Israel's Air War in Lebanon and the German Press

When Israel’s Prime Minister was asked in a recent interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung why he had involved his people in a bloody war when he had just promised them peace and prosperity, he said Hezbollah “forced a war on Israel.” His intentions when he took office, he said, had been “to further the peace process and not to prosecute war”; “Everybody knows that the war started with a border violation by Hezbollah, their kidnapping of two soldiers and bombarding Israel with rockets.”

Victimized by its enemies and misunderstood by the world, Israel needed the help of its few remaining friends, notably Germany, to defend itself. It would make him “happy,” Mr. Olmert said, to see Germany protect Israel’s security by sending a German Schutztruppe (peace keepers) to Lebanon which for the Germans would also be a particularly meaningful task. He ridiculed, as just a reflection on their “desperate situation,” Hezbollah’s recent offer of a cease fire for humanitarian reasons: “Hezbollah is no longer a threat for us. We have never begged for compassion or a cease fire but said: To hell with you! We will take the hardest measures against you.” 1

Already, the beginning of this war appears shrouded in the mists of politicized historical memory: Who provoked whom? Who has or will have the power to determine the provocation? How urgent is the issue of Israel’s security after almost a month of bombing granted by the US in several installments of “one more week or so”?  Why has there been so little discussion of the legal aspects of Israel’s preemptive strike? And why Israel’s new emphasis on its “cordial” relationship with Germany? The German reactions to Mr. Olmert’s statements were cautiously neutral across the political spectrum,  But Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Shimon Stein, called it  a “Novum” and a “historic statement”; never before had an Israeli Prime Minister explicitly welcomed the engagement of German soldiers in the stabilization of the Middle East—a great Vertrauensbeweis (proof of trust). 2 The German government, as reported in the press, did not seem to share Mr. Olmert’s happiness, aware of their over-extension in dangerous places like Afghanistan and the historical complications of German-Jewish relations. But Olmert repeated his Vertrauensbeweis over the weekend of August 5-6, when the UN cease-fire resolution drafted by France and the United States was being debated or, rather, pushed on the UN by the Bush administration for whom Lebanon’s insistence on an immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops  remains  “nonnegotionable.”

The draft makes no mention of an Israeli withdrawal at all any and moreover calls for a stop of all military activities in the case of Hezbollah but only “offensive” activities in the case of Israel: a wording that could easily be read to allow all Israeli military activities as “defensive.” The press reported that “Israel was happy with the draft” and the Bundesregierung was “satisfied” with it. 3  However, another report that day in the same paper argues that Olmert’s keen interest in having German soldiers in the UN Schutztruppe is more than awkward for Berlin. A high-ranking SPD official complained that Olmert has explicitly defined this UN troop as “Schutztruppefor Israel” rather than the usual neutral UN peace keeping troops. 4  The neutrality issue is of course crucial: this Schutztruppe will also provide protection for Arab States and that might involve German soldiers fighting against Israeli soldiers—a situation “hard to imagine” for the official and, in a Spiegel interview with a former Bundeswehr-General “unthinkable for Germans.” 5  Satisfied” or not, the Bundesregierung is trying, as the report puts it diplomatically, to send Kooperationssignale to the Arabs, meaning that Berlin is apprehensive that this early debate of German participation in the projected French led UN Schutztruppe in Lebanon might limit its range of political action.

The Israeli air war has been disastrous for the Lebanese and further damaged the stability of the Middle East rather than ushering in the new Middle East of Rice’s curiously limited imagination.  Whether they acknowledge it or not, it is politically bad for Israel and the US. But some aspects of German politics may have benefited from it. From the beginning of that disastrous unilateral adventure, the German elite press across the political spectrum has kept large German audiences well informed about the huge damage caused by it and the conspicuous absence of credible reasons for starting it. For the inevitable “security reasons,” Olmert managed to mis-remember the sequence of the events of July 12 and, most importantly, the history of Israel’s political and military conduct in  the Middle East over the last 40 years. It made it easier for him to put aside, in this moment of need for an increasingly rare commodity, well-trained competent soldiers, memories of Germany’s proverbially bad history. What he said in this interview to a laudably skeptical German journalist is in some ways a “Novum” and may have interesting consequences for the enduring politically powerful German fear of accusations of anti-Semitism.

