I’m back in Israel now, and plan to be here for a while. I left Germany just as winter was starting in earnest, and arrived just as what is called “winter” here is starting – which has a lot in common with late summer or fall in Germany, and nothing at all with German winter.

I’m thrilled to be back, and wondering how long the euphoria can last. I will finally resume posting in the coming days, and hope to be able to share with you some interesting thoughts and experiences.

If there’s something in particular you’d like to hear my take on, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Das deutsche Gerichtsurteil gegen Beschneidung hat mich schockiert und ich finde es falsch, obwohl ich finde, dass Beschneidung tatsächlich eine Art der Körperverletzung ist.¹ Das Urteil ist ein Fall von religiöser Unterdrückung, was jedoch vielen Menschen in Mitteleuropa offensichtlich nicht klar ist – sogar die Österreicher und Schweizer haben sich dieser Entscheidung angeschlossen.

Um es vorweg zu nehmen: Obwohl ich dieses Thema schwierig finde, bin ich grundsätzlich der Meinung, dass alle kulturellen Praktiken, die die Verletzung von Babys beinhalten, fragwürdig bis absolut widerlich sind. Schon in meiner Kindheit, als skeptischer Junge in einer jüdischen Umgebung, habe ich insbesondere die Beschneidung etwas widerlich gefunden. Ich wünsche mir, dass Beschneidung und alles ähnliche von der Welt verschwinden würde. Ich bin auch dankbar dafür, dass das Thema aufgrund des Urteils jetzt diskutiert wird, auch in Israel.²

Allerdings zeigt für mich das Urteil und dessen Unterstützung ein grundsätzliches Fehlverständnis der Bedeutung von Beschneidung im Judentum.³

Beschneidung, so krass sie als Praxis sein mag, gilt im Judentum schon seit Jahrtausenden als wichtiges, für Jungen sogar als das wichtigste Zugehörigkeitskriterium. Natürlich bedeutet diese Tatsache allein nicht, dass die Praxis gut oder schlecht ist. Eine Beschneidung ist tatsächlich eine ziemlich bescheuerte Art und Weise, sich von anderen Gruppen zu unterscheiden. Ich finde aber, dass man es bei Religionen wirklich nicht anders erwarten kann. Was erst einmal wichtig ist, ist die Bedeutung dieser Praxis, für die von dem Urteil betroffenen Menschen.

Egal wie wir es bewerten, man muss einfach wissen, dass die Entscheidung, einen neugeborenen Jungen nicht zu beschneiden gleichzeitig bedeutet ihn aus der Gemeinschaft, aus der man selbst kommt, zu entfernen. Ein Junge aus einer jüdischen Familie, der nicht beschnitten ist, wird vermutlich nicht nach jüdischem Recht eine jüdische Frau heiraten dürfen, sollte er sich das wünschen.⁴

Das ist alles ziemlich scheiße, weil für uns, die wir einen jüdischen Hintergrund haben, dann die Wahl, es dem Kind ganz selbst zu überlassen, nicht vorhanden ist: wir legen für ihn fest, ob er ein potenzieller Jude ist oder nicht.

Ich wünsche mir, das wäre alles nicht so, aber es ist so. Fakt ist, dass, wenn es mir auch nur ein bisschen wichtig wäre, mein Leben nach jüdischer Tradition zu führen, nach diesem Urteil Deutschland als Wohnort einfach nicht mehr in Frage käme. Selbst ich, so absolut sekulär wie ich bin, mache mir jetzt angesichts des wiederbelebten Gestanks der Intoleranz erneut Gedanken zum Thema. Und das, noch bevor wir über Geschichte geredet haben.

Denn im Judentum selbst ist das ein schwieriges, historisch beladenes Thema. Schon seit über zweitausend Jahren kommt immer mal wieder ein Herrscher, der den Juden die Beschneidung verbieten will. Weil die sturen Juden immer wieder auf ihre Religion beharren, wurden sie früher auch immer wieder ermordert. Damit will ich nicht andeuten, dass Deutschland auf diesem Hintergrund wieder Juden schlachten will – das glaube ich nicht – der Punkt ist, dass dieses Gerichtsurteil im, der Geschichte sehr bewussten, jüdischen Bewusstsein, alte Wunden aufreißt.

