The Palestine Chronicle
April 14, 2012
Gunter Grass, German Guilt, and We’re the Ones Who Pay
By Susan Abulhawa
No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you’ve achieved in
your life or what gifts you’ve given to the rest of humanity, if you
criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata. You
should expect an utter onslaught of attacks. Otherwise rational and
decent people will, one by one, genuflect and sign onto the stupid
clichés and tiresome accusations that question your character,
integrity and even sanity. You will be called an anti-Semite, or a
self-hating Jew if you happen to be Jewish. The Holocaust will be
invoked. You’ll be reminded of Hitler and Himmler and Goebbles and
perhaps likened to Nazis, or Capos if you’re Jewish. You’ll be accused
explicitly or implicitly of secretly supporting the genocide of Jews
and having a deep seeded desire for it.
Incredibly, this dumbfounding nonsense does not occur among the
paranoid fringe, but in mainstream culture!
It happened to moral authorities like Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu and
Jimmy Carter, both of whom were called anti-Semites, crazy old fools,
and worse, for daring to criticize Israel’s criminal policies toward
Palestinians – the natives of the Holy Land. It happened to renowned
scholars like John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt for publishing a
well-documented and supported audit of Israel’s manipulation of US
foreign policy through their domestic proxy lobby. Richard Goldstone
was so chastised, shunned, and punished by his own community for
reporting his findings that Israel had committed war crimes and crimes
against humanity in Gaza that he utterly discredited himself as a
jurist by retracting his well-reasoned legal conclusions based on
irrefutable evidence, which was nonetheless upheld by all his
colleagues and by the international legal community. Among many
abuses, they called him a capo and a self-hating Jew and he was
prevented from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Those labels too
have been hurled at intellectuals like Norman Finkelstein and Noam
Chomsky – the latter actually banned by Israel from entering the West
Bank to speak at Bir Zeit University. The list is too long for one
article, but it stretches the full breadth of international thinkers,
artists, intellectuals, clergy, moral authorities, and political
figures. No one is immune from this insanity.
But the world still has brave people who are willing to take
significant risks for the rest of humanity. Pulitzer Prize winning
author, Alice Walker, renowned crime fiction writer Henning Mankel, 84
year old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, and many like them risked
their lives to break the siege of Gaza when they boarded the Flotilla,
an unarmed group of people carrying humanitarian aid who were
attacked, and some killed by Israeli forces. Others, like Nobel
Laureate Mairead McGuire, likewise have risked the abuse and attacks
that come with speaking up for the rights of Palestinians against
Israel’s unchecked aggression.
The latest case in point is Gunter Grass, the German Nobel Laureate
who dared to suggest glaringly obvious truths: that Israel has a
robust nuclear program and it’s hinted intention to attack Iran is a
threat to world stability.
Of course, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” is
banning him from ever entering the Holy Land, which happens to be my
homeland. I’m barred from living there, too, but for different
reasons. By the laws of the state of Israel, I am not the right kind
of human being to inherit my family’s property and live where all my
ancestors have dwelled for millennia. But I digress.
Gunter Grass has entered forbidden intellectual and political
territory and the criticism against him has been intense. The other
side of Germany’s silence when it comes to Israel is loud and sure
chastising of Israel’s critics. Every article here in the mainstream
US press mentions Germany’s “understandable” reluctance to criticize
Israel, as if it’s a foregone and logical conclusion that it’s
perfectly fine for Germany to sit on the sidelines – eyes, ears, and
lips sealed – sending aid and weapons to a country that has placed
itself above the law, a country with one of the worst human rights
records in the world, and one that is engaged in systematic ethnic
cleansing of the native population of the land it occupies.
As a member of that native population, I do not accept that it is
“understandable” for Germany to continue blindly supporting Israel no
matter what. It is convenient, for sure. Because Germany is not the
one paying for its sins. We, the Palestinians are. Everything – home,
heritage, life, resources, hope – has been robbed from us to atone for
Germany’s sins. To this day, we languish in refugee camps that are not
fit for human beings so that every Jewish man and woman can have dual
citizenship, one in their own country and one in mine. We are the ones
who find ourselves at the other end of the weapons that Germany
supplies to Israel. It is Palestine that is being wiped off the map.
It is our society that is being destroyed. Of course Germany’s silence
is easy and convenient, but “understandable” it is not.
Israel is not Judaism. It is a nuclear power with the most advanced
death machines ever known to man, which it unleashes frequently
against a principally unarmed civilian population that dares to demand
freedom. It is a country that is currently in violation of hundreds of
UN resolutions and nearly every tenet of international law. It is a
country that has been condemned by every human rights organization
that has ever investigated the situation on the ground there. It is a
country with multi-tied legal and social infrastructure that measures
the worth of a human being by his or her religion. It is the
regionally bully that has refused a comprehensive peace proposal set
forth by all Arab states. It has in the past attacked Egypt, Lebanon,
Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, all on the pretext of pre-emption. And now it
wants to attack Iran under the same pretext, citing the tired
“existential threat” mantra.
We are reminded of the Jewish holocaust. But there is no need because
we remember it. We also remember the Armenians, the Serbs, and we
remember Rwanda. We remember the holocaust of the extermination of
Native Americans and we remember the holocaust of slavery – 200 years
of kidnapping, buying, and selling human beings as a commodity. And we
remember Deir Yasin, Sabra and Shatila, Qibya, and the many other
atrocities Israel has committed against Palestinians.
But no matter how great or unspeakable the crimes, victims are not,
and should not be, granted license to commit crimes against others
with impunity.
None of us can fully predict the ramifications of an Israeli attack on
Iran but we can all imagine the immensity of loss, blood, upheaval,
and instability that will reverberate far beyond the region. All so
that Israel can maintain unchecked military dominance in the region.
I can only thank Mr Gunter Grass for making a minimal gesture that
Germany should take measures not to remain complicit in the
destruction of Arab or Persian life.
– Susan Abulhawa is the author of Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury 2010)
and the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine
(). She contributed this article to
PalestineChronicle.com.
www.playgroundsforpalestine.org