This post is about the Günter Grass poem “What must be said”. If you haven’t read the poem yet, please do so before reading the rest of this post (German/English/Hebrew).

Lisa Goldman shared a NYT piece about how the poem has made more Germans speak up about Israel, sometimes even in ways that make Israeli lefties feel uncomfortable.¹

One commenter on Lisa’s post responded: “the creators of Holocaust should keep their mouth shut for the sake of decency”. This would, in and of itself, be a reasonable comment, except that at this point in history, the people actually behind the Holocaust are for the most part dead – a fate far more pleasant than they deserve, as it were – and this kind of comment aims simply to silence all German criticism of Israel. Oddly enough, you don’t hear it when Germans voice opinions supportive of Israeli policy.

I have heard at least one Jewish and one non-Jewish German say they prefer that everyone in Germany just keep their mouth shut on Israel and not have an opinion either way. I can actually understand this and respect it. But it’s one thing to say to a group you belong to “hey guys, let’s just stay out of this” and quite another to tell a group you very much don’t belong to “hey guys, why don’t you stay out of this”.

There’s also something ironic about Israelis, who are typically so keen to tell anyone who hasn’t been in the military not to dare criticize it, telling the state that started the last world war to shut up about starting world wars. Yeah, like they would know anything about how that goes. Of course, this would be a different story fifty years ago. If the people criticizing Israel’s plans to plunge the world into war were ex-Nazi leadership or German politicians who had been active in the time of Hitler’s rise to power – as opposed to pacifists who had been drafted into the Nazi army as teenagers – it would make sense to tell them to STFU, and maybe to give them a fair trial and some swift, cruel, and unusual punishment.² But the people being told to shut up are not in any way, shape, or form the “creators of the Holocaust”, unless you are the kind of racist/nationalist who doesn’t think individuals do things except as part of a collective, and that the collective bears full responsibility after the individuals involved are dead.

The people being told to shut up here are in a unique position to inform international discourse. The generations forming the majority of the German public were not involved in the Holocaust, but in the subsequent denazification and the long aftermath of collective self-examination. Aren’t we always wiser for having made mistakes? Shouldn’t this be even more so when it was one of the most awful mistakes collectively made anywhere, by anyone, ever? Sure, there are some unreflected Germans whose silence merely mirrors the incredibly heavy taboo on this topic and some of them hold despicably racist/nationalist opinions still. But Grass’s message is not anti-Semitic. It is pacifistic, very brave, and basically friendly criticism. Like many of us, he sees the potential for a terrible war on the horizon, and Israel stirring it up over a mere possibility of future threat.

Germans have reflected collectively on the unacceptability of war and nationalistic violence more than perhaps any other national group in the world. If they choose to remain silent because they don’t trust themselves, due to their culture’s past, that’s their prerogative. But who are we, who did not grow up in the guilt-and-atonement-ridden German context, to shut them up? Isn’t one of the lessons of the Holocaust – and European Totalitarianism in general – that individuals should be allowed to have their own opinions, and if they so choose, voice them, too? Have the unspeakable crimes of one generation of Germans revoked their offsprings’ status as human beings?

Footnotes

1. This is not to say that Israeli lefties are used to offensive comments about Israel – but that some of the comments Germans are making may be beyond what we accept as honest criticism.
2. Intellectually, I don’t believe in vengeance or violence or really even punishment, as such. But when it comes to violent racists, especially Nazis, I can’t think of anything more emotionally satisfying than knowing they suffer unspeakable physical pain, wrong as it may be.

I just got back from Leipzig’s #globalchange festival/demonstration. At one point, I noticed two guys holding up an Israeli flag, and went over to ask what that’s about. It was the only national flag present and I wasn’t sure what it was doing there. “We’re here to provoke,” said one of the guys. “This demonstration is structurally anti-Semitic.” The idea, of course, is that a demonstration with anti-elite, anti-banker sentiment is anti-Semitic, whether the demonstrators know it or not. I tried to argue against this odd rhetoric, but he quickly said he doesn’t want to discuss it.

