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.

Chris Hedges: Murder is not an Anomaly in War (TruthDig)

A Hebrew translation, along with some discussion, is available over at Idan Landau’s blog (his post alerted me to the existence of this piece. H/t.)

Meta comment: I haven’t been posting lately – these link posts don’t count – not for lack of ideas or words, but mainly because I’m spending a very big chunk of my waking hours in (academic) writing and having a hard time finding the time to properly formulate blog posts. I hope and assume that I’ll get posting again at some point soon, but no promises.

It’s been one damned thing after another. And yesterday, the Knesset managed to top it all. I spent the evening trying not to think about it, but today I can think of nothing else.

You see, dear readers, for a while now people in Israel have sensed that our state is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the world. However, the nationalistic Israeli mainstream can hardly imagine such a thing happening as the result of the state’s actions and character. We were all taught that Israel is a model of democracy, a holy state of utmost morality, and, of course, that there are Antisemites everywhere and anyone who questions Zionism is likely doing this because they secretly think Hitler was a good guy. So instead of realizing that we’re losing legitimacy because of decades of repugnant occupation on the West Bank; instead of seeing that we lose credibility as a state every time our army hurts people and goes through seven different stories in three days about how we didn’t do it, or they started, or they didn’t start it but we were right to do it, or all of the above; instead of seeing that the popularity of populistic nationalistic jingoistic nearly-fascistic politicians makes the world doubt us — instead of all that, people have let politicians and provocateurs convince them that the de-legitimization of Israel is a broad conspiracy of lefties who hijack the human rights discourse as part of some kind of evil Antisemitic plan to destroy the State of Israel, starting by putting IDF war criminals on trial.

This has been going on for a while now and I’m not the first to have said all this. The entire time, my impression has been that the claims of a delegitimization conspiracy are fantasy of the blood-libel variety: lies invented by those fixing to wipe out the opposition. As someone who eagerly reads this movement, all I’ve seen is very open discourse in the spirit of honest criticism and disagreement, with no hint of the cabal mentality needed for an international conspiracy. Besides, the human rights organizations in Israel are models of transparency, as opposed to the groups calling for them to be banned. And besides besides, what the hell does calling for war-crimes trials against a state’s war criminals have to do with delegitimizing it?? The Bush administration should be put on trial for Iraq, but that doesn’t mean the USA is any less legitimate for it.

For the time being, this is a lost fight. Those trying to save the legitimacy of Israel as a moral state and a democracy are now being targeted by the state’s parliament. Democracy has finally turned into a tyranny of the majority (a majority of parliamentarians, that is.) They will be investigated in a context that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with internal political posturing. As Yossi Gurvitz points out (Hebrew here, English here), if this were a matter of justice there’s a justice system to deal with it. The Knesset is not an assembly of judges, neither by job nor by qualification. As always, they’re out to point to imaginary threats and make believe they’re dealing with them.

There’s bitter and obvious irony here, going after the human rights organizations, one of Hasbara’s last excuses to call Israel a democracy, under the banner of getting rid of those who would delegitimize Israeli democracy. It makes my head spin.

Time will tell whether this is the beginning of the end in a good way or a bad way.

All I am left to do is hope that the people I love will not be hurt in the process. That, and choose which organizations to donate to in this dark hour. I’m thinking NIF, B’Tselem, and Breaking the Silence… I can’t donate much, but you know, if everyone donates a little it might help. (h/t Noa Raz for proposing this [here, Heb]) I wonder who needs it the most. Any suggestions?