In Gaza, Israeli forces are precision bombing the homes and cars of journalists and poets, children and grandmothers, Red Cross convoys, and buses of Palestinian refugees attempting to follow Israeli orders to evacuate the north, followed by the south. Around half of the region, one of the most densely populated in the world, stands under evacuation orders. Eighty-five percent of Gaza’s population is already displaced. Half of the buildings in northern Gaza are damaged or destroyed. More children are being killed in air strikes per day than at any time in any modern conflict. Fifteen thousand Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, have been killed, surpassing by far those killed in the 1988 Halabja massacre in Iraq, the nearest single event I can think of in which a country massacred a civilian population so openly, with such overwhelming force, the evidence captured on camera and televised internationally, while world powers looked on, unmoved.
There is a popular pro-Israel slogan heard at protests in Germany: “Save Gaza from Hamas.” It is a variation of a phrase I remember from the schoolyard: “Stop hitting yourself.” As everyone knows, it is Israel dropping the bombs, Israel erecting the walls and borders, Israel making the calculation that mass civilian death is an appropriate punishment for a population that harbors, tolerates, or even suffers and survives under enemies of its state. I have watched videos of point-blank executions of pedestrians carried out by Israeli soldiers. I have watched Israeli soldiers broadcasting Jewish prayers from occupied mosques. I have heard Prime Minister Netanyahu pledge to enact the Biblical destruction of “Amalek” and to reduce parts of Gaza “to rubble,” have heard the Israeli Army spokesperson promise to make all of Gaza a “city of tents” and I heard the Israeli defense minister claim “we are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Israel’s president has said that not only Hamas but “an entire nation,” meaning all Palestinians, were responsible for the attack. A member of Israel’s parliament agreed it was “time for a doomsday weapon” for “crushing and flattening Gaza” and the minister of heritage said there were no non-combatants in Gaza and Israel should drop a nuclear bomb on the region. And 151 countries in the United Nations voted to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and the United States and Germany were among the only countries to vote against it.
It is by no means a universal German affliction, but the journalists and politicians who control German-language public discourse, where Palestinians are routinely demonized, seem to believe that to “save Gaza from Hamas,” Gaza must be destroyed, its population wiped from the map. It is even with a kind of suppressed glee that certain leaders, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz and CDU head Friedrich Merz, pledge their support to Israel. It is the starched German pleasure of voyeuristic moral transgression: to enjoy the spectacle of mass slaughter without having to break any rules yourself.
Even to those not cheering it on, the deaths of thousands of Palestinians have exposed an internal contradiction Germans seem unable to overcome. On the one hand, their country is a democracy, bound to postwar principles of a free and open society. On the other hand, Germans are committed by decades of educational reprogramming to a vision of their country and race as uniquely suspect, with German nationalism the dark ensorcelling weapon responsible for the crimes of their grandparents. Support for Israel thus appears to many as a transposable form of German nationalism, one that remains kosher in the postwar era. It is simultaneously the form of philo-Semitism most legible to a body politic that remains fundamentally nineteenth-century (i.e. ethnonationalist) in character, a body for whom third-generation German citizens remain “of migration background” so long as they are not ethnically, which is to say fully, German.
Within Germany, any questioning of German or U.S. support for Israel’s bombardment, even by Jews and Israelis themselves, is suspect, liable to be labeled antisemitic by the country’s leaders. After October 7, there was an initial slate of brutal police crackdowns on Palestinian support. In the cultural sphere, where the state holds the purse strings to many of the country’s major theaters, museums, galleries, and publishing houses, there have been silencings, cancelled shows, and withdrawn prizes and support. A boycott of German cultural life by international artists and scholars appears to be brewing.
I recently purchased a book that suggests how Germany’s progressive institutions might, under other circumstances, have reacted differently. Territories: Islands, Camps, and other States of Utopia accompanied a major 2003 exhibition at the state-funded KW: Institute for Contemporary Art, in Berlin. The exhibition was co-curated by two now-famous Israeli architects — Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal — together with Stefano Boeri and the German curator Anselm Franke. The exhibition focused heavily on Israel and the West Bank, and included “a new map of the West Bank, jointly produced by the architect team and the Israeli Human Rights Organization B’tselem,” which “shows for the first time the total fragmentation of the terrain in its current state, including the actual shapes of the settlements and their legal boundaries.”
It goes without saying that such an exhibition — with connected essays and related work titled “A Civilian Occupation,” “Military Operations as Urban Planning,” “Model State” (on 1940s architectural models of Israeli settlements in Palestine) and “Apartheid Cartography” (on Bosnia) — would be impossible to mount today in Germany, that all involved parties would be cancelled under accusations of antisemitism. And Territories looks astonishingly prescient: on the militarization of urban space, the settlers’ battles for the hilltops of the West Bank, and the openly dehumanizing language used by Israeli leaders to describe Palestinians.
