In a time of violence, should we respond with violence? There is a better, resolute way.
The world has broken in two, again, at dinner tables, in the workplace and on the streets, all over the world. We already know this: Corona has torn our society apart, Putin has torn our society apart and now the Middle East has torn society apart.
One part calls the massacre of the Jews terrorism, compares Hamas’ actions with the fascist German “operations troops”, and speaks of pogroms and the Holocaust. It is the part that forbids any “but” and demands solidarity.
The other part is open to terror. He shrugs his shoulders at atrocities, mass murder, kidnapped babies and the seething, charring will to destroy everything. “Terror” here means “combat operations”. This part sees the Jews where they believe they belong: in the role of the actual perpetrators.
Why they call Hamas terrorists “animals.”
Here, in some left-wing and Muslim milieus, people talk about “resistance” and “Free Palestine”. People join hands with the Nazis and want an end to German guilt so that the Jews can take their place in front of the sights again: “Free Palestinian from German guilt.” Massacre? This falls under “where there is planing, there are shavings” – as Hermann Göring once put it in a very similar situation.
One part no longer has anything to say to the other. How do you talk to people who believe that raping women among corpses and then spitting and urinating on their lifeless bodies is legitimate resistance? There is nothing to say, there are no similarities. That’s why many Israelis today talk about “animals” – because there’s nothing humane about Hamas anymore.
There is a reason why the law recognizes the term “crimes against humanity.” The Nazi atrocities were called “crimes against humanity” at the Nuremberg trials. These crimes are more than murder and manslaughter, they are systematic attacks of annihilation on the civilian population. They are so disgusting that they are banned globally – it was thought. Crimes against humanity can be prosecuted in German higher regional courts, even if there is little connection to Germany. This is the “universal legal principle”: all of us against such people.
Clown school for haters of Israel
But the idea of humanity is a lie of life. Because today it becomes clear that there is no consensus that such crimes should not exist. It is a fantasy of one part that the other does not share. It is not the law that is on the rise internationally, but rather the brute force, whether in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Sudan or Israel.
International law is only a shaky skeleton. The ban on violence is overrun by Russian tanks in Donbass. The United Nations, which I idolized as a student as a kind of temple for sublime international politics, international law and peacekeeping, looks on bad days like a clown school for left-wing decolonialism cranks and Israel haters.
Violence breaks law, and violence is what separates one side from the other. Hamas uses violence, and so do its sympathizers. Incendiary devices are being thrown at synagogues again, Israeli flags are being broken, and Jewish institutions in Germany are being threatened.
Does violence work?
The Israeli “Bild” reporter Antonia Yamin puts it in a nutshell: No Muslim shop in Berlin has to fear that after the massacre in Israel, Jews will storm in and destroy everything. Israel is also not suspected of spreading terror by slaughtering babies or destroying medical facilities. On the contrary: Nothing would currently be as threatening to Israel’s existence as a deliberate strike against the civilian population.
Violence and aggression are directed not only against Jews, but against everyone who shows solidarity with a people that is currently staring destruction in the eye. At universities, left-wing groups are urging leaders not to side with the Jewish state too clearly. In Muslim communities, friends of Israel are harassed and insulted; in left-wing milieus, deviants who condemn Hamas’ actions are called racists.
We are therefore at a crossroads. What do we, as a country of the Holocaust, put in the way of the will to destroy Jews and Israel? The right? Or violence?
“Expell everyone!”
How about violence? You can’t talk to Hamas and its friends! “Evacuate Gaza and then fire roller,” a Jewish friend writes to me, it’s sarcasm, but you can also hear similar demands in some pro-Israel WhatsApp groups, the fermenting compost heap of digital society. “Expell everyone!” That’s what the right-wing and far-right say, even though German anti-Semites, be they “imported”, cannot be expelled.
Well, maybe not violence after all. But if the law is to triumph over violence, it must arm itself now – broadly, sustainably, decisively. We’ve talked enough. Enforce Hamas activity ban. The fact that we still have to demand this is embarrassing. Punishing approval of Hamas terrorism has long been possible; we also managed to do that with Putin’s “Z”.
If a footballer shares anti-Israel Instagram posts, his club must be able to kick him out without a conversation. Write it in the contracts. These people influence an audience of millions, especially young people.
If Muslim associations make ambiguous statements about Hamas terror, they can no longer be dialogue partners. When prosperous left-wing Palestinian fans at a university rail against Israel, the president has to stand up and take sides. Write it in the statutes. Expell terrorist fans.
Tighten criminal law
When three people without German passports shout “from the river to the sea” on Sonnenallee, the next thing they see is a phalanx of police officers with batons drawn. The constitution allows this – Bundestag Vice President Wolfgang Kubicki has made a suggestion. Tighten criminal law so that sedition can also be punished against people abroad, i.e. Israelis. There have been suggestions for a long time.
If a ZDF presenter vents anti-Jewish sentiments with the 1-euro shop of German philosophy, Richard David Precht, they should both be shown the door the next day. Write it in the contracts or risk litigation.
Springer-Verlag has shown how one can rightly defy violence. Anyone who works there has to sign a simple sentence: “We support the Jewish people and the right to exist of the State of Israel.” Basically, the sentence belongs directly in the Civil Code, the Residence Act and the Naturalization Act.
It is already in the Basic Law – the Federal Constitutional Court found it between the lines in 2009: “The experiences from the destruction of all civilizational achievements by the National Socialist tyranny and despotism shape the entire post-war order,” Karlsruhe wrote at the time. Today it’s about nothing less: saving civilization’s achievements.