Because I live for part of the year in Germany and because I feel that Germany's ongoing nefarious role in the oppression of the Palestinian people is being fatally underestimated, I will be regularly commenting on and analysing statements and commentaries concerning Israel/Palestine emanating from that country. To begin with, here is the original version of an article on the recent "Günter Grass affair", which once more brings into focus the idiocy of German discourse in this context (http://electronicintifada.net/content/poem-sparks-debate-about-whether-germany-should-absolve-israels-crimes/11149).
What may not be said? Günter
Grass, Germany and Israel.
Raymond
Deane
Günter Grass is an
84-year-old Nobel prizewinning German author most famous for his 1959 novel The Tin Drum.
On April 4th the
Bavarian newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung published his poem Was
gesagt werden muss (What must be said), in which Grass warns
against an Israeli attack on Iran and demands that Germany should cease
providing Israel with nuclear-capable submarines.
To paraphrase: Why
has the poet been silent for too long about the possibility of a “first strike”
that could wipe out the Iranian people? Why should he not name Israel whose secret
nuclear programme is beyond reach of inspection? Germany, in the name of
“reparations” yet in reality for business reasons, is providing Israel with
another submarine that may aim nuclear weapons at Iran, where the existence of
a single atom bomb is unproven. Those who break silence on this issue are
accused of “anti-Semitism”. Why, with his “last ink” does he now write that
Israel threatens world peace? Because tomorrow it might be too late, and
Germans “could be the deliverers of a crime” for which “none of the usual
excuses/ would suffice to erase/ our shared guilt.”
Whatever the
literary qualities of Grass’s poem, it testifies to his lingering literary
eminence that it has engendered such a colossal backlash.
Even the Israeli Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has waded
in, claiming that Israel and Iran
cannot be compared because "[i]n Iran there is
a regime that denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of
Israel". While the first part of this assertion is partly true, the second
has long since been exposed as a
lie – which does nothing to prevent its repeated
dissemination. Netanyahu continued: “It is Iran, not Israel, which threatens to destroy other
countries.” Again, the opposite is the case: Israel, which has repeatedly
“destroyed” its neighbours Gaza and Lebanon, has not signed the
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and is in possession of hundreds of nuclear warheads;
Iran, which has invaded none of its neighbours in modern times, has signed the
NPT and possesses no nuclear weapons.
Why should Netanyahu feel obliged to
respond to a piece of doggerel by a German writer? Because Germany, Europe’s
most powerful country, is Israel’s most important ally after the USA.
A positive outcome of Germany’s crushing
defeat in World War II has been the development of a strongly anti-war
conviction among ordinary Germans. Although German participation in NATO
air-strikes against Yugoslavia without a UN mandate in 1999 was successfully
sold to the German people (with Grass’s support) as “humanitarian intervention” and “a progressives’ war”, German
involvement in the current Afghan war has, from the start, been opposed by some
70% of Germans. If the German state is to maintain its unconditional support
for Israel’s aggressive policies (even if spiced with occasional pro forma criticisms of its illegal
settlement expansion), then nobody as prominent as Grass must be allowed to
step out of line without being subjected to massive defamation as a deterrent. Of
course Grass is vulnerable to such a campaign, having incomprehensibly waited
until 2006 to admit his adolescent membership of the Waffen SS.
In Germany, the chorus of vilification
has been loud and predictable.
Writing in the right-wing paper Die Welt, the notorious rabble-rouser Henryk
Broder called
Grass “the prototype of an educated anti-Semite” who “always had a problem with
Jews”, backing these accusations with a quotation from a 2001 interview in which Grass – in line with international law – called on
Israel to end the occupation and withdraw its illegal settlers. Note that both
poem and interview refer to the Israeli state and not to “Jews”.
The Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld, weirdly
enough a candidate for Die Linke (The Left Party) in Germany’s recent
presidential election, cited a Hitler speech from 1939 in which he attacked “international
Jewish finance”. Were we to replace that phrase with “Israel”, according to
Klarsfeld, “we would hear the same anti-Semitic music from the Tin Drummer.” By
this logic, anything can be proven about any utterance simply by replacing what
was actually said with something totally unconnected.
In the Berlin taz (Tageszeitung, a
supposedly leftist daily paper) the educationalist Micha Brumlik concludes puzzlingly that Grass is “worse than an anti-Semite”, apparently because
he cannot convincingly be pinned down as one. Klaus Hillebrand, a member of the
same paper’s editorial staff, comments that “[t]he scandal consists not in Grass’s critique of Israel,
but in the fact that he depicts himself as a martyred victim of Jews, who
apparently wish to censor the truth. That is an anti-Semitic stereotype.” But
nowhere did Grass claim that Jews were responsible for the censorship of
criticism of Israel in Germany.
Such contorted reasoning needs to be
placed in context.
Marking
Israel’s 60th anniversary in May 2008, Peter Struck, a
former Defense Minister and a member of the SDP (Social-Democratic Party),
stated that “[t]he crimes of the Nazis founded a perpetual responsibility of
Germans for the Jewish state.” A few months later, in a speech in a Berlin
synagogue on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht (the “night of broken glass”
that features powerfully in Grass’s Tin
Drum), Chancellor Angela Merkel asserted that “protecting Israel’s security is part of German Staatsräson.”
This
is a Gallicism for what in English is covered by the German word Realpolitik, which has replaced the
older “reason of state” defined by the
Merriam-Webster online Dictionary as “a motive for
governmental action based on alleged needs or requirements of a political state
regardless of possible transgressions of the rights or the moral codes of
individual persons.” If German “responsibility… for the Jewish state” is
“perpetual”, then it is independent of any crimes of which that state may be
guilty. If Nazi crimes against the Jews result not in German responsibility
towards the Jewish people in general, but in “responsibility… for the
[self-styled] Jewish state”, then Jews worldwide are being equated with the
state of Israel, which did not exist during the Third Reich.
Within this
framework, it follows naturally that any critique of Israel is by definition
anti-Semitic. As a result, the “Jewish state” is conceded perpetual impunity,
defended “regardless of possible transgressions of the rights… of individual
persons” (or peoples) by Germany, Europe’s most powerful state, with ruthless
character assassination the fate of anyone who.protests.
The philosopher Judith
Butler has written: “To say that all Jews
hold a given view on Israel or are adequately represented by Israel or,
conversely, that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately stand for the acts
of all Jews, is to conflate Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an
anti-semitic reduction of Jewishness.”
Paradoxically, therefore, Germany’s “reason of state”
commits precisely such a “reduction of Jewishness” while simultaneously
facilitating the transgression of the rights of anyone deemed by the Israeli
state to stand in the way of its hegemony in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, although mainstream media continue to parrot
the line that his poem has caused “global outrage”, Günter Grass has received a degree of support from the
German peace movement that might not have been forthcoming had the Netanyahus
and Klarsfelds not ranted quite so vehemently. Participants in the traditional Easter peace
marches throughout Germany, which rarely
mention the question of Israel, have reportedly adopted such slogans as “Günter Grass, you are right.
Thank you!” Felicia Langer, a retired German-Israeli lawyer who specialised in
defending Palestinians before Israeli military courts, published an “open letter” in which she and her Holocaust survivor
husband Mieciu expressed their “admiration for your civil courage in the face
of the general mendacity regarding Israel”.
Gary Smith, executive director at the American Academy in
Berlin, claims that Grass is “focusing the fears of Germans now
around Israel as a danger…[T]his could be a turning point in the way part of
the German public speaks about Israel.”
If this is the case,
then Günter Grass will have achieved his greatest success since The Tin Drum.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political
activist living in Ireland and Germany.
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