Solidarity with ethnic cleansing

Solidarity with ethnic cleansing

The crimes of the Israeli army and the complicity of Western countries with these crimes are based on a traditional contempt for the Palestinian people.

War is peace, ignorance is strength and criticism of Israel is “anti-Semitic”. This is contradicted by the fact that Jews worldwide refuse to support horrific atrocities in the name of their religion: “Not in our name!” Non-Jewish Germans can also join them precisely because of a historical experience that includes the dehumanization of entire groups of people. They can express their solidarity with a people that has been sacrificed to imperial power interests for over 100 years. To justify “solidarity” with this policy, Germans in particular claim that they have learned lessons from the fascist past. The author objects to this all-too-direct adaptation of the historical material.

by Michael Ewert

[This article posted on 1/24/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.manova.news/artikel/ethnisch-gesauberte-solidaritat.]


The attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023 was an attack against occupiers who, in turn, cannot invoke a right to “self-defense.” To give the mass murder in the Gaza Strip the appearance of legitimacy, not only did the war machine fire on all cylinders, but unfortunately, the engine of the PR apparatus quickly ran out of fuel.

Children and women are always taken, so the lie of the “40 beheaded babies” was supplemented by the still unproven claim that “massive” numbers of women had been raped (1). In addition, there were pictures of vehicles and houses whose damage could not have been caused by the light armament of the attackers.

The number of dead initially dropped from 1,400 to 1,200. Officially confirmed were the deaths of 373 security forces, 71 foreigners and 695 Israeli civilians, many of whom were killed by their own army (2). This had the advantage that they could not be exchanged for Palestinians, who have disappeared in Israeli dungeons by the thousands, sometimes underage, often without a court sentence and tortured.

Officially, the Israeli military assures that the protection of the civilian population is “ensured as far as possible”. With the three hostages with bare chests and white flag, it was not possible. They were shot. Apparently, the Israeli army also faced major difficulties when 1000-kilo bombs were dropped on refugee camps, women in churches were murdered by snipers, as were over a hundred journalists, or the nine relatives of Yousef Khalil, including his children and grandchildren, were shot in the beds of their makeshift sleeping quarters before his eyes (3).

Thousands of old people are dying due to the total blockade of medical supplies. The U.S. has not only supplied at least 100,000 pounds of bombs, but also projectiles designed to completely collapse the building they hit. So far, more than 25,000 people are dead, including many more buried under the rubble. At least 70 percent of them are women and children. How many Hamas fighters can we expect to find among the remaining 30 percent? The Israeli army claims 8,000, and has quite openly revealed that its web of lies has also been destroyed in the hail of bombs. However, suppressing this is not an Israeli privilege.

The prerequisite for the sheer horror at October 7, 2023 is the total amnesia in the “collective West” regarding the decades before.

Only in this way does the question not arise as to what was actually to be expected, after the most brutal behavior has been drummed into those affected since the founding of the “Jewish state” in 1948 and again intensified with the occupation from 1967 (4). Anyone who ignores this has given his judgments feet of clay. They are supported by the crutches of an obligation arising from history. If it plays a role, then in a way that is not a glorious chapter for Germany.
The lessons of the Nazi era

The experience with fascism would have suggested a “zero hour” as the beginning of a new era. But it did not go that far. After a moment of shock, not only had relations between the wealthy, politicians and the media recovered, but so had authoritarian attitudes towards the powers of the established order. Immediately after the war, Erich Kuby observed an attitude that “in a roundabout way branded as a nationalist anyone who criticized the Allies” (5).

This not only secured the continued existence of a culture of denunciation in language, but also staked out the scope of German options for action as a playpen in the US's playroom. The framework for co-creation became apparent when, wherever the US army marched in, liberation from fascism was shaped as liberation from anti-fascism. In Germany, this travesty was expressed in a very selective distancing from the Nazi era: the lessons to be learned were reduced to not forgetting the “crimes of Dachau and Buchenwald” because of the “amazing exploits” of the Wehrmacht (6).

The memories thus narrowed lacked the character of the experiential, as László Földényi emphasized in a laudatory speech for Imre Kertész. He spoke of a falsification of history (7). By reducing fascism to anti-Semitism, conversely, anti-Semitism could be equated with fascism. It was thus made palatable to a bourgeois audience, but stripped of its deeper essence. At the same time, it was “natural” that with regard to Judaism, there was a concentration on a spectrum that corresponded to this parsimony and did not stand in comprehensive opposition to fascist attitudes. On the contrary.

