”An idea of life for Jews and Palestinians”

The barbaric terrorism of Hamas against Israel and their visible intent to destroy all Jewish life has led to a wave of solidarity in Germany with the victims of this assault, the Israeli population, and also with Jews living in Germany.

This solidarity persists despite visible antisemitism and hatred toward Israel in Germany, whether homegrown or the result of an Arab immigrant community ingrained with antisemitism.

As unacceptable and often criminal as many recent events on Germany’s streets have been, they have never truly undermined the overwhelming majority of German society’s solidarity with Israel. German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck’s speech on November 1 conveyed this in striking clarity.

However, particularly here in Germany, there is a void in the public political discourse and in some major media outlets with regard to this renewed conflict in the Middle East.

And this void pertains to the dire situation of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip and increasingly in the West Bank, the area between the Jordan Valley and the Israeli state border — where officially, a Palestinian autonomous authority is supposed to govern the Palestinians living there, but in reality, this autonomy exists largely on paper.

We see the images of massive destruction in the Gaza Strip, people trying to pull their relatives from the rubble, hear of infants dying in hospital incubators due to a lack of electricity, and see the growing number of deaths, which have long surpassed the Israeli casualties caused by Hamas terrorism.

It is true: Unlike Hamas, the Israeli army is doing much to avoid civilian casualties. But in one of the world’s most densely populated high-rise settlements, massive military action cannot be carried out without also endangering innocent lives. Where were the 1.2 million people — who were given a 24-hour deadline to leave their homes — supposed to flee to? I do not know anyone who can ignore these images. We feel a mixture of compassion and helplessness in the face of the terrible aftermath of Hamas’ terrorist attack on October 6, 2023.

And I admit, it breaks my heart to see children dying – regardless of whether they are Jewish or Palestinian. No one who feels the way I do is a “relativizer” of Hamas’ terrorism or equates Israel with Hamas.

It is possible to abhor Hamas’ terrorism and still feel compassion for the children and families in Gaza. And yet, we Germans only are hesitant to discuss this. The reasons are not hard to pinpoint: Leaders in politics, media and business want to show that former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dictum — set on March 18, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s statehood in the Israeli Parliament, that Israel’s security is part of Germany’s raison d’être — was indeed sincere and needs to be upheld in Israel’s hour of need.

Anyone who is part of a nation that tried to extinguish Jewish life across the globe in the 20th century has a duty in the 21st century to support the only state where the descendants of those who escaped can live safely.

For that reason, we Germans have a unique and warranted obligation to defend Israel’s right to self-defense and should provide the necessary means if Israel calls on us.

But does this clear commitment mean that we, in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, harden our hearts against the suffering of Palestinians? Is it enough to argue that Hamas is also responsible for these civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip because their leaders cowardly hide behind and below hospitals and other civilian facilities?

And does the argument really hold up in the long run that the destruction of Hamas has to be such an existential goal for Israel that it justifies many thousands of civilian casualties? Does the hard reality in the Middle East mean that we have to accept this violence as inevitable?

Benjamin Netanjahu and Joe Biden © dpa

The policy of the United States and President Joe Biden shows that both are possible: Clearly standing behind Israel and, at the same time, clearly acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians in the present and past.

We Europeans, and we Germans, would do well to support him.

Because as much as we would like to see an end to Hamas and its jihadist allies, little suggests that continued war in the Gaza Strip with more suffering and more bloodshed will result in anything new and better for either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

In order to defeat Hamas, what we need in addition to weapons and military, is a willingness to deprive them of the breeding ground for their inhumane ideology.

This willingness was once there when Palestinians were promised their own democratic state alongside Israel — the so-called “Two-State Solution.”

But the bitter truth is that all of us – the European Union, the international community, Israel’s Arab neighbors, the Israeli government and its settler movement, as well as the divided Palestinian leadership – have allowed this “Two-State Solution” to become little more than mere lip service. It was the idea of a peaceful coexistence of a democratic Jewish and a democratic Palestinian state side by side.