But did Olmert, Israel, have any idea what would happen when on July 12, in immediate reaction to the familiar border clashes with Hezbollah—Sharon used to do business with Hezbollah on the issue of prisoners—it began dropping bombs on Lebanon?  It did so in a situation of heightened tension over the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in Gaza to which the Israeli air force had already contributed earlier that morning when it bombarded a home in Gaza City, allegedly targeting senior Hamas leaders but instead killing nine members of the Abu Selmiya family. It was the familiar Israeli policy of political assassination with its high “collateral damage” quotient  that, curiously, has never seemed to violate US humanitarian “values.”

But why a full-blown air war at this time? In strategic terms, as an all-out preemptive strike against Hezbollah, it never made any sense—unless one thinks of the gloriously terrifying power of the ones who do the bombing reflected in the pure impotence and fear of the bombed. Preemptively struck in their houses; struck again and again trying to flee; finally, with ever more roads and bridges destroyed,  trapped, terrified prey. When all the dead have been pulled out from under the rubble, and all the wounded are minimally taken care of, when there will be some kind of cease fire to Israel’s advantage, the terrible, diminishing fear of the trapped will not so quickly retreat into a neatly politicized past. They will remember that the rush of omnipotence achieved by bombing makes total destruction and unconditional surrender the preconditions for “lasting” peace and security on the victor’s terms—assertions repeated endlessly in the Bush administration’s circular arguments for “sustainability.” In the super-power scenario, a sustainable peace is only achieved by simply unsustainable means.

It is not a new scenario. General Hugh Trenchard, Commander of the Allied Independent Force of Bombers, argued already in 1917 that systematic area bombing of densely populated areas resulting in high civilian losses would destroy the morale of the population. They would therefore be more important for victory than even substantial industrial and infrastructure damages (unless these were meant, as they are in Israel’s war, to prevent the bombed from trying to flee the bombings). Issues of morality and the law of war—erasing the distinction between combatants and civilians in air war—were easily bracketed after the 1917 German attacks on London; and the overriding concern in the British debates was military effectiveness. However, the new concept of unlimited air war was not  presented as revenge, since England had attacked Germany from the beginning of W.W.I. The seductions of  area bombing were rather  “the beauty of the coming war,” as Lord Fisher would put it in 1919. The new war in the air was characterized by the absence of obstacles: no crossing of mountains, rivers, forests, deserts; no being stuck in the primeval mud of  trench warfare despite (because?) of awesome modern technology. No scruples about what we now call “collateral damage.” Waging war in the empty air was quintessentially modern minimalism: one could just fly high above everything; removed, unhindered, one could be dropping tons of bombs, wreak total devastation, and never look back. Only in Great Britain and the U.S. was the doctrine of air war focused so exclusively on bombing. The 1935 War Manual of the RAF defined the bomb as the main weapon of the air force; and both U.S. and British pilots saw themselves as harbingers of the new modern “total war” that had totally dispersed with the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. 6

Instructively, given the concrete consequences of this doctrine, the air war strategies described before the Munich agreement in the 1938 RAF War Manual called for area bombings of densely settled regions like the industrially vital Ruhrgebiet [Ruhr Valley]. They would result in large numbers of civilian dead as part of the goal to demoralize the civilian population to the point of national collapse. Anything that might contribute to weakening decisively the “national efforts” of the enemy was seen as a strategically worthwhile measure. This principle was shared by the U.S. air force during  W.W.II and into the Cold War, the fire bombings of Japan and Germany and the notorious “carpet bombings” of the Vietnam war being particularly brutal examples. In W.W. II, both British and U.S. pilots were conditioned to look at modern warfare as “total war” and at civilian populations as “the enemy” to be destroyed by any means. The theories of total war were masked by the use of abstract or metaphorical discourse of “systems”—hitting the nerve centre, aiming at the heart, the brain, the veins of an infrastructure of roads, railroad tracks, bridges—to turn the attention away from the extreme damage done to the hundreds of thousands of real bodies this kind of warfare would surely create.  Are there not echoes of the seductions of bombing in Israel’s decision to attack so freely from the air, not even having to fear any fire from anti-aircraft?

