A wake-up call on the madness that has gripped society since October 7
One of the greatest contemporary German writers and the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature says she is horrified that young people don’t seem to recognise that Hamas’ bloodbath was a total derailment from civilisation.
In most narratives about the war in Gaza, the war does not begin where it began. The war did not start in Gaza. The war began on October 7, exactly 50 years after Egypt and Syria invaded Israel.
Palestinian Hamas terrorists committed an unimaginable massacre in Israel. They filmed themselves as heroes and celebrated their bloodbath. Their victory celebrations continued back home in Gaza, where the terrorists dragged severely abused hostages and presented them as spoils of war to the jubilant Palestinian population. This macabre jubilation extended all the way to Berlin. In the Neukolln district there was dancing on the streets and the Palestinian organisation Samidoun distributed sweets. The internet was buzzing with happy comments.
More than 1200 people died as result of the massacre. After torture, mutilation and rape, 239 people were kidnapped. This Hamas massacre is a total derailment from civilisation. There is an archaic horror in this bloodlust that I no longer thought possible in this day and age. This massacre has the pattern of extermination through pogroms, a pattern that Jews have known for centuries.
That’s why it traumatised the entire country, because they wanted to protect themselves from such pogroms by founding the State of Israel. And felt protected until October 7. Although Hamas has been breathing down the State of Israel’s neck since 1987. The founding charter of Hamas already made it clear back then: the destruction of the Jews was the goal and “death for God is our noblest wish”.
Even though there have been changes to this charter since then, as you can see nothing has changed: the extermination of the Jews and the destruction of Israel continue to be Hamas’s goal and desire. It’s the same as in Iran. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, too, the extermination of Jews has been state doctrine since its founding; that is, since 1979.
When you talk about Hamas’s terror, you should always include Iran. Because it is the same principles why big brother Iran finances, arms and turns little brother Hamas into its henchman.
Both are merciless dictatorships. And we know that all dictators become more radicalised the longer they rule. The government of Iran today consists entirely of hardliners. The mullahs’ state with its Revolutionary Guards is a ruthless, expanding military dictatorship. Religion is nothing more than camouflage.
Political Islam means contempt for humanity, public flogging, death sentences and executions in the name of God. Iran is obsessed with war, but at the same time pretends that it is not building any nuclear weapons. The founder of the so-called theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, according to which nuclear weapons were un-Islamic.
As early as 2002, international inspectors demonstrated that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons program. A Russian was hired to develop the bomb. The expert in Soviet nuclear weapons research worked in Iran for years. It appears that Iran is pursuing nuclear deterrence following North Korea’s example – and that is a scary thought. Especially for Israel, but also for the whole world.
The mullahs’ and Hamas’s obsession with war is so dominant that when it comes to the extermination of the Jews, it even transcends the religious divide between Shi’ites and Sunnis. Everything else is subordinated to the obsession with war.
The population is deliberately kept in poverty, and at the same time the wealth of the Hamas leadership clan is increasing immeasurably – in Qatar, Ismail Haniyeh is said to have billions. And the contempt for humanity is limitless. There is almost nothing left for the population except martyrdom. Military plus religion as complete surveillance. There is not an inch of space in Gaza for dissenting opinions within Palestinian politics. With incredible brutality, Hamas has pushed all other political movements out of the Gaza Strip. After Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2007, Fatah members were thrown from a 15-storey skyscraper as a deterrent.
Hamas hijacked the entire Gaza Strip for itself and established an unchallenged dictatorship ever since. Unchallenged because no one who questions it lives long. Instead of a social safety net for the population, Hamas has built a network of tunnels under the soles of Palestinians’ feet. Even among hospitals, schools, kindergartens funded by the international community. Gaza is a military barracks, a deep state of Jew hatred underground. Seamless yet invisible.
There is a saying in Iran: Israel needs its weapons to protect its people. And Hamas needs its people to protect its weapons.
Since October 7, I’ve been thinking about a book about the Nazi era, the book Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning. He describes the extermination of Jewish villages in Poland by the Reserve Police Battalion 110, when the large gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz did not yet exist.
It was like the bloodlust of the Hamas terrorists at the music festival and on the kibbutzes. In just one day in July 1942, the 1500 Jewish residents of the village of Jozefow were massacred.
Children and infants were shot in the streets in front of houses, old people and sick people were shot in their beds. Everyone else was driven into the forest, had to take off their clothes and crawl naked on the ground. They were mocked and tortured, then shot and left lying in a bloody forest. The murder turned perverse.
