UNIVERSALISM IN THE LEVANT
Alfred Bodenheimer, Swiss Professor of Jewish Literature and Religious History at the University of Basel, gave a lecture last on this May 10 on occasion of an anti-Semitism presentation at the University of Hamburg. In the audience his wife, Mrs. Bodenheimer, member of the German-Israeli Society in Hamburg, was listening when a group interrupted the lecture and insulted the Bodenheimers, calling them – among other invectives – child murderers and physically attacked Ms. Bodenheimer.
Such actions, demonstrations and aggressions directed against Israel, pro-Israel governments, Israel-explaining events and also against normal Jewish fellow citizens have been on the rise to an alarming extent in many European countries, in the USA and in Canada in recent months.
The fever seems to have passed the 40° mark.
… trying to understand and structure the excited confusion …
Israel’s warfare – ‚regardless of (any) losses‘ – directed by its current extreme right-wing government is equally criticized by the citizens of Israel and its mainstream media. A newly elected government would have to equally satisfy the need for security as a top priority and there would still be warfare. But very likely in a „more civilized“manner caring more for civilians and providing food and medical assistance to the Gazans.
Last Sunday (May 19) David Petraeus explained how under his command in Iraq he managed to vanquish the Islamic State by combining co-operation with all factions and population groups (shiite and sunnite and minority groups) and applying grouping tactics to herd and liquidate IS-fighters. Petraeus succeeded. Here is the link to view this interview on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS last Sunday, May 19:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2024/05/19/gps-0519-david-petraeus-on-israels-counterinsurgency-strategy.cnn?cid=ios_app
Noteworthy: Israel criticism is harsher (e.g.Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, +972 Magazine) than appears possible in Germany. Here the boundaries to anti-Semitism are much tighter. Germany is the Holocaust Nation. The raison d’état inhibits state functions, too.
For universalists in Germany who advocate human rights for all people – here is a cognitive dissonance.
Universalist Israeli philosophy professor Omri Boehm resolves this dissonance through constructive criticism of Israelis‘ defensive struggle. On German TV he corrected his talk master: „not despite German epochal guilt and overarching responsibility, but because of it (November 2023).
Is it possible to stand up for the Palestinians‘ right to their homeland without denying Jews theirs? What would be Omri Boehm’s reply? My guess: „yes, definitely“.
First of all, we must understand what the massacre of October 7 means for Jews … and remember that what the Holocaust means to Jews, the Nakba is the catastrophe to the Palestinians. They – the indigenous – who have been living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza since 100 years now.
Comparing these two crimes makes no sense and is counterproductive to the project of co-existence in the levantine land.
And they are historically incomparable in terms of dimensions and 1000 years, yet they are categorical for the individual Palestinian and his family.
Jews have been the persecuted ethnic group par excellence since the emergence of Christianity. This persecution, horribly and incurably engraved by constant pogroms, is an inherited and hereditary trauma, part of the DNA of a Jewish person.
The role of martyr became collateral and forced. Fighting back? Hopeless until less than 100 years ago.
Not after the Holocaust and no longer with today’s defense technology.
Auschwitz survivor Patriarch of the Zweifler-family in the 5-star ARD series(*) „The Zweiflers“to his grandson:
‚A defenceless Jew is a dead Jew‚.
* Serial about a Jewish family in today’s Frankfurt.
The poem „In the City of Massacre“ by Chaim Nachman Bialik laments the pogrom of Kishinev in Tsarist Russia (today Chișinău in Moldova) in April 1903, where 49 Jewish people were massacred and hundreds were injured.
Bodenheimer in Republik (a newsletter that is also well worth reading for non-Swiss Europeans) explains: „Bialik’s poem became so significant primarily because it was understood as an energetic rejection of the passive martyr role that had characterized the Jewish community since the Middle Ages. It became a call for the Jewish youth of the time to organize and fight back.“
HAMAS on October 7 – much more than a terrorist crime …
… and why the events of October 7 represent an incomprehensible trauma for the Jewish community.
Bodenheimer quotes from an article by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Hariri that the Hamas massacre brought precisely the pogrom situation into the territory of Israel, the prevention of which is the state’s actual purpose of existence.
… and adds in Republik: „This was nothing less than the symbolic destruction of the state itself and made it clear that Hamas interprets the concept of destruction not only politically, but genocidally.“ … „from the river to the sea“.
HAMAS – just a liberation movement?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has recently – on the occasion of the visit of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to Ankara – contradicted „an important point“:
„Hamas is not a terrorist organization“, no, they are „people who are trying to protect their people“
(from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung of May 14)
A mistake and an opinion that is held by many in America, in Europe, all over the world, and shows how fake, manipulation or simply ignorance are driving the global debate. The world’s Islamic population – wherever they are – believe this fallacy because they probably want to believe it. It seems to me that the Islamic belief is as authoritarian as the Christian belief has been over the centuries.
The pathologically criminal figure of GAZA-HAMAS leader Yahya Sinwar represents HAMAS like no other.
Ayelet Shani, Ha’aretz reports: :
„I asked Sinwar, is it worth 10.000 Gazans dying? He said, even 100.000 is worth it.„
The GAZA-HAMAS leader thus confirms that he deliberately accepts the victims among the population, whose protection is the primary task of HAMAS. Sinwar’s mission thus looks like a part of Islamism’s cult of death.
Erdogan is therefore mistaken. These are not „people who are trying to protect their people“.
(Does Erdogan believe so himself?)
In the particularist ideology of the terrorist HAMAS, people are the means, not – as in the universalist world view (Kant!) – the end.
Although universalistically inclined anyway, I confess to a special inclination towards fellow Jews. Perhaps a congeniality developed in the course of my biography. There is more affinity between Israeli people and Europeans also in terms of democratic(*) minds …
The Israelis I worked with in the 80s had enough reasons to reject me as a German – member of the Holocaust perpetrator people .
