Friends of Genocide

Has Germany learned nothing from committing the Holocaust?

The demonstrative support shown once again by Berlin for Israel-while-committing-genocide is a spectacle that remains very revolting and puzzling to many and certainly to everyone who is intellectually and morally sane. Across changes of government, Germany is displaying a callous, brutal, and also perfectly tone-deaf come-what-may loyalty - if that is the word - to the genocidal apartheid state of Israel that practices an ideology and commits crimes all too reminiscent of Nazism. It is ironic that, within the perverted coordinates of German public discourse, occasional, very cautious hints of “concern” are considered noteworthy. Why is Germany the way it is?

A single, small, low-quality do-it-yourself poster recently displayed in the center of Germany’s capital Berlin may offer some cluse. It has caused a minor scandal that has gone against the grain of the country’s usually unshakable support for Israel. But the more important news is that that scandal, in the end, has made no difference.

The essence of the incident was simple: in late April, the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (DIG) – “German-Israeli Society” – held one of its “Israel Days” in Berlin. In Germany, the DIG is a prominent and powerful organization. Its main source of funding, according to the country’s official lobbying register for 2023, is the German state. The latter’s Federal Agency for Civic Education – in essence, Germany’s office of Centrist ideological orthodoxy and indoctrination – describes it as the country’s “central organization […] where friends of Israel come together in non-partisan cooperation.”

“Israel Day” in Berlin was a largely informal event, really a street party with speeches. To make things even more fun, there was catering by the restaurant Feinberg’s. In particular, Feinberg’s, specializing in what it calls Israeli cuisine – Palestinians recognize many dishes as plagiarized from their tradition – offered a very special melon smoothie.

The poster advertising the drink showed a lion (used by Israelis as a national symbol) wearing an apron emblazoned with the Israeli flag (just to make sure). The lion held two large glass tumblers, one with pieces of melon (an already traditional and well-known symbol of Palestine and its resistance), the other with the finished smoothie and a small Israeli flag.

The background consisted of a pile of melons, often cut open, many featuring instantly recognizable baby faces. The poster’s text said (partly in English and partly in German): “Watermelon meets Zion. Israeli-style watermelon, shredded, mashed, and hacked to pieces.”

The watermelons evoked what is known as “Kindchenschema” or “cuteness” (in the scientific sense): an almost universally recognized pattern of features that signals babies and children and – with psychologically normal individuals – stirring deep hormonal and neurological responses of sympathy and care or at least restraint.

The message was obvious and not at all funny: The Israeli “lion” was crushing the Palestinian “watermelons” into an enjoyably refreshing ice-cold and blood-red pulp, available with a “shot” of – presumably celebratory – vodka, too. That the faces on the anthropomorphized “melons” were childlike made everything even more repulsive: clearly, whoever felt this picture was a good idea is not normal enough for the Kindchenschema to work on them.

Those who study genocide have long agreed that the deliberate dehumanizing of the victims by propaganda and indoctrination is one of its elementary methods and signs. Those who pretend to fail to recognize a textbook case of such dehumanization in this poster are deliberately obtuse.

The poster was, of course, an unmistakable allusion to Israel’s ongoing combined genocide-ethnic cleansing operation, with its main (though not sole) target the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. That is the place where the majority of Israel’s victims, many of them babies and children, have literally been “shredded” and “cut to pieces” by air raids and bombing as well as systematically starved and deprived of housing and vital infrastructure, especially medical institutions, and, not to forget, their caretakers: it is Gaza under Israeli assault for which doctors had to invent a new abbreviation: WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family.

In the words of Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN humanitarian office responsible for Gaza, Israel is practicing “deprivation by design” and the “deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life.”

The latest - de facto minimum - death toll among the Palestinians is approaching 63,000. Almost 112,000 victims have been injured, often severely, leading to lifelong consequences, such as amputated limbs. Horrifying as they are, these figures, generated by Gaza’s health ministry – which, contrary to Israeli and Western propaganda, is conservative in its counting – are only the tip of the iceberg. For one thing, a study in the authoritative medical journal The Lancet has long maintained that the real figures are likely to be substantially higher.

Killing, injuring, and maiming are, of course, only one part of Israeli violence. Mass displacement and the literal razing of the Gaza Strip, much of which has been pounded into toxic dust, and deep and pervasive psychological trauma are others. There is no room here to even sketch all the vicious methods of Israel’s genocide or all its horrendous consequences. And as with genocides before, there is also a limit to language: It is hard to even accommodate in ordinary words both what the Israeli perpetrators have been doing, together with their Western accomplices, and the vicious sadism that not a few but many Israelis, in and out of uniform, are proudly displaying.

