Wissenschaft und Publizistik als Kritik

Schlagwort: Michael B. Oren

Der Mossad bringt Frieden in Nahost auf den Weg: Vereinigte Arabische Emirate nehmen diplomatische Beziehungen zu Israel auf

Von Dr. phil. Clemens Heni, 15. August 2020

Das ist einer der größten geoplitischen Paukenschläge der letzten Jahrzehnte in Nahost: Am Donnerstag den 13. August 2020 verkündete US-Präsident Trump in einer gemeinsamen Erklärung Amerikas, Israels und den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten, dass die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate (United Arab Emirates, UAE) und Israel normale diplomatische Beziehungen aufnehmen werden.

Nach Berichten der Times of Israel (TOI) könnte die Unterzeichnung der Urkunden in ca. drei Wochen stattfinden. Nach Ägypten (1979) und Jordanien (1994) wären die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate erst das dritte arabische Land, das diplomatische Beziehungen zu Israel aufnimmt. Ein wahrhaft historischer Erfolg, wie der Gründer der Times of Israel David Horovitz betont.

Bislang wurde immer gedacht, ausschließlich nach der Lösung des palästinensisch-israelischen Konflikts sei eine Friedenslösung mit den arabischen Staaten möglich. Das dachten so gut wie alle Expert*innen, wie der amerikanisch-israelische Politiker, ehemalige Botschafter Israels in den USA und Buchautor (“Ally”)  Michael B. Oren unterstreicht.

Doch die Palästinenser weigern sich seit Jahren, wieder an den Verhandlungstisch zurückzukehren. Israel unter Benjamin Netanyahu verfolgt seit Jahren einen sehr nationalistischen Kurs, der nicht nur innenpolitisch  scharf kritisiert wird. Die geplante Annexion von weiten Teilen des Westjordanlandes am 1. Juli 2020 hatte die Befürchtungen bestärkt, dass Israel diplomatisch russisches Roulette spielt und den Zionismus, der gerade auf einer Übereinkunft mit den Palästinensern (“zwei Völker, zwei Staaten”) aufbaut, in Gefahr bringt.

Doch jetzt zeigt die Übereinkunft mit einem führenden arabischen Land wie den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten, dass es ganz anders kommen kann als gedacht: Im Gegenzug zur Aufnahme diplomatischer Beziehungen legt Israel seine Annexionspläne auf Eis, das war die Bedingung der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate.

Die Palästinenser hingegen drehen mal wieder durch, die Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde spricht von Verrat, palästinensische Aktivisten zertrampeln und verbrennen Fahnen der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate mit dem Bild des de facto Herrschers Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan und sehen nicht die pro-palästinensische und pro-israelische Position eines führenden arabischen Staates.

Auch rechtsextreme Israelis aus der national-religiösen Bewegung wie der Yamina-Politiker Bezalel Smotrich oder  der Siedleranführer David Elhayani kriegen die Vollkrise und attackieren Netanyahu – dessen Rücktritt aus völlig anderen (und nachvollziehbaren) Gründen (u.a. Korruption, Nationalismus, Einschüchterung der Judikative, aggressive Coronapolitik) in den letzten Monaten eher scharf linke und liberale Gruppen und Protestierende mit Großdemonstrationen, Sitzblockaden und auch gewalttätigen Aktionen fordern.

Es haben bereits weitere arabische Länder erkennen lassen, dass auch sie möglicherweise diplomatische Beziehungen zu Israel aufnehmen könnten, wie Oman oder Bahrain.

Natürlich ist der gemeinsame politische Feind Iran ein zentraler Aspekt. Aber geschickte Diplomatie des Mossad scheint wegweisend gewesen zu sein in diesem für den Frieden in der Region historischen Schritt.

Wir wissen nicht, ob Netanyahu seine offensiv verkündete Annexion des Westjordanlandes nur machte, um dann die Nicht-Annexion als großen Erfolg zu feiern – denn einen viel größeren Erfolg als diplomatische Beziehungen mit einem arabischen big player hat es lange nicht gegeben in Nahost und für Israel. Das betont auch der diplomatische Korrespondent der Times of Israel, Raphael Ahren, der in diesem Abkommen den größten außenpolitischen Erfolg Netanyahus in der langen Zeit als Regierungschef Israel sieht, ja es handele sich um eine “diplomatische Sensation”:

Indeed, Netanyahu pulled off an unparalleled diplomatic sensation. Securing a full-fledged peace agreement with an Arab state that had hitherto been, and insists it remains, a steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause, all the while unapologetically expanding settlements and reducing the prospects for a future two-state solution, will likely go down as the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of his long career.

