RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli-German Relations Polemics Have No Place in True Friendships An Essay by Christoph Schult

“A large share of Germans — perhaps even the majority — offer their one-sided support to the Palestinians, not seldom as a way of trying to relativize Germany’s responsibility for the Holocaust. “At some point we need to get over it,” is one popular refrain. Others, with clear anti-Semitic undertones, say: “The Israelis have learned nothing from history and are doing the same thing to the Palestinians that was done back then by the Nazis to the Jews.”

With dubious Holocaust comparisons, the German Israel lobby is making life difficult for supporters of the Jewish state in Germany. Polemics should have no place in the relationship.

Friendships between nations are similar to those between two people. The first rule is that they have to be tended to. The second is that the affection must be mutual. The third: A true friendship thrives on the courage to give criticism — and on the ability to accept it.

It’s hard enough to live up to this ideal in private relationships, but it’s even harder when it comes to ties between two countries. Particularly the friendship between Germany and Israel.

On the surface, it appears that relations between these two nations are better than they have ever been. This year, Germany and Israel celebrated 50 years of diplomatic relations. Young Israelis are fond of traveling to Berlin or living in the German capital. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel is more popular in Israel than United States President Barack Obama.

Germans, though, have a much tougher time defining their friendship with Israel. Two factors play a decisive role in this: the history of the Holocaust and the serious sense of guilt that Germans still carry with them today; and the current conflict in the Middle East, which has intensified as a result of Israel’s dubious occupation policies. It creates a tense relationship that no small number of Germans would rather not have to put up with. Instead they seek simplistic answers.

Former Knesset member Yinon Magal is no paragon of personal virtue. The rookie lawmaker from the Bayit Yehudi, who left a successful career in journalism to enter politics, resigned his position last month when he found himself drowning in a pool of muck of his own making.

Magal resigned last month after one after another, four women alleged that he had sexually mistreated them in various ways. The media gave the allegations saturation coverage. And Magal walked away from the Knesset and public life, quickly putting an end to the story.

While clearly no personal saint, in resigning from office, Magal acted with public virtue. He owned up to his mistakes and he took responsibility for the consequences of his behavior.

This might not seem like a big deal, but in the toxic environment that has come to characterize Israeli politics over the past 25 years, Magal’s willingness to pay a personal price for his behavior was a very big deal. It was a big deal because it signaled the beginning of the end of a very troubling era in Israeli political life.

For the past 25 years, the role of the politician in politics has become smaller and smaller. Rather than take the initiative and lead the country in the direction they pledged to the voters they would move – whether on issues of war and peace, economics, culture or health policy – for decades politicians have stood behind lawyers and waited to be given permission to make a move.

German authorities are searching for 12 refugees from Syria who entered the country using fake passports from the same source used by the Paris attackers. The passports were reportedly stolen from a passport office in Raqqa, the unofficial capital of Islamic State, in 2013 following the city’s capture.

The news comes a week after two men were arrested at a refugee center on suspicion of having links to the Paris attacks. The men entered the country at the same time as the Paris attackers and were also using false Syrian passports.

But Germany’s problems go far beyond a few potential terrorists with false passports. The German newspaper Bild is reporting that more than 250,000 of the refugees who have entered the country this year cannot be located because the system of registering refugees was so bad.

A story revealed by Reuters describes the severe damage Secretary of State Kerry has now done to U.S. human rights policy.

Here is the gist of the story:

As the United States negotiated this year’s nuclear pact with Iran, the State Department quietly agreed to spare the Gulf sultanate of Oman from an embarrassing public rebuke over its human rights record, rewarding a close Arab ally that helped broker the historic deal.

In a highly unusual intervention, the department’s hierarchy overruled its own staff’s assessments of Oman’s deteriorating record on forced labor and human trafficking and inflated its ranking in a congressionally mandated report, U.S. officials told Reuters. The move, which followed protests by Oman, suggests the Obama administration placed diplomatic priorities over human rights to pacify an important Middle East partner.

This is not really a story about Iran, or Oman. It is story of how Kerry interfered in what is supposed to be, and almost always is, a fair and conscientious process. The damage is immense, and not only to the process by which the State Department makes judgments about the human rights situation around the world–as Congress requires it do by law. The damage is not only to our country’s efforts to stop “trafficking in persons” and the terrible abuses that accompany that activity. These efforts have resulted in real achievements in many countries, and Kerry should be ashamed to interfere with them.

It would be truly embarrassing if a Turkey-Israel normalization results in new arms shipments into Gaza and rockets over Israeli skies — with the only achievement being a temporary peace with Turkey’s Islamists, who never hide their ideological kinship with Hamas.

