Principles of Solidarity. A statement

Helmut Suttor, Frankfurt

There are roughly as many people of Palestinian origin living in Germany as there are of Jewish origin. In addition, there are around 4-5 million inhabitants with a Muslim background, most of whom share the Palestinian perspective on the current Gaza war and the Middle East conflict in general. This segment of the population finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile the explanations given by our politicians with their own perceptions, conveyed via the media and telephone conversations with relatives on the ground. It is difficult to explain to them how the dropping of 900 kg Joint Direct  Attack Munitions bombs with a blast radius of 360 m (see SPIEGEL: Nightmare Gaza) in a refugee camp can be a form of self-defence in accordance with the principle of proportionality in international law.

Against this background, a public statement on the current Gaza war should in principle be able to claim credibility in the eyes of an observer endeavouring to be objective.

This is obviously not the case:

The statement speaks of a „principally justified counterattack„. This is somewhat reminiscent of Radio Yerevan. The „avoidance of civilian casualties“ and the „conduct of a war with the prospect of future peace“ should be the guiding principles. The authors of the text do not ask themselves whether this is actually the case or can be expected. With regard to these two guiding principles, there are explicit statements to the contrary from responsible Israeli politicians (including from the Minister of Defence and Prime Minister Netanyahu on avoiding civilian casualties; Avi Dichter, member of the Security Cabinet on the peace perspective „We are introducing Nakba 2023“).

The statement avoids any suggestion as to what, based on Israeli government behaviour over the last twenty years, could nurture the hope of a willingness for peace. It also avoids any suggestion as to what would argue in favour of Israel abiding by the laws of war, given the fact that for decades it has flouted international and human rights law to the point (or beyond) of crimes against humanity (apartheid and ethnic expulsion).

There is a broad consensus among Middle East experts that Israeli policy has favoured Hamas over the Palestinian Authority in order to prevent a two-state solution. The consensus within the current government favours a second Nakba rather than a two-state solution. The

„Peace solution Nakba 2.0“ also seems to have become mainstream in Israeli society.

Terms lose their analytical value when they are used inflationarily as instruments of war in the war of opinion. Even if it is inappropriate to speak of genocidal intentions on the part of the Israeli government in the current Gaza war, it should nonetheless be understood as a

„concern for the fate of the Palestinian people„, it would be appropriate to be more specific with regard to crimes below the threshold of the worst offence in international criminal law. Prof.

Habermas was criticised by Omri Boehm in the New York Times in 2015 for remaining silent on Israel, even in the face of serious human rights violations. In the meantime, a total of six reports have been published by human rights organisations that attest to apartheid in Israel’s entire area of responsibility or limited to the occupied territories. A study by the Research Service of the Bundestag (2017) on the topic of ethnic expulsion states that there are

„There is a plethora of individual sovereign measures which, taken individually, can be qualified as discrimination and/or human rights violations. However, these individual measures, when viewed as a whole, nevertheless result in a picture that comes very close to the classic definition of expulsion in Art. 49 para. 1 of Geneva Convention IV and which must be legally summarised.“ (S. 5)

Despite all this, Prof Habermas remained silent. He may well have considered reasons for this. However, the question arises as to whether credibility can be claimed with this statement in view of this silence.

With regard to apartheid, one can at least speak of a valid circumstantial situation in the occupied territories. In the case of crimes against humanity, it should therefore be necessary to work towards clarifying this issue under international law, regardless of one’s own judgement. Anything else cannot be justified from any moral, legal or other point of view.

Public intellectuals who do not even demand this do not fulfil the role they should have in public discourse.

Bringing about this clarification would be in the sense of normative order and also in the sense of a statement in the opinion:

„The basic rights to freedom and physical integrity and to protection from racist defamation are indivisible and apply equally to all“.

This presumably presupposes an active interest in recognising infringements of the law, as well as an active interest in taking remedial action.

The statement speaks of a German „self-image“ that is „orientated“ towards the „obligation to respect human dignity„.

With this formulation, the authors remain true to themselves: What should be is said and what is is ignored.

