Tel Aviv
24.2.2024
The hotel is reminiscent of an East German barracks tarted up with Buddha statues, colored string lights, and plush carpets. The narrow veranda with its inflatable round pool and tiny stools is particularly impressive. It is a beautiful, sunny day. Beach weather. The beach is visible from the hotel’s veranda. After drinking my espresso there — a gift from the receptionist, who addresses all male guests as “Brother” — I set off.
On the way to the beach, I discover a McDonald’s and take the opportunity to have breakfast and go online. On the display boards of the McDonald’s franchise, too, images of Hamas hostages in Gaza alternate with advertisements for burgers and chicken wings. Despite this omnipresence and scattered protests by the population against Netanyahu’s policies, the Israeli army continues its retaliatory campaign against the Palestinian civilian population at full intensity.
On this day, Saturday, February 24, 2024, according to OCHA’s website (the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), 1.7 million people in Gaza are displaced.
The Israeli air force is intensifying its attacks on populated areas in Rafah. By now, 1.5 million people are seeking shelter in Rafah — six times the population before October 7, 2023. Since October 7th, the Israeli army has killed nearly 30,000 people in the Gaza Strip; more than half were women and children.
Between October 7, 2023, and February 23, 2024, 399 Palestinians fell victim to the Israelis in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. More than 100 of the victims were children. 2023 was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the United Nations began keeping records in 2005.
Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, is quoted with the following statement: “In just over four months, more children, more journalists, more medical personnel, and more UN staff have been killed in Gaza than anywhere else in the world during a conflict.” ⁵⁸
1.7 million people displaced — women, children, the elderly, on foot, on bicycles, and on donkey carts, bombed from the air. Many are malnourished; all are housed in tents and emergency shelters. The contrast with the beach of Tel Aviv, 71 kilometers away, could not be greater.
On the promenade this morning, an endless parade of attractive women in Lululemon leggings marches by. The mood is relaxed and cheerful; beach volleyball is being played, and folk dancing is being improvised in groups. A beach boy with broad shoulders carries an automatic pistol tucked into the back of his shorts. I reach a wide staircase sheltered by sun canopies. I notice that the facade of the building at the top of the stairs is decorated with the colors of the rainbow flag.
The decoration reminds me of the “Brand Israel” advertising campaign, which aimed to improve Israel’s image in the USA. Positive associations were to be anchored instead of war and conflict; in the USA, too, the erroneous assumption of a religiously motivated conflict that has been going on for centuries is widespread. The campaign’s most important target group was Americans aged 18 to 31. Initially, the campaign’s creators focused primarily on the heterosexual portion of the target audience.
The star of the first campaign, organized in collaboration with the men’s magazine Maxim, was Gal Gadot, who later became known as “Wonder Woman.” The cover image of the series also served as the invitation card of the consulate, which had insisted on organizing a celebration for the presentation of the Maxim issue. The photo series appeared with the headline “Women of the Israeli Defense Forces” and the text: “They are drop-dead gorgeous and can field-strip a Uzi in seconds flat. Are the women of the Israeli Defense Forces the hottest soldiers on earth?” ⁵⁹
The images themselves are unfortunately no longer to be found online, but they are described in an article published by the University of Heidelberg under the title “The Israeli Military in Public Space” as follows: “Visual productions like these, in which ostensibly military elements are at most hinted at in the background while sexual appeal is demonstratively pushed to the foreground, are reminiscent of the iconography of modern warrior Amazons from the most diverse entertainment genres, such as the fictional cyber-heroine Lara Croft from the video and computer game Tomb Raider or the comic and film character Barbarella, well known in the 1960s. This character type, through tight-fitting, figure-hugging clothing and the wearing of boots and weapons, embodies a mixture of female sex appeal, power, and military strength.” ⁶⁰
In the Name of Love
One might think this state-funded eroticization of power and violence would be hard to surpass in tastelessness, but that would be a mistake. Driven by the imperative to distract from the Zionist colonial project and the brutal oppression of the Palestinians, the “Brand Israel” campaign changed its thrust and subsequently focused on celebrating Tel Aviv as a queer oasis in the desert of Arab homophobia.
In doing so, the Israeli state tailors the message to the target audience: When addressing a liberal, LGBTQ-friendly audience in Israel or the rest of the world, it produces pink rhetoric to portray Israel as a gay paradise. For homophobic target audiences domestically and for Christian Zionists abroad, the emphasis is on conservatism and adherence to family values.
