Current Events

Time To Be Honest With Israel

S. NIHAL SINGH

 

 

 

Germany's greatest living writer, Gunter Grass, is forcing his country to confront a bugbear.

How long will successive generations of Germans, most of them born in the post-Nazi era, bear the burden of what Hitler did? Must Germany be bound hand and foot to what Israel chooses to do, however unjustified, in continuing to colonise Palestinians because Germans must wear sackcloth and ashes for the Holocaust till eternity?

Grass is no stranger to controversy.

The last time it was for revealing in 2006 his affiliation with the Waffen SS as a teenager in the dying days of World War II.

And recently he wrote a poem entitled “What Must be Said” on the threatened Israeli strike on Iran.

In literary terms, the poem has little merit, but in questioning Berlin’s craven attitude to Israel and Tel Aviv’s ability to blackmail Germany, it has great merit because it poses the question of guilt and punishment and a state’s policy determined by events that happened many decades ago.

This policy, it is clear, is distorting the future of Europe’s most important country, and, coupled with America’s blind support for Israel’s policy of practising apartheid in continuing to colonise Palestinians for its own reasons (the strength of the American Jewish lobby in particular), it is creating a fearful conflict in the Middle East.

Grass had anticipated the charge of being an anti-Semite, and a furious Israeli establishment has heaped calumnies on him, echoed in varying degrees by Germans long conditioned to cower before the ‘H’ word.

Berlin has built an extravagant Holocaust memorial in its capital as a sign of its penitence and, in addition to the crippling reparations it has already paid, it has supplied Tel Aviv with three Dolphin submarines with three more to come without asking any questions.

It needed an iconoclast of the stature of the Nobel Prize winner to break the taboo of not criticising Israel and slavishly following a pro-Israeli policy, in spite of the unspeakable acts committed by Tel Aviv to retain conquered land and rule over Palestinians in the post-colonial age while buttressing its already formidable military machine.

In a sense, Grass has raised the all-important point.

I have been to the Holocaust Memorial in Israel and was moved by its symbolism - until I saw buses bringing hundreds of school children to be indoctrinated in a badge of suffering substituted for statecraft. Even a tragedy of a scale of the Holocaust (somewhat dubiously presented as the greatest human tragedy in history) must have a closure. True, there is a backlash from the Left parties in Germany, but the majority in the establishment seems content to follow the well-trodden path of atonement for the wrongs committed by an earlier generation.

Must each succeeding generation of Germans hobble themselves and their country by a dark chapter in their history?

Ironically, the German Chancellor, Ms Angela Merkel, grew up and graduated in what was East Germany, which (erroneously) presented itself as the unsullied part of the Germen population. Despite the reparations and the state of the war-devastated country, Germany has achieved its present status of power and prosperity by dint of hard work and prowess in science, technology and industry.

Grass is now calling on his countrymen and women to look ahead to becoming a normal nation.

The iconoclast Grass is, he poses the question directly in his poem: Why do I only speak out now/ Aged and with my last drop of ink:/ Israel’s power is endangering/ Our already fragile world peace?

The most potent symbol of German atonement was Willy Brandt’s bowing his head before the memorial to the decimated Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. And it is open to question whether any other nation would have built a vast memorial in the heart of its capital city to remind itself in perpetuity of its past crimes.

[Compare Germany's sincere atonement with India's criminal cover-up of its own 1984 crimes.]

If Israel still pretends to be unhappy with Germany and Germans, it is chiefly for materialist and political gains. It has at least one European country, its richest, in its bag to serve the geopolitical purpose of serving its colonial goals.

Now that Grass has broken the taboo, will Germans take a fresh look at the Holocaust’s crippling legacy encouraged by Tel Aviv?

The jury is still out, but more Germans are asking questions.

One result of the supine attitude of the German establishment is the growth of the neo-Nazi movement symbolised most recently by the confessed murderer of 77 innocent people, mostly youth, by the Norwegian far-right proponent, Anders Breivik. He has merged multiculturalism with immigrants, in particular Muslims, destroying the "purity" of the "white" race.

It is for socialists to determine how far the self-flagellation indulged in by succeeding German governments is responsible for the revival of neo-Nazism. But it is common sense that, on the analogy of giving a dog a bad name, the constant Israeli and Jewish drumbeat of Nazi crimes makes a new generation restless and looking for extreme ideologies.

The recession in Europe and the privations of belt-tightening for post-war generations enjoying the peace dividend in the levels of affluence they achieved make immigrants of a different ethnicity the scapegoats. It is a dangerous mix that could spell a disaster for the future of Germany and Europe.

The ball is now in the court of the German establishment.

Ms Merkel and her party and the larger German elite must now demonstrate that penitence has its limits and there comes a time when Germany should take its rightful place in Europe and the world.

The world is watching and waiting now that Gunter Grass has sounded the bugle.

 

[Courtesy: Tribune. Edited for sikhchic.com]

April 22, 2012

 

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