Dear Jana - A Letter to a German Friend Who Wants to Avoid Gaza

This is a letter that applies to the many friends around us who are escaping their moral duty towards the most horrific crime of our time

The reality you can’t see. Illustration by Ann Kiernan

Dear Jana,

It’s taken me some time to get round to writing this. It’s mostly because I spent time thinking if I should frame things in a way that doesn’t offend you, or if I should just be truthful. I feel that if we had one thing going, it has been honesty. In the past it was never hurtful, but I suppose it can’t always be that way. l feel that if I tip toe around things because of how you feel, I would be doing both of us a disservice, you would have lost the opportunity to understand a different perspective that many people wouldn’t bother to tell you, and I would be catering to your ego. That’s not to say that I want to be hurtful but that if you get offended, it won’t be because I want to offend you but because I want to be truthful.

The fact that you wish Gaza out of your life so that you can enjoy yourself is the perfect example of colonialism. The price of your comfort is the colonization of other nations, the murder of people somewhere else, at least according to one sociologist. That wish is exactly what the German government is trying to grant you. Keeping the protests and the abuses out of coverage, assaults on journalists, lawyers, women, trans people, gays ,lesbians, children. You’re shielded from all this so that you can enjoy your life. You’re shielded from the crimes Israel commits sanctioned by German politicians and weapons, you’re shielded that your tax money helps beat up people who look like me and create cases for them to make their life miserable. You’re shielded because of your wish to spend your days and nights without having to think about Gaza. You don’t have to think about the price of your rave parties in children’s blood.

I suppose the only inconvenience to that is the existence of people like me in your vicinity. We are reminders that it’s not so remote, that Germany is not only complicit in the genocide against Palestinians, but destroying its own institutions, laws and norms in order to harm us. I’m sure you have nothing against me. I’m smart, exotic, well read, dark skinned and you see me as a full human. If only you weren’t reminded that your silence is complicity, that your professed ideals fail the real tests, that your train journeys probably save up the carbon emissions so that they can be consumed a million times over with F16 Jet planes dropping bombs indiscriminately on children.

My presence in Germany is a threat to the privilege of having to close your eyes to Gaza and show off your progressive anti-capitalist rhetoric. My presence is a reminder of German complicity, mass murder, the environmental damage, the utter absence of remorse over Germany’s past crimes in today’s society. After all, how can you pretend to love immigrants if you cannot rebuke people protesting AfD who tell Arabs go back to their own country during their protests. How can you lecture others about feminism as you betray the simple ideal of equality and the right not to be murdered by German weaponry. How can Germans have idols like Baerbock if she keeps lying, sending weapons and actively support a genocide? (Not you perhaps but other Germans I’ve met)

I wonder to myself if the presence of people like us would radicalize people like you into not wanting people from my sort of background. I know you’re still far from that but in my mind it’s not implausible.

You want to discuss different topics when we meet. You want to avoid the biggest genocide of our time with German complicity, the mass targeting of anti-genocide voices, the continuous lying of politicians, the complete dehumanization of people like me. Perhaps we can talk about music, how about clubs, like About Blank. Oops, we cannot mention how they are racist against people like me, what else then? The weather? Great, let’s just do that. I’m sorry if I mention how my own life is affected, I mean I wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable.

You ask me what I would do if I were you with the white privilege. You don’t have to ask me, there are many Germans who can answer this better than I can. They show up every week, tirelessly and challenge themselves, teach themselves, learn and unlearn, don’t shy away from the truth, confront racist police, put their bodies on the line. I’m not asking you to do that, I’m just saying you can ask them. As for my answer, the simplest is to educate yourself on your own country’s complicity in genocide, their trampling on basic laws and rights and perhaps offer something with that privilege to someone. Write something, say something.

But I’ll make it even simpler. If you’re out having a good time, don’t try to ask a question at the end of the day to someone whose existence is threatened by Germany’s Staatrsäson if they’re annoyed by the Germans who want to ignore the systematic racism people like me are subjected to. How about not getting annoyed by a truthful answer? How about not expecting me to try my best not to make everyone uncomfortable by telling them what their country is really like?

And to your last question, as to why you get offended when I criticize the German system even though you often do it yourself, I can’t determine what it is for you, but I’ve encountered a few people and I think I understand their reasons and maybe that helps you think through it. The first reason is elitism, how can a person from a non-democratic country criticize a system that has worked so well, sure the system has flaws but what do they know about democracy? Germans have worked hard to work out a system and the criticism is not educated or nuanced.