The cynical exploitation of the topic, dubbed “pinkwashing” by critics, culminated in November 2023 with this photo of the destruction in Gaza published on “X”:
The episode is a good example of the derailment of Israeli propaganda and the moral erosion of the society that produces it. Objectively speaking, the focus on the topic of homosexuality was an intelligent chess move. It is better to use selectively chosen facts for a campaign if you want to be successful in the long term. Good propaganda lies with the truth.
It is true that the legal situation in Israel regarding homosexuality is significantly more humane and enlightened compared to most countries in the region. It is true that within the Islamic world, there is hardly any tolerance for homosexuality. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of Islamic theologians are extremely hostile toward homosexuality.
This statement by an association of Australian imams is a good example: “From the Islamic perspective, homosexuality is a forbidden act, a grave sin, and anyone who engages in it is considered a disobedient servant of Allah, incurring His displeasure and disapproval. This is clearly established in the three main sources of Sharia: the Quran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of all scholars, extending from the time of the Prophet to the present day.” ⁶¹
Homosexuality is rejected and severely punished in many Islamic countries. In these countries, according to a US government fact sheet, consensual same-sex relations carry the death penalty: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Mauritania, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan. ⁶² Only in Iran does the death penalty for homosexuality appear to continue to be enforced; most recently, according to the Associated Press, two men in Iran were executed for the crime of homosexuality in 2022. ⁶³
A Queen’s Lack of Imagination
The British Mandate Criminal Code of 1936, which continues to apply in Gaza, criminalizes “unnatural” sexual acts between men with a maximum penalty of ten years in prison. Under British law, only men were considered — allegedly because Queen Victoria was unable to imagine that women could be capable of such acts at all.
Although this law is formally in force, there is little evidence of its practical application. The legal situation is complex, and some experts argue that the law could be interpreted in a way that consensual homosexual acts are not punishable. ⁶⁴
The crucial question is, of course: What does any of this have to do with the fact that Israel is a colony planned by European settlers that drove the indigenous population, the “natives,” from their land and has since disadvantaged, oppressed, robbed, and periodically massacred them?
Nothing.
Effective propaganda demonizes by reducing people to caricatures. Caricatures only work if they contain a kernel of truth. But this kernel of truth does not serve as the starting point for an argument. Logic plays no role here. In Saudi Arabia, three gay men were still being beheaded in 2002. ⁶⁵ Does that give the free, civilized, Western world the right to colonize Saudi Arabia?
The goal of propaganda is not argumentation but devaluation, distraction, and obfuscation. Good propaganda comes across as empathetic and benevolent, as for example in this article in the Algemeiner, a Zionist publication in the USA: “The brutal treatment of LGBTQ+ Palestinians under Hamas is a serious human rights violation that urgently requires attention. The geopolitical complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is immense, yet the fundamental human rights of LGBTQ+ individuals should not be pushed into the background. Their suffering is a stark reminder of the brutality that marginalized groups face under oppressive regimes.” ⁶⁶
The crucial sentence: “The geopolitical complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is immense, yet the fundamental human rights of LGBTQ+ individuals should not be pushed into the background.”
The ever-same phrases: The conflict is terribly complex and hard to understand; they’ve been bashing each other’s heads in down there for centuries; religious fanatics on both sides. Nothing can be done about it; let’s better leave the topic aside.
In any case, it is wrong and evil that Hamas mistreats gay people. They are barbarians — not noble desert knights like the faithful friends and allies of the free world, the Saudis, who have long since stopped beheading gay people and now only have them civilizedly flogged. ⁶⁷
The ever-same phrases — none of them is true. The conflict is not hard to understand. Was the conflict between white settlers and indigenous populations in the USA, Canada, or Australia hard to understand?
Talented propagandists for the Zionist cause, such as the Times of Israel journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, like to raise the objection at this point that many of the European immigrants were homeless Holocaust survivors. That is true, even though the Zionist elite around Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky had been settling in Palestine long before the Holocaust. ⁶⁸
This cynical, manipulative instrumentalization of human suffering as justification for the colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is a rhetorical trick. Jews were not the only group of people who fell victim to the Holocaust. Among others, 500,000 Roma/Romnja and Sinti/Sintizze were also murdered during the Holocaust.