These counter-demonstrators are, I gather, anti-Germans. This is a movement considered to be left-wing and anti-fascistic, with a commitment to unconditional solidarity with Israel. The paradox of the “provocation” I witnessed is that this was the only mention of the “banking=Jews” stereotype I could detect in today’s demonstration, or indeed in all of the Real Democracy Now activities that led up to it in the past half year. It seems to me like the anti-Germans were the only ones bringing anti-Semitism into the demonstration. It annoys me to no end that they weren’t open to discussion, and this post is my attempt to say what I would have told them if they were willing to listen.

I recently read a pamphlet titled “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere”, a fascinating guide to understanding and combatting anti-Semitism targeted at social change activists. It can be found online [PDF] and I highly recommend reading it, especially if you are involved in any kind of movement for social change. It makes the crucial point that anti-Semitism is:

“a divide-and-rule strategy that has served to maintain ruling classes, conceal who actually has power, and confuse us about the real systems of oppression that pit us against one another.”
(Chris Crass, Quoted on a now-defunct website hosting the pamphlet.)

Historically, rulers and ruling elites have used anti-Jewish sentiments to deflect the anger of the oppressed masses towards a relatively powerless group (Jews). In a way, it comes down to rulers explicitly or implicitly fostering the belief that the Jews, not the rulers themselves, are the problem.

What those anti-Germans were trying to do today was the same in reverse – delegitimizing an expression of legitimate grievance against the ruling class by claiming it’s an illegitimate expression of intolerance against Jews. This makes me pretty angry, I have to say. If I had detected any anti-Semitic sentiment or rhetoric from the demonstrators, I would go berserk. But I felt very comfortable at the demonstration, felt it was a matter of global solidarity, explicitly inclusive to me (with my irrelevant Jewish background) and to anyone else. The first thing that made me uncomfortable there was the anti-Germans with that big Israeli flag. How dare they insinuate that the German banking system is controlled by Jews? Where the heck did they get that idea?

You know what, I don’t actually know the names and backgrounds of any major German bankers. And I don’t need to. We were demonstrating against the absurd situation in which Europe and the world are in crisis yet the number of millionaires in Germany has only increased. We were demonstrating because we’re told things are going to get hard and we have to live in fear of economic collapse while those who were involved in creating this mess have nothing to fear and they continue to control much more wealth than the rest of us. Even if it so happened that 99% of German bank owners are Jewish, this wouldn’t have been an anti-Semitic demonstration.

Speaking out against someone who happens to be a Jew is not anti-Semitism. Speaking out against “the Jews” or attacking someone because they’re a Jew is anti-Semitism. Is those anti-Germans’ approach supposed to somehow protect Germany from a resurgence of anti-Semitism? Seems to me like at the very least, it muddies the waters and creates confusion about what is or isn’t anti-Semitic, making it easier for real intolerance to fly in under the radar. Even worse, it can actually re-enforce anti-Semitism by suggesting that speaking out against the powers that be is speaking out against Jews – supporting the false equation that “(the) Jews” are responsible for the power structures we live within.

There. I think I got it out of my system now. Has anyone else encountered similar situations, where people meaning to fight intolerance end up implicitly encouraging it?

Many people have pointed out how society is addicted to the concept of security — in the US, in Israel, in the UK,  really everywhere in the developed world. This can lead to some paradoxical situations. For example, as Roi Maor points out, the wave of xenophobia in Israel is far more dangerous to the African refugees than they are to the Israeli public. The primal fear of the Other plays a central role here, as does the government’s utter failure to address the needs of the poor neighborhoods and of the foreigners that gravitate towards them.¹

I think another factor is the Israeli addiction to insecurity — the inseparable flipside of our addiction to security, as well as a bit of residue from Diaspora. You could call it chronic societal paranoia.

