Israel-Gaza Conflict III - This Time It's On-Topic

[Cerys]

It's quite scary that the IDF chief of staff has had to remind soliders not to shoot unarmed people:

...The Israel Defences Forces (IDF) chief of staff has reminded troops they are "absolutely not" permitted - under the rules of engagement - to shoot unarmed people holding up a white flag in surrender.

General Herzi Halevi was speaking to troops in the wake of the accidental killing of three Israeli hostages in Gaza by soldiers on Friday.

He told soldiers to "take two seconds" if they see people "who do not threaten you, who don't have weapons, who have their hands up".

Halevi stressed that even enemy fighters, if they put down their weapons and raise their hands, must be taken prisoner, not shot...

You'd think this would be something they are reminded the day they get their weapons, reminded because you'd hope this would be something anyone who is conscripted into the IDF would be aware of.

I think the shooting of three hostages holding white flags has shocked even Western governments.

Let's try this again, but playing nice - even if they can't.

[DelurkedToHelp]

Why are you starting a new thread?

To be blunt, it's a bit rich for you to be coming out with "playing nice" when you continually make snide comments towards Buelligan.

[Blumf]

Should have called this thread "Israel-Gaza Conflict III - Making the mistake of losing its moral authority alongside its legal one"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67745408

[Cerys]

Too long of a title, but good point.

[Mister Six]

Love how the second post is off-topic.

If Israel is losing the Tories, they're really fucking up.

[Cerys]

Love how the second post is off-topic.

It's the way of things :)

If Israel is losing the Tories, they're really fucking up.

They've been fucking up for a while - the rest of the world has just been too brainwashed to argue.

[jobotic]

Yeah, we've got a thread.

[Mr_Simnock]

Ms Kearns - who chairs the committee of MPs tasked with holding the Foreign Office to account - warned Israel could inadvertently increase support for Hamas among Palestinians.

The israeli state wants this, then once 'hamas' (in quotes as it probably won't be them) launches a strike from the west bank then that will be the permission for them to then bomb that into nothing too. This is netenturds plan all along.

[BlodwynPig]

He has Starmer's unwavering backing

[C_Larence]

The two thread solution

[Buelligan]

Touched on in the previous thread

BP pauses all Red Sea shipments after rebel attacks

So looks like people whose economies are at least in part reliant on fossil fuels will now pay even more, thanks to even more war on the planet.  Looks good for oil shares and weapons-sellers though.  Every death has a silver lining.  More and more money moves from the pockets of the little people and into the coffers of the super-wealthy. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67748605

[Buelligan]

And now this -

On Saturday, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said two Christian women - named as Nahida and her daughter Samar - were shot and killed while walking to a building in the church complex known as the Sister's Convent.

"One was killed as she tried to carry the other to safety," a statement said. Seven more people were shot and wounded as they "tried to protect others inside the church compound" on Saturday.

The patriarchate said no warning had been given and added: "They were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish, where there are no belligerents."

The patriarchate said that earlier on Saturday an Israeli tank fired on part of the church compound with 54 disabled people inside. It caused a fire that destroyed the building's generator, the only source of electricity, and some of the disabled people can no longer use their respirators, the statement said.

In response to the church's letter, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said it took "claims regarding harm to sensitive sites with the utmost seriousness".

This doesn't look good for Biden.  We all know there is a huge section of the American electorate who are evangelical Christians, many of whom are zionist Christians and support Israel unequivocally for doctrinal reasons but there is also a very large, I would guess, larger, tranche of voters who are Catholic.

More on the same story with more terrible detail -

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67746432

[lauraxsynthesis]

Love how the second post is off-topic.

If Israel is losing the Tories, they're really fucking up.

I'm actually surprised that there isn't more diversity among Tory MPs on this. Zionism is clearly a big part of the Labour Right project, but apart from those who hold shares in arms manufacturers, I genuinely don't get why there's such consistency in the Tory votes on this.

Anyway, if anyone's in London this Saturday, Sisters Uncut are organising a shut down protest from midday. 

[Buelligan]

I'm actually surprised that there isn't more diversity among Tory MPs on this. Zionism is clearly a big part of the Labour Right project, but apart from those who hold shares in arms manufacturers, I genuinely don't get why there's such consistency in the Tory votes on this.

Anyway, if anyone's in London this Saturday, Sisters Uncut are organising a shut down protest from midday. 

Do you have a link or details of where to meet and so on?

[lauraxsynthesis]

Do you have a link or details of where to meet and so on?