As early as June 1933, the “Zionist Association for Germany” emphasized “that a rebirth of national life, as it has taken place in German life through the attachment to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish ethnic group” (8). The midwives of “Jewish national life” were Zionist death squads that spread fear and terror, especially in peaceful areas. The Stern Group, led by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Prime Minister, became famous. It emerged from Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, who also became Prime Minister. During his visit to New York in 1948, he was described by more than two dozen Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, in a letter published in the New York Times, as the leader of a party that was to be regarded as the latest manifestation of fascism (9).

This was not a problem for the West. It had and has very elastic ideas of domination and the use of force to establish an order based on its rules, tailored by Nazi collaborators to their interests in power. The conception of a Jewish state, then its founding and finally its support, already met their needs. It was necessary to create a bulwark against “uncivilized” Arabs.

The role of the British was then taken over by the United States. In Germany, the obedient following of their instructions in this region, too, harmonizes with the pleasant sound of auto-suggestion that one is drawing “lessons from the past”. But only the character of a policy as a simulation event of independent action is concealed. Konrad Adenauer made it clear what it was really about when he referred to Israel as a “stronghold of the West” at a meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1960.

Apart from billions of dollars for the expansion of this unsinkable aircraft carrier on the shores of Arabia, Germany's greatest contribution was that its way of distancing itself from fascism lent an ideological-aggressive touch to the terror against the Palestinians: anyone who criticized it was henceforth criticizing the “Jewish”. But this sectarian caricature is far from representing Judaism.

Yakov Rabkin, a historian at the University of Montreal, mentions a rabbi who considers the Zionist state to be a doomed revolt and criticizes the fact that identification with the State of Israel has replaced the Jewish value system for many: mercy and modesty have been replaced by selfishness and national pride (10).

The concept of an ethnically “pure” state corresponded to the currents of the 19th century. There was no place for socially emancipatory, solidary and humane moments, as found in the labor movement.

All ideas of a multi-ethnic state were fought by nationalist thugs, whose ideology also led to the excellent relations between Israel and the right-wing and right-wing radical spectrum worldwide (11).

Conversely, all advocates of an aggressive policy see Israel as one of their most reliable outposts. What they have in common is the self-understanding that human and international rights can be suspended in a “greater area” as defined by Carl Schmitt. Catchphrase campaigns obscure those tendencies that have always paved the way for fascism and genocide: the claim to foreign territory, the unconditional enforcement of economic interests, a propaganda system that encompasses all areas, disregard for all legal norms, plundering of the weak and repression of all attempts to curtail the interests behind it (12).

The accusation of “anti-Semitism,” which is tied to Israel, is being asserted all the more aggressively the more the situation of the military-industrial complex demands that all disciplinary stops be pulled out. That is why “anti-Semitism” is encountered everywhere, why it must be incessantly warned against, and why the associated suspicions and defamations are ubiquitous. Like a treacherous monster and a threatening virus, it legitimizes arbitrary measures such as censorship, assembly bans, discrediting, defamation, etc., which were already characteristic of the Nazis.

Their practice of dragging Jews into the spotlight as Jews, set apart as a distinctive part of society, is also repeated. Immediately after the war, Victor Klemperer found this appalling (13). Later, in 2007, Kertész no longer wanted to be a “Holocaust clown” (14). He didn't want to be one because it wasn't the person who was Jewish that interested people, but the Jew who was no longer a real person. A strategically instrumentalized philo-Semitism is, however, the billet d'entrée to selections, a preliminary stage of hostilities. They would begin by granting Jews genius, thus subtly denying them the right to be villains, Raymond Chandler quotes a writer in his letter to a Miss Aron (15).

In fact, without the resentment, the pathological possibility of being fascists and following a corresponding pattern of behavior can be conceded, provided that the reprehensibility of such resentment is taken into account. The accusation of anti-Semitism as a criticism of pathological aspirations serves as an instrument to conceal pathological aspirations. Therefore, the rejection of NATO's war against Afghanistan is not only considered “anti-Americanism”, but is seen as “a particularly perfidious form of anti-Semitism” (16). Hundreds of thousands of Afghans would probably contradict this logic if they were still alive.

The affinity of authoritarian-structured perpetrators of violence was proven in the US arms deliveries for the murder of more than 10,000 children in the Gaza Strip and the announced destruction of the entire population through hunger, thirst, disease and bombing. Officially, supporting the Leningrad catalog of the Wehrmacht is referred to as “German raison d'état”.

