it happened – it makes your blood run cold when you read it. Violence and counter-violence – especially since the “Zionist, later Israeli leadership saw and sees no reason to meet its nearest neighbor on an equal footing.” How peace initiatives fizzled out, how positions hardened while the pan-Arab dimension of the Palestine question became obvious – the book meticulously follows the developments on both sides and places them in geopolitical contexts.

Things got messy early on. »The official Israeli and Israeli-affiliated view in Western countries likes to point out that the Jews had recognized the partition plan, i.e. had shown a willingness to compromise, while Palestinians and Arabs, on the other hand, insisted on maximum demands… but: Why would Palestinians and Arabs have to take possession in the beginning era of anti-colonialism of their country through a settler-colonial movement? … And why should they pay the price for the Holocaust, with which they had nothing to do?” On the Israeli side, the motto was “create facts regardless of losses.” Hair-raising details about bomb and drone attacks, arrests and torture as well as destruction through starvation are collected in the book. The complete destruction of all infrastructure is the order of the day.

Hate collides with hate. And Germany is adding fuel to the fire. Right at the beginning of the book, Michael Lüders points out that “German arms exports to Israel will have increased tenfold in 2023. “Artillery and tank ammunition in particular were used reliably in the Gaza Strip. In addition, Berlin supplied firearms of various calibers and 500,000 rounds of ammunition for machine guns in the first six months of the war alone. How far should the number of civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon continue to grow before official federal policy calls into question the uncritical solidarity with an ultra-right Israeli government? And now the conflict has reached Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah. The violence can set the entire region on fire at any time, with fatal consequences for us in Europe too.

In September, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly called for an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Germany abstained from voting. As early as December 2023, South Africa sued Israel at the International Court of Justice, and in March 2024 Nicaragua sued Germany for aiding and abetting. An emerging global South is pushing back against Western arrogance. “Images of the use of German weapons in Gaza or the police breaking up pro-Palestinian protests have gone around the world and have caused Germany a loss of image that is in no way inferior to that of the USA in the wake of the Iraq War in 2003.”

Michael Lüders: War without end? Why we need to change our attitude towards Israel for peace in the Middle East. Goldmann Verlag, 400 pages, hardcover, €22.
nd Literature Salon with Michael Lüders on November 6th, 6 p.m.