German Antisemitism Comes for the Palestinians.
1.
In Jean-Luc Goddard’s Notre Musique (2004), the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is speaking with the Israeli-French Jewish actress Sarah Adler. He explains (in Arabic) that we know of Trojan victims through the words of the Greek tragedian Euripides. Instead, Darwish said, he was “looking for the poet of Troy because Troy didn’t tell its story.” Adler concludes (in Hebrew), that Darwish is ‘talking like a Jew’, to which he agrees, before adding: “Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interests in us stems from the interest in the Jewish question.” “The interest is in you [the Jews], and not in me [the Palestinians]”, Mahmoud Darwish tells Sarah Adler, adding: “So we have the misfortune of having Israel as an enemy because it enjoys unlimited support. And we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy because the Jews are the center of world attention. You’ve brought us defeat and renown.”
Darwish understood that the West views Israel-Palestine through the lens of its own history, as one inherently linked to the Holocaust. It made no difference to European post-WWII politics that Palestinians had nothing to do with the European Nazi decision to murder six million Jews. By the time the Nazis embarked on their so-called ‘final solution’, the European ruling class had by and large been accustomed to viewing the rest of the human species as an extension of itself. After the Holocaust, it became increasingly convenient for the average European to avoid the Jewish Question altogether as Israel provided a more convenient answer. This framework effectively imposes the most militaristic interpretation of ‘Never Again’, one which juxtaposes the Holocaust and Israel as two timelines emanating from the same story, with the latter effectively coming out of the former.
Palestinian innocence doesn’t mean, however, that we are not implicated in the Jewish Question. Although it is not fair, Israel’s history – and, by extension, the Jewish question – is our own because Israel wrote its history on our bodies. My Palestinian grandfather from Haifa had nothing to do with Auschwitz, Treblinka or Dachau but Israel nonetheless exiled him permanently and then rewrote his exile as a necessary step, as the sacrifice needed to make Jewish emancipation in Palestine possible after Europeans made Jewish emancipation in Europe impossible. But because Israel was formed as an attempt to answer the Jewish Question, the latter has since incorporated the Palestinian crisis resulting from the Nakba and the founding of Israel. As Raef Zreik put it simply: “The Palestinian Question is now a Jewish Question” because “[Israel] has transferred the question from Europe to the Middle East, and it thinks that it has solved the problem.”
This is evidently not the case, and thinkers going back decades have understood this fundamental flaw in the belief that Israel, standing on the ashes of torched Palestinian homes, is the best solution to antisemitism. In his 1979 essay Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims Edward Said summarized this perfectly: “To those Palestinian victims that Zionism displaced, it cannot have meant anything by way of sufficient cause that Jews were victims of European anti-Semitism and, given Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinians, few Palestinians are able to see beyond their reality, namely, that once victims themselves, Occidental Jews in Israel have become oppressors.” In other words, why are we paying the price for what the Germans did?
2.
In the 1800s, as Jews were being emancipated and given rights in what’s now Germany and the rest of Europe, many Germans started asking themselves what to do with all those German Jews that they suddenly had to think of as fellow Germans. Some went down the intellectual route that would most notoriously end up in Auschwitz, whereas others argued that Jews could become German – the highest honor, surely – if only they give up certain aspects of Jewish-ness. The US Holocaust Museum frames the debate surrounding the Jewish Question as being between ‘integrationists’ and ‘racial antisemites.’ In other words, and with the notable exception of certain radicals, Bundists and other awesome folks who opposed this racist worldview, German intellectuals found themselves debating what form of antisemitism was the more acceptable one for their country. By the 30s and 40s, it was virtually taken for granted that the Aryan race was a separate one, one which could not tolerate the richness of Jewish culture. So, in what would become a very German tradition, Germany found itself having to ‘solve’ a ‘problem’ it made up. As we now all know, Germany then tried to ‘solve’ the Jewish Question through mass violence and genocide.