The term originated in the Italian Renaissance. It stands for a utilitarian thinking beyond morality and law. All maxims of action are forced into a framework that, to quote Carl Zuckmayer, smells more of putty and glue than of good wood. The price for Israelis, too, is traumatization caused by their own actions and leading to the abyss. There is no escape from the failure to shape life constructively. This would suggest starting points for a peace perspective.
Perspectives in the Middle East

Genocide is a crime punishable under § 6 of the German Code of Crimes against International Law and Art. 6 of the Rome Statute. Anyone who supports it is complicit. As Hermann Broch emphasized, even “political indifference is quite closely related to ethical perversion.” Craig Mokhiber did not want to expose himself to this suspicion. He was head of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) and resigned in a letter to UNHCR chief Volker Türk.

In the statement of reasons, which became known at the beginning of November 2023, he wrote:

"The ongoing mass murder of Palestinians, based on an ethno-nationalist ideology of settler-colonialism, which continues decades of systematic persecution and cleansing of Palestinians (...) and is accompanied by corresponding declarations of intent by leading representatives of the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for discussion. (…) But the greatest loss of the Palestinian people has been our failure. It is a bitter irony that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in the same year that the Nakba was perpetrated on the Palestinian people” (17).

“What can I know? What ought I to do?” asked Immanuel Kant, and posed as the final problem: ‘What may I hope?’ With regard to Palestine, we could rephrase: ”What must I hope for, so that I know what to do?” For Mokhiber, the goal would be “a state based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews, thereby dismantling the deeply racist settler state and colonial project, and ending apartheid throughout the country.”

It will be a long road ahead, because the social character that led to the founding of the state and has hardened incessantly also has a long history. Its bankruptcy can be seen in the demand of Israeli doctors to bomb hospitals in Gaza. Young children joined in with a song:

“Within a year we will destroy all of you, and then we will return to plow our fields” (18).

The moment a state is erected on the ruins of another society, the end of constructive community has been reached.

If survival depends on one's own aggression, threatening enemies, against whom one must defend oneself, become a condition for giving life a meaning. On this royal road to archaic bonds, the individual loses his trust and confidence. That is bleak. There is reason for hope in the impulses of Palestinian-Jewish initiatives in Israel itself, reinforced by an immense increase in worldwide protests and the isolation of the Israeli regime.

It would be naive to demand a two-state solution, but Edward Said already described it as illusory in 1995, when the ink under the Oslo Accords was not yet dry (19). It has been completely pulverized by the incessant intensification of the settlement program since then, which was and is a maneuver of expulsion.

More urgently than ever, the one-state solution presents itself as the only realistic goal (20) – also because of the lessons from Germany's past, which would otherwise smack of “solidarity” with apartheid, expulsion and annihilation. If this kind of “lesson” is to be constitutive for the formation of national self-awareness, then one can only say that this formation failed after 1945. It would also confirm that there was no “zero hour”.

The fight against destructive tendencies must be guided by compassion, instinctive rejection of imperious power and solidarity with all those who are deprived of elementary rights.

This is only possible by striving to lead a self-determined, free and productive life – and to do everything to remove obstacles that make it difficult or even impossible to achieve these goals. This also applies to the relationship of the Germans to Palestine, in which our “Western values” are reflected.

The barbarism that has been going on for decades, originating from the “Jewish state”, took place in the shadow of imperial terror, which has claimed at least 20 million lives since the end of the Second World War – 20 million who were never worthy of being mentioned by name. What are 20,000 dead in the Gaza Strip in comparison? They will only become a problem in a public sphere characterized by schizophrenic behavior when the fight against conditions that produce armed violence has achieved political and cultural hegemony.

State terror is used according to the constraints of an economy that is more dependent than ever on expansion in its debt-based phase, oriented towards the well-being of a military-industrial-media-propaganda complex. If these structures are not stopped, there is no end in sight to colonial practices of terror.

On the contrary, their horror has now reached a climax with the realization of an officially expressed extermination mania that can no longer be suppressed, like the expulsion of the Palestinians that has been practiced for decades, along with the disregard for Resolution 194 of the UN General Assembly of 1948 on their right of return. Nevertheless, South Africa's attempt to sue Israel for genocide at the International Court of Justice is unlikely to be successful. This political institution was not created for that. Israel has accused Pretoria of “anti-Semitism”. But this grotesque has been encouraged by the West's neglect of routine crimes.

The global despotism of the USA is related to the massacres of its client as the brutality of a mafia boss to the offenses of his errand boys in the suburbs.

Israel's former education minister, Limor Livnat, had grasped this relationship well when she demanded that the means allowed to the USA in Afghanistan “must also be allowed to Israel” (21). They are not only allowed, but a prerequisite for Israel's “right to exist” (22).