It is agonizing to see how much worse things are now than in 2003, in Gaza as well as the West Bank (where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since October 7 by armed settlers). Documenting the catastrophe is often a fatal task in itself. No militant group — not Mexican narco-gangs nor the far-right militias of Rodrigo Duterte nor even ISIS — has been deadlier for journalists performing their jobs than the State of Israel.
Will there ever be justice? What kind? In the immediate aftermath of the Halabja attack and the Anfal campaigns in Kurdistan, U.S. intelligence was divided on the culprit, with some agents suggesting—in the face of evidence and common sense—that Iran may have been responsible. But soon enough, the West knew what had happened: Saddam Hussein and his military executioner, “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majid, had dropped chemical weapons on Iraqi citizens in an effort to terrorize and destroy a long-subjugated, colonized minority. “As time went on, it appears that US and British intelligence agencies did indeed have a fairly clear idea of what was happening,” historian Peter Sluglett writes, “[but] clearly realized that forthright public condemnation would be bad for business and kept silent.”
And so, even as the nature and extent of the attacks became clear, little was done to condemn, much less punish, Hussein’s government. There were no sanctions. A bill to cut $800 million in export credit guarantees died in Congress. The U.S. was a major importer of produce to Iraq, and agriculture lobbyists did not want to rock the onion boat. Only decades later, in 2003, once it became a convenient clarion for regime change, did the U.S. broadcast Hussein’s use of chemical weapons as proof that Iraq had and was producing weapons of mass destruction. (“I can't tell you that Saddam Hussein was a murderous tyrant. You know that," Colin Powell said when he visited Halabja the September after the U.S. invasion, which, unsurprisingly, many Kurds supported. "What I can tell you is that what happened here in 1988 is never going to happen again.”) Chemical Ali was tried and executed. Halabja became a cypher of “never again” remembrance, like Auschwitz or the Cambodian killing fields, and, some years later, a pilgrim site for memory tourists. Will this be Gaza’s fate?
After an amnesty was called, doctors and geneticists visited Halabja and collected evidence that a bouquet of toxic gases had been used there, including mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and even VX (the “V” stands for venomous), discovered by the British and produced in huge quantities by the United States in the 1960s at a chemical depot in Newport, Indiana. Hussein later testified that his government had researched but failed to weaponize VX, and — as everyone knows — after the second U.S. invasion, no stockpiles or production facilities for any weapons of mass destruction were found. Some believe the U.S., which supported the coup that brought the Ba’athist regime to power, had decades earlier armed Hussein with chemical weapons to use against the Kurds. One investigation suggested that at least some of the weapons came from Singapore and India, and that certain chemical precursors came from West Germany. But there has never been conclusive evidence. In the end, chemical weapons, like ideas and money, are all but impossible to trace across borders.
//
Some Updates
In October, I helped to organize and write an open letter from more than 120 Jewish artists, writers, and scholars living in Germany. The letter, published in German in taz and in English in n+1, condemned “a disturbing crackdown on civic life in the wake of this month’s horrifying violence in Israel and Palestine.” Serious infringements of civil rights, we wrote, “are taking place almost entirely without comment from Germany’s cultural elites.” That remains largely the case, although there is thankfully now more open criticism than in the early weeks of the conflict. The letter ends with the following sentiment, which continues to describe the crisis of free expression in Germany:
Dissent is a requirement of any free and democratic society. Freedom, wrote Rosa Luxemburg, “is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” As our Arab and Muslim neighbors are beaten and silenced, we fear the atmosphere in Germany has become more dangerous—for Jews and Muslims alike—than at any time in the nation’s recent history. We condemn these acts committed in our names.
The letter was covered by many of Germany’s major media outlets, who had previously done little to report on the state’s violent suppression of pro-Palestinian voices. Even if much domestic coverage of the letter was neutral or negative (one especially embarrassing response from a Jewish newspaper even hinting that the signatories were not real Jews), outside of Germany, the letter was well-received and included in coverage of Germany’s crackdown in The Washington Post, The Nation, Artnet, Coda, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times, whose reporting on Germany’s crackdown drew heavily on our work.
I spoke with Hanno Hauenstein for an interview in Neues Deutschland.
I was quoted in stories related to Germany’s crackdown that appeared in Jewish Currents and Der Freitag.
Also in October, 2023’s Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology was published. An essay of mine was chosen for inclusion.
In November, I joined an overcrowded room and wrote my own report from Germany for The Dial on Germany’s crackdown on civil liberties.
In December, also for The Dial, Carleen Coulter and I reported from the northernmost county in Europe. The result is a photo essay documenting the collision of Norwegian wind energy projects and reindeer herding in the far north. I wrote a short accompanying text, but will write much more about it in the final chapter in my book (about which I will have more to say in the new year, if we get there).
xo
Ben