Dazu muss man sagen, dass unter vielen Juden, Versuche, Juden von ihrer Religion abzubringen oder insbesondere sie dazu zu bringen, ihre Kinder nicht entsprechend der Religion zu erziehen, mit Genozidversuchen gleichgesetzt werden. Ich finde diese Gleichsetzung stark übertrieben, kann sie aber nicht ändern, und ich kann sie gewissermaßen auch verstehen. Denn dieses Urteil ist nicht das erste mal, wo Juden gesagt wird, die dürfen gerne wo leben, so lange sie ihre religiöse Identität abgeben.

Der Wunsch, Beschneidung nicht mehr in der Welt, oder zumindest im eigenen Land, zu haben, ist ein berechtigter. Dieses Urteil wird aber meiner Meinung nach bei den meisten Juden zwei Arten Reaktionen auslösen: entweder woanders zu leben, oder hier zu bleiben und aus Trotz weiterhin Beschneidung zu betreiben. Die jüdische Kultur hätte nicht so lange überlebt, hätte sie nicht den Reflex entwickelt, das Überleben als solches allen Vorschriften der Herrscher als überlegen zu betrachten. Selbst einige Juden, die sich zuvor vorstellen konnten, die Beschneidung sein zu lassen, werden nun darauf bestehen. Wer das nicht versteht, kennt offensichtlich weder Juden noch das Judentum.

Die inhaltliche Bedeutung einer Aussage ist oft eine andere, als die Bedeutung der Aussage selbst, in ihrem Zusammenhang. Das Urteil, Beschneidung mit Körperverletzung gleichzusetzen, ist inhaltlich richtig, durfte aber trotzdem nicht gemacht werden, denn es bedeutet schlicht und einfach, dass Juden und Moslems nicht mehr in Deutschland willkommen sind – solange sie drauf bestehen, weiterhin Juden bzw. Moslems zu sein.

Dieser Post wurde von Sabine Günther korrigiert, wofür ich mich herzlich bedanke.

Kommentare, in Englisch oder in Deutsch, sind unten herzlich willkommen, insbesondere anderer Meinung. Kommentare, die ich subjektiv als rassistisch empfinde, werden nicht veröffentlicht – ich bitte die Verfasser dieser Kommentare, ihren Rassismus woanders zu äußern und mir (per Mail) einen Link zu geben.

[Englische Übersetzung beginnt / English translation begins]

Ignorance and bris

The German court ruling against ritual circumcision – outlawing it as a form of unnecessary bodily harm – shocked me. I think it’s the wrong decision, although I actually do think ritual circumcision is a form of unnecessary bodily harm.⁵ The ruling is a case of religious oppression, but this is apparently not clear to many people in Central Europe.

Before I even start, I should make something clear: although this is a very difficult issue for me, I do basically believe that any cultural practice which includes harming babies is at best questionable, usually repugnant. In my childhood, as a skeptical boy in a Jewish environment, I was already disturbed by circumcision. I wish circumcision and everything like it would cease to exist in this world, and I’m thankful for the court ruling insofar as it’s instigated discussion about this, even in Israel.⁶

Nonetheless, the ruling reveals a fundamental lack of understand of the meaning of circumcision in Judaism.⁷

Jewish circumcision – crass a practice as it may be – has, for millennia, been an important criterion for belonging; for boys, perhaps the most important. This alone says nothing to how good or bad it is, of course. It’s actually a pretty insane way to differentiate yourself from other groups, but I don’t think one can really expect much better from religion. The important thing is only the meaning of the practice for those affected by the ban.

No matter how you choose to judge it, it’s crucial to understand that the decision not to circumcise a newborn boy means, at the same time, to decide to remove him from the community you come from. An uncircumcised boy from a Jewish family, I think, will later not be able to marry a Jewish woman by Jewish religious law, even if he wishes to do so.⁸

It’s a pretty shitty situation. Those of us from a Jewish background don’t actually have the choice to let our boys decide on their own. We face the decision of either deciding that our boy can potentially be every bit as Jewish as he wants, or that he can’t.

I wish it weren’t so, but so it is. Fact is that if it were even just a little important to me to live by Jewish tradition, Germany (and Austria, and Switzerland) would no longer be places I could see myself living in. In fact, even as thoroughly secular as I am, the reanimated stench of intolerance makes me have second thoughts already. And all of this before we even touched on the history.

You see, in Judaism in particular this is a difficult, historically loaded topic. For over 2,000 years already, Jews have been confronted, again and again, with some ruler who wishes to stop their circumcisions. Because the stubborn Jews repeatedly insisted on sticking to their religion, they used to be repeatedly murdered. I don’t mean to insinuate, that Germany will return to the wholesale slaughter of Jews on this backdrop – I don’t believe that’s the case whatsoever. The point is simply that this court ruling reopens old wounds, wounds which all Jews remember well.

