German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said last Thursday that “the suffering and hardship of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip will only increase. Hamas is also responsible for this.” But is there any limit to this increase in suffering, given that you and your colleagues in the West have expressed unlimited support for Israel?
Will you acquiesce in 2,000 Palestinian children being killed? Are 80,000 elderly people who may die of dehydration because there is no water in Gaza a legitimate increase in suffering in your eyes?
You also said, “Our own history, our responsibility arising from the Holocaust, makes it an everlasting task for us to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel.” But Scholz, there’s a contradiction between this sentence and the one quoted above.
“Suffering... will only increase” is a blank check for a wounded, hurting Israel to pulverize and destroy and kill without restraint, and risks embroiling us all in a regional war, if not a third world war, which would also endanger Israel’s security and existence. But “responsibility arising from the Holocaust” means doing everything possible to prevent war, which leads to disasters that lead to wars that increase suffering, in an endless cycle.
I learned this from my father, a survivor of the German cattle cars. As far back as 1992, every time I returned from Gaza with reports about Israel’s oppression of its residents, he would tell me, “True, this isn’t a genocide like we went through, but for us, it ended after five or six years. For the Palestinians, the suffering has gone on and on, for decades.” It’s an ongoing Nakba.
You Germans have long since betrayed your responsibility, the one “arising from the Holocaust” – that is, from the murder of my parents’ families, among others, and the suffering of the survivors. You betrayed it by your unreserved support for an Israel that occupies, colonizes, deprives people of water, steals land, imprisons two million Gazans in a crowded cage, demolishes homes, expels entire communities from their homes and encourages settler violence.
And all this has happened under the auspices of a so-called peace agreement that you and other Western leaders embraced. You allowed Israel to act contrary to this agreement in its European interpretation – as a path to the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories Israel occupied in 1967, and which many Palestinians supported precisely because of their desire to prevent further suffering and bloodshed.
There is no shortage of diplomats and employees of development agencies who have reported on how hundreds of thousands of young Palestinians have lost all hope, and all meaning to their lives, under Israel’s arrogant oppression and its killing of civilians – sometimes in dribs and drabs, sometimes in waves. Palestinian human rights activists have warned over and over that Israel’s policy could only lead to an eruption of unimaginable proportions. Israeli and Jewish anti-occupation activists also warned you.
But you stuck to your path, sending Israel the message that everything was fine – that nobody will punish it or teach Israelis by means of forceful diplomatic and political steps that there can be no normalcy alongside occupation. And then you accuse Israel’s critics of antisemitism.
No, this column is not a justification of the orgy of murder and sadism that Hamas’ armed men perpetrated. Nor is it a justification of some Palestinians’ gleeful reactions and others’ refusal to address the atrocities committed in their name.
Rather, it is a call to you to stop the current campaign of death and destruction before it brings another catastrophe down on millions of Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and maybe even residents of other countries in the region.