No one has seriously worked toward this in the last two decades. On the contrary, it seemed more and more possible to reconcile Israel with its neighboring Arab states even without an answer to the Palestinians' right to self-determination. The Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu even went so far as to believe that it could support Hamas without any real danger to Israel in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The Israeli journalist Meron Rapoport quoted Netanyahu from a speech to his Likud party

Netanyhu explicitly said:

That is why Qatari dollars flowed to Hamas with the approval of the Israeli government. For that reason, not a single Qatari dollar went to Hamas without the approval of the Israeli government. The real goal of Netanyahu's government was the complete annexation of the West Bank as Israeli territory. This was also shown by the map of Israel he presented to the UN General Assembly a few weeks ago, which no longer pictured a West Bank. For the time being, this illusion of "divide and rule" has also been shattered by the Hamas terror attack.

It is this collective international failure that has enabled Hamas and its Islamist fanatics to make themselves the representatives of the Palestinian cause — even though they never were, nor are they today. They are not fighting for a democratic Palestinian state, but rather for the destruction of Jewish life and the establishment of a "caliphate," which would be little more than a medieval regime of violence in which every free expression of opinion, every dissent, every woman and every claim to a self-determined life would be threatened with death.

Hamas was able to fill this gap because there was no one left to genuinely represent the cause of Palestinians and because secular Palestinian leaders were largely helpless and grappling with corruption and nepotism — although Hamas has no intention of working toward a democratic Palestinian state.

Full of scorn and cynicism, Hamas representatives have recently pointed out that the Palestinian question has only been put back on the international agenda as a result of their terrorist attack. Saying this out loud in Germany is neither a reversal of perpetrator and victim roles nor a downplaying of Hamas' terrorism.

It is the contextualization needed to understand why even a military defeat of Hamas will neither make the long shadow of the past disappear, nor will it erase the potential for violence in the Middle East.

In the past, Germany in particular built up a good deal of capital in the Middle East. Everyone there knows about our attitude toward Israel. And yet we were also seen as a fair mediator for Palestinian interests. We need to be careful not to use up this capital in one fell swoop among Palestinians and the Arab world by neglecting to speak up about the growing number of civilian victims in the Gaza Strip.

The fact that France and Germany, two leading European nations, voted differently on a resolution concerning the Middle East conflict at the United Nations General Assembly is seen by the rest of the world as a sign of Europe's ongoing provincialization. Rarely has the discrepancy between Europe's claim to be a "geopolitical power factor" and the reality been so apparent.

Given the disunity of the European Union in its external and geopolitical views on Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world, we are lucky to have the United States. Despite its close alliance with Israel, the U.S. recognizes the dangers of continuing military violence in the Gaza Strip. It was not a European head of state or government, but U.S. President Joe Biden, who was prepared to defend Israel's security not only in words but also in deed — even going as far as to offer his own military to defend Israel against potential attacks from Iran or its proxies in Lebanon and Syria.

If it came down to it, this would be significantly different from its support for Ukraine, where the United States provides weapons, training and information, but avoids anything that would make it a direct combatant against Russia. In the Middle East, it would be different: The U.S. itself would engage militarily against Israel's enemies. We would be faced with a major war in Europe's back yard, with dangers far exceeding the Ukraine conflict.

Perhaps that is why the U.S. president was the first Western leader to warn Israel to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible in its counter-strike in Gaza. With the United States' own mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, the American president cautioned Israel against creating an even bigger monster in the region and behaving like a merciless colonial state toward the Palestinians in the eyes of the global public.

Biden sees more clearly than his European allies that the conflict, seemingly limited to Gaza, can easily become another major aspect of the growing confrontation between the Global South and Western democracies. Whether we like it or not, Western support for Israel's military operation in Gaza and the failure to speak out about thousands of civilian deaths is seen by many states of the Global South as just another example of Western "double standards“ — calling the death of civilians and the destruction of residential buildings and hospitals in Ukraine Russian war crimes, but legitimizing the same in Gaza by citing Israel's right to self-defense.

Of course, there is a central legal difference between a country like Ukraine being attacked without reason and a country like Israel defending itself against an aggressor and seeking to defeat it. But does anyone in Germany really believe that this admittedly politically and legally important difference can overshadow the images of thousands of dead children, families and other innocent people in the bombed houses of Gaza?

