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  Israel's 60th Anniversary: The Poisoned Congratulations of German Know-It-Alls

Israel's 60th Anniversary The Poisoned Congratulations of German Know-It-Alls

By Henryk M. Broder

Part 2: 'A Total Lack of Historical Substance'

An open letter signed by 120 academics caused a Europe-wide stir in 2002. The letter called for academic relations to be frozen between Israel and European countries in protest against Israel's policies. In other words, the cultural and scientific cooperation between the countries should be stopped. The letter went largely unnoticed in Germany, for a very simple reason -- only two of the 120 signatories were German.

Meanwhile, there is hardly any well-known writer who has not made some kind of statement about Israel. Jostein Gaarder, the Norwegian author of the bestseller "Sophie's World," wrote Israel out of the pages of history with the words: "We no longer recognize the State of Israel." Gore Vidal, the American author who lives in self-imposed exile in Italy, South Africa's Breyten Breytenbach and the Portuguese author Jose Saramago have all also expressed their opinions, with latter comparing the situation in Ramallah to Auschwitz. When asked where the gas chambers were, he reportedly replied: "There are no gas chambers, yet."

One floor lower, we find people such as Thilo Bode, the former director of Greenpeace Germany. Bode believes that "refraining from criticizing Israel is immoral." Germany, Bode feels, should help "Israel to learn a lesson which Germany itself has successfully learned, namely the historical costs of subjugating others."

The most striking thing about such statements is not just the total self-assurance with which they are made, but also the total lack of historical substance: The same people who feel responsible for the fate of the Palestinians and feel driven to give Israel advice, want to be released from the historical responsibility for the fate of the Jews, which has weighed on them for over 60 years as a heavy burden. As early as the late 1960s, the Berlin revolutionary Dieter Kunzelmann called on the Germans to get over their "Jewish problem."

And little changed has until now, except that the language has become a little more subtle. Significant parts of the German intelligentsia see it as their task to watch day and night to make sure that the Jews (in other words, Israelis) do not backslide and do not gamble away the moral credit that they gained by being the victim of the Nazis. But Israel's original sin isn't its poor treatment of the Palestinians but rather the fact that it makes it so hard for those nice Germans to like the Jews.

Many years ago, an article appeared in German weekly Die Zeit, with an appeal to the "responsible men of the government of Israel." The author said they should pause and recognize "how far they have already come along that path which recently led another people to doom."

That was on Sept. 23, 1948, just four months after the founding of Israel. The author? The German journalist and intellectual Marion Dönhoff.

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