Unfortunately, one cannot say that such a country has no place in “our community of states”. It perfectly meets their requirements. Israel always complains of being treated differently from other countries. That is whining at a high level. The leader of the mob can only indoctrinate more successfully, his crimes are as natural as the air we breathe. Nevertheless, a certain ingratitude on the part of Israel must be criticized, because the crimes of others may never have happened, as Harald Pinter stated in his Nobel Prize speech, but as a rule they cannot count on explicit acclamation from the heroes and heroines of “rule-based orders”.

They are spurred on by the lessons of the past. These lessons were to take up the threads dropped by the Nazis with the United States: contempt for international law, glorification of violence, oppression of the weaker. The current nonchalance in the extermination of entire families shows that the “denazification” after 1945 was a failure. It did not aim at the end of the triumph of the idols of power, control, submission and disregard for human and civil rights. Only in this way could the development towards genocide in Gaza come about.

It was prepared by indifference to the serial bombing of Afghan wedding parties, with around 100 dead at a time, or the cancer rate in Fallujah caused by the use of depleted uranium ammunition, which is higher than it was in Hiroshima at the time. It is a broad phalanx of diabolical reprehensibility, given five lines in the press or completely ignored, that needs to be fought wherever and whenever support for it can be gained. Until then, even in the face of the traumatic events in Gaza, it would be better to hope for heavenly assistance than for earthly justice.

If the curse of God will not fall on such barbarians who mock his commandments, then on whom will it fall? If, as prophesied in Jeremiah, the days of horrific evildoers are not numbered, then on whom will they fall? Their genocide in Gaza is no mistake. It fits perfectly into a pattern of horror woven not only by the Israelis. It seems to have fallen out of line only because the reputation of one of the many perpetrators is now finally in the dust – in the dust of the rubble on thousands and thousands of corpses.

From this point of view, one could speak of a mistake – not a mistake in strategy, because it was always ruthless, but a mistake in tactics. Not only the Palestinians have paid a horrendous price for it. But they will rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Their resistance is based on ideals that cannot be destroyed or defeated.

Israel, on the other hand, will not recover from its atrocities (23). Nor will we in the West, if we do not come to our senses and end active support or the no less reprehensible acceptance.

But presumably we will also first have to learn how low we can fall.

Sources and notes:

(1) see Jonathan Cook, Evidence Missing in 'Mass Rape' Charge Against Hamas, Consortium News, December 22, 2023 consortiumnews.com/2023/12/22/evidence-missing-in-mass-rape-charge-against-hamas/

(2) see Jochen Mitschka, Israels Beschuß der eigenen Bevölkerung, apolut 9. November 2023 apolut.net/israels-brutkaesten-von-jochen-mitschka/, which is based on Max Blumenthal, October 7 testimonies reveal Israel's military 'shelling' Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles. Israel's military received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on October 7. How many Israeli citizens said to have been “burned alive” were actually killed by friendly fire? The Grayzone, October 27, 2023 thegrayzone.com/2023/10/27/israels-military-shelled-burning-tanks-helicopters/; or: 12-year-old Israeli girl killed by Israeli tank on October 7, according to witnesses. Two survivors of the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Be'eri reported that Liel Hetzroni, her family and neighbors were killed by Israeli forces. The Israeli government tried to stoke outrage over the girl's killing, Transition News, November 28, 2023 transition-news. org/12-year-old-israeli-girl-was-according-to-witnesses-on-7-October-by; Gareth Porter, How Israel Leverages Genocide With Hamas 'Massacres', Consortium News, 6 January 2024 consortiumnews.com/2024/01/06/how-israel-leverages-genocide-with-hamas-massacres/

(3) see Mike Ludwig, Allegations of Israeli War Crimes Grow as US Again Delays Security Council Vote, truthout, December 20, 2023, truthout. org/articles/allegations-of-israeli-war-crimes-grow-as-us-again-delays-security-council-vote/ or Brett Wilkins, Human Rights Group Alleges Israeli Forces Executed Over 1,000 Palestinian Elders. Human rights group claims Israeli forces engaged in targeted killings, including field executions, truthout, December 24, 2023, truthout.org/articles/human-rights-group-alleges-israeli-forces-executed-over-1000-palestinian-elders/