Lustig ist, dass in Deutschland ja das Ressentiment gegen den Mossad vorherrscht. Erst kürzlich meinte die ehemalige Chefredakteurin der taz (1998-2009) und der Frankfurter Rundschau (2014-2020) Bascha Mika – die im Bereich der feministischen Kritik und im Kampf gegen die Männerdominanz in den Medien viel geleistet hat -, ein deutsch-iranisch-israelischer Aktivist, Publizist und Regierungsmitarbeiter wie Arye Sharuz Shalicar in Israel stünde für das ganz Böse, den Mossad (das Interview Mika/Brumlik, inklusive der Attacke auf den Antisemitismusbeauftragten der Deutschen Bundesregierung Felix Klein, wurde umgehend in der FR selbst von Meron Mendel kritisiert):

Shalicar berät den Mossad, das ist kein Geheimnis. Gleichzeitig wird er bei seiner publizistischen Arbeit von der Bundesregierung unterstützt. Heißt das, der israelische Geheimdienst nimmt auf diesem Wege Einfluss auf die Debatte in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit?

Darauf ihr kuschliger Gesprächspartner Micha Brumlik:

Indirekt ja.

Und jetzt sehen wir: Der Mossad ist noch viel dreister, krasser und schafft eine historische Tat, die Annäherung der arabischen Welt an den jüdischen Staat Israel! Aus dem “indirekten” Einfluss wird ganz konkrete Weltpolitik in Nahost.

Dank dem Mossad und seinem Chef Yossi Cohen, der viele Reisen unternahm und die historische Übereinkunft diplomatisch vorbereitete, gibt es jetzt also eine große Hoffnung auf Frieden und israelisch-arabische Kooperation in der gesamten Region.

Fazit: Es lebe die jüdische-arabische Kooperation gerade nicht im Sinne der Antizionisten, die die Einstaatenlösung wollen, sondern im Sinne der Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate und des zionistischen Mossad. Mazl tov!

The Obsession to fight the Jewish state – The binational option, from Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt to Micha Brumlik and Judith Butler

The Times of Israel, September 3, 2013

On September 9 and 10, 2013, the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Berlin’s Technical University, together with the huge German Foundation on “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future”, which spends up to seven million Euros a year for events (and spent over 70 million Euros since its inception in the year 2000), the group “Berlin-Kreuzberg Initiative against Antisemitism (Kiga)” and several other organizations as well as a German ministry of the Federal Government, will held a conference in Nuremberg on the Middle East conflict and its perception among immigrants in Germany.

The ZfA and its former head Wolfgang Benz have been criticized in recent years for promoting research on “Islamophobia” instead of Muslim antisemitism. In addition, Benz has been questioned about his silence about the Nazi legacy of his PhD advisor Karl Bosl, who awarded Benz a doctorate in 1968. In 1964, Bosl had compared the Holocaust to the expulsion of Germans from the East, and during Nazi Germany Bosl was on the payroll of the SS, an active historian in Nazi circles, and a member of the Nazi party NSDAP. Wolfgang Benz even collaborated with hardcore Islamist activists from the German online project Muslim Market and gave those pro-Iranian antisemites a very friendly interview in November 2010. Muslim Market is among those groups that organize the pro-Iran, pro-Hezballah and anti-Israel al-Quds rallies every year at the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan. On their homepage Muslim Market promotes the boycott of Israel with a scratched-out Star of David. Is this an appropriate place for the best known German scholar on antisemitism to be interviewed?

Then, in 2012, the new Center head since summer 2011, historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, appointed Edward Said follower and anti-Zionist Islamic studies scholar Achim Rohde. I analyzed the problematic tropes of Rohde’s scholarly approach and he left (or had to leave) the ZfA in 2013. Schüler-Springorum, though, is far from being an expert on research on antisemitism, let alone Israel, the Middle East, or the history of anti-Zionism. She has not published a single book on antisemitism so far, which is remarkable for the head of the leading European institute for research on that topic.