The Devouring of the Roma and Sinti
They were gassed in the Auschwitz extermination camp and fell victim to violence, hunger, and disease in forced labor and concentration camps. Many were deported and exploited as forced laborers. Roma and Sinti call this genocide “Porajmos,” which means “devouring” or “destruction” in Romani.
Linguistic analyses have shown that Roma and Sinti originally came from India. Does the crime of the Holocaust give the surviving Roma and Sinti and their descendants the right to establish a colony in India and drive out the indigenous population?
Rettig Gur’s arguments and the article in the Algemeiner are examples of effective propaganda through manipulative rhetoric. For tactical reasons, they acknowledge points made by the opposing side, come across as empathetic and thoughtful, without yielding even a centimeter in their unjust cause. They do not withstand critical scrutiny, but propaganda never does.
Stages of Moral Erosion
Bad propaganda makes itself ridiculous at first glance, like the “In The Name of Love” photo, which is grotesque and repulsive. The dehumanization of the Palestinians has apparently progressed so far that many Israelis no longer even notice the contrast. They do not associate the ruins of Gaza with human suffering.
They are literally no longer able to perceive the grotesque contrast between the symbolism of the rainbow flag and the bombed-out apartment buildings.
Their moral erosion appears to be in its final stage. They are incapable of even feigning humanity. The suffering of the civilian population in Gaza has completely lost its real, human dimension for them. The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are nothing more to them than “cockroaches.” That is what Dan Schueftan, a “security expert” popular with German institutions, calls them during an interview for the podcast “Two Nice Jewish Boys.” ⁶⁹
The development is particularly drastic within the Israeli army. What is disturbing is the fact that much of the evidence of moral degeneration is recorded and published by the Israeli soldiers themselves. Similar to the case of the rainbow flag against the backdrop of Gaza’s rubble, the soldiers do not seem to be aware of how their video messages are perceived by people outside Israeli society.
Dogs Eat the Corpses
On February 5, 2024, for example, an Israeli soldier stationed in the Gaza Strip published a video that once again shows how devastatingly the occupation and the religiously veneered, bloodthirsty nationalism have affected the psyche of many Israelis.
Here is a text excerpt: “We are the sons of Abraham… We are the sons of Joshua, who conquered this land from seven different peoples. Do you remember the Canaanites? The Hittites? The Jebusites? They have all disappeared from the world, and the people of Israel are here to stay… And they tried to fight us… and every time they lost. Every time we won, and that was thanks to the heroism of the soldiers and citizens of Israel… They are not just human animals, they are also idiots; they give their people no hope, only hatred and blood and hell.” ⁷⁰
The Haaretz article “No Civilians. Everyone Is a Terrorist.” proves that the genocidal revenge fantasies were also put into action: “For the division, the ‘kill zone’ extends as far as a sniper can see.
We kill civilians there, who are then counted as terrorists. The IDF spokesman’s statements on casualty numbers have turned it into a competition between units. If one division has taken out 150, the next unit wants to kill 200. After the shots, the bodies are not collected. That attracts the packs of dogs, which eat them. In Gaza, people know that you have to stay away from these dogs wherever you see them.”
“Once, guards spotted someone approaching from the south. We reacted as if it were a large militant raid. We took up positions and simply opened fire. I’m talking about dozens of bullets, maybe even more. For about one to two minutes, we just shot at the body. The people around me were shooting and laughing. We approached the blood-soaked body, photographed it, and took the phone. He was still a boy, maybe 16 years old.”
A signals officer collected the items, and hours later, the fighters learned that the boy was not a Hamas activist but just a civilian. “That evening, our battalion commander congratulated us on the death of a terrorist and said he hoped we would kill ten more tomorrow.” ⁷¹
“The Jews Are Above All a Race”
The racist superiority complex has accompanied the Zionist colonial project from the very beginning. The philosopher Moses Hess, a contemporary and occasional collaborator of Karl Marx, was one of the forerunners of Zionism and wrote in his 1862 work Rome and Jerusalem: “The Jews are above all a race. They should bring civilization to the primitive peoples of Asia and be teachers of European sciences.”
Herzl, the founding father of modern Zionism, has one of the one-dimensional characters in his 1902 novel The Old New Land present the following reflection regarding the successful colonization of the African continent: “But the conditions are different in Africa. There, all these expenditures are not possible because the prerequisite — mass immigration — is lacking. The white man, the colonizer, perishes there. Africa will only be opened up for civilization once malaria has been rendered harmless.”