However, they accepted me and some even welcomed me as a friend. Arie and myself were even able to pass on our friendship to our daughters.
We shared the same unspoken ideas of community, the same musical interests, certainly also Kantian ethical ideas and an agnostic anchoring.
Different creeds did not separate us – they are secondary.
40 years ago, my somewhat mistrustful view of Arabs – whom I didn’t call ‚Palestinians‘ back then – was limited to them being pitiable.
Today – especially after a documentary about that multi-part series Nakba broadcast by Al Jazeera at the end of the 90s – I rather follow Boehm’s Kantian universalism as applied in his Haifa-model.
This includes recognizing human rights of the Palestinians. A body of law that has been guaranteed in ‚my‘ (20th) century. Thus injustice that had been done to them then … and is still being done to them today, must be prevented.
So I follow the news of current, blindly particularistic events in the Levant (certainly not only there) with disgust.
At many universities around the world, failure on the part of teachers is becoming apparent: have universities trained students more for content than for thinking?
In an interview in May, Gilles Kepel pointed out that „ideology has displaced knowledge(*)“ and that the debate is so charged that factual arguments no longer count. The expertise of Kepel, who to this day is a highly respected Arabic-speaking professor and orientalist for at least 30 years, is no longer in demand; not by the students, nor by the university management (Kepel’s university is Sciences Po in Paris).
Interview on ARD (7 min.on German TV): https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/ttt-titel-thesen-temperamente/gilles-kepel-ueber-die-propalaestina-proteste
à propos ‚knowledge‘: the demonstrators on the US campus were found to be shockingly ignorant. Many did not know where Palestine was located … and as far as the history of the region was concerned, the demonstrators‘ knowledge of events and developments there was quite limited – to put it politely … Geographical and historical knowledge would improve the Palestine debates and make them politically more relevant.
On the positive side, young people are motivated by the natural reflex of wanting to be fair and are usually on the side of the weaker. This is a good reflex that deserves to be protected against manipulation.
Toddlers and very young kids act out natural reflexes when they play with their peers and settle differences. These are consistent reports from nurseries.
Toddlers are born universalists … and remain so until … in the adult world.
There these natural reflexes and characteristics do not always survive the pressure of particular experiences unscathed.
All over the world, adults should help children to survive this pressure. That would be good for the world.
How about Israel?
Israel’s current excessively particularistic policies and warfare seem to amount to „a defeat in the virtual courtroom of the global public“ (SZ-Kornelius) … Kornelius continues: „Just as Hamas bears responsibility for the outbreak of this war, the Israeli prime minister bears responsibility for its course. … and without international control, a Hamastan threatens to emerge in Gaza.“
NYT columnist Thomas Friedman makes a similar argument, comparing the future Gaza to Somalia, or alternatively and constructively – Inşallah – potentially to a Levantine Dubai.
And pollster and political analyst Dahlia Scheindlin for Ha’aretz and +972 opines:
„Israelis may not feel sorry for the residents of Gaza, but the majority have seen the pictures of destruction there and believe the war is not going well. Netanyahu can be happy about the political trends in this week’s polls, but these results are a terrible indictment of Israel’s leadership.“
Is it possible to help the Palestinians restore their homeland without breaking our republic’s (constitutional) promise to defend Israel’s security within its borders?
If so which borders ? E.g., – per Wikipedia – the two states the UN General Assembly defined in November of 1947 when that body decided to divide Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state (the State of Israel founded a year later) with Jerusalem being placed under UN administration as a „corpus separatum“.
The decision then had been accepted by most Jews (who became Israeli only a year later) in Palestine, but rejected by most Arabs. As the map demonstrates, this had been quite a patchwork. Although totally inacceptable to the extreme right-wing and orthodox settler colonialists, today, it should be a starting point for the 2-States-Solution.
After 77 years of bloody conflicts and wars every two years (!), this solution can only be the „starting point“ for negotiations. The goal should be two sovereign states that provide security and a livelihood for both population groups.
Other solutions such as Resolution 242 of 1967 and the multiple agreements such as Oslo I and II could be the building blocks for these two states.
In 1967 the UN Security Council confirmed the right of the state of Israel, founded in 1948, to live within secure, negotiated borders. The same is overdue for Palestine.
The 20 years that followed was the Oslo Process.
De iure this Oslo-process is over. De facto it is not. It should be upgraded rather than merely updated.
In its very special responsibility towards the Jews and their state of Israel, the perpetrator Germany guaranteed the defense of Israel … and thus broke a moral law. It was not possible here to follow a moral law without harming the third party, the indigenous Palestinians.
Does the Roman „Non Tertium Datum“ apply here. No, because this is not a moral law, but merely a legal principle.
Martin Luther King: „An unjust law is no law“.
And the Kantian Omri Boehm: „I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to achieve moral means. But now I would almost like to claim that it is just as wrong, or even more wrong, to use moral means to achieve immoral ends.“
As this war is continuing and events happen almost daily, conditions for negotiating seem to change daily, too.
To continue …
P.S.: Ireland, Spain and Norway say they will recognize a Palestinian state.
I say: Palestinians must first ’sanitize‘ (weed corruption) and reform PLO, alternatively create another credible political force. There are very credible and able Palestinians which must come to the fore.
P.P.S.: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the Genocide Convention and to ensure its troops commit no genocidal acts in Gaza.
I say: this World Court is functioning correctly. May 25: Ha’aretz‘ Noa Landau Editor-in-Chief analyses:„Why ICJ’s Gaza Ruling is actually good for Israel.“
Last Monday (May 20) the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders.
I say: the prosecutor is doing his duty. The ICC is functioning.