A speaker at the event in Nuremberg will be Islamic studies scholar and journalist Alexandra Senfft. In November 2012 she interviewed Wolfgang Benz and welcomed his new book on “How fear of Muslims threatens our democracies” – a strange topic for a scholar on antisemitism who is silent on jihadism and Islamist Jew-hatred. Senfft even mentioned that Benz frequently is interviewed by Muslims and Muslim journals in Germany but she had no problem and did not mention Benz’ interview with the hardcore Islamist and antisemitic Muslim Market. Senfft argues against critics of antisemitism like Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano and journalist Henryk M. Broder because they are critics of “Islam,” in fact they are critics of Islamist antisemitism in particular and Islamism in general.

One of the best known speakers at the September 9 event, invited by Schüler-Springorum and her allies, is Professor Micha Brumlik, a pedagogue by profession. Brumlik has been known in recent decades as a critic of some forms of antisemitism in Germany. But he is even better known today for his kosher stamps for antisemitic agitators like Judith Butler who received the very prestigious Adorno-Prize of the city of Frankfurt in 2012. Butler calls Israel an apartheid state, she supports the anti-Jewish Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and she is in favor of German-Jewish philosophers Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Martin Buber (1878–1965). Both Arendt and Buber agitated against a Jewish state of Israel and favored a binational Israel.

In the July issue of the leading left-wing German monthly, Konkret, Brumlik promoted a “Plan B.” In his article he argued against Israel as a Jewish state and followed Buber’s plans for a binational Israel. Konkret and Brumlik went so far as to say that Jews may not have a principled right of return to Zion – rather humanitarian and economic aspects should regulate immigration to Israel/Palestine.

Brumlik and Konkret are not stupid, they are not pro-Hamas or pro-Hezballah, they are rather critics of Islamist antisemitism and the Iranian threat. Konkret is even known as one of the very few self-declared pro-Israel journals in Germany. If it is pro-Israel to plead for a binational state – then you can imagine the anti-Zionist climate in Germany.

A few days after Brumlik’s piece was published by Konkret, I wrote a critique of this anti-Israel article. I said that this approach for a binational Israel, coming from a well-known Jewish professor and a self-declared pro-Israel monthly, is perhaps more dangerous than anti-Israel hatred coming from all kinds of hardcore right-wing or left-wing circles. I said that Brumlik and Konkret are perhaps more dangerous thanks to their distinguished style, their clear and calm strategy for this “Plan B” aiming at a binational Israel and rejecting Jews’ principled right of return.

Konkret became rather angry about my critique and attacked my person in a nasty and completely unprofessional way in the following editorial. Such attacks against pro-Israel scholars are normal when it comes to typical extreme right-wing or left-wing hate mongers, but Konkret always pretended to be pro-Israel. But well, Martin Buber was pro-Israel, too. He was a Zionist and this is the problem we are facing: what is Zionism?

This is a strategic question, going beyond the actual debates and conflicts.

There is the political Zionism of Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) and his followers. Herzl was not religious but desperate for a Jewish state. Others, like Achad Ha’am (1856–1927) preferred a cultural Zionism, urging Jews to become more Jewish in an inner, philosophical or religious and cultural way. This awakening of being Jewish was also a main element of Martin Buber’s approach in the early 20th century. Buber was a strong Zionist but did not want a Jewish state at all. Like Arendt, who was much younger than him and less religious, he was in favor of a homeland for Jews, but not a Jewish state. Sounds strange to today’s ears? This convoluted logic is behind today’s proposals for a binational state. And this is what we have to struggle with, in the next years and decades.

Influential German historian Dan Diner from Leipzig and Tel Aviv Universities argued for a binational Israel in his super PhD (habilitation) in 1980, too. I am not sure if this is still his point of view, but I fear it is. Historian Siegbert Wolf, known for books on Buber or anarchist and friend of Buber, Gustav Landauer (who was killed by sadistic, antisemitic, nationalistic and anti-socialist pre-Nazi German soldiers in 1919), argued for a binational Israel as well and referred to Diner. Like Diner, Konkret or Brumlik, Wolf is not stupid at all. He is aware of the Nazi collaboration of the leading Arab and Muslim politician at the time, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, and refers to pro-Israel and anti-Islamist critics of the Mufti like political scientist Matthias Küntzel, and historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers. Despite these facts, Wolf supports antisemitic and so called post-Orientalist superstar Edward Said (1935–2003) and his plea for a binational Israel. Wolf’s pro-Buber article was published by the official German Martin-Buber-Society in 2011.