When it comes to standards in the Middle East, the coalition agreement of the current German government describes the legal situation in Israel-Palestine. The demand is „progress in democracy, the rule of law and human rights“ only from the Palestinians, but not from the Israelis – apartheid or ethnic expulsion or not. There can be no talk of an „orientation“ towards human dignity. For years, what is trivialised as a „settlement policy“, but is in fact a policy of annexing the West Bank, has been criticised by German federal politicians and all parties across parliamentary groups as „contrary to international law“ using ritualised phrases.

This is not only implausible, it also raises the question of Palestinian-related racism. This manifests itself, not only from a Palestinian perspective, in the systematic exclusion of the human rights situation of Palestinians from the horizon of perception of official German Middle East policy and public opinion.

The massacre carried out by Hamas in the Israeli border region, for which it alone is responsible, and the Israeli reaction to it led to a revival of traumatic experiences from the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba that had been kept in a state of latency for decades. It is indeed „intolerable that Jews in Germany are once again exposed to threats to life and limb and have to be afraid of physical violence on the street.“ No one who does not already harbour this disposition will become an anti- Semite or Jew-hater because a war has broken out in the Middle East.

What is still tolerable in Germany, however, is that Palestinians are discriminated against as a matter of course. This is a consequence and outgrowth of the fact that the Palestinian human rights  situation and conflict perspective have been ignored – part of the DNA of German-Israeli relations from the very beginning.

This is part of the German raison d’état, which is applied in German-Israeli relations in the sense of the pre-democratic variant of interpretation that contradicts the Basic Law, because it serves as a sham legitimisation for the disregard of the human rights situation of Palestinians in the Middle East and Germany.

The dignity of the Palestinians in this country can be violated.

The most recent example of this is the anti-BDS resolutions which, over a period of four years, provided a façade of legitimacy for the unconstitutional violation of the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

The Federal Administrative Court ruled in a judgement dated 20 January 2022 that this was not because subordinate authorities were biased due to a legal error. The case law on freedom of expression has been settled for decades. This discrimination was promoted and implemented on behalf of the state, at all levels: Federal, state and local. In Germany, it is widely perceived as normal to restrict the Palestinian culture of remembrance out of „responsibility to German history„, for example on the subject of the Nakba (cf. Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Erinnerungsverbot – die Ausstellung „Al Nakba“ im Visier der Gegenauffilärung).

„The democratic self-image of the Federal Republic of Germany„, which is based on the obligation to respect human dignity, is initially linked to a principle that precedes and underpins all political culture as a minimum consensus:

There can be no responsibility before German history in contradiction to the core norms of our Basic Law.

This also applies to the relationship with Israel and the Jewish minority in Germany.

The Basic Law represents a break with Germany’s past and thus also with a reason of state in the spirit of German-national legal tradition, which appeals to a higher reason in order to hide or cover up human rights violations.

This does not promote constitutional patriotism, but confuses the general general sense of justice.

It is not compatible with this minimum consensus to generally demand that the Palestinians commit themselves to a state that permanently assigns them the status of second-class citizens. Anyone who demands recognition of Israel’s right to exist is obliged to prove that this applies to a state that has enshrined the principle of equality in its legal system in an enforceable manner, namely „for all its citizens„, as stated in Israel’s legally irrelevant founding declaration of 1948. This requirement is currently not met in Israel within the 1967 borders – not to mention the occupied territories.

The statement falls within the boundaries of the current German majority consensus on Israel- Palestine. In political terms, it demonstrates a high degree of uninformedness about the current Middle East political discourse and the conditions in the region. In constitutional terms, it suffers from the deficits that have resulted from the German-Israeli relationship for years: The universalistic legal norms of the Basic Law are not upheld, but de facto abridged to the detriment of one side.

 To express the communicative problem with Niklas Luhmann.

His term „structural-functional latency“ states, among other things, that a lack of cognitive will can include a moment of self-protection if cognition could jeopardise the respective internal consensus and its questioning is associated with risks and dangers. Knowledge and cognition are therefore subject to selective perception. Depending on what serves to preserve the structure to be protected, the internal consensus, a selection is made as to what is to be known or not to be known, what is to be recognised or overlooked. Awareness and communication can destroy the structures that constitute the internal consensus. This is why „awareness or communication is blocked“ (Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, 1984 p. 458).

To paraphrase Kant, you could say that in order to achieve awareness and communication in opposition to the internal consensus, you first and foremost need courage, the courage to communicate – publicly.