The Maybrit Illner talk show is divided into two parts on Thursday evening. At the beginning the guests talk about the situation in the Middle East. But former Federal President Joachim Gauck is responsible for most of it. He is thinking about the fight against anti-Semitism in Germany.
Germany must stand by Israel in the current Middle East conflict. This is what former Federal President Joachim Gauck demanded in the ZDF talk show Maybrit Illner on Thursday evening. The former politician is a guest there for an individual interview after the experts have commented on the current situation in the Middle East.
“When we talk about Israel in Germany, we do so from a special situation that no other country shares with us,” explains Gauck. Germany is responsible for the fact that the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust led to an international solution that the Palestinians did not like. After the Second World War, the United Nations recognized that Jews needed a space in which they were safe. That’s why they developed a distribution plan that the Palestinians never accepted.
In the current situation, Germany will not become overconfident if politicians also ask critical questions. “But we are also supported by critical questions about the critical politics in Israel from Israelis themselves, because the Israelis constantly and very strongly criticize their Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
“There are mistakes that are difficult to endure”
This criticism from Israel was brought to the point in the previous discussion by ZDF Today presenter Christian Sievers, who was a correspondent in Tel Aviv for years. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is under considerable pressure, explains Sievers. She must free the hostages that the terrorist organization Hamas kidnapped into the Gaza Strip, and at the same time she must defeat Hamas. Both prove to be very difficult. “Then there is another point that the Israelis are putting aside at the moment, and that is the question of responsibility and what went wrong,” said Sievers.
The border between Israel and the Gaza Strip is very well secured. “You were always stuck there for a whole day because the Israelis really controlled everything. There is a fence that supposedly cost a billion euros and that was driven ten meters deep into the ground so that no one from the Gaza Strip could come to Israel “The government will still have to answer a lot of questions, because the great thing about Israel is that it has a very lively democracy and a very lively press that is already asking the question of how this could have happened.”
Gauck later said that Germany would not stop showing solidarity with Israel. It doesn’t matter whether the government in Israel makes mistakes. “There are some mistakes that are difficult to tolerate,” says Gauck, probably with a view to the Israeli government’s planned judicial reform. “But it would be even harder to bear if the people who murdered millions turned away completely and acted as if it was none of our business.”
Excesses like those in Berlin-Neukölln are “unculture”
Many people living in Germany seem to see things differently, as the growing anti-Semitism shows. At Illner, Gauck calls on those who try to remain decent “not to be incited to counter-hatred.” It is impossible to repair the damage that our forefathers caused. “But it is important to recognize that we have a special responsibility.”
The anti-Semitism that has been evident in schools, families and on the streets for years is and remains disgusting. “But if you no longer take seriously the virulent anti-Semitism that can be found in many schools and other places, then they think they can get away with anything. And then there are these excesses like in Berlin-Neukölln. It’s a lack of culture The population and politics must be confronted equally.”
Gauck hopes that one must try to free people from the prison of hatred from which anti-Semitism arises. That’s why we have to “take the liberal spirits from the immigrants’ milieu seriously and show solidarity with them.” At the same time, we need to talk about anti-Semitism, including in schools in the hotspots where many immigrants from Arab countries live. “We must not avoid the topic there, even if it would cause us difficulties in the classes,” demands Gauck.