The Warped Mirror: Inventing new Nazi victims

A week ago, the Israeli branch of the German Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and Netanya College organized a debate on a manifesto published in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war by a group of 25 German social scientists, most of whom work on conflict resolution and peace research. According to the Ebert-Foundation website, the manifesto calls for a re-evaluation of Germany's relationship with Israel, arguing that the friendship between the two countries has become mature enough to allow for criticism. That sounds like a rather reasonable argument, because there is indeed little justification for the notion that German history should oblige Germans to be completely uncritical of Israeli policies. But the manifesto does more than just claim a right to criticize Israel - it also attempts to rewrite history.

Consider this report, which, when checked against the original German text of the manifesto, is indeed quite accurate: "According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is 'one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention.' It [i.e. the manifesto] went on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about 'the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable.'" 

That was how the Iranian Press TV website reported about the initiative of the German academics under the title "German intellectuals have urged their country to change its Holocaust-rooted blind support of Israel in the Middle East conflict". Since the manifesto eerily echoes some of Ahmadinejad’s favorite fantasies about the "root cause" of the Middle East conflict, it is no surprise that among the Iranian president’s admirers, the initiative of the German academics was well received: Hizbullah's English language website featured the Y-Net report about the conference, a Google-hosted group dedicated to "Satan's Little Helpers -- The Zionofascists" provided relevant links to the anti-Semitic "Ziopedia" which offered a gushing "editorial" proclaiming "If the Germans owe anyone then it is the Palestinians, not the Jews."

Some of these websites have to be more careful because they are watched by the authorities, and therefore they make do with simply posting articles from the mainstream press, hinting at how they want their readers to understand the piece just by assigning a filename or hyperlink. Thus, an article in which I criticized the manifesto shortly after it was published in fall 2006 was posted by the Australian-based Holocaust denial group Adelaide Institute under the title "Germans stand up to Jews". 

Individual bloggers also applauded the German academics. As one pro-Palestinian blogger wrote: "If German intellectuals want to point out that the creation of Israel is the root cause of injustice to Palestinians, they are more than welcome." He also thought that Professor Moshe Zimmermann of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who had argued against the German academics in the debate at Netanya College deserved a "Most Worthless Human Being Award". And, unsurprisingly, Norman Finkelstein noted on his website with some satisfaction: "Germans Confront the Holocaust Industry, Finally". 

Given this list of admirers, it is hard to resist the temptation to say to the German academics: Tell me who your friends are, and I tell you who you are. As noted above, the issue is not that Germans should be obliged to suppress any criticism of Israel, the issue is the attempt of the manifesto's authors to justify their criticism of Israel by rewriting history. In their view, Israel's owes its existence exclusively or primarily to the Holocaust, and thus they implicitly deny that Zionism was a legitimate quest for a Jewish homeland.

The text of the manifesto emphasizes that the UN decision to "accept" the establishment of the State of Israel was taken still under the "shock" of the Holocaust and "against the Arab states"; therefore, the Middle East conflict and particularly the plight of the Palestinians should ultimately be seen as having German and European roots, because with the creation of Israel, "a part of the European problems was transferred to the Middle East".

But if "a part of the European problems was transferred to the Middle East", it is a part that the authors of the manifesto conveniently ignore: Nazi-style anti-Semitism. As the German scholar Matthias Küntzel argues in his recently published book "Jihad and Jew-Hatred", the spreading of  anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda among Muslims in the Middle East was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, which found willing collaborators in Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

One thing is for sure: given the enthusiastic cooperation of the mufti with the Nazis, the Palestinians would not have been among the victims, if the Nazis had won. To consider them now victims of the Nazis anyway clearly takes some advanced degree in academic acrobatics and an appalling lack of intellectual integrity.