World politics is not negotiated in a court, and lawyers do not ultimately decide what people are willing to endure and what not. In the end, war is not just about legality. A lesson from the time after the attacks of September 11, 2001 is that lawyers should not be allowed to define the outer limits of a state's behavior in armed conflicts.

Israel should be guided not only by what its lawyers say but also by common sense about how its behavior will affect innocent people.In the Arab world and beyond, this Western argumentation is perceived as a lack of empathy and as cold-bloodedness towards Palestinian victims.

The conflict in the Gaza Strip has long become the new breaking point between Western democracies and the Global South. There is a growing political drift between the still affluent countries of the Global North and West and the Global South. The defining characteristics of this decade are increasing instability, insecurity and other wars, such as those in the coup belt of West Africa. It is the autocracies and dictatorships of the world that benefit from this.

The West's claim to leadership in the world has long since faced competition and is no longer undisputed in the global South. In the future, the West will only be seen as relevant if it respects the legitimate interests of the new strong countries of the Middle and Far East and the Global South and establishes new alliances that equally value people’s lives, regardless of where they live.

This new kind of policy is the only thing that can foster peace in the affected region and domestic peace in our own countries. Reducing the suffering of civilians in every armed conflict to an absolute minimum has been a part of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations since the late 19th century, as an element of humanitarian international law. It is not only the Arab world that is closely watching the way the West responds to civilian suffering in this conflict. It is also in Israel's interest to make a strong distinction between Hamas and the civilian population in Gaza.

Joe Biden, whose capabilities are not limitless, is trying to counter the global drift between the West and the Global South. Hence his commitment to finding some stable form of exchange on global issues with China and to agree on mechanisms that prevent a direct military confrontation between these two superpowers. And hence his dual message to Israel: We stand behind you, but we expect steps toward de-escalation and efforts toward finding a political future for Gaza.

The best option now is for the USA — and hopefully also its European allies — to urge Israel to stop the bombings, to keep its promise to allow humanitarian organizations access to the Gaza Strip and to set the conditions for a ceasefire. The Hamas and the militant Palestinians, in return, would have to stop the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and release the hostages.

If this does not work, the number of innocent victims could become so large that even the Israeli heroes disappear under the mountain of innocent lives lost. And with each passing day, the danger of war spreading to the West Bank and then to Lebanon, Syria and Iran grows. A war of that scale would overshadow all of the horrors we have already seen in Ukraine.

The American president dares to do what is often derided and despised in our country: He has the courage to engage in diplomacy. His secretary of state travels through the region on nearly a daily basis — and more top US politicians, including the head of the CIA, have been to China in a month than from the whole of Europe in a year. Biden knows that the most urgent task is to gain time for a humanitarian pause in Gaza and for this very diplomacy. The Europeans would do well to give him their support on this.If we manage to do that, the most difficult task still lies ahead, because Hamas and its allies unfortunately stand for, among other things, an idea – the idea of death.

Death to all Jews and the supposed martyr's death for all who participate in it. But in order to defeat an idea, you need one thing above all: a better idea.An idea of life — for Jews and Palestinians in their own democratic and self-determined states. With the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, we were working toward bringing this two-state solution to fruition. Back then, an extremist Israeli not only murdered his own Prime Minister but also the peace process. Today we were close to initialing the Israeli-Saudi agreement, of which Joe Biden says, "there is something in it for the Palestinians," and this time, this tiny chance for improvement has been shot down by a radical Palestinian organization.

This shows the great tragedy: Radicals on both sides need one another as their enemy, because peace, even rapprochement, makes them unnecessary.The key to containing the conflict now lies in the gradual solution of the hostage issue while simultaneously improving the humanitarian situation of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip.

Many parties will have to take responsibility for this, especially Israel's Arab neighbors, who, together with the USA and Europe, will have to guarantee Israel's security and combat violent fanatics. This may sound like a naive dream given the reality in the Middle East. But it must have felt similar when courageous men like the Frenchman Schumann and the Italian De Gasperi invited us Germans to build a common Europe only a few years after the devastations and genocide on our continent. Less than a lifetime later, we had come from Auschwitz to Strasbourg and Brussels. That goes to show just what is possible when people genuinely want to make a change.