On July 12, I was, like most people, shocked by the news of Israel’s sudden bombing assault on a country that, after lengthy and costly reconstruction, had just  “come back” from many years of brutal warfare and was just beginning to enjoy promises of a better future. I also thought that the “the world’s” reproach of a “disproportionate reaction” was too tame, like the curiously muted criticism of Israel’s conduct in the Middle East over many  decades; and I expected the German print media to practice their familiar self-censorship, perhaps even to the point of avoiding the reproach “disproportionate.” 7

I was irritated but not surprised by a Spiegel  interview of July 17  with the well-known public intellectual and historian of anti-Semitism, Dan Diner. The title of the interview is a quote from Diner’s argument "Deshalb spielt Israel verrückt [therefore Israel acts (as if it had gone) crazy]"; and his explanation for this seemingly crazy but  calculated strategy is that Israel, withdrawing from occupied territory to the old borders before the 1967 war, is consumed with anxiety over keeping them absolutely secure, no matter the cost to other countries and other people. Never one  for taking accusations of war crimes seriously, Israel is saying to the gentile (therefore) hostile world: “don’t mess with us.” In Diner’s view, Israel wants to  persuade the world that it is a “crazy,” dangerously unpredictable state; to defeat and disarm Hezbollah is a secondary goal.

Spiegel  is well known for quoting rather than stating opinions, particularly of the controversial kind, like Diner’s assertion that lsrael does what it wants to do, no matter what, since what it wants to do is what it has to do. The Germans are known for their tolerance of this kind of argumentation if it concerns Jews or the Jewish state. Fear of war and bombs is deeply imbedded in the German “collective psyche” but not as deeply as the fear of accusations of anti-Semitism. For many decades, life in Germany has been controlled by a host of rules guarding the purity of German anti-anti-Semitism. According to a law passed unanimously by the German Bundestag after a particularly dense anti-Semitism dispute in the fall of 2003, gentile Germans have to be referred to as “non-Jewish Germans” instead of “Germans” in public speech. Un-hyphenated Germans of all colors and shapes, among them large groups of Muslims, think this law silly; but if they argued against it in public, they would automatically be branded anti-Semites. In the German climate of ideological non-exclusivity, Muslims, too, do not want to be seen as anti-Semitic, if only to reserve the right to complain about their own exclusion by the non-Jewish and non-Muslim German majority.

Over the last half century, the German intellectual and political elites have gone through the strangest contortions to make it absolutely and ”forever” clear that they will “never again” tolerate anti-Semitism by which they mean anything that might in any way be “offensive” to Jews. Official use of the term “non-Jewish Germans” is intended to eliminate even the slightest suggestion of exclusion. Given the German anxiety of being misunderstood,  the solution is quite brilliant: the very small Jewish-German  minority now designates by negation a very large and diverse majority of non-Jewish Germans; Jewish Germans are “the Germans.” But even this essentialist identification does not clear up the conceptual fuzziness of "anti-Semitism" that has made it such a popular multi-tasking instrument for quite clear accusations and punishment. Not unexpectedly, it has not helped the Germans still working hard on making amends for W.W.II to have their efforts recognized, not to speak of appreciated.

In a recent bitter lament about German lack of sincere remorse and of respect for past and current Jewish suffering, the Jewish-German public intellectual Henryk M. Broder called this law “kokett”: after 60 years, the Germans are still just flirting with their enduring guilt and shame. Looking at it more critically, Germans have been remarkably steadfast in their remorse and their memories of guilt—perhaps more so than is warranted for these familiarly unstable states of mind and emotion, especially where it concerns long periods of time; and more so than has been politically useful. They have done so partly because of  German postwar socialization; partly because many of them did and still do have a sense of the horrors of Nazi persecutions; partly because of American and Israeli pressure working on fears of accusations of anti-Semitism that include, in the age of multi-national concerns and globalization, fears of economic boycotts.  

Showing remorse—and it has to be shown to be “real”—for the bad German past has become much more complicated since the late sixties, when the student generation of 1968 could not only accuse their parents, the war “generation of perpetrators,” whose passivity had created the millions of innocent victims of the Holocaust, but also their contemporary war generation of Americans dropping bombs on innocent civilians in Vietnam. Anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism were not yet synonymous. They had become so by the time Angela Merkel’s predecessor Schroeder refused to be among “the Willing,” admittedly for his own political reasons, and was reminded by the German financial leadership that it would pay to show a bit more remorse, since the Americans were so hooked on it.