It's midday but I think the location will be shared on the day - check Sisters Uncut's Insta.

[Buelligan]

Thanks!  Obvs I won't be able to join, not being in UK, but it's a useful tip for anyone who can.

[All Surrogate]

... it's a bit rich ...

Yeah, Cerys, it's the good advice that you just didn't take. 🤣🤣🤣

[Kankurette]

Have any of you seen this? It's a really good article about Germany's relationship with Israel and performative 'we truly are very sorry' bullshit.

[Steve Faeces]

Thought this piece in Jacobin was interesting and quite alarming really: Pro-Israel Billionaires Are Spending Big to Oust Socialists From Office

Goes without saying that there is a usage of "Israel Lobby" that is a trope and we should be wise to, but this is about The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that lobby very openly on behalf of Israel. When I see stuff like this I wonder how far you can really call this a deomcracy and why anyone who knows about this sort of thing would bother voting at all when the game is so blatantly rigged. It's like one of those things I'm aware of, but still remain kind of incredulous it goes on when seen written down. When they're literally bragging to the newspapers about it.

There are issues with all kinds of political lobbying and I'm constantly surprised it isn't more of a pressing concern over here as well, but when you've got a group saying they will specifically target funding at candidates to stand against American politicians, because of their stance on a foreign war, it's nothing short of using financial clout to silence dissent. There's no political will to change it here or there I suppose when blue and red have both got their noses in the trough.

Worth noting how many of those targeted are Black as well. 

[Buelligan]

Have any of you seen this? It's a really good article about Germany's relationship with Israel and performative 'we truly are very sorry' bullshit.

Yes, that is extremely well worth reading, thanks for linking it. 

A thought, triggered by reading it, struck, perhaps the greatest lesson of the Shoah, who am I to choose, is that human capacity for cruelty, for evil acts, monstrous evil acts towards other humans is very flexible, deeply ignorant.  We need to learn.  Desperately.  We need to learn not to protect this race or that but all races, all humans, all living creatures.  Yes.

Accordingly, Germany now sees its post-Holocaust mandate as encompassing not a broader commitment against racism and violence but a specific fealty to a certain Jewish political formation: the State of Israel. Germany has relied on its close diplomatic relationship to Israel to emphasize its repudiation of Nazism, but its connection to the Jewish state goes even further. In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Israeli Knesset to declare that ensuring Israel's security was part of Germany's "Staatsraison," the state's very reason for existence. If asked why it is worth preserving a German nationalism that produced Auschwitz, Germany now has a pleasing, historically symmetrical answer—it exists to support the Jewish state.

Not sure about the use of "Jewish state" though.  Is it useful?  I don't think so but then, as the article states, if you wash away all references to Jews, you remove them.  Difficult and probably not something for this thread.

[pancreas]

Just appeared on LRB site in advance of print:

Memory Failure - Pankaj Mishra
reviewing:
Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany
by Esra Özyürek.
Stanford, 264 pp., £25.99, March, 978 1 5036 3556 2
Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust
by Andrew Port.
Harvard, 352 pp., £30.95, May, 978 0 674 27522 5

In March� 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer's language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a 'fortress of the West' and 'I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.' Six decades on, Israel's security is Germany's Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany's proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country's Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What's more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had 'joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could'.

West Germany's munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a 'late 19th-century colonialist' who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany's long road west lay through Israel. West Germany moved fast after 1960, becoming the most important supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation. Adenauer himself explained after his retirement that giving money and weapons to Israel was essential to restoring Germany's 'international standing', adding that 'the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.'

Such was the 'unprincipled political gamesmanship', as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. 'Your philosemitism depresses me,' he wrote to a colleague, 'degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ... You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don't request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.' In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at 'the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth', who are 'of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces' and exhibit 'almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish'. Commenting on Israel's successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German 'infamies' about the Jewish people: the belief that they were 'without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else's war effort'. The Jews were in fact a 'small, brave, heroic, genius people'. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis.

