A German Medal for an Israel-Basher

Felicia Langer with Hubert Wicker of the Baden-Württemberg state government at her award ceremony.

Last week, Germany bestowed one of its highest honors, the “Federal Cross of Merit, first class,” upon the 79-year-old Israeli human rights lawyer and author Felicia Langer. The award is given to persons who have made “special contributions to the Federal Republic of Germany” [besondere Verdienste um die Bundesrepublik Deutschland]. Ms. Langer’s award was presented to her in a ceremony in Stuttgart in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Langer is a resident of Tübingen. Presenting the award on behalf of Governor Günther Oettinger, Hubert Wicker of the Baden-Württemberg state government praised Ms. Langer for her “exceptional engagement” for “peace and justice, as well as the protection of human rights.” Governor Oettinger, it should be noted, is a member of the “conservative” Christian Democratic party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “An uncompromising engagement on behalf of humanity is the very core of Felicia-Amalia Langer’s existence,” Wicker continued, “She is still fighting for human rights and a just peace in the Middle East, whereby she steadfastly pursues her goal of building a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians.”

But it is not in fact as a “bridge-builder” between Israelis and Palestinians that Felicia Langer is known in Germany, but rather as a ferocious critic of Israel who does not hesitate to draw parallels not only between Israel and the South Africa of the apartheid era, but indeed, if somewhat more coyly, between Israel and Nazi Germany. She has, among other things, called for war-crimes trials against Israeli leaders, dismissed Palestinian suicide bombings as the product of “suicidal desperation,” endorsed the charge that Israelis were behaving like a “master race,” and insisted that Germany is somehow obligated by its history to “intervene” in the Middle East conflict…on behalf of the Palestinians.

According to a report by Peter Weidner on the Jewish-themed Austrian web magazine Die Jüdische, during an April 29th presentation in Linz, Langer praised Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at the UN anti-racism conference in Geneva. “What Ahmadinejad said in Geneva is the truth,” Weidner quotes her as having said. In the same presentation, Langer is supposed to have displayed a series of photos, while making comments like

A Palestinian is forced to play a violin by a [Israeli] soldier. That reminds us of something.

and

Two Franciscan nuns at the wall [i.e. the Israeli security barrier]. From the Warsaw ghetto to the wall. That’s not yet my comparison.

Langer’s presentation in Linz was organized by several local “peace” groups to mark Israeli Independence Day.

A former member of the Central Committee of the Israeli Communist Party, Langer left Israel for Germany in 1990. She did so apparently out of protest against Israeli policies and, more specifically, Israel’s “exploitation” of German guilt. In his essay “Her Enemy is Israel”, published just one year after Langer’s arrival in Germany, the noted German author Ralph Giordano quotes her explaining her decision as follows:

I have made a politically conscious choice for Germany. It is a challenge for me, because I understood with what brutality and sophistication Israel was exploiting the Germans’ guilt. If anyone opens his mouth, one calls him an anti-Semite right away and says: How can a German dare to criticize us, with the weight of such a past on the shoulders? The Israeli government abuses the blood of our mothers and fathers.

It is particularly ironic that Langer chose to settle precisely in Tübingen: a city whose mayor for some twenty years, from 1954 to 1974, was the known former Nazi official Hans Gmelin. As discussed in my article on his daughter, “Do You Remember Herta Däubler-Gmelin?”, Gmelin was directly implicated in the deportation of tens of thousands of Slovakian Jews to the Nazi death camps.

As Giordano already pointed out in his 1991 essay, the thesis of the Israeli – or, respectively, Jewish – “exploitation” of German guilt is part of the standard repertoire of complaints of German so-called “rightwing extremists”: a euphemism in German usage for neo-Nazis. Allusions to the Third Reich in describing Israeli policies are likewise absolutely standard fare on the German “extreme Right” – as well, of course, as on the German “extreme Left,” whose discourse is in this respect indistinguishable from that of the neo-Nazis. Indeed, in claiming that a Palestinian was “forced” to play his violin at an Israeli checkpoint or in comparing Gaza and/or the West Bank to a “ghetto,” Langer is not saying anything that has not been said thousands if not millions of times before. It has, however, been the “special contribution” to German public discourse of prominent “Jewish critics of Israel” like Langer or Evelyn Hecht-Galinski to invest such comparisons with an aura of respectability also for the mainstream. If a Jew says so, after all… (On Hecht-Galinski, the daughter of a well-known former president of Germany’s semi-official “Central Council of Jews,” see my report here.)