I also have to add that for many Jews, such attempt – attempts to get Jews to abandon their religion, and especially to get them to stop raising their children as Jews – are seen as a form of genocide. I find the comparison highly exaggerated, but I can’t change the way people feel, and I can even understand it a little; after all, this ruling is not the first time that Jews have been told they can live somewhere so long as they relinquish their religious identity.

The wish to see circumcision gone from the world, or at least one’s own land, is a fair wish to have. However, I believe this ruling will trigger one of only two reactions amongst Jews: either we’ll live somewhere else, or we’ll stay here and circumcise our sons out of spite. The Jewish culture would not have lasted this long if it did not have the reflex of seeing the survival of the culture as overriding any ruler’s decrees. I imagine that even some Jews who might previously have considered avoiding circumcision for their sons might now insist on it. If you can’t understand this, you clearly know neither Jews nor Judaism.

What you say is often something different from what it means that you said it. The ruling is correct in stating that ritual circumcision is unnecessary bodily harm. But a German court should never have said such a thing – the fact of the statement, in its context, means very simply that Jews and Muslims are no longer welcome in Germany – so long as they insist on continuing to be Jews or Muslims.

Thanks, Colin, for the suggestion that led to this post’s English title!

Comments in English and in German are most welcome, especially those disagreeing with me. However, any comment I subjectively consider racist will not be published. I ask those whose comments I do not publish to publish their comments elsewhere and email me a link.

Footnotes

1. Man kann sich aber natürlich auch fragen, ob man also nicht auch das Rauchen in der Schwangerschaft strafbar machen will, und sogar das Essen von industriell aufgezogenem Fleisch.
2. Ein Beitrag auf Englisch zum Beispiel hier von Larry Derfner.
3. Wie es im Islam ist, kann ich nicht genau sagen – es folgt hoffentlich bald ein Beitrag von einem muslimischen Freund dazu.
4. Ich kenne mich mit diesen Einzelheiten nicht aus, da ich mich nie mit der Religion identifiziert habe, aber soweit ich weiß, müsste der Junge sich dann konvertieren und auch beschneiden lassen, und würde danach noch immer für viele Juden nicht als wirklich-echt-ganz-100%-jüdisch gelten.
5. But while we’re at it, why aren’t we banning smoking during pregnancy, or even the consumption of industrially-grown meat?
6. For example, see what Larry Derfner wrote.
7. I can’t really speak for Islam, but I will hopefully soon have the pleasure of hosting a guest post by a Muslim friend on this topic.
8. I should point out that I’m not very knowledgeable about the details, mainly because I’ve never identified with the religion. But if I’m not mistaken, the boy would have to go through the process of conversion, including adult circumcision, in order to marry that way – and then many Jews would still consider him not really-truly-totally-100% Jewish.

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of serving as interpreter to John Moravec, in his talk about the Invisible Learning project, in Halle (a town near Leipzig.) I had never done this before, but once I got into it it went pretty well.

You can judge for yourself – you can watch the talk (mainly English with my attempt at German translation) online:

The Invisible Learning website – where you can read and watch more about the project – says:

“The proposed invisible learning concept is the result of several years of research and work to integrate diverse perspectives on a new paradigm of learning and human capital development that is especially relevant in the context of the 21st century. This view takes into account the impact of technological advances and changes in formal, non-formal, and informal education, in addition to the ‘fuzzy’ metaspaces in between. Within this approach, we explore a panorama of options for future development of education that is relevant today. Invisible Learning does not propose a theory, but rather establishes a metatheory capable of integrating different ideas and perspectives. This has been described as a protoparadigm, which is still in the ‘beta’ stage of construction.”

2

For the Hebrew speakers amongst you, there’s also a new promotional movie about Sudbury Jerusalem:

The movie was released in honor of the school’s tenth anniversary. I was in Israel briefly, to take part in the celebrations, and just got back this past weekend. This is the main reason for the long silence on this blog – normal (almost-daily) posting is now officially the order of the day.

I hope to be able to post a subtitled version of the video soon. I also expect to post videos of my talk at the decennial events, as well as the other excellent talks given there (also given in Hebrew.)

Family puts kids in charge for a month

A German author and his wife put themselves to the biggest test of their lives last year by handing over the family power to their two children for a month. The biggest challenge? Managing the budget.

