www.ssoar.info Shadows from the Past: the Nazi-Regime, the Holocaust, and Germany's Relationship towards the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Krell, Gert Veröffentlichungsversion / Published Version Arbeitspapier / working paper Zur Verfügung gestellt in Kooperation mit / provided in cooperation with: Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK) Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Krell, G. (2015). Shadows from the Past: the Nazi-Regime, the Holocaust, and Germany's Relationship towards the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. (PRIF Working Papers, 26). Frankfurt am Main: Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-456272 Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Deposit-Lizenz (Keine This document is made available under Deposit Licence (No Weiterverbreitung - keine Bearbeitung) zur Verfügung gestellt. Redistribution - no modifications). 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Sie dürfen dieses Dokument document in public, to perform, distribute or otherwise use the nicht in irgendeiner Weise abändern, noch dürfen Sie document in public. dieses Dokument für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke By using this particular document, you accept the above-stated vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, aufführen, vertreiben oder conditions of use. anderweitig nutzen. Mit der Verwendung dieses Dokuments erkennen Sie die Nutzungsbedingungen an. 1 Shadows from the Past: The Nazi‐Regime, the Holocaust, and Germany’s Relationship towards the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict Gert Krell ABSTRACT As a consequence of the Holocaust, Israel’s security is officially regarded as part of Germany’s “reason of state”. Yet the criteria for a responsible relationship between Germany and Israel are by no means self-evident or without logical or practical contradictions. One of the complications is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In order to better understand this complication, I examine two familiar national narratives, one from each side, about possible connections between the Nazi era, the Holocaust, and this conflict. I also put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a broader historical context. It turns out that the examined relationships are not as obvious as the familiar narratives describe them. The origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are older than the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and they also point to broader European responsibilities more generally, to Europe’s nationalism, anti-Semitism, colonialism and imperialism – with irresponsibilities towards both Jews and Arabs. In no way does such a comprehensive perspective affect Germany’s special histori- cal responsibilities resulting from the Holocaust. But it puts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a more complete and also more honest framework, with consequences for Germany’s moral and political position. 1 1. HISTORY AND RESPONSIBILITY IN GERMANY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ISRAEL The terms “history” and “responsibility” are used heavily in connection with the relations between Germany and Israel, more than in any other inter-state relationship; yet neither of them is self- evident. On January 21st, 2009, quite a number of viewers of the established German TV talk-show “hart aber fair” (tough but fair) must have felt embarrassed, when Norbert Blüm, a high-ranking member of the Christian Democrats’ labour wing (he had been Minister for Labour and Social Security from 1982 to 1998) and almost everywhere considered a courageous and upright person, used the German experience of the Nazi crimes as a legitimizing basis for criticizing Israel’s human rights violations in the Gaza war, which he called a Vernichtungskrieg (war of annihilation). When talk-master Frank Plasberg suggested that this was a dubious term in the debated case, Blüm insist- ed on it. Blüm’s doubly strange message was obvious, at least between the lines: We Germans had learned our lessons from the Holocaust; it was time that the Jews did that, too (see Krell 2009). In German discourse, perhaps inevitably, Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have always been objects not only of factual analysis, but also of projections resulting from guilt or the defense against it. Germany may have done better than other countries in addressing and working through their major historical crimes, but its self-image as a nation with an exemplary record has serious cracks. While, fortunately, Holocaust denial is no longer a significant position, embarrassing dis- tortions of “the past” or the present in view of “the past” continue or are discovered constantly, even 70 years after the end of World War II. They involve not only respected German politicians 1 This article is a revised and updated version of earlier writings in German (see in particular Krell 2004, 2008, 2009a and 2011). A similar paper will be published under the title “History and Responsibility: Germany’s Relationship towards the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, in: Alfred Wittstock (Ed.), Rapprochement, Change, Perceptions, and Shaping the Fu- ture. 50 Years of German-Israeli and Israeli-German Diplomatic Relations, Berlin 2016. I am grateful for suggestions and critical comments by Martin Altmeyer, Reiner Bernstein and Dieter Senghaas. PRIF Working Paper No. 26 2 but also great minds in philosophy or literature. On the basis of formerly unpublished material, we today know that Martin Heidegger, who is often regarded as one of Germany’s greatest philoso- phers of the 20th century, made some of the worst possible remarks about the Holocaust you may think of (Probst 2015). The recently deceased Günter Grass, one of Germany’s most famous writers and an active zoon politikon, gave Tom Segev a terrible interview in 2011 in which he suggested that the Russians had “liquidated” (his terminology) “six million” (his figure) German prisoners of war. Actually, only three million German soldiers had ever been Soviet prisoners, and of those one million died, most- ly from the catastrophic living conditions in a war-torn USSR, devastated by Germany’s aggression and war of annihilation (Heer 2014, p. 72). And in 2012, Grass wrote an infamous political poem about Israel’s conflict with Iran’s nuclear program in which he suggested that Israel was (the Jews were?) not only the major or even the single danger to peace in the region but also a major threat to world peace, and that it was willing to risk annihilation of the Iranians and with them even the whole world in a global nuclear war, and all that because it was taking a big-mouth seriously with- out evidence (see Krell 2012 and Krell/Müller 2012).2 My generation of the rebellious, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist 68ers, too young to have been involved in the Nazi crimes or born after the war, tried their own strategies of escape. We would be totally different from our parents and thus remain untarnished by unpleasant continuities. That turned out an illusion, as the aberrations and violent offenses, some against Jews or Israel, by the Red Army Faction and its supporters vividly demonstrate (Koenen 2011, pp. 331–335; Altmeyer 2007, 2007a). We did not regard our “late birth” as exculpation from responsibility, yet we prac- ticed our own kind of de-realization. Simply cutting the generational bond with our parents, who very often had been active Nazis or at least sympathized with the “Third Reich”, was ill suited to overcoming our own subtle and subconscious impregnation by an extremely nationalistic, racist and violent and yet, at its time, widely accepted and supported political tradition. In this respect, there had been no “zero hour” in Germany in 1945. Leaving the obvious and revealing misrepresentations or misdeeds aside, the criteria for an appro- priate German relationship with Israel are still not self-evident or without logical or practical con- tradictions. An important part of the official German solution to history and responsibility is the “non-negotiable support” of Israel’s security. The symbolical weight of such a commitment should not be underrated, particularly since it does have material substance; e.g. weapons deliveries al- ready in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the US still held on to its arms embargo.3 Yet the question remains, how Israel’s security can be assured best and what solidarity with Israel actually means. In a poll of 2008, 53 percent of the respondents (65 percent in the group aged 30 to 39) saw “no special responsibility towards Israel”. 58 percent agreed that Germany should support Israel politically if it was attacked; 82 percent came out against financial support and 81 against support with soldiers (Jüdische Zeitung, June 2008, p.1). In a more recent poll, 58 percent of the Germans asked wanted to draw a “final line” under the history of the German persecution of the Jews, com- pared to 60 in a poll of 1991. On the other hand, the figure for those who considered the Shoah still relevant for the present rose from 20 percent in 1991 to 38 in 2014 (Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 15, 2015, p. 1). Israel should live within secure borders, is the obvious, often repeated, and widely shared German position, yet with the clear understanding that, in material geographical terms, such secure borders 2 Frank Schirrmacher, 1994–2014 one of the chief editors of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called Grass’ poem “a lousy work of resentment”, www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/eine-erlaeuterung-was-grass-uns-sagen-will, p.