Yet this is, after all, what Amnesty International – and many others – have rightly identified as a “live-streamed genocide.” Due to the stunning shamelessness of many Israeli perpetrators and the development of modern media and especially social media, this is a genocide in the global public eye as never before.

That is why it is entirely impossible to believe the silly attempts to obfuscate and backpedal now made by the clearly anything but “leonine” creators of the poster. Obviously stung by protests and afraid of possible legal consequences, Yorai Feinberg, owner of Feinberg’s, has retreated to claiming that the melons were meant to stand for – drum roll – “antisemitism,” and that the whole thing was just satire anyhow.

Both claims are offensively absurd: Everyone knows that watermelons stand for Palestine, Palestinians, and their resistance, not “antisemitism.” It may, of course, be that in the unwell minds of the poster’s creators those two things appear to be the same. That would be a classical Zionist delusion as well as a propaganda trick. And still, obviously, a lie.

Also, it is very, very hard to explain why things now allegedly representing merely “antisemitism” needed to be drawn with cute, childlike faces. No, this is, let’s print it, for-crying-out-loud bullshit, nonsense of the same evil, brazen sort as the Israeli genociders’ endless, daft lies about Hamas here and Hamas there, whenever they feel – which is often – like bombing yet another hospital, tent encampment, or residential building.

Regarding “satire” – a cop-out publicly endorsed by (surprise, surprise) the DIG – where to even start? If the makers of this revolting picture really felt that they were producing something akin to a “witty” or “edgy” statement, a kind of “joke,” then that simply means that they find “joking” about genocide and especially the mass murder of children “normal.” And there can’t be anything less normal and more morally rotten than such a sense of “humor.” Seriously boasting of mass murder or “just kidding”? You know what: It does not matter – either means you are a monster.

But this scandal involves more than the bloody bigotry of one German and Israeli restaurant. Consider that this was an official DIG event, attended by both its president Volker Beck and the Israeli ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor. They cannot have been unaware of the ‘lion-exterminates-melons’ poster: an Instagram picture showed both of them in front of the stand displaying it.

Beck is a major – if past his prime – politician from Germany’s Green Party, a fanatical supporter of Israel, and, as it happens, also a figure with a less than shining past. He has argued for the decriminalization of “pedosexuality,” that is, de facto the unpunished sexual abuse of minors, a fact he later tried to conceal without success; he has also been caught with serious drugs. Prosor is a veteran Israeli diplomat who does what Israeli diplomats do: Past highlights include attacking UNRWA, a signature move of Israeli aggression against Palestinians designed to cut them off from any support that might disturb Israeli siege and starvation operations. Indeed, Israeli assaults on UNRWA are currently the subject of yet another case against it at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Recently, Prosor has sought to suppress critical voices in Germany, including Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, and, for good measure, police German universities by defaming resistance to Israeli crimes and German complicity as “new antisemitism.” How original.

It’s not hard to imagine that both gentlemen saw nothing wrong with that melon-shredding lion and may even have enjoyed a splash of genocide-’joke’ smoothie. And they won’t face any consequences, of course. For – and this is the widest and saddest context of this vile affair – Germany has chosen to side with Israel with a ‘to-the-bitter-end’ obstinacy reminiscent of that other very disappointing Germany that failed to ever stop being loyal to – and fighting for – Nazism until finally stopped by others, mostly the Soviets.

Berlin, the capital, has been at the forefront of this new, as it were, transferred nationalism-without-restraint and Nibelungentreue for pure, obvious evil. Its mayor Kai Wegner has acquired a reputation for genocide denial; its police for brutality against those showing solidarity with Israel’s Palestinian victims. And it is the city where an anti-genocide protester has just been convicted for “trivializing the Holocaust” simply for peacefully holding up a sign saying “Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust?” Clearly, that judge has not.

Against this background of pervasive, dominant ethical perversion, a poster viciously dehumanizing Palestinians came as no surprise. What was intriguing - for a moment - was that this time there was some protest even, if all too faintly, in some mainstream media outlets. Maybe Germany is not entirely lost yet? Or - as seems much more likely - it is, as before in German history, only a minority that shows decency but cannot change the deeply indecent course of the country’s morally and intellectually kaput elites and the majority still following them.