Over on Y-Net, a report about a group of German academics visiting Israel who assert that their country should stop giving Israel “preferential treatment.”All of them were signatories to a manifesto published in the Frankfurter Rundschau which also urged an end to “preferential treatment.”
It’s an arresting phrase, and one - given that the Holocaust provides the foundation for relations between Israel and Germany - which brings to mind the recent row over Arun Gandhi’s article in the Washington Post, in which he claimed Jewish fixation with the Nazi genocide was beginning to “repulse” friends and that a “nation which refuses to forgive” makes other nations angry. Meanwhile, Tony Judt - convincingly dissected by Norman Geras here - has been arguing something similar in the New York Review of Books.
Yet there is a certain shock value when such sentiments are uttered by German academics. Reading through their remarks as reported on Y-Net, it sounds like they are articulating a “national interest” argument. Horrifying as the Holocaust was, they appear to be saying, it cannot function as a block upon German foreign policy, to the detriment of relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds. And in any case, Germany has repaid its debt to Israel in the form of reparations.
The implication that Jewish wounds can be healed with cash payments makes me feel slightly queasy. Moreover, as Hannah Arendt observed in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the decision to accept the reparations provoked a furious and bitter public debate within Israel. Many considered it a betrayal. Others regarded it - as Dov Ben-Meir, who debated with the German academics in Netanya, pointed out - as a moral debt paid to those who had been robbed.
The German academics will also give succour to those who simplify the Holocaust and the creation of Israel into the following equation: “Germans killing Jews = creation of a Jewish state = German responsibility to the Palestinians.” Indeed, this particularly nasty mouthpiece for the Iranian regime is saying just that.
“For socialists, not just the wealth, but the guilt, must be redistributed”
Please do not let this individual issue conceal the larger problem:
With varying arguments and varying logic, almost the entire world (excluding American Christian Zionists) is ceding to pressure and intimidation by Islam’s multiple weapons - violence, fanaticism, demographics, and oil.
It is essential for the survival of Israel and of Judaism that a strategy be found to deal with the Islamic juggernaut.
The German matter is merely a symptom of this juggernaut, compounded by
- endemic European anti-Semitism
- lack of conscience - most of Europe still refuses to admit either collaboration with the Holocaust, or the millennia of anti-Semitism leading up to it
- the virulent anti-Semitism of the European left.
No amount of reparation can pay for who and what was lost during the Holocaust. In fact, there is no end to the impact and implications of Germanic collective madness. There is no “I am sorry” for what was done to the Jews and millions of others who were killed, displaced and suffered. The Morgenthau plan would have been appropriate but probably just repeat the cycle.