War in Gaza: Middle East: The German processing class

There is war in Gaza – and the world is watching Germany. And the Germans themselves? They are not able to lift their eyes from their own navel anyway. What is actually so interesting about debates here while people are dying in the Middle East?

While large parts of the global left (but only parts of it) agree on who to side with in this bloody dispute, solidarity with Israel and partial support for its Palestine policy, as expressed by some on the left, is dissolving represented in Germany, caused irritation and even dismay.

In March, the journalist Hans Kundnani brought up the term “hyper-Zionism” in an article entitled “Zionism Über Alles” in the left-wing US magazine “Dissent”, with which he describes the special path in the German Middle East discourse as a historical development since the 60s traces and describes. Today, the German culture of remembrance is no longer the basis for humanism and universalism, but rather, as a kind of false lesson from the Holocaust, it only defends Israel’s particular interests.

The literary scholar Adrian Daub recently described the same phenomenon in the US magazine “N+1”, but with the term “psycho-Zionism”. In it, what is supposedly pathological is expressed much better. Coming to terms with German history inevitably led to no one wanting to see Israel’s guilt and in Germany allegedly only complaining about the suffering caused by Palestinians. False apportionment of blame instead of actual processing. But is it really that banal?

In his article, Kundnani at least draws attention to the fact that politics with the Holocaust has not just been made in Germany since yesterday, and reminds us of Joschka Fischer’s “Never again Auschwitz”, this perverse call for participation in the war in Yugoslavia. What was actually politically unjustifiable and morally depraved was stylized with a moralistic charge as the only possible consequence of German guilt. As is well known, Fischer’s strategy set a precedent.

But what neither Hans Kundnani nor Adrian Daub wants to see – and here a huge blind spot is revealed – is the fact that the harshest accusers of the prevailing Israeli policy and the greatest advocates of a Palestinian liberation struggle in Germany also use the same argumentation patterns as those who are said to have a deluded hyper- or psycho-Zionist worldview.

How old is the myth that in Israel yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators? Isn’t there talk of genocide everywhere when people talk about the Gaza war? With regard to Israeli war crimes, isn’t it repeatedly warned that Germany must speak out clearly about its history here? The positions are interchangeable, the sound is the same: it is the tone of the person whose deep insight into the German past has evoked attitudes without alternatives. If that doesn’t seem suspicious, it’s hard to help.

A strange, historically charged vocabulary could already be heard during the Ukraine war. While one side constantly equated Putin with Hitler, the other side was certain that the entire Ukraine was populated by fascists. It didn’t take long before the Russian invasion was reinterpreted as a “war of annihilation.”

Anyone who finds questions annoying should simply play politics with German history. Who wants to become a collaborator of a 21st century Hitler or be suspected of being in common cause with fascists? Fascism – it is not without reason that it is once again a fighting term of our day. However, fascism analysis as a tool has apparently gone out of fashion. Buzzwords rule.

So what to do? Leave all this, all the baggage of history behind us? Adorno’s categorical imperative that Auschwitz not be repeated, like the “Oath of Buchenwald” should be shelved? Of course not.

However, the Shoah is not the appropriate justification for the Germans to trumpet to the world every position developed beyond political analysis. To stop thinking processes, to always appear to be above all doubt, no matter how complicated the conflict situation, and to compulsively call for “historical responsibility” as if that were the joker in the battle of opinions is deeply cynical. The memory world champion Germany, it seems, is the big loser when it comes to questions of the ability to discourse. The first thing that comes to mind is Auschwitz. Whether this goes against the rules of good taste is apparently no longer a category.

It has long been clear that, if the vociferous know-it-alls about the Middle East had their way, the world would be able to recover thanks to the German reprocessing system. But that has very little to do with left-wing politics.