Figuring Israelis as Aryan warriors – Moshe Dayan was like Erwin Rommel, according to Bild – wasn't a contradiction but an imperative for some beneficiaries of the German economic miracle. Marwecki writes that Adenauer made a major loan and the supply of military equipment 'dependent on the Israeli handling of the trial' of Adolf Eichmann: he had been shocked to learn of Mossad's discovery of Eichmann just weeks after his meeting with Ben- Gurion (he didn't know that a German Jewish prosecutor had secretly informed the Israelis about Eichmann's whereabouts) and feared what Eichmann might reveal. He went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his closest confidant, Hans Globke, wasn't fingered as an exponent of Nuremberg racial laws at the trial. Many sordid details remain locked up in the classified files of the German Chancellery and German intelligence. Bettina Stangneth found enough in the archives to show, in Eichmann before Jerusalem (2014), that Adenauer enlisted the CIA to delete a reference to Globke from an article in Life magazine. It is also now known that, acting on Adenauer's instructions, a journalist and fixer called Rolf Vogel stole potentially incriminating files on Globke from an East German lawyer at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Much to Adenauer's relief, his new Israeli allies protected Globke, keeping up their end of what Marwecki describes as the 'exchange structure specific to German- Israeli relations': moral absolution of an insufficiently de-Nazified and still profoundly antisemitic Germany in return for cash and weapons. It also suited both countries to portray Arab adversaries of Israel, including Nasser ('Hitler on the Nile'), as the true embodiments of Nazism. The Eichmann trial underplayed the persistence of Nazi support in Germany while exaggerating the Nazi presence in Arab countries, to the exasperation of at least one observer: Hannah Arendt wrote that Globke 'had more right than the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem to figure in the history of what the Jews had actually suffered from the Nazis'. She noted, too, that Ben-Gurion, while exonerating Germans as 'decent', made no 'mention of decent Arabs.

In Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, Esra Özyürek describes the way that German politicians, officials and journalists, now that the far right is in the ascendant, have been cranking up the old mechanism of sanitising Germany by demonising Muslims. In December 2022, German police foiled a coup attempt by Reichsbürger, an extremist group with more than twenty thousand members, which was planning an assault on the Bundestag. Alternative für Deutschland, which has neo-Nazi affiliations, has become the country's second most popular party, partly in response to economic mismanagement by the coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, 'white Christian-background Germans' see themselves 'as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation', according to Özyürek. The 'general German social problem of antisemitism' is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as 'the most unrepentant antisemites' in need of 'additional education and disciplining'.

Both Judaeophobia and Islamophobia have increased in Germany in the wake of the Hamas attack, Israel's scorched-earth assault on Gaza and the German government's crackdown on public displays of support for Palestine. The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with 'Arab roots' to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on 'unchecked immigration'. To denounce Germany's Muslim minority as 'the major carriers of antisemitism', as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly '90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.'

Netanyahu, too, has learned from Germany's postwar efforts at whitewashing. In 2015 he claimed that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had persuaded Hitler to murder rather than simply expel the Jews. Three years later, after initially criticising a move by the Law and Justice Party in Poland to criminalise references to Polish collaboration, he endorsed the law making such references punishable by a fine. He has since legitimised Shoah revisionism in Lithuania and Hungary, commending both countries for their valiant struggle against antisemitism. (Efraim Zuroff, a historian who has helped bring many former Nazis to trial, compared this to 'praising the Ku Klux Klan for improving racial relations in the South'.) More recently, Netanyahu accompanied Elon Musk to one of the kibbutzim targeted by Hamas, just days after Musk tweeted in support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Since 7 October, he has seemed to be reading from the Eichmann trial script. He regularly announces that he is fighting the 'new Nazis' in Gaza in order to save 'Western civilisation', while others in his cohort of Jewish supremacists keep up a supporting chorus. The people of Gaza are 'subhuman', 'animals', 'Nazis'.

This vengeful rhetoric from a damaged fortress of the West is echoed in Europe and America. White nationalists have long identified with Israel: an ethnonational state that violates international legal, diplomatic and ethical protocols with its language of ethnic homogeneity, unwavering policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called 'militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel' also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes. In Our American Israel (2018), Amy Kaplan described the way an American elite projects its fears and fantasies onto Israel. But the state-enforced philosemitism that shapes Germany's relationship to Israel belongs to another order of convolution and ferocity.

Shortly before the Hamas offensive, Israel secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. The Financial Times reported in early November that German arms sales to Israel have been surging since 7 October: the figure for 2023 is more than ten times as high as the previous year. As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing, Scholz reiterated the national orthodoxy: 'Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.' As Netanyahu's campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the commander of the Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the 'accuracy' of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.