Another reason, which I think is closer to the main public sentiment, is that if the criticism offered by outsiders is true, then there’s a lot of work to be done, and like you said, you just want to enjoy your privilege without neither the annoyance of Gaza’s genocide, nor the annoyance of having to overhaul a system and revisit it completely because it is irredeemable in its current form. After all, how would you stop a racist, fascist police force if you don’t dedicate time to it?

The main problem with mainstream Germans who have not broken free from their indoctrination is that they haven’t worked for their redemption but rather have inherited it. The criticism and condemnation of the current system is an attack on their inheritance. It is an attack on their redemption which they so desperately need. Redemption for themselves, for their society and for their ancestors who have committed one of the biggest crimes of our modern time. If it’s not small reform, if the system simply replicates the rise of fascism, then they’ve been living a lie and I don’t think people take kindly to that sort of accusation. It also means that you would have to work on your own redemption, from scratch, with a society hell bent on ignoring their past. I’m left wondering what differentiates a German who wants to escape the reality of their country partaking in genocide today from a German of the 1930s who also looked the other way. What is a German of today doing differently as Palestinians are dehumanized daily, both in Israel and in Germany. By the time they send Palestinians and their allies to German jails it will be too late.

No one wants to be in a broken system, people want to be in a system that has flaws but is fixable. After all, you have to deal with a present day Germany that denies a genocide while punishing holocaust deniers. No one wants something they value dearly to be criticized so deeply.

The love of the system is inherent within German society. Those who describe themselves as ‘Left’ have not broken barriers, but have been brought up in communities that have turned them into mainstream leftists who don’t have to question ‘the left’ they’ve been allowed to think, they don’t have to lose anything by masquerading as progressives. It’s a societal norm, a mainstream norm that doesn’t collide with the powers that be.

The LGBT crowd and the Jews collided with the system when they protested genocide and that’s when they were demonized once again, and assaulted. I’m wondering if that shouldn’t scare people, but no, people convince themselves Palestine is the exception but everything else works fine. Such cognitive dissonance. Media and the state are granting you the wishes that you’re not bothered, they don’t bother manipulating the news about protests anymore, they simply ignore it altogether so as not to subject you to it. The problem is me and my existence in German society at the moment, me and many others laboring away, paying the Rundfunk fees to fund our demonization and paying taxes to kill those whose only sin was to exist on a land that a group of people wanted and whose murder whitewashes German crimes.

I’ve come to realize the great lengths Germans go to in order to avoid Gaza. They’re hoping it’s over so that they go on with their lives. These aren’t the brainwashed Germans who have no idea what’s going on and think all Palestinians are terrorist, I’m talking about Germans who know a genocide is happening but they might lose some small privilege if they speak up.

I’ve speculated a lot as to why you felt the need to ask me about your own silence, even though I did nothing to accuse you, just simply didn’t make any effort to deny my experience of Germany. I think it’s because internally one question haunts you, ‘Is it possible to be a good person and still ignore Gaza?’

Maybe you expected you’d feel better if a non-white, non-German person told you that it’s okay to ignore it because you don’t know enough about it. Maybe you expected that out of politeness I would tell you that it’s an issue I care about deeply but that you didn’t have to. But the truth of the matter is that we both know the answer to this question. The answer is: No, you can’t ignore Palestine today and still be a good person. It’s not just a litmus test to all of the politics of the world, but it’s a much bigger test to your own German history. Those who ignore it are simply the same people who ignored and allowed Nazi Germany, and ‘Never Again’ becomes an empty rhetoric used to whitewash German ancestral crimes. The real answer is that you can’t be a good or progressive person if you do everything in your power to ignore Palestine and German complicity in genocide and German repression against anyone who objects to genocide. Your white fragility does not accept that conclusion, but I’m not sure it’s possible to draw another one.

This message may hurt or anger you now, but I hope that in the future you can look back on it and appreciate how honest I have tried to be, particularly if you experience some awakening that shows you just how deeply immoral the German rhetoric, actions and reactions have been. But then again, you may leave that guilt and awakening to future generations to deal with, much like the past generations have left you that inheritance.

With love,

Wael

Also in German.