(4) See only Oded Na'aman, “It's primarily about punishment...” (statements by Israeli soldiers in the group Breaking the Silence), Antikrieg, December 15, 2023 antikrieg. com/aktuell/2023_12_15_esgeht; on the intensified repression on the West Bank, where more than 300 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, see Amira Hass, Amid the mourning, Israel's settlement enterprise celebrates a major victory, antikrieg November 3, 2023 [reprint of a Ha'aretz article from November 1, 2023] antikrieg.com/aktuell/2023_11_03_inmitten and, a few minutes of depressing splendor on public broadcasting, Jan-Christoph Kitzler in RadioWelt. Magazin am Mittag in Bayern2 on November 6, 2023: the harrowing report was rounded off by an hour-long threat to journalists by armed uniformed men on the way back near Hebron; or Shatha Hanaysha, Israel's Attempt to Crush Armed Resistance in the West Bank Is Backfiring. Support for the armed resistance fighters in Jenin has increased in the wake of Israel's scorched-earth approach, truthout, December 20, 2023 truthout.org/articles/israels-attempt-to-crush-armed-resistance-in-the-west-bank-is-backfiring/

(5) Kuby, Aus schöner Zeit. Vom Carepaket zur Nachrüstung: der kurze deutsche Urlaub, Hamburg 1984, page 72

(6) Kuby, ibid., 70/71

(7) see Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 23, 2001

(8) see Hajo Meyer, Judentum, Zionismus, Antizionismus und Antisemitismus, Berlin 2009, 49f, quoted in Ludwig Watzal, Der neue Antisemitismus. Israel- und Zionismus-Kritik werden als “neuer” Antisemitismus definiert, Rubikon, 11. August 2018 rubikon.news/artikel/der-neue-antisemitismus

(9) see Albert Einstein/ Hannah Arendt/ Sidney Hook et.al, Letter to The New York Times, December 4, 1948 archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948

(10) See Rabkin, Doppelte Pflicht. Is every opponent of Zionism anti-Semitic?, Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 10/11, 2004; id., Au nom de la Torah. Une histoire de l'opposition juive au sionisme, Québec 2004; id., A Threat from Within. A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, London 2006; Rolf Verleger, Israels Irrweg. Eine jüdische Sicht, Cologne 2009

(11) See only Daniel Lazare, “Netanyahu's Brand of Tolerance for Anti-Semitism Goes Back 120 Years,” Consortium News, January 31, 2019, consortiumnews.com/2019/01/31/netanyahus-brand-of-tolerance-for-anti-semitism-goes-back-120-years/

(12) On this, see the recently published work by Ullrich Mies, Das 1x1 des Staatsterrors. Der neue Faschismus, der keiner sein will, Hamburg 2023

(13) See Klemperer, LTI. Notizbuch eines Philologen, Leipzig 1975, 36f

(14) quoted from Lothar Müller, Späte Jahre, waches Ich, Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 28/29, 2013 (review of Kertész, Letzte Einkehr. Tagebücher 2001-2009, Reinbek 2013)

(15) see Frank MacShane (ed.), Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, London 1981, 66f

(16) Michael Wolffsohn, quoted from Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 29, 2001

(17) quoted from junge Welt, November 2, 2023 jungewelt.de/artikel/462308.krieg-in-nahost-ein-fall-von-völkermord-wie-aus-dem-lehrbuch; see also Albrecht Müller, In Sachen Israel/Palästina Meinungsmache am laufenden Band, NachDenkSeiten November 2, 2023 nachdenkseiten.de/?p=106128

(18) quoted from John Mearsheimer, Tod und Vernichtung in Gaza, antikrieg, December 13, 2023 antikrieg.com/aktuell/2023_12_13_todundvernichtung; Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone summarized the rotten character of a fascist mob and an uninhibited soldateska in a video: bitchute.com/video/4vKuB1su43c/


(19) see Said, Das Ende des Friedensprozesses. Oslo und danach, Berlin 2002, especially pages 45ff; also Felicia Langer, Quo vadis Israel. Die neue Intifada der Palästinenser, Göttingen 2001

(20) see also Said, ibid., pages 208ff

(21) quoted from Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 4, 2001

(22) see Susann Witt-Stahl, Explosive Endzeitphantasien. Against the backdrop of the Gaza war, the PR machines of right-wing think tanks in the US and their German offshoots are running hot, junge Welt, January 12, 2024 jungewelt.de/artikel/467053.kriegspropaganda-explosive-endzeitphantasien

(23) see only Gideon Levy, The legitimation of evil will remain with the Israelis long after the end of the Gaza war (reprint of a Ha'aretz article from December 31, 2023), anti-war, January 3, 2024 anti-war.com/aktuell/2024_01_03_die_legitimation