The German-Israeli Love Affair Must End
Ghada Karmi
13.09.2012
A Palestinian View
I have never understood why Germans are so hostile
towards Palestinians. We all know that Germans are consumed by guilt
about Jews. Even now, nearly 70 years after the end of WWII, they still
feel some measure of this, by heredity if nothing else, since most of
them weren't even born before 1945. And neither, for that matter, was
Israel. Nazism had ended three years before Israel's establishment. Yet,
this new state has come to represent all the Jews who suffered from the
holocaust and their descendants, apparently for all time. Israel became
the shrine for German atonement, remorse and guilt, unabated by the
passage of time.
German-Israeli relations are very close. War reparations
to Israel have cost Germany billions of dollars, and continue till
today. Germany's leaders routinely make obeisance to Israel. In recent
visits Germany's president and its chancellor, have been extravagant in
their praise and pledged their undying support for the Jewish state. In
the last month, Germany has sent 3 advanced Dolphin submarines to
Israel, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, part of whose cost will be
borne by Germany. Another three are promised by 2018, despite German
displeasure at Israel's settlement expansion.
But why should this friendliness towards Israel be
coupled with an equal antipathy for Palestinians, the very people who
were sacrificed to compensate for the crimes of Nazism, whose country
became Israel while they became stateless refugees? I saw this conundrum
in action in Germany recently. Last February I was invited to speak on
Palestine at a Middle East conference at the University of Bremen. But
at the last minute the invitation was withdrawn because the university
heads considered my views were "not appropriate".
It later emerged that an Israeli Ph.D. student had
protested that the conference, and presumably myself, were
"anti-Semitic". In June I attended a conference
at the Freie Universitat Berlin, organised by the university's
Research College in cooperation with the German Council on Foreign
Relations. The subject was Europe and the Arab Spring.
What followed was a depressing display of German
sycophancy towards the Israeli participants and a barely disguised
discomfort with me, as if they had regretted their boldness in allowing a
Palestinian voice to be heard. The chairman of the first session, who
represented the German Council on Foreign Relations, introduced me
astonishingly as "a Palestinian terrorist according to some Israelis".
My obvious consternation received neither apology nor explanation. Only
after the session ended and on direct questioning, he said he was
reading my biography as given by the organisers. The latter denied that,
saying I had been described only as "an activist". None of them
apologised at the time.
My talk about the EU's well-documented partiality
for Israel, the privileges and preferential treatment accorded to
Israeli trade and scientific institutions, the frequetly-obeserved fact
that Israel has become a European state in all but name, had a cool
reception. One conference organiser complained that they wanted
political analysis, not "political advocacy". An Israeli participant
objected that the meeting was not about the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, and Israel's former ambassador to Germany asserted angrily he
could refute every point I had made, as if we had been at a political
rally, not an academic meeting. The other particants largely avoided me,
by contrast to the effusiveness with which they treated the Israelis
there.
This unpleasant episode demonstrated to me the
depth of fear that Germans still have of criticising Israel, and by
extension, their rejection of Palestinians. Extraordinary that the
victims of Israel have been turned into the villains and the occupier of
their land has become a hero. I came away convinced that Germans,
whatever the role of their ancestors under Nazism, will have to come to
terms with their history and see the world as it is. Israel is a state
with indefensible policies of discrimination and oppression of another
people, offensive to the civilised values we all aspire to.
Recognising this fact in no way implies an
abnegation of Germany's responsibility for the Jews who perished at the
hands of Nazis 70 years and their descendants are owed the fullest
restitution. It was the failure to distinguish between the Israeli state
and the Jewish victims of Nazism which I saw amongst Germans; the
consequence of this is an exaggerated indulgence of Israel whatever
crime it commits and an irrational hatred of its Palestinian victims. It
is time to end both the indulgence and the hatred.
Dr Ghada Karmi is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, England.
German version: Die Liebesgeschichte zwischen Deutschland und Israel muss enden.
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