Less than 10 years ago, Germany, and especially Berlin, was held up as a beacon of openness and inclusivity in a western world rocked by Brexit and Donald Trump. Angela Merkel’s decision to take in thousands of refugees displaced by the war in Syria boosted her country’s reputation in progressive circles, with many international artists and academics choosing to make the German capital their new home.
Yet the conflict in the Middle East is showing Germany in a new light, highlighting fissures in society and the arts world that until now had been easier to ignore.
A main reason why it’s taboo to call the war in Gaza “genocide” is that it’s a carbon copy of propaganda from original Nazis and Neo-Nazis. We have yearly neo-nazi marches to “memorize” the bombing of Dresden and other Allied attacks against German cities. Now, obviously from a modern standpoint these “strategic bombings” were a war crime. And so were the limitations on food supplies into Germany after the second world war. But that doesn’t change that there was no genocide. The Allies didn’t try to wipe us out. They just behaved like humans who are attacked do. and humans who were atacked are rarely kind. We also remember that the things done to us were were neglible compared to what our regime would have done if it had won.
So when we see Gaza we essentially see something similar to what happened to our grandparents. A population felt wronged, allowed fascists to take over and start a war and then suffered when the facists lost their war.
Now, there’s some important differences, Hamas fortunately never made remotely as far as the Nazis (one could say we see what should have happend in 1933 here) and fortunately the IDF isn’t using fire bombings (otherwise there’d be no Palestinians left, strategic bombing took hours to kill tens of thousands, not months), but there’s a lot of similarities here. Hence learning from our past means that we have to recognize that violence is unfortunately needed to stop regimes run by fanatics. and that this violence will always hurt countless inncocents and that even the better side will commit atrocities.
That of course doesn’t change that Israel should be continued to be pressured towards minimizing suffering - and that is done - Germany takes part in food aidrops and has condemned things like settlements for many years, but all that doesn’t change that Israel being the winning power is by a huge margin the lesser evil here. Hence when the choice is binary the Israeli government is supported against groups like Hamas.