[…]

“For one month we parents unquestioningly took orders from our children. We gave them absolute control of the family budget.”

The result was a long humiliation – asking for pocket money, begging to stay up longer in the evenings, and accepting a “No” without question.

“Even if they grow up with loving, generous parents, children have to do whatever they’re told, day in, day out,” wrote Metzger, explaining the experiment.

“Of course, we’re the big ones, they’re the little ones. It’s our job to protect and feed them, and to show them how things work. But very often we do all that with words and with an attitude that contradicts all the rules of respectful co-habiting.”

Metzger claims the psychological experiment did not come out of any radical pedagogical beliefs – “Me and Helga are not hippies” – but out of a spontaneous decision to allow his son Jonny to train him in table-tennis.

“Afterwards, he gave me a big hug and told me, ‘Dad, no adult has ever talked to me as politely as you did then. That felt really good.’ ”

[…]

(Read the full piece on The Local)

I’m glad to see adults outside alternative education taking note of how condescending and authoritarian adults’ treatment of children is. It does, however, chalk up the children’s inferior planning skills to their age, which isn’t really fair (besides being ageism.)

I bet these kids would be much better at planning if they were allowed to plan more. Since their parents “aren’t hippies” – which apparently means they go to traditional schools – they’ve spent the better part of the day every day for years in an environment in which a clock tells them what to do when. How on earth are they supposed to learn how to plan anything?

Not to mention budget management. In a Sudbury school, the Metzger children would have had the right to participate in school budget decisions – which are boring, so they probably wouldn’t, but if they did they’d know more about budgets – and they would be able to consult with friends amongst the students and staff who have more experience with money.

I guess the thing that disturbs me most about this is that even when a couple is willing to give their children serious responsibility, they do it in this temporary, schizophrenic way. Children actually can deal with real responsibility and control over their life, but that doesn’t mean the children should swap roles with the parents. There’s quite a lot of room for treating each other equally and respectfully within a parent-children relationship, without either side going all authoritarian on the other.

I got some odd looks today for using the local dialect’s way of phrasing the time.  But I don’t care for Standard German and don’t think I should be expected to use it.

I have to go back a few years first.  I started learning German in 2004.  Most of it I learned at the Goethe Institute in Jerusalem and on my visits to Germany.  I learned very quickly, and by the time I moved here in 2007, I spoke fluently, but with a bunch of mistakes.

Since then my accent has improved – Germans don’t immediately notice I’m a foreigner – and I’ve learned to make less obvious mistakes and to speak more naturally.  People often tell me how great my German is, but it’s my understanding that people are wrong in making language learning out to be some high intellectual achievement to be praised and awed at.

I’m pretty sure the reason I learned German so quickly is first, I grew up a bilingual (English+Hebrew,) giving me an unfair head-start on language-learning, and second, I managed to experience a lot of total immersion in a very short time by visiting Germany for weeks at a time and by hearing German-language music (yes, it was mainly Rammstein.  Excellent for learners, very clear singing!)

Anyway, I’ve tried to learn a few language since, and I’ve never been quite as successful as I was with German, although I’ve picked up useful learning habits.  (Pro-tip: just speak, even if you hardly know any words and grammar.  Speaking badly is the only way you will ever learn to speak well!)

High German, Upper Saxon

The situation with the standard language, in Germany as in most places in Europe, is this: there’s a more-or-less official standard language, and people are expected to use it in formal situations.  Every region – down to the town level – has its own variant of German, some dialects being close to Standard German (called Hochdeutsch, “high German”) and some very different from it.  There are also some new urban dialects created by contact with immigrant languages.

Schools teach Hochdeutsch as the One True German and penalize children for speaking German the way people actually speak it at home.  Adults are often judged, consciously or unconsciously, on their ability or inability to speak Standard German, with certain dialects having an especially bad reputation.

The basic reason people tend to use a standard language or language variety and consider it important is that it gives them access to a broader range of people to communicate with, because it’s not specific to one place.  This can be very important if you’re in politics, business, or academe – incidentally the areas where the standard language is most important.

The way I learned German is mainly by speaking and hearing it and trying to imitate what I heard.  I quickly forgot most of what I learned in German class and started operating on intuition.  After moving to Leipzig, I grew to really like the local dialect (a variety of Upper Saxon – the best variety, that is) and started consciously learning to speak it.