Broder’s lament was published in Spiegel  on August 1, when the world appeared to be truly shocked by the Israeli air raid on Qana and calls for a cease fire had become even more urgent. Not that they were realistic as long as the Bush Administration was just re-asserting “unconditional” support for their “most important ally” Israel and ordered Great Britain to impose this support on the EU. But  Broder’s complaint seemed to echo a more real fear: could the world be persuaded to adopt “our values” even in clear view of the disaster created by Israel? Had there not already been some mentioning of possible “war crimes?” 8 And did not the Germans need to be reminded even more emphatically now that they owed unquestioned, unconditional, unwavering loyalty to their victims precisely because their guilt was sixty years old?  One day before the attack on Qana,  Merkel had repeated her country’s “historical political obligation to unconditionally (unverbruechlich) support Israel’s right to exist” and continued with the familiar Israeli-American accusations against Hezbollah—they are in every way and solely responsible for the current crisis. But these remarks were occasioned by her explicit uneasiness over sending German soldiers to the Middle East. 9

Broder’s uneasiness was no doubt increased by the German media expressing shock, sadness, and explicit criticism of Israel in the case of Qana, but also previous attacks. 10  From the beginning of the air raids, I checked periodically the reports and commentaries in the German elite press across the political spectrum (admittedly a rather narrow one, especially regarding the conservative part): Frankfurter Rundschau (FR), Frankfurter AllgemeineZeitung (FAZ), Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Spiegel, Die Zeit, and  Die Welt (the latter is owned by an international concern requiring its journalists to sign a statement prohibiting all criticism of the US or Israel). All of them dealt in great and critical detail with the humanitarian catastrophe—the dead, wounded, the ever higher numbers of refugees, the wholesale destruction of habitats, infrastructure and the ecology in ever larger areas. The term “disproportionate” was not used in these texts to prettify the terrible situation in Lebanon created by Israel for who knows what “real” reasons, but to show Israel’s irresponsibility. There are variations in the reporting of the incidents and in the substance and style of the commentaries—SZ  and Spiegel tend to have more high-profile interviews; FAZ and Die Zeit more general political commentaries, FR more reporting from journalists on location—but not in the general critical perspective on the issue of Israel’s war.

Israel has not had to fight for its existence for a long time now,  and arguably German reluctance to be more critical of Israel’s stubborn politics in the Middle East  has contributed to the political conditions enabling the “war” in Iraq as well as the enduring crisis in Palestine and the current  assault on Lebanon. It has not been good for Israel to be forever the innocent victim in relation to Germany—as the US has been forever the innocent victor—and therefore able to act unilaterally in the Middle East. It has been even more damaging to the US to support Israel’s conduct because the Jewish state’s politics of identity and unconditionality has blinded the US to the complex, volatile political conditions in the Middle East—far more important than affordable oil and perhaps from now on more accessible to openly critical discussion in the German press.

1 . SZ  Aug.3, "Niemand kann uns stoppen" (nobody can stop us). Translating the German reports and commentaries on Israel’s air war is tricky because they concern tricky issues often  discussed in carefully orchestrated diplomatese.  For this essay  I have consulted almost 100 texts of which I can reference here only a tiny fraction . If somebody has a good reason to want to know sources they can email me.

3 . FR, Aug.7,  “UN-Entwurf kommt Israel entgegen” (UN draft favors Israel).

4 . FR Aug.7, “UN-Entwurf als "Anfang": Blair lobt, Berlin sieht Probleme” (UN draft as a “Beginning”: Blair praises it, Berlin sees problems).

5 . Spiegel Online,Aug.7,  "Keine deutschen Truppen im Kampfbereich.”

6 . Richard Overy, “Die alliierte Bombenstrategie,” Ein Volk von Opfern. Die neue Debatte umden Bombenkrieg 1940-45, ed. Lothar Ketttenacker (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2003), 27-47, 30-31.

7 .  In June I had an article returned by a major German newspaper asking me to always put Israel Lobby in quotation marks, cut all references to Israel as a “Klientenstaat” of the US; and in general avoid all possible”misunderstandings” =never be openly critical, when writing about Jewish or Israeli concerns.

8.   Le Monde, July 30, 200.

9 .  Spiegel Online, July 29,  “Merkel äußert sich skeptisch zu Bundeswehr-Einsatz in Nahost.”

10. For July 30-August 1 see the FR and SZ reports and commentaries critical of  Israel’s excessive air raids; the SZ interview with Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier pleading for more contacts to Arab states like Syria. See also the critical commentary on Israel’s air war by Heribert Prantl, SZ, July 23, “Auge um Auge, Zahn um Zahn,” which also asks how much critique of  Israel is permitted in Germany. In his Spiegel  piece Broder lists Prantl  as “anti-Semitic.”