Why do I care about what's happening on the other side of the world?

The other day, in response to something I shared on Instagram about Palestine, someone I went to school with asked why I care so much about what’s happening on the other side of the world. A bit of an ignorant question, to be sure, but a genuine one. I can handle good faith. Many from my past have probably wondered the same thing. 

I grew up in a small town in Ontario. So small, in fact, that it’s literally called Tiny. In a way, anything two townships over is the other side of the world—fuckin’, did ya hear what happened up in Parry Sound?! Buddy crashed his Ski-Doo right into a family bonfire! Geopolitical matters are mostly irrelevant to life here.  

So I can understand why someone whose entire life takes place on this lovely little peninsula might be bewildered to see an old friend call for the liberation of a foreign land half the size of Toronto and seven time zones away.

I may write and sound Canadian, and have lived there half my life, but the only country of which I’m a citizen is Germany. I’ve lived in Berlin for nearly 12 years, which means I bear some responsibility for how Germany uses the money it deducts from my pay. And how it uses it, particularly in its support of Israel, have made it complicit in severe human rights violations in Gaza. (Germany sold €326.5 million worth of arms to Israel in 2023).

For the third time in the last 120 years, the nation of my birth is on the wrong side of a genocide. I am alive for this one. I am obliged to care. It is the most glaring injustice I’ve witnessed in my lifetime and I’ve probably unwillingly contributed, like, three cents to it. Makes me fucking sick. 

It is, of course, Germany’s second genocide (Namibia was the first) that produced this entanglement. In the decades after the Holocaust, Germany was lauded the world over for its effort to atone for its atrocities and memorialize the victims. But any potential for a universalist reckoning was swiftly replaced by a movement to position Germany as a foot soldier of Zionism. As the political researcher Hans Kundnani writes, “During the last two decades…Germany has abandoned the belief that the Holocaust bestowed on it a responsibility to humanity and replaced it with a responsibility to Israel alone.” The result has been so shameful and deranged that I feel gross just knowing about it, and so should you.  

Over the past eight months, German police have cracked down on calls for a ceasefire with increasing brutality. They regularly assault protesters young and old, Jewish and otherwise; at a makeshift vigil, they stomped out candles for the dead. The mayor of my city, ostensibly the liberal mecca of the world, loves it. Meanwhile, hundreds of artists and academics, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor, have been made persona non grata at events and even airports for opposing Israel’s exterminationist policies.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, has been barred from appearing in the country altogether, including on Zoom. In a similar case, Germany’s Schengen-wide ban on the British-Palestinian war surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah recently prevented him from testifying before the French parliament about Israel's crimes in Gaza. After an Israeli-Palestinian filmmaking duo won a major award at the Berlin International Film Festival, Germany’s Minister of Culture insisted that her applause was only intended for the Israeli member, not the Palestinian. At one demo, the Irish language was banned. The absurdities are indiscriminate. 

Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra; Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham; Germany’s federal commissioner for culture, Claudia Roth

Back in mid-October, a friend who is a prominent journalist reached out to express his dismay over how the German press was distorting the context of unfolding events. “I read Der Spiegel (a popular weekly news magazine) and am totally shocked and outraged,” he wrote. I had it in me to reply with a joke, but in the following weeks everything became more warped and darker. I remember one protest I attended, everything was peaceful until cops dressed to the teeth in riot gear started dragging people out of the crowd by their keffiyehs. The next day, a display on the subway referred to the event as an “Israel-hating” mob of “terrorist sympathizers.”

Every time I read another journalistically irresponsible headline, or hear another politician doubling down on their unconditional support for a murderous regime, or see that another voice against genocide has been silenced, I feel completely misrepresented, not to mention demoralized and enraged. Some days, it seems like there’s a nationally coordinated effort to deny reality altogether. I feel, and I don’t use this term lightly, gaslit to the extreme. I cannot imagine how it feels to be a Palestinian in this country, hearing all this eulogizing of free speech and human rights, only to realize it's conditional. The horrors inflicted on them are either ignored or justified by a society too absorbed in its struggle to think well of itself.

Not a week has passed without someone asking me about the disintegration of sanity that’s occurred in this country. “What the fuck is going on over there?” one person wrote to me, along with a story about a Jewish anti-Zionist organization having its bank account frozen. In fact, Germany has strained a great deal over which Jews are compatible with its national interest. Those deemed unpalatable have been arrested or denounced as antisemitic, a term that is now a mile wide but an inch deep. As Jewish Currents wrote last summer, it appears “that the Jews are not being sensitive enough to what antisemitism means to the Germans.” It does not seem to occur to the Germans that fascism on behalf of Israel is still fascism.

Meme via @berlinisover

Despite dwindling public support for Israel’s tantrum in Gaza, Germany’s commitment to its ally remains sacrosanct. In fact, it has been elevated to the level of divinity. Consider, for instance, that it is Germany’s Staatsräson (reason of state) to back Israel’s right to self-defense unequivocally, no matter how grotesquely Netanyahu and his cabinet of ghouls have appropriated the concept. For a country fixated on precise definitions, Germany has kept Staatsräson perilously ambiguous. Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, speaks of a "permanent duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel." We have a “special responsibility” that "guides us,” he says. Well, look where it’s guided us. I want no part of this special responsibility. I want "never again" to mean never again for anyone, not that Israel can do whatever the fuck it wants for eternity. My special responsibility is to recognize when ethnonationalist motivation is used to eradicate an oppressed people and say, not in my name. 

I was reading an interview with James Baldwin recently, as one does. It took place shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. At one point, the interviewer, speaking of the white population specifically but of oppressors in general, says to Baldwin: “You would say, then, that we have a lot to answer for?” To which he replied:

You may think that my death or diminution, or my disappearance will save you, but it won't. It can't save you. All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history…which is not your past, but your present. Nobody cares what happened in the past. One can't afford to care what happened in the past. But your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history, in the name of your gods, in the name of your language. 

This is the special responsibility that binds Germany and Israel today, and it is the tragedy of the Palestinians that neither these two countries nor the greatest sponsor of their subjugation, the United States, have enshrined as their Staatsräson the Palestinians' right to not be killed. We can all see what is happening in the name of a shared history. As for the notion of “German guilt," it's crucial to note that after World War II, especially in West Germany, the prevailing sentiment wasn't remorse but victimhood. As American philosopher Susan Neiman, a Jewish woman who spent three decades in Berlin, observes, “What better way to avoid responsibility for others’ suffering than to focus on one’s own?” I don’t think I need to spell out any further parallels here.

For Germany, Gaza seems to have triggered a familiar mode: By distancing itself from a crime, say by concocting a Staatsräson that evidently overrides international law, Germany can avoid facing its complicity. It can cower, as many of our politicians are, behind a dilemma of its own making. I find the cognitive dissonance frightening. How can I not care about Palestine when war crimes are being committed there on behalf of my citizenship, funded by my taxes, and endorsed by politicians I voted for? (I voted Green; to my knowledge, every major party in Germany is categorically loyal to the state of Israel). Am I really supposed to believe that Jewish safety can be achieved through the decimation of Palestinians? Such a tactic has never worked. Scholars are running out of ways to say nobody’s free until everybody’s free.

Of course, all of the considerations I’ve mentioned – being on the right side of history, feeling partially responsible for the funding and enabling of merciless dogmatists, a fundamental conflict with my country's national interests – are secondary to what a person knows long before they learn about lobbying and alliances and Zionism and special responsibilities: one people's existence should not come at the expense of another's. This is a basic tenet of humanity. It is what narrows the distance between each of us. With every fresh atrocity in Palestine, we are brought to within an inch of the other side of the world.

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