The state of Israel was formed in struggle, on the backdrop of the greatest atrocity in humanity’s most atrocious half-century to date. The state’s formative first three decades were marked by constant external threats of the very real kind. It’s no surprise our national mentality is so security-oriented. Yet the world seems, for the most part, to have moved on. The Arab states have mostly accepted we’re there to stay, Antisemitism in the West has become a marginal phenomena, and even the Palestinians haven’t posed a serious threat in years, especially on the West Bank.² As for Iran, it seems unlikely they can realize Ahmedinejad’s Antisemitic banter — it would be national suicide, and I’m led to believe it’s not Ahmedinejad himself who would have to make the decision.

Yet these very threats continue to serve as justification for everything Israel does, from settlements through senseless IDF provocations, torture, and dismantlement of civil and human rights in Greater Israel as well as, more recently, the state of Israel proper. One hears a lot about these threats in Israel, and so they seem real. But here in Europe, where the press is freer, they fade out of view, not due to lack of interest (Germans, at least, are certainly interested), but probably due to the total lack of substance. The self-censoring mainstream media in Israel presents a very slanted view, always being desperate for the continued cooperation of the security establishment, and ever-eager to feed on the public’s siege mentality.

The states of the developed world, as I understand it, have for decades been accommodating Israel’s governments. The popular Israeli conception (as I know it) is entirely blind to this: the West is seen as a bunch of malignant Antisemites and the world at large as a place that is dangerous for Israelis. Our tiny country’s constant dependence on the world’s support (especially material support from the United States) is rarely acknowledged. Yet lately, the Hasbara mechanisms have shown awareness of this situation. Unfortunately, their response to the threat of isolation is to control who is let into Israel/Palestine and to run astroturf propoganda in the West. These policies, very much like the construction of settlements and the IDF’s systematic disruption of Palestinian society, manufacture more insecurity than they resolve.

A culture obsessed with security naturally espouses a politic of manufactured insecurity. This is hardly an Israeli thing. The US invasion of Iraq, the UK putting up useless cameras everywhere, states everywhere (lamentably including Germany) implementing insecure RFID chips in identification documents, Germany’s previous government’s utterly unimplementable plans for combating online child pornography (which would have been entirely ineffective even if they could be implemented)… The list goes on, and these are all symptoms of chronic societal paranoia. But the USA and the wealthy EU can afford imaginary threats. ³ Israel can’t. Israel has real, major problems to deal with: crumbling public services, underfunded education, huge economic gaps, loads of poverty, rampant corruption, and of course Hamas in Gaza and Hizbollah in Lebanon (who, no offense, are nothing compared to Israel’s internal problems — but much better at scaring people.)

A country in Israel’s situation has to pick its fights carefully to survive. Unfortunately, the opposite is true of political parties and ideas, whose survival depends on picking as many fights as possible, as quickly as possible, to give the impression that you know what’s going on. If you’re a politician, a political party, or a political idea, there are huge short-term gains to be had from paranoia. If party A promises to deal with problem X and party B doesn’t, the effect is pretty big, even if X is imaginary or harmless. In a society trying to lead a normal life while managing a variety of problems and threats, it’s easy and practical to believe authoritative-sounding claims without research and without question if they fit your world-view. This is even more so when the claims prey upon people’s fear of the Other, which in Israel is compounded by hundreds of years of Jews actually being persecuted and murdered by Others.

And so Israel bites off more than it can chew, taking on minor and even imaginary threats, overreacting and creating new problems while serious societal and infrastructural problems go untreated. Even if none of the real or manufactured threats get it, Israel may not survive such remarkably unsustainable politics for long.

Notes

1. It’s okay. They’re building a concentration camp for the foreigners now. That’ll solve the problem, right? (I guess the Israeli government is capable of not thinking of the Holocaust for a minute after all!)
2. None of this is to say the world has grown benign: The Arab states, I take it, are happy to have Israel oppressing the Palestinians because it saves them the work of doing this themselves. And while foreigner-bashing is on the rise in Europe, the European far-right has recognized Israel as a paragon of what they want to achieve (ethnic segregation) and their leaders have become “friends of Israel”. Most of the world is still pretty awful, the true awfulness just isn’t aimed at us anymore.
3. Well, they could at least up until the economic collapse. Now it’s more iffy.