In a more unnerving illustration of the postwar German-Israeli symbiosis, the German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which the Douglas Murray, a mouthpiece of the English far right, claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. 'Watch and listen,' retweeted Karin Prien, deputy chair of the Christian Democratic Union and education minister for Schleswig-Holstein. 'This is great,' Jan Fleischhauer, a former contributing editor at Der Spiegel, wrote. 'Really great,' echoed Veronika Grimm, a member of the German Council of Economic Experts. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, which in 2021 'outed' five Lebanese and Palestinian journalists at Deutsche Welle as antisemites, with equally flimsy evidence exposed the Indian poet and art historian Ranjit Hoskote as a calumniator of Jews for comparing Zionism with Hindu nationalism. Die Zeit alerted German readers to another moral outrage: 'Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians.' An open letter from Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn and other academics criticising Jürgen Habermas's statement in support of Israel's actions provoked an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to claim that Jews have an 'enemy' at universities in the form of postcolonial studies. Der Spiegel ran a cover picture of Scholz alongside his claim that 'we need to deport on a grand scale again.'

'German officials,' the New York Times reported – belatedly – in early December, 'have been combing through social media posts and open letters, some going back over a decade.' State-funded cultural institutions have long penalised artists and intellectuals of Global South ancestry who show any hint of sympathy for Palestinians, retracting awards and invitations; the German authorities are now seeking to discipline even Jewish writers, artists and activists. Candice Breitz, Deborah Feldman and Masha Gessen are just the latest to be 'lectured', as Eyal Weizman put it, 'by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic'.

What then of Germany's much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. 'German historical reckoning has gone haywire,' she wrote in October. 'This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.' In Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, which examines the German response to mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda and the Balkans, Andrew Port suggests that their 'otherwise admirable reckoning with the Holocaust may have unwittingly desensitised Germans. The conviction that they had left the rabid racism of their forebears far behind them may have paradoxically allowed for the unabashed expression of different forms of racism.'

This goes some way to explaining the widespread indifference in Germany to the fate of the Palestinians, and the conviction that any criticism of Israel is a form of bigotry (a stance that negates Germany's own historic support of many UN resolutions against Israeli infractions). Port could have strengthened his argument by discussing Germany's failure fully to acknowledge, let alone pay reparations for, its first genocide of the 20th century: the mass killings by German colonists in South-West Africa between 1904 and 1908. Port also gives too much credit to German memory culture, which maintained an appearance of success only because the German ruling class had, until recently, less occasion to expose its historical delusions than, for instance, the Brexiteers dreaming of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency.

In reality,� official attempts to bolster Germany's image in the present by denouncing its past have faced much domestic resistance. Rudolf Augstein, the founder and editor of Der Spiegel and another early patron of former Nazis, remarked in 1998 that Berlin's Holocaust Memorial was designed to satisfy American 'East Coast' elites. Historical memory is too volatile to be fixed by political and cultural institutions; it always seemed implausible that a collective moral education could produce a stable, homogenous attitude across the generations. There are too many other factors determining what is remembered and what is forgotten, and the German national subconscious is burdened by a century of secrecy, crimes and cover-ups. Speaking at Weimar in 1994, Jurek Becker, a rare Jewish novelist who lived in both East and West Germany, blamed the resurgence of violent neo-Nazism in unified Germany on the Nazis who, indulged and even embraced by Cold Warriors, had continued to flourish in West Germany:

    They saw to it that the look back at the Nazi past turned out as mild as possible, not brutal, and where it was possible they tried to prevent it ... They supported one another mutually and supplied influence for one another. They prevented the progress of those who had seen through them. They said that not everything had been bad in those days, you couldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometime or other they got the idea of asserting that fascism had simply been the answer to the real crime of our epoch, to Bolshevism.

Many well-placed men worked to compromise West Germans' understanding of their complicity in the Third Reich. Franz Josef Strauss, a veteran of the Wehrmacht in the 'bloodlands' of Eastern Europe who became Adenauer's defence minister and later prime minister of Bavaria, thought that the 'task of leaving the past behind us' was best accomplished by defence deals with Israel. Ralf Vogel, who claimed that 'the Uzi in the hand of the German soldier is better than any brochure against antisemitism,' now seems an early exponent of this mode of leaving the past behind – what Eleonore Sterling, a survivor of the Shoah and Germany's first female professor of political science, was by 1965 calling 'a functional philosemitic attitude' that replaces 'a true act of understanding, repentance and future vigilance'. Frank Stern's unsparing diagnosis in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge (1992) holds true today: German philosemitism, he wrote, is primarily a 'political instrument', used not only to 'justify options in foreign policy', but also 'to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and right-wing extremist phenomena'.