Below some further translated remarks from Felicia Langer. It will be noted that the need to “liberate” Germans (and, by implication, Germany) from guilt is a recurrent theme. Could it be that the delivery of such absolution – coming, as it does, from a Jew and self-described “indirect Holocaust survivor” – is in fact Ms. Langer’s principal “special contribution to the Federal Republic of Germany”?

***

From her 1994 book “Bridge of Dreams: An Israeli Goes to Germany” (via the Research Group in Peace Studies of the University of Kassel):

In fact, especially because of their past, Germans are obligated to intervene everywhere where human rights are being violated. They kept silent once before, even if in other times and under other circumstances…. As the victims of yesterday, we, the Israelis, the Jews, can in no way claim the right to be the perpetrators of today.

From an August 2002 lecture in Vienna, as reproduced on the “Campo Antiimperialista” website:

[On Israeli “occupation” and “invasions” in the West Bank and Gaza:]

I’d like to tell you why all of this is possible. It’s possible because the boss is in Washington. The global sheriff is there. We are the regional sheriff. …In our homeland, everything is either “American made” or “American paid” [in English in the original]. The distribution of roles is as follows: the Americans supply or pay for the weapons – F16, various awful weapons that are used against civilians. The American taxpayer pays to destroy what the EU-taxpayer has built.

*

[After her remark that Israel has a “sort of democracy” provokes objections from the audience:]

Mehmon Ben Welischti, an Israeli journalist and deputy of Teddy Kollek, has said that we have developed a sort of master-race-democracy. That’s my answer.

*

As a Jew and Israeli, as a Holocaust survivor (indirectly, since directly my husband is a survivor), I have learned the lesson of the Holocaust.

*

[On Palestinian suicide bombers:]

Our conscientious journalist Amira Hass, who has drawn the same lesson from the Holocaust as I have, reports from the occupied territories. …She recounts how the road blocks are laboratories for [producing] suicide bombers, since the people are subjected to so much indignity and humiliation at the roadblocks. That makes them crazy. It is a situation of suicidal desperation.

(In winter 2003, following the American-led invasion of Iraq, the Vienna-based “Campo Antiimperialista” would gain notoriety in Europe by launching a campaign to raise money for the Iraqi “resistance.”)

From a June 2007 interview with the German daily Junge Welt (via the Research Group in Peace Studies of the University of Kassel):

It is true that German history is abused by Israel. Whoever criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-Semite. As you know, I am myself a Jew and I decidedly reject such blanket accusations. Wherever human rights are being violated, the Germans have not only the right, but the obligation, to intervene. Precisely because they kept silent once before. Human rights are universal, international law applies to all people and states, and therefore Germany must intervene in this [the Middle East] conflict – and indeed clearly on the side of the victims of the occupation.

From a December 2008 interview with the “Muslim Markt” [Muslim Market] website:

I have long said, long before the current events [in Gaza], that many of our leading figures in Israel and the generals and also Barak – indeed especially Barak – belong at the international court in The Hague. They should be charged and tried there for war crimes….

*

Everything that is directed against civilians is illegal: also the rockets [fired] from Gaza. I also say that. But if you keep people in such a cage, in an enormous prison, in an enormous ghetto, for months at a time and longer, completely blockaded, without appropriate medical care…, one should not be surprised. …It would have been entirely possible to negotiate and one could have come to a reasonable conclusion. But they [the Israelis] did not want that. They only want to defeat Hamas. They want to create facts on the ground.

In an entry on the popular German Achse des Guten blog, Walter Schmidt reports Langer making the following comments during a January 2009 presentation at the municipal library of Leipzig.

Haniyeh and Meshaal are for peace!

Hamas is for a two-state solution. De facto this amounts to recognizing Israel!

The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was pure propaganda!

In Gaza, Israel has left behind a policy of scorched earth!

The Israeli war of aggression in Gaza was prepared in minute detail.

Israel needs Palestinian blood for the upcoming elections!

Israel bombed Gaza at precisely the time when children were getting out of school.

Israel only wanted to test its new weapons in this war!

We as Germans above all must criticize Israel, since we kept silent once before!

The day will still come when justice prevails: they are betraying our dead!

Israel is blackmailing the German people by using the Holocaust and consciously instrumentalizing German feelings of guilt.

One has finally to free the Germans of their feelings of guilt!

Only Israel is encouraging anti-Semitism throughout the world!