When ambiguity isn't an option

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Much of the rest of the world decided that, at the point when the Palestinian death toll exceeded the Israeli one, Israel had become the perpetrator. 

That is a childish and gullible reaction that Hamas had calculated into its despicable plan. Yet, six weeks into the war, it seems increasingly clear that Germany is one of the few countries that is yet to fall for it. 

While other Western partners have buckled to international pressure and attempted to present themselves as peacemakers, Berlin has doubled down.

Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck published a must-watch video in which he clearly set out why Hamas needed to be defeated: “Hamas is a terror organisation that fights for the destruction of the state of Israel and the death of all Jews,” he stated in a simple comment that boiled the conflict down to its essence.

Olaf Scholz, meanwhile, has resisted increasing calls for a prolonged "humanitarian" ceasefire.

"I am happy to admit that I don't think the demand that some are making for an immediate ceasefire or a long pause - which is more or less the same thing - is right," the chancellor said.

A pause in fighting, he pointed, "would mean that Israel should let Hamas recover and buy new rockets again, so that they can fire them again. That will not be acceptable."

As well as engaging in tireless diplomatic work to prevent an international coalition being built against Israel, Germany has also pledged to supply military gear.

Meanwhile, the euphemisms bandied around in the Anglophone press, whereby Hamas' murderers are turned into “gunmen”, are completely unacceptable on the pages of a German newspaper. In the German press, Hamas are terrorists and their attack - still referred to in English newspapers as “raids” - were a Vernichtungsangriff (annihilatory attack).

And, whereas an intellectual justification (apartheid state, anti-colonialism etc) for excluding Israel from the international community has crept into the intellectual life of countries like the UK and the US, such ideas and the boycotts they entail are largely taboo in Germany.

Why is Berlin so much more decisive than capitals in the rest of the world, where cynicism or cowardice appears to be driving ever more hostile attitudes to Israel?

Quite simply, no country is as aware of why Israel needs to exist as Germany. And Germany is maybe the only nation other than the Jewish one that understands anti-Semtism in all its murderous logic.

Because Germany's Erinneriugskultur has forced it to take an unflinching look at its own past, it has drawn hard lessons from its own history.

German politicians and intellectuals understand that civilian deaths alone can't possibly tell the whole story of a war. Indeed, it can be misleading to give them too much weight.

To this day, remembering the dead of the firebombing of Dresden is a highly fraught matter due to the fact that dark political forces still want to use the civilian dead of Dresden to force a “re-evaluation” of German history.

The post-war history of tackling neo-Nazism is the history of fighting attempts to instrumentalise the deaths of German civilians to blur the lines between civilisation and barbarism. 

Perhaps Germany's own history also gives it a deeper appreciation of what Hamas aspires to. The German public seems to grasp more easily than other western publics that a fanatical Jew-hating movement will stop at nothing - including the mass deaths of its own civilians - to achieve its insane ends.

A fascist organisation hiding command centres under hospitals isn’t such a stretch of the imagination for a country that sent children out to defend Berlin in a crazed fight to the death in 1945.

The question is: will Berlin apply these lessons more widely at a time when the attack on Israel is only one piece of the puzzle of heightened attacks on our civilisational order?

Domestically at least, Germany has always understood that liberalism needs to have teeth. That's why, rather uniquely among western democracies, the constitutional court can ban parties that seek to undermine democracy.

Internationally though, Scholz' clear words on Israel come in stark contrast to his obfuscation on Ukraine, a war zone where he still seems to have misplaced his moral compass.

Berlin has refused to equip Kyiv with Taurus cruise missiles that could kill Russian commanders far behind enemy lines. And its military support was too slow and too timid to stop the Russian army digging in ahead of Kyiv's counter attack.

Maybe the attack on Israel, clearly conducted with the support and go-ahead of Hamas' financial backers in Tehran, will wake the chancellor up to the need for an unambiguous response across the globe.

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What members are reading:

Last year Olaf Scholz’ government passed a major welfare reform that cut sanctions on the jobless and increased the size of their financial support. Conservatives are convinced that the support is now so generous that people are quitting the jobs en masse because work simply doesn’t pay anymore. What is the truth of the matter?