The future Turkish and Israeli ambassadors would always have to keep their bags packed, ready to return to their own capitals at the first dispute – which could be caused by Israeli retaliation against Arab terrorism or anything that may make Erdogan roar in front of cameras.

How do you shake hands with a man whom you know ideologically hates you and wishes to mess up things at his earliest convenience?

None of this happened half a century ago; the timeline here covers only a span of a year and a half: A Turkish-Kurdish pop star wrote on her Twitter account, “May God bless Hitler. He did far less [than he should have done to Jews].” The mayor of Ankara replied: “I applaud you!” Hundreds of angry Turks, hurling rocks, tried to break into the Israeli diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul. The mayor of Ankara said: “We will conquer the consulate of the despicable murderers.” He blamed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris on Israel’s Mossad. Islamist columnists close to the government suggested imposing a “wealth tax” on Turkish Jews (who are full citizens). A governor threatened to suspend restoration work at a synagogue. And a credible research group at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul found in a poll that Turks view Israel as the top threat to Turkey.

Samir Kuntar murdered four Israelis. One of his victims was a four-year-old girl, Einat Haran. Kuntar smashed her skull. Kuntar was killed this week in Syria while helping President Bashar Assad commit war crimes against his own citizens.

Senior Palestinian official Sultan Abu Al-Einein evidently believes that murdering Jews is not a “despicable crime,” but killing an arch-terrorist such as Kuntar is a “despicable crime.”

When the Western-backed Palestinian Authority openly endorses terrorists and names streets, squares and schools after them, Palestinian leaders are sending a message to their people that murdering Jews is a noble and dignified act. This show of solidarity with a baby-killer is the direct result of ongoing incitement against Israel and Jews in mosques, the press and social media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In this sick, twisted society that the Europeans have bought and paid for, anyone who murders Jews is considered a role model. Anyone who supports peace with Israel is denounced as a “traitor.”

When, in the early 2000s, Arab activists called for a boycott of the Jewish state, it wasn’t especially high on the Israeli agenda. After all, Israel was busy subduing the second Intifada, constructing a security barrier to stop terrorists from getting into Israeli towns and cities, and preparing to pull civilians and the military out of the Gaza Strip. Fast-forward to today, however, and a significant proportion of Israeli diplomacy and pro-Israel advocacy around the world is dedicated to battling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS is a diffuse movement — mostly confined to Europe, North America and South Africa — that advocates boycotting Israelis and their nation’s institutions, urges states to sanction Israel, and pressures corporations to divest from the country. Meanwhile, opposition to BDS unites Jews and Zionists, regardless of differences of opinion over Israel’s foreign policy, more than most other issues. Whence, then, did BDS arise, and why? Has it been successful, and what does it say about its supporters? Does it justify the attention Israel and others afford it and, crucially, can it be defeated?

BDS is often dated back to July 2005, when more than a hundred Arab organisations, principally in the West Bank and Gaza, called for a boycott of Israel. But that declaration was in fact the culmination of several years of agitation. Omar Barghouti — widely considered to be the founder and face of BDS — was among several Arab activists to call for such a boycott a year earlier in Ramallah. Earlier still, in April 2002, a letter was published in the Guardian that called for an academic boycott of Israel. It garnered more than 700 signatures (although a counter-petition on the internet boasted more than a thousand), and by October 2002 divestment petitions were circulating on more than 50 campuses in the United States and elsewhere.

After the massacres in Paris on November 13, the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a statement so disgraceful you had to read it, rub your eyes, and read it again to comprehend the extent of his folly: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry began in the laboured English of an over-promoted middle manager.

“There was a sort of particularised focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorise people.”

The staff of “Charlie Hebdo” in 2006: The cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Honoré (first, second, fourth and fifth from left) were all killed in the 2015 attack, and Riss, third from left, was wounded. Meurisse, second from right, happened to be out of the office (© Joel Saget/AFP/ Getty Images)

Did you get that? Then allow me to translate. Kerry believes the satirists Islamist gunmen killed at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on January 5 had it coming. It is not that they deserved to die. John Kerry is a New England liberal, after all, and does not endorse the death penalty for journalists. But liberalism is a two-faced creed. It can mean that you believe in individual freedom and abhor every variety of prejudice, including the prejudice that allows men to shoot journalists dead for producing a magazine they disapprove of. Or it can mean that you go to such lengths to take account of your enemy’s opinions you become indistinguishable from him.