Butler likes the idea of a binational Israel, and therefore she refers to Arendt and Buber. For Butler, though, in her anti-Israel book from 2012, “Parting Ways. Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” Buber was still a problem, because he was in favor of Jewish “settler colonialism” and Jewish immigration to Palestine (prior to 1948). In fact, Buber wanted limited immigration even after the Shoah. In 1947, together with the co-founder and later President of Hebrew University, Judah Magnes (1877–1948), he wrote a pamphlet “Arab-Jewish Unity,” a “Testimony before the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission for the Ihud (Union) Association.” In it, they argued against a Jewish state of Israel and wanted a limited immigration of 100,000 Jews a year, in order to not disturb the Arabs.

In 1958, Martin Buber wrote that the “philosophy of violence” of the “national socialist evil” kept on “having an effect” “in a part of our people,” the Jewish people. This (antisemitic) comparison of Jews to Nazis was remembered, quoted and not at all criticized in 1961 in an afterword to a big study by Hans Cohn on Buber, written by the Brit Shalom member (1925–1933), co-founder of the Leo Baeck Institute and first editor of its Yearbook (1956–1978), Israeli journalist Robert Weltsch (1891–1982). Cohn’s book with Weltsch’s afterword appeared in a second printing in 1979, published by the Leo Baeck Institute New York, with a foreword by German historian Julius H. Schoeps, today head of the 1992 founded Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (MMZ) in Potsdam.

As historians and co-editors of the “New Essays on Zionism” in 2006, David Hazony, Yoram Hazony, and Michael B. Oren, observed, there is a need to justify Zionism in our times after the Cold War, an era that for Israel was relatively harmless, predictable, and largely free of today’s jihadist threat. Thanks to “European ideology,” they wrote, the “future of mankind” is seen “in the dissolution of state sovereignty.” Therefore Zionism, political Zionism and not spiritual or cultural Zionism, to be sure, needs philosophical, historical, political and religious justification.

We have to confront European and German ideology of Immanuel Kant and the end of the nation-state in the late 18th century. Kant is still very influential in philosophy and politics alike, take Yale’s Seyla Benhabib as an example. In 2012 she was awarded a prize in Germany, despite her outspoken anti-Zionist articles in recent years and her friendship with Judith Butler. Even pro-Israel young scholars embrace Benhabib and are unwilling or unable to decode the dangerous ideology of Kant, and his followers in the anti-nation-state tent.

Israel is a Jewish state and has to be a Jewish state and has to be accepted as a Jewish state. Israel as a Jewish state with unlimited immigration could have saved hundreds of thousand Jews, if not millions. Jews have by far the longest and most intense relationship to Zion and the territory of Israel. Jerusalem is of minor importance to Islam, just take the Quran as an example. Finally, no one in the humanities and social sciences is questioning the Muslim character of almost all Arab states, or of Iran.

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, perhaps today the two most influential Jewish anti-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state celebrities in the humanities and social sciences from the 20th century, did a bad job. They attacked and defamed the very idea of Israel as a Jewish state in the 1940s, take the time frame from 1942 until 1948, when the Holocaust happened and the Biltmore conference in May 1942 in New York City argued in favor of a Jewish state of Israel.

The question is not only if someone is pro-Israel, but also what kind of Israel. What do people refer to when they are in favor of Israel – a cultural Zionist or spiritual Judaistic Israel with no Jewish majority, a binational Israel? Or, a political Zionist Israel, the Jewish state of Israel?

It is a scandal that proponents of a binational Israel and authors who attack critics of antisemitism and Muslim antisemitism are invited to that conference to be held in Nuremberg, September 9, 2013.

Finally, even among self-declared friends of Israel there is a huge gap of knowledge about the history of Zionism and Israel as a Jewish state. There is much work to be done for serious scholarship.

Präsentiert von WordPress & Theme erstellt von Anders Norén

WordPress Cookie Plugin von Real Cookie Banner