The book is called Ordinary Men because this reserve police battalion did not consist of SS men or Wehrmacht soldiers but of civilians who were no longer considered soldiers because they were too old. So they came from normal jobs and turned into monsters.
It was not until 1962 that a trial on this war crimes case began. The trial files show that some of the men “enjoyed the whole affair immensely”. The sadism went so far that a newly married captain brought his wife to the massacres to celebrate their honeymoon. Because the bloodlust continued in other villages. And the woman, wearing the white wedding dress she had brought with her, strolled around among the Jews who were being rounded up in the market square. She wasn’t the only wife allowed to visit. In the trial documents, a lieutenant’s wife says: “One morning I was sitting with my husband in the garden of his accommodation having breakfast when a simple man from his platoon came up to us, stood at attention and explained: ‘Mr Lieutenant, I haven’t had breakfast yet!’ He further explained: ‘I haven’t killed a Jew yet.’ ”
Can we think of the Nazi massacres on October 7? I think we should. Because Hamas itself wanted to evoke the memory of the Shoah (Holocaust). And wanted to demonstrate that the State of Israel is no longer a guarantee for the survival of Jews. That their state is a mirage, that it will not save them. The mind forbids one to misuse the word Shoah. But why shouldn’t we use it when you feel that it is impossible to avoid the close parallel?
And what comes to mind and reminds me of the Nazis again: the red triangle from the Palestinian flag. In the concentration camps it was the symbol for communist prisoners. And today? You can see it again today in Hamas videos and on house facades in Berlin. In the videos it is used as a call to kill. It marks targets on house facades that are to be attacked.
A large red triangle looms over the entrance to the Berlin techno club About Blank. For years, Syrian refugees and gay Israelis danced here as a matter of course. But now nothing can be taken for granted. Now the red triangle above the entrance screams. A raver whose Jewish family comes from Libya and Morocco says today: “The political climate is awakening all demons. For the right, we Jews are not white enough, for the left we are too white.”
Hatred of Jews has eaten into Berlin’s night-life. After October 7, the Berlin club scene ducked. Although 364 young people, ravers like them, were massacred at a techno festival, the club association commented on it only days later. And even that was just a dull exercise because anti-Semitism and Hamas weren’t even mentioned.
I lived under a dictatorship for more than 30 years. When I came to Western Europe I couldn’t imagine that democracy could ever be so questioned. I thought that under a dictatorship people were systematically dumbed down. And that in democracies you learn to think individually because the individual counts. In contrast to a dictatorship, where one’s own thinking is forbidden and the coercive collective trains people. And where the individual is not a part but an enemy of the collective.
I am horrified that young people and students in the West in particular are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom. That they seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between democracy and dictatorship.
It’s absurd that homosexuals and queer people are demonstrating for Hamas, like they did on November 4 in Berlin. It’s no secret that not only Hamas but the entire Palestinian culture despises and punishes LGBT people. Just a rainbow flag in the Gaza Strip is unimaginable. Hamas’s sanctions list for gays ranges from at least 100 lashes to a death sentence. In a 2014 poll in the Palestinian territories, 99 per cent of respondents said homosexuality was morally unacceptable. You can also put it more satirically, like blogger David Leatherwood on X: Demonstrating for Palestine as a queer person is like demonstrating for KFC as a chicken.
I also wonder whether students at many American universities know what they are doing when the demonstrations chant: “We are Hamas”, or even “Beloved Hamas bomb Tel Aviv”, or “Back to 1948”. The massacre of October 7 is no longer mentioned at these demonstrations. And it is infamous when October 7 is even interpreted as a staging by Israel. Or if there is not a word called for the hostages to be released. If instead Israel’s war in Gaza is portrayed as an arbitrary war of conquest and annihilation by a colonial power.
Are young people’s minds only filled with clips like those on TikTok? The terms follower, influencer and activist no longer seem harmless to me. These sleek internet words mean business.
They all existed before the internet. I translate them back in time. And suddenly they become as rigid as metal and become extremely clear. Because outside the internet they mean followers, agents of influence, activists. As if they had been taken over from the cadres of a fascist or communist dictatorship. Their suppleness is just an illusion anyway. Because I know that the words do what they say. They promote opportunism and obedience in the collective and avoid personal responsibility for what the group does.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the demonstrators included students who protested against oppression in Iran a few months ago with the slogan “women, life, freedom”. It horrifies me when the same demonstrators show solidarity with Hamas today. It seems to me that they no longer understand the profound contrast of content. And I wonder why they don’t care that Hamas wouldn’t allow even the smallest demonstration for any women’s rights. And that on October 7 violated women were paraded as spoils of war.
