The German silence on Israel, and its cost

The task of German intellectuals is to engage Israel in the realm of public rational discussion, not exclude it

Look at the media in nearly any country on any given day and you will find that there is no shortage of opinions on Israel and its policies. So when a respected public figure declines to share his own, it’s worth taking note.

In an extensive interview given in 2012 to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was asked for his opinion about Israeli politics. His answer was that while “the present situation and the policies of the Israeli government” do require a “political kind of evaluation,” this is not “the business of a private German citizen of my generation.” (my emphasis).

When intellectuals like Jürgen Habermas and Günter Grass fail to speak out, they are stepping into a familiar, and dangerous, trap.

The reluctance of German intellectuals to speak critically about Israel is, of course, understandable. Many would agree that refusing to comment is only appropriate – German responsibility for the crimes of the Holocaust would make it so. Evidently, Habermas’s silence speaks for many other intellectuals, including ones who belong to younger generations.

Still, the problem with Habermas’s answer  and the stance it represents is that, in fact, Habermas is not much of a private German citizen at all: when the quintessential public intellectual seeks refuge in privacy; when the founder of a branch of philosophy called discourse ethics refuses to speak, there are theoretical and political consequences. Silence here is itself a speech act, and a very public one.

In order to understand the meaning of this silence, it is necessary to go back to Kant’s concept of enlightenment. In his well-known essay from 1784 – “What Is Enlightenment?” – Kant defines enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” a process of growing up that consists in finding the “courage” to think for oneself. That does not mean, however, to think by oneself, or alone. On the contrary, Kant insists that using one’s “own understanding” is possible only through a “public use of one’s reason,” in at least two interrelated ways.

First, in order to think for oneself one must strive to transcend the perspective of one’s private commitments – personal, historical, professional, civic – and attempt to judge from the cosmopolitan “standpoint of everybody else.” Second, is the idea that thinking for oneself is possible only by thinking aloud. We would not be able to think very “much” or all too “correctly,” Kant writes, if we would not think together “with others with whom we communicate.” Transcending our private perspective thus depends on submitting our opinions to the judgment of the “entire reading public” – striving to reach, through public debate, an agreement of “universal human reason in which each has his own say.”

The consequences to the Israel question can be easily overlooked. A German refusing to comment about Israeli conduct – remaining true to the private commitments generated by his German past – is quite literally refusing to assume the stance of enlightenment when addressing Jewish affairs.

This is a position that most German intellectuals would probably like to avoid; and it would be a mistake to suggest that, for the case of a German criticising a Jew, it makes sense to admit an exception to Kant’s idea. Exactly because from its earliest beginnings enlightenment thinking was haunted by its relation to anti-Semitism – that is, especially because it was often tempted to treat the Jews and their tradition as Enlightenment’s mythical “other” – repressing public criticism of the Jewish State is dangerously stepping into a familiar trap. The task of German intellectuals is to engage Israel in the realm of public rational discussion; exactly not restrict it to some metaphysical realm.

This is nowhere clearer than in Habermas’s own thinking. Discourse ethics was developed as a heroic intellectual effort to salvage enlightenment thinking from the ruins of the Third Reich — to offer Kant’s ideal of public reasoning in response to Heidegger’s idea of private authenticity. This return to Kant will not be achieved before German intellectuals find the courage to think and speak about Israel.

Now consider the case of another of Germany’s prominent intellectuals – the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and poet Günter Grass. “This general silence on the facts,” he wrote in a now infamous poem, “What Must Be Said,” “before which my own silence has bowed/seems to me a troubling, enforced lie…” And he continues: “But now that my own country/ brought in time after time/ for questioning about its own crimes/ profound and beyond compare/ has delivered yet another submarine to Israel…/ I’ll say what must be said…”

When asked about Grass’s poem in his Haaretz interview, Habermas replied that he could see no “reasonable excuse” for such a behaviour. “There is not the slightest doubt that Günter Grass is not an anti-Semite,” Habermas emphasised; “but,” repeating his earlier statement, “there are things that Germans of our generation should not say.”

Critical, poetic silence

Despite its title, “What Must Be Said” says little about Israel if anything at all. What is distressing about Grass’s intervention is not the content but the form: the poem complains about silence but does not break it; Grass condemns the self-censorship of those who fear to be called anti-Semites but then succumbs to it. The result is a useless critique of Israel but a rather effective spreading of resentment. Habermas’s silence about Israel manages to be not just more critical, but more poetic.

Under the circumstances, however, the price of silence is too high. In a time when Israel’s own prime minister cynically abuses the memory of the Holocaust to score political points,  and when Elie Wiesel, who accompanied Netanyahu to Congress, serves as chairman of a powerful settlers’ organisation, rational, ethical voices, not silence, are needed.

After 48 years of military occupation, eight years of siege on Gaza and more than 2,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces just this past summer, German intellectuals who do not speak are de facto endorsing several propositions that they should very much like to deny. For example, that their history as Germans commits them to the Jews, not to universal humanism. There is a sensible answer to this claim, which is that Germans are committed to both, and that there’s no contradiction.

But one can endorse this healthy proposition in good faith only by condemning Israel’s international law and human rights violations, thus taking a position that supports both humanism’s ideals and the Jews. By failing to speak out against Israel’s violations, Germany will not only fail to meet its own responsibilities; it will undermine the Holocaust as a politically significant past.

It would be foolish for an Israeli of my generation to underestimate the anxiety that German intellectuals must face when taking a stand about Israel. But if enlightenment thinking can function as a political answer to Germany’s past, courage must be found to overcome this anxiety. Keeping silent about Israel at this point is not the right way, nor is it an effective way, to do justice to the history of the Holocaust.