Gaza: Germany has to help end this suffering. NOW!

There are texts that you know as a journalist that you will write them at some point. Mostly because you absolutely want to write them. But I had no idea of this text that I would ever write it. I still don’t want to write him either. But I have to.

Israel is not just a country for me. I’m German. I am not responsible for the worst of all human crimes, as a result of which this state emerged, I enjoy the grace of late birth, as Helmut Kohl called it. But I can’t think of Israel without thinking about German guilt towards Jews. She jumped at me when I read and heard over the Holocaust, and maybe even more when I read and heard over the years later, about German silence and hide, the relativization, the whole terrible “coping with the past”, which in the end was not always one.

And it started in all the years when many people could get upset about everything that Israel did without even registering what other people and states had done to the Jews. All this hypocrisy, also at the universities, where I studied, where Israel was mostly evil (and the violation of international rights), and the (almost exceptional autocratic) countries in his neighborhood were transfigured. The trivialization of new anti -Semitism, terrorist organizations such as Hamas, the hiding of their propaganda, as their failure (or refuse), to build democratic institutions as they exist in Israel.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, this has gotten worse, around 1200 deaths, 251 kidnapped. Anyone who wanted to justify this atrocity with Israeli mistakes (as it happened) could also say that the terror of September 11, 2001 had collapsed themselves. “Never again is now,” we have at the time at the time star titled. And if some said early on that you also have to raise the catastrophic conditions in Gaza to the title, I hesitated: of all things we as German magazine should be relatively relatively in the way of the Jewish suffering? Sure, we reported on the devastation among the Palestinians, but that Israel defended itself legitimate, I did not want to doubt this for a long time.

These feelings have not disappeared, they are still there. And yet other feelings have been added that were always there, which I suppressed for a long time. I looked at the pictures from the first day to our editors from Gaza, and they hurt me, and they might hurt even more because I had become the father of twins shortly before the attack. What if their arms were so thin? If you screamed in the morning with hunger, and at noon, and in the evening, at night anyway, and I couldn’t do anything?

But it’s not just these human feelings as much as we should listen to them. They are also the facts. Israel has increased into a retaliation that does not know or know, and that is almost worse, a clear goal. But Israel is the wrong word that you have to write: the Israeli government. Because the majority of the Israelis want to peace, according to surveys. According to Palestinian authorities, almost 60,000 people are dead, including 18,000 children. Many more threatens to get hungry. Israeli soldiers are shooting civilians whose only offenses are to look for edible. Israel now controls almost 90 percent of the Gaza Strip, around two million people are pushing in an area that is as large as a district of Berlin.

There is hell on earth, as saying that is not anti -Israel, as well as everyone who knows war, such as the general director of the International Committee from the Red Cross, Pierre Krähenbühl: “If Gaza is the future of war, I am afraid of the future of humanity.” It is no longer about the question of whether Israel’s existence has to be secured in US media-it is about the question of how much Israel can dominate. Like Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán, Benjamin Netanyahu acts, he gets rid of annoying critics and all those who investigate him. He wages this war for the sake of war, more precisely: for his own power. “As in the script of the populists,” writes the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Israel, which is supposed to be the bright democracy in the Middle East, is converted into a baseless speed into a system that is tailored to Netanyahu.” There are moments when you have to say: it is enough.

This moment had come in America at the latest when the torture photos from Abu Ghraib showed how much the country had morally betrayed in the “war against terror”. I know how difficult the current situation is political, I don’t envy German politician to show Israel borders. Should we German Israel, of all places, should still withheld weapons, although the country is still threatened, still surrounded by states that speak openly about its wreath? Should we Germans boycott Israel, for example, by sanctions in the style of “German, don’t buy from Jews!”? The recognition of Palestine, where there is not even a suitable political leadership, would only be symbolic.

Something has to happen, beyond an air bridge, even if I consider Hamas to be an incredibly cynical terrorist organization; Even if the pictures of the still captured Israeli hostages stir me to tears. The Gaza War has to end, and yes, we Germans also have to contribute to it. Because he is no longer on (justified and very understandable) self -defense, but long ago for destruction, in revenge, on hatred. We have to contribute to the end of this war, not despite our history, but because of our history. Israel to say when it stops being Israel – that can also be a form of German state ranks.