At some point, pretty early in my living here, I was already able to have complex discussions in Hochdeutsch, so long as they were about education, but for lack of practice, I was no good at casual conversation.  So I started applying myself to learning how people who live here talk in normal social situations, and this made my German even more Säcksch (that’s pronounced [zecksh] or [zeggsh], and it’s how we call Upper Saxon, which in Hochdeutsch they call Sächsisch, pronounced [zeck●sish]). ¹

Dry Furdl!

Now, Säcksch is, if not the least-liked German dialect, then one of them, and it has a very recognizable accent which anyone who lives here for a while learns to love.  What’s more, it’s strongly associated with the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a.k.a “Communist East Germany”.

One noticable thing about Säcksch – together with many other variants of German – is the way we phrase the time.  8:15pm is fördl neun, pronounced approximately [fur●dl noyn], meaning ‘a quarter of nine’.  8:45 would be dreifördl neun, [dry●fur●dl noyn], ‘three-quarters nine’.

This is extremely confusing if you’re used to saying viertel nach acht and viertel vor neun, i.e.  ‘a quarter after eight’ and ‘a quarter before nine’, respectively, as in Hochdeutsch.  But it’s the way I’ve come to speak, without having to think about it, and I speak this way because it’s the most effective way for me to communicate with the people around me.  It signals my familiarity with the language and my control of its subtleties in a way that’s literally impossible in pure Standard German, simply because every native speaker has a bit of their own dialect.

But most of all, it’s the way I speak, and I’m not about to learn some sterile, artificial version of German on top of the one I already speak just to accommodate people who aren’t familiar with Säcksch.  Due to the dominance of Hochdeutsch, it’s not even really Säcksch anymore, just Hochdeutsch with bit of an accent and some occasional regional word.  Students who move to Leipzig for the low cost of living and nearly-free education should learn to speak the language here, and as for foreigners like me, learning to speak the way locals do is the most natural and reasonable thing we could do – even if native speakers think it’s funny.

Footnotes

1. The pronunciation keys in the [skwer bra●kits] are supposed to be read as though they were American English.  This gives roughly the right pronunciation.  The ● thing means “syllable boundary”, and the stressed syllable is bolded.  If that last sentence is “all Greek to you”, don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter.

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?

Whew. Over a month without a post. And what a month it has been!

Summer is finally here. Summer in Germany is something altogether different from summer in Israel, as I learn anew every year. Winter in Germany is something altogether different from Israel’s so-called “winters”, too. And it all comes down to sunlight, for me.

In Israel, the sun is omnipresent and a real health hazard. It is just too fracking hot most of the year. Here, on the other hand, I desperately miss the sun all winter, and as soon as it’s out I feel like I have to jump on the opportunity and expose my skin to its incredible warmth, the warmth that reminds me that it’s not so bad, the light that reminds me that the world isn’t all that grey after all.

Now, summer here isn’t as reliable as it is in Israel. In Israel, summer is summer. Sunlight, nonstop, every day, all day. Here we get summer rains (an oxymoron to me) and even full cloud cover – in June!! Very strange. But this makes me appreciate the sunlight even more. After waiting for it all winter, summer can be coy, making me wait again. I get suspicious. Has global climate change hit us so hard already? Did the BP oil spill knock out the jet stream like I read it might? I watch the skies. Like a Stark, I know winter will come again, sooner or later. I dread it. Then the sun comes out again and everything looks different.

I have an Egyptian friend and (language-learning) tandem partner – he wants to know Hebrew and I want to know Arabic. He always says he doesn’t want to talk about the conflict, but we end up on that topic every time we meet. Last time we had lunch, the sun was shining bright, and I noted that when the sun shines, I think the Middle East is headed towards peace and prosperity like never before; when the sky is grey, I’m sure Israel is on the brink of fascism or civil war and dread what might become of all the people I love.

Well, we had grey skies and rain for the past few days, and I’m still getting over the accompanying sense of impending doom, but today the sun is shining. The StuTS is behind me, but busy times are still ahead. This weekend two very good friends of mine are getting married (congrats, F&B!); I’m trying to finish an old term paper, practice for Spanish class, and get preliminary reading done for my degree thesis; and, of course, I have to prepare the EUDEC Assembly for this summer.

Time flies when you’re too busy to check what time it is. I might try to write more this month, but maybe not such heavy long posts, and likely little or nothing about Israel/Palestine. The situation there is getting more complicated by the hour and I haven’t been following closely enough to make informed comments lately. Fortunately, there are plenty of other, less despair-inducing topics out there…

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.