Talk is cheap

Germany has come out strongly in support of Israel's position at the International Court of Justice and against the allegations of genocide brought by South Africa. The statement from Germany mentioned a sense of obligation felt by the current German government as a result of the mass murders of Jewish people committed by Nazi Germany. 

The question of what the German government and the German people today owe the descendants of Holocaust survivors matters, but it has no direct connection with the factual issue before the International Court of Justice. The current actions of the Israeli government in Gaza either fit the definition of genocide, a crime against humanity, or they do not. German history may give the German government a particular obligation to speak out, but it doesn't change the facts. Indeed, I would argue, the history of mass murders committed by Nazi Germany has created a much greater obligation for the German government, and the German people today.

 

The camps cast a long shadow...

The conflict in Gaza has to end, if only from exhaustion. Whether or not you believe the estimates by figures in the IDF, who claim Gaza currently has adequate food supplies, the food in Gaza will run out, and the pressure, on all sides and from all sides, to avoid mass starvation will mount to an irresistible level. The fighting may go on for months,at an appalling and tragic cost, but it will come to an end. Peace, not only desirable and essential but inevitable, will come.

A permanent peace, rather than a pause in the violence accompanied by the continuing threat of more violence and crimes against humanity, will have to not only find a way to end the violence, but to do justice. Doing justice will inevitably mean reckoning with the expulsion of the Palestinians at the founding of Israel, the Nakba, and it seems likely that reckoning with the Nakba will prove impossible without reckoning with its roots in centuries of European antisemitism, capped with the mass murder of the European Jewish community.

 

The industrial mass murder machine of Nazi Germany inflicted the worst of its harms on its intended victims: the Jewish and Slavic communities. It also inflicted less direct harms on many other peoples and communities. In particular, a large part of the cost of dealing with the aftermath of this horror fell on the Palestinian community, whose members lost land, homes, families, and stability.

Refugees have, in principle, a right to return to the homes they have been displaced from by war or disaster. As Gwynne Dyer observed, not allowing refugees to return constitutes ethnic cleansing. In modern day Palestine, the number of current residents plus the number of people with a theoretical right of return would overwhelm the available resources: land, water, and infrastructure. This creates an extreme difficulty for any just peace settlement. One proposal often floated to remove this obstacle would replace the right of return for all but a few with a right to compensation. Such compensation would not only provide an economic boost to the Palestinian diaspora; it would also make a clear ethical statement: the people of Western Asia do not have, and never had, the principal responsibility for dealing with the effects of systematic mass murder a continent away from them.

Some of the compensation for Palestinian losses should come from those who benefited from the land and resource seizures following the foundation of Israel; some of it should come from countries that turned their backs on Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the years before the war, but a substantial, and painful, share ought to come from the inheritors of responsibility for that industrial mass murder.

This may well prove more painful, and more controversial, than a brief to the courts in the Hague. However, it would also indicate the Germans mean what they say about their sense of obligation stemming from the atrocities of the past century.