This is not the first time invocations of Staatsräson have been used to conceal democratic deformations. In 2021, for example, while pursuing defence deals with Israel, Germany challenged the right of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in the Occupied Territories. In mid-December, with twenty thousand Palestinians massacred and epidemics threatening the millions displaced, Die Welt was still claiming that 'Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.' German leaders continue to block joint European calls for a ceasefire. Weizman may seem to exaggerate when he says that 'German nationalism has begun to be rehabilitated and revivified under the auspices of German support for Israeli nationalism.' But the only European society that tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson. German politicians and opinion-makers are not only failing to meet their national responsibility to Israel by extending unconditional solidarity to Netanyahu, Smotrich, Gallant and Ben Gvir. As völkisch-authoritarian racism surges at home, the German authorities risk failing in their responsibility to the rest of the world: never again to become complicit in murderous ethnonationalism.

[Mr_Simnock]

Just appeared on LRB site in advance of print:
.......ring policy of territorial expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called 'militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel' also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes. In Our American Israel (2018), Amy Kaplan described the way an American elite projects i......

[Buelligan]

Just appeared on LRB site in advance of print:

...

A big read in frightening shape.  Fucking hell.

An example -

Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on 'unchecked immigration'. To denounce Germany's Muslim minority as 'the major carriers of antisemitism', as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly '90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.'

And there's so much more.

[pancreas]

"MORE GENOCIDE," opines Germany, citing its own Holocaust as justification.

[Buelligan]

[Paul Calf]

Touched on in the previous thread

So looks like people whose economies are at least in part reliant on fossil fuels will now pay even more, thanks to even more war on the planet.  Looks good for oil shares and weapons-sellers though.  Every death has a silver lining.  More and more money moves from the pockets of the little people and into the coffers of the super-wealthy. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67748605

It's going to be boom time for pirates in the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea.

[Steve Faeces]

Have any of you seen this? It's a really good article about Germany's relationship with Israel and performative 'we truly are very sorry' bullshit.

Good piece. I remember going to Hamburg years ago and meeting German leftists and being really surprised by some of their views on Israel, and not really thought of that again until recent events and the German media and political response.

[pancreas]

It's absolutely crazy the degree to which their professed ethical foundations have completely taken leave from their actual beliefs. From the evidence, Israel™️ is basically a national religion for these fucked up stupid cunts.

[Kankurette]

"MORE GENOCIDE," opines Germany, citing its own Holocaust as justification.

I wish the takeaway people got from the Holocaust was 'genocide is bad' and not 'genocide is bad unless it's against people we don't like'. Performative apologies are all very well but they don't mean dick when you're turning a blind eye to other genocides. Like, you know, the one going on in Palestine right now.

[Schnapple]

I have lived and worked in Germany for close to a decade, and have long since accepted I will always feel like an 'Auslander'. Unfortunately, I have all-but decided I am going to leave whenever convenient over the next couple of years. The 'memory culture' which once very much impressed me as something the country should be proud of, a willingness to look their crimes in the eye and honour their victims appropriately, has morphed into an appalling kind of civic pride. The article pasted above and a few others elsewhere do a better job of explaining this than I will in this short post, but it feels like the country has decided that wot gone happened was quite so singular, the majority of people have taken a perverse pride in it. And while I've come to appreciate the German mindset and philosophy in some ways, I can't think of a society less prone to introspection. Seeing the media, politicians and the public all in complete unblinkered lockstep agreement on one issue would be chilling anywhere, but it feels worse in Germany.

In Berlin alone, the local government have already defunded a cultural centre for hosting a meeting by Jewish Voice for Peace (broadly, unironically considered to be virulent, deluded antisemites), as well as a women's rights charity working against people trafficking, after one of their leaders had the temerity to say that war is bad. The government in Germany are extremely generous with the arts, institutions and individuals can secure incredible funding, but the back-office defenders of the faith are working harder than ever to trawl up anything that might be considered remotely controversial. It's an appalling state of affairs, and all the digital advertising in my largely Arab neighbourhood seems to have a particular focus on current events. Last month it was 'Deutschland Stands With Israel!' and it's currently, 'Celebrate 75 Years Of Israel.' The Jewish population in Germany is smaller than I'd imagined, perhaps for obvious reasons, and I actually know a few moderate Israelis who have more nuanced views and less willingness to swallow this self-aggrandising horseshit than the average Bild reader, so it's difficult not to read this kind of material as 'know your place' material for hundreds of thousands of people in the city, many of whom have been systematically denied the right to grieve or express basic, collective solidarity. Integration in Germany has always seemed to represent a series of parallel societies that co-exist due to the 'live and let live' attitude that most seem to at least espouse, but it is clearly still one of the most fucked up countries in the world, and the mask has certainly slipped.