On the George Washington University campus in Washington, DC, the protesters play the group game People’s Tribunal as entertainment. University representatives are put on trial for fun. Then the verdicts follow and everyone shouts in unison: “Off to the gallows” or “Guillotine”. There is clapping and laughter and they name their camp “Martyrs Square”. In the form of happenings, people celebrate their own limitless stupidity as a collective with a clear conscience. One wonders what is being taught in universities today.
It seems to me that, since October 7, anti-Semitism has spread like a big collective snap of the fingers, as if Hamas were the influencer and the students were the followers. In the social media world of influencers and their followers, only the quick clicks on the videos count. The opening of the eyes, the tapping of lively emotions. The same trick works here in advertising.
Is the seduction of the masses, the reason for the disaster of the 20th century, taking a new turn? Complicated content, nuances, connections and contradictions, compromises are alien to the social media world.
This is also reflected in a mindless call by internet actors against the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. It is the oldest short film festival in the world and is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Many great filmmakers started their careers here with early works: Milos Forman, Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Istvan Szabo and Agnes Varda. Two weeks after the Hamas celebrations on the streets of Berlin, festival director Lars Henrik Gass wrote: “Half a million people took to the streets in March 2022 to protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was important. Please let us now send a signal that is at least as strong. Show the world that Neukolln’s Hamas supporters and Jew haters are in the minority. Come on everyone! Please!”
There was then a hostile response on the internet. An anonymous group accused him of demonising solidarity with Palestinian liberation. The group assured him that it would encourage the international film community to reconsider its participation in the festival. A veiled call for a boycott that many filmmakers followed and cancelled their commitments.
Gass rightly says we are experiencing a regression in the political debate. Instead of political thinking, there is an esoteric understanding of politics. Behind this is the longing for freedom from contradiction and pressure to conform. In the art scene, too, it has become impossible to differentiate between standing up for Israel’s right to exist and simultaneously criticising its government.
That is why no one even considers that the global outrage over the many deaths and the suffering in Gaza is part of Hamas’s strategy. Hamas is deaf and blind to the suffering of its people. Why else is it shelling the Kerem Shalom border crossing, where most aid arrives? Or why else is it shelling the construction site of a makeshift port where relief supplies are soon to arrive? Not a single word of compassion for the people of Gaza has been heard from its leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Haniyeh. And instead of a desire for peace, only maximum demands that they know Israel cannot fulfil. Hamas is betting on permanent war with Israel. It would be the best guarantee for its continued existence. Hamas also hopes to isolate Israel internationally, no matter the cost.
In the novel Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann it is said that National Socialism “made everything German in the world intolerable”. I have the impression that the strategy of Hamas and its supporters is to make everything Israeli, and therefore everything Jewish, intolerable to the world.
Hamas wants to keep anti-Semitism as a lasting global mood. That’s why it wants to reinterpret the Shoah. The Nazi persecution and the saving escape to Palestine also should be called into question. And ultimately Israel’s right to exist. This manipulation goes as far as claiming that German Holocaust commemoration serves only as a cultural weapon to legitimise the Western-white “settlement project” of Israel.
Such ahistorical and cynical reversals of the perpetrator-victim relationship are intended to prevent any differentiation between the Shoah and colonialism. With all of these stacked constructs, Israel should no longer be seen as the only democracy in the Middle East but as a colonialist model state. And as an eternal aggressor against whom blind hatred is justified. And even the desire for its destruction.
Jewish poet Yehuda Amichai says a love poem in Hebrew is always one about war. Often one from the middle of the war. His poem Jerusalem 1973 recalls the Yom Kippur War:
Grief-stricken men bear the memory
their loved ones in the backpack, in the side pocket
in the cartridge belt, in the bags of the soul,
in heavy dream bubbles under the eyes.
When Paul Celan visited Israel in 1969, Amichai translated Celan’s poems and read them out in Hebrew. This was where two survivors of the Shoah met. Amichai was called Ludwig Pfeuffer when his parents fled Wurzburg. The visit to Israel shook Celan. He met school friends from Czernowitz, Romania, who, unlike his murdered parents, were able to escape to Palestine. After his visit and shortly before his death in the Seine, Celan wrote to Amichai: “Dear Yehuda Amichai, let me repeat the words that spontaneously came to my lips in conversation with you: I cannot imagine the world without Israel; nor do I want to imagine it without Israel.”
This is the edited translation of a speech delivered by Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Muller at the October 7 Forum arranged by the institution Jewish Culture in Sweden last month.