By the time the Nazis came on the scene, German culture had become too short-sighted and intellectually impoverished to truly appreciate the richness of Jewish culture all around it. Germans were willing to destroy large parts of their own intellectual advancement because of their antisemitism. They burned books of sexual emancipation and Jewish thinking, exiled thousands of Jewish intellectuals to the rest of Europe and North America, and ended up in a spiral of self-destruction that brought the rest of the world down with them – that is, until they were defeated.
Today, those same Germans’ children and grandchildren are having public meltdowns over the presence of Arabs and Muslims on German soil following Hamas’ October 7 massacre in Israel-Palestine. They are showing that hatred of foreigners takes precedence over their supposed commitment to vergangenheitsbewältigung. Germany’s public ‘intellectuals’ are going so far as to whitewash their Nazi past to redirect their hatred towards Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. Although they’re none the wiser for it, the German intelligentsia clearly understands that the so-called Palestinian/Arab/Muslim question they have now created as a problem for them to solve is no different than that other question they repeatedly failed to answer.
This should be stated clearly: This has nothing to do any kind of resolution of the Jewish question. The Germans currently losing their minds over the realization that so many of us brown and black folks share the same soil as they do have simply reinvented antisemitism to suit today’s political climate. They will smear and intimidate ‘bad’ Jews like Judith Butler to the point where they, Butler, don’t feel safe speaking in Germany. Germany doesn’t want Jewish emancipation. This is why it cannot accept the thousands of Jews all across the Western world that have openly stood with the Palestinians against Israel’s ongoing genocide. They can’t because doing so would require a real commitment to understanding the failures of their parents and grandparents to stop a genocide, just as they are currently failing to stop a genocide. This will be Germany’s legacy, no matter the denial of its intelligentsia: Germany is seeking, once more, the right to define who is a Jew. And once more, Germany opts for mass violence and genocide, except this time it has found the perfect alibi in the form of the Israeli state.
In fact, the answer was, is, and always will be Jewish emancipation, for Jews to live safely wherever they live in the world, whether this be Europe, North America or the Middle East today. The Germans simply found yet another convenient way out of dealing with the ‘problem’ they created. Their parents and grandparents ‘solved’ it with the Holocaust, and now they’re ‘solving’ it with Israel – in other words, just not here, not in the present, not in today’s Germany. They get to sit back and condemn the Nazis and honor the Jews they’ve murdered because, as Dara Horn’s book puts it, “people love dead Jews.” In other words, they love to honor the dead as a means of avoiding the living. Europe as a whole has perfected the art of speaking of an entire people in the past tense, not just as a way of conveniently erasing the Jews who are very vocally critical of the Israeli government’s policies, but also as a way of downplaying their complicity in both past and present oppression.
In recent years, we have been seeing a resurgence in Palestinian engagement with German and Jewish history. At protests in 2021, many held signs such as “Palestinian children pay the price for guilty German consciences” and “liebe Germany, you can’t fix the past by silencing the present.” This is it, in a nutshell, and it is no surprise that this was said in Germany itself. I think these Palestinians have understood the consequences of the Holocaust much more so than the European politicians seeking to absolve themselves of the history of their continent through unconditionally supporting the Israeli government. Many Palestinians and Jews in Germany seem to be aware of this today, so they hold up a mirror reflecting Germany’s own moral monstrosity. Germany, in return, arrests both Palestinians and Jews on the streets calling for a ceasefire in Gaza or bans their demonstrations – including one by Jews with the theme “Jewish Berliners against violence in the Middle East – Against the murder of our fellow human being in Gaza, Jewish and Palestinian people have the same right to live.” They even cited “anti-semitism” as a reason for banning a protest by Jews because, again, Germany wants to maintain the right to define who is a Jew, a right it most notoriously gave itself under the Third Reich. Having Jews saying Palestinians in Gaza are fellow human beings proved to be too much.
3.
When the dust settles in Gaza – a horrible metaphor given the extent of Israeli destruction – we will all have to reckon with the fact that less than eight decades after the Holocaust, the world’s only Jewish state decided to commit a genocide, live-stream it for the world to see, and with the full complicity of the German state which committed the Holocaust in the first place. We are still looking for the poet of Troy.