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 recently finished reading an amazing book about Israel and Jewish history, written over 20 years before I was born. The Source, by James A. Michener, is a thick tome spinning an intricate web of fictional stories spread out through the realistic history of a fictional tel¹ called Makor (Hebrew for ‘source’) near Acre, in what is now Israel. In retrospect, I probably should have kept a reading diary, because there are so many things in this book I would like to comment on.

The book begins with a frame story, which it returns to briefly again and again between short stories, each spanning a few years; the first takes place some 11 thousand years ago, then they progress through the history of Makor and the scions of one family, skipping millennia, centuries, or decades at a time, to create a coherent chain of stories ending in a young, pre-1967 Israel. The main topics are the evolution of religion and civilization, the persecution of Hebrews, and the development of modern rabbinical Judaism and later, Zionism.

I don’t know where exactly Michener got his information, but it’s evident throughout the book that he really did his research. This is history done better than real history ever could be; the narrator knows things that can’t be known, carefully drawing connections between stories that at first seem connected only because they take place in or near Makor. The early stories – where I assume Michener had to rely on intuition, creative license, and the anthropological literature of his era – are fascinating, although even without knowing much about anthropology I got the impression that his theory must be outdated; for one, the relationship he describes between male and female in the stone age is basically the same as that which was the norm throughout history before feminism. In contrast, I’ve heard many different educated assertions that the agricultural revolution radically changed this relationship in some way or another.

The storytelling itself is magnificent, and in 1,000 pages, Michener managed to better get across to me the history of the Jewish people than my rather Jewish education could in 8 years. (Of course, I also approached this book with a more positive, open attitude than I ever approached my pre-Sudbury schooling with.) All in all, I feel much enriched for having read this novel, and there are certain ideas and attitudes I grew up exposed to that I don’t think I ever properly understood before. Take the concept of “in every generation, they rise up to destroy us” (a line sung on Passover); with the Israeli fixation on the Holocaust, the strange and cruel sequence of oppression and persecution that followed Hebrews since antiquity seems to more or less have escaped me. Now, far be it from me to follow this to the conclusion that Jews are now justified in destroying or harming others, nor do I think every person should try to imagine the suffering of his ancestors’ people (i.e. “every generation should see itself as having escaped Egypt/Auschwitz”, etc.), but I’m glad I can better appreciate the very long and complex history behind these attitudes.

Now, reading about disgusting, brutal, and surprisingly varied forms of oppression throughout history was difficult, but I was surprised at the view of the 1948 war (a.k.a Nakba, or Israel’s War of Independence) presented in the book. It was so one-sidedly pro-Zionist that it made me wonder whether Michener was just trying to make sure his novel sold well, or if he was actually ill-informed. He didn’t spare any brutality elsewhere in the book. But after struggling a little with the 1948 chapter and the 1964 ending, I simply made my peace with the fact that this was a novel, i.e. a story, and a story means a narrative. The Zionist narrative is only partly true, just like the Palestinian narrative is only partly true, and I’m wiser for having had the Zionist narrative sold to me so convincingly, so beautifully.

But like other books about Israel², this one ended on a very hopeful note, in particular regarding co-existence between Jews and Arabs and Israel’s intention of being a model of human right. Obviously, 1967 and its consequences were unimaginable at the time of writing (1964), no less than Israel’s victory in 1948 was even as it was going on. But reading about a hopeful future imagined before I was born and falling so very far off the mark is always painful. And all we can do is update the hopeful imagination and work to make it come true this time.

Footnotes

1. A tel is a hill composed of layers over layers of civilization; these things are everywhere in Israel.
2. At least non-fiction Arab and Jew, by David Shipler (1986), which I highly recommend, and not only because both of my parents are quoted in it from when they were dating!

I must have gotten this link over Facebook or Twitter, but I can’t recall to whom credit is due. At any rate, I found it interesting, especially because it looks at an aspect of the conflict that is not often discussed but might be one of the most critical in the long run: the experience of Palestinian children.

I grew up aware of the conflict in a very different way from my contemporaries on the Palestinian side. The Mondoweiss post discusses, with many excerpts, a new report criticizing aid organizations’ failure to prevent injustice towards children and to protest Israel’s violations of international law regarding children and their well-being.

Israel routinely treats children as enemies. I think Israel should actually make it part of its security policy to make sure Palestinian children are treated well and protected, because they will grow up to be Palestinians adults who we have a strong interest in not being intensely despised by. I happen to believe that Israel has done genuine grievance to the Palestinians and much of their hate (which is often of the non-compromising raging racist variety) is due to legitimate gripes with what our government (and some of its citizens) have done in the past 63 years. But it seems many in Israel think the Palestinians just hate us for no good reason, and cannot be appeased. Either way, we should be doing our best to show them that we are human and humane, like we keep telling ourselves and the rest of the world. Instead we make their lives a living hell and increasingly allow ourselves to only be represented towards them by our army.

Even if we think that Eden Abergil and her ilk are a marginal phenomenon (Google her if you missed the controversy)– and it can’t be entirely marginal, as Breaking the Silence and others subsequently released more pictures of soldier’s celebrating prisoners and dead opponents — we have an interest in doing our best to minimize animosity towards us. And I find it very difficult to accept that my government is systematically splitting up families, arresting children, interrogating them until they confess, and making it practically impossible for them to lead a normal, healthy childhood. I won’t even mention the number of children Israel apparently killed in “Operation Cast Lead”. Many in Israel may blame the Palestinians’ leaders for it coming to this, but that’s besides the point, as those children will certainly grow up to blame Israel, and that should be prevented, even at great cost and effort.

Like most Israelis, I grew up hearing about the horrors experienced by children in the Holocaust. I can’t help but feel the same despair when I think about how every day, Palestinian children experience things that remind one, even if just a little, of what my paternal grandmother and her contemporaries in Europe went through. And this feeling of despair is compounded by the fact that the perpetrators, this time, are supposed to be representing me and my family — and the families of so many whose childhoods were obliterated by monstrous state violence not so long ago.

The place of children in this conflict is one of the most horrifying aspects of it — on both sides, but especially in those areas where children regularly experience violence and great injustice (which is mostly where the civilians are Palestinians). Peace, and, even more, normalization, will not be possible with generations who have a ruined childhood to hate us for. It’s the kind of thing a person can hardly ever get over, even if they try. I hope Israel’s governments will soon realize this and stop making it impossible to ever end this conflict.