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Petra Marquardt-Bigman is a German/Israel citizen with a Ph.D. in contemporary history with a focus on European public opinion relating to the Middle East, Islamic Terrorism, the US and Israel.
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By Petra Marquardt-Bigman
March 10, 2007
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When a German bishop compares conditions in Ramallah to the Warsaw ghetto, something is really wrong. And what is wrong will not be set right if Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke of Eichstaett was told that the "living conditions" in the Warsaw ghetto were such that between 4000 to 5000 people died there every month. Bishop Hanke knew that, he had just visited Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev protested the comparison in a letter and openly addressed a crucial aspect of the incident when he noted that such "unwarranted and offensive comparisons serve to diminish the memory of victims of the Holocaust and mollify the consciences of those who seek to lessen European responsibility for Nazi crimes." In seeking to lessen European responsibility for Nazi crimes, Bishop Hanke is hardly alone. During a visit at Auschwitz in May 2006, Pope Benedict XVI startled many by suggesting in a speech that the Nazis had been "a ring of criminals" that "used and abused" the Germans, and that the Shoah was "ultimately" directed against the sources of the Christian faith.
Considering the role played by the Catholic Church during the "Third Reich", the urge to 'mollify consciences' and 'lessen responsibility' is not hard to explain. But it would be mistaken to consider the comparison made by Bishop Hanke ? and indeed similar remarks by several of his fellow travelers in the German Bishops' delegation ? as a peculiar Catholic, or even German, phenomenon. Comparing Israeli policies to Nazi policies has long ceased to be taboo and has become acceptable in Europe's public discourse about the Middle East.
Obviously one could marshal miles and miles of library shelves with documentary evidence and top-notch scholarship to show how outrageous the comparison is. Equally obviously, that doesn't matter. The documentary evidence and the top-notch scholarship can only appeal to reason, but reason is no match for the emotion to which the inappropriate historical analogies appeal. However inappropriate and unwarranted, these analogies alleviate shame and guilt, they blur the Holocaust's stark moral dichotomy between victims and perpetrators and soothe the trauma of Europe's bloody 20th century.
The Israeli ambassador to Germany reacted to the remarks of Bishop Hanke by charging that anyone who feels justified in comparing Israeli policies to those of the Nazis "has forgotten everything or never learned a thing and failed morally," and similar criticism came from the Central Council of Jews in Germany. However, many in Germany and in Europe would reject such criticism with self-righteous indignation, and in all fairness it cannot be denied that, by and large, Europeans have made considerable efforts to face up to their traumatic 20th century history. The problem is perhaps not so much that Europeans haven't learned from their history, but that the "lesson" they like to focus on is a rather simplistic one that reduces the debate about the past as well as the unfolding present to a narrow conceptual framework described by the categories of the victim and the perpetrator.
To be sure, when it comes to Europe's own past, the moral dichotomy between good and evil that is implicit in the roles of the victim and the perpetrator tends to get blurred so that victim and perpetrator can well be one and the same person or entity. Indeed, Pope Benedict's remarks in Auschwitz, describing the Nazis as "a ring of criminals" that "used and abused" the Germans, implicitly absolved all but the most fanatical Nazis of the perpetrator's guilt and allowed almost anybody to feel as a "used and abused" victim of Nazism.
However, when Europeans look beyond their own borders, they tend to perceive the moral dichotomy between victims and perpetrators in the starkest terms possible -- certainly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: in the eyes of many Europeans, the Jews had been the victims of the Holocaust, but then their occupation and settlement of Palestinian land turned them into perpetrators, all the more contemptible for having "betrayed" their role as victims. The role left for the Palestinians is the role of the victim, and victims are always "good", deserving of empathy and support, and whatever they do, they cannot be blamed or held responsible.
Questions such as how the occupation came about and why it continued for so long are ignored -- all that counts is that there is an occupation, and for much of Europe, the word "occupation" is enough to justify associations with the Nazi occupation. Thus, in the Middle East's setting, Europe's history lesson turns into a drama in black and white. There is no room for ambiguity, and thus little interest in an Israel that struggles with its role as a perpetrator, but dreads to become a victim; and there is little interest in Palestinian victims who long to turn into perpetrators. More than sixty years after the end of World War II, many critics of Israel in the West also feel that the public debate about the policies of the Jewish state should no longer be proscribed by constraints of "political correctness", and the perception that the state and the people that had long been accorded unquestioning victim status have become perpetrators makes this debate particularly resistant to voices that speak for a country that wants to be neither victim nor perpetrator.
Whether the unwillingness to acknowledge Israel's predicament is ultimately motivated by a latent anti-Semitism or just by an uncritical acceptance of the Palestinian narrative of victimization is not always easy to determine. However, the emotional appeal of an all-consuming identification with the Palestinian "victim" should not be underestimated, particularly since this identification is often claimed to reflect the "lessons" of the Holocaust. As a result, those who most passionately adopt the narrative of Palestinian victimization tend to have little doubt about the righteousness of their views, even if that means comparing conditions in Ramallah to the Warsaw ghetto.
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