Racist superiority was a generally accepted standard at the time and is not a unique feature of Zionist ideology or of Europeans. The slave trade, racism, and brutal dehumanization of groups defined as inferior were also widespread in the Arab world.
Pyrrhic Victory
Although the “Nakba,” the expulsion of the Palestinians and the theft of their land, stands at the beginning of Israel’s history, many Israelis see the Six-Day War of 1967 as the moment when the country lost its way, and the process of moral degeneration began.
From this perspective, the Six-Day War — a military triumph for Israel — marks the beginning of moral erosion through occupation. The conquest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights transformed Israel into an occupying power. Critics warned early on that the permanent military control over millions of Palestinians would poison Israel’s soul. Particularly pointed and prophetic was Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s criticism.
From Nationality to Bestiality
The Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz was a rare phenomenon: a polymath who penetrated natural science, philosophy, and theology with equal sharpness. Born in Riga, he earned doctorates in chemistry and medicine, taught biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and published groundbreaking works on neurophysiology.
After the Six-Day War of 1967, he warned of the “corrupting power of the occupation” and drew parallels between Israeli military actions and Nazi methods — a statement that earned him death threats. In 1993, he declined the Israel Prize in protest against a government he considered morally bankrupt. What Leibowitz, who died in 1994, prophesied has come true:
“Since the Six-Day War, Israel has become a power apparatus, a Jewish power apparatus ruling over other people. That is why I say in all clarity: This glorious victory was the historical misfortune of the State of Israel. In the year of the ‘Spring of Nations,’ 1848, Franz Grillparzer warned of the path that leads from humanity through nationality to bestiality. In the 20th century, the German people actually walked this path to the very end. We embarked on this path after the Six-Day War.” ⁷²
I walk a good stretch further along the beach. Even at the beach, there is no escape from the Israeli flag. I can no longer stand the sight of it.
I try to remain objective, to remind myself that the Israelis were victims of a murderous attack on October 7th, that small children were kidnapped; that from childhood they are manipulated through propaganda and are unable to recognize that the Palestinians are not the successors of the Nazis but an oppressed people defending itself against land theft and colonization. This acquired blindness to the obvious is terrifying.
I traveled to Israel to form my own judgment. I did not want to take the easy way out and rely only on books, articles, and videos. It was important to me to confront the reality and the people in the country directly.
For me, there is no longer any doubt that a large part of the Israeli population adheres to a dangerous nationalist ideology that makes use of the symbolism of Judaism but rejects the ethical values of this religion.
Israeli propaganda insists on the equation of Zionism and Judaism, but this equation is misleading and inaccurate. Leibowitz already put it succinctly in a 1990 interview: “The word ‘nationality’ can have several meanings. One of them is simply the statement of a fact. A man is indeed the son of a particular people. In this sense, he has no choice.
He is born and lives in a kind of ‘natural reality.’ But the word nationality can also mean a particular ‘program,’ and then it is the most abominable and contemptible thing. In Israel, there is a program.
‘Who are we?’, ‘What are we?’, ‘What are our values?’ The question is very hard to answer, so we avoid it, because we are the ones to whom all injustice was done. So we allow ourselves to be arrogant and immoral… but who cares, since we are the ones to whom all injustice was done! We only need to be reminded of it and are immediately freed from everything! So we can massacre Arabs in refugee camps. Are we not the ones who caused all this in the first place?” ⁷³
Many Germans, for understandable reasons, do not want to speak out on the subject. They think it is not their place to criticize the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust. But can that be the right lesson from the Holocaust? The focus on one’s own German identity vis-à-vis the identity of Jewish Israelis?
Is the lesson from the Holocaust not, on the contrary, precisely the mandate to look beyond identity constructs and labels and to focus on the universally human, on what connects all individuals?
Every form of dehumanization is equally reprehensible; there must be no hierarchy here. This insight is the great ethical achievement of our time, a development we also owe to Christianity and, thus, to its origin, Judaism. Article 1, Charter of the UN: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
A Universal Potential
The events in Palestine prove once again that all human beings carry within them the latent potential for the dehumanization of the Other. On the side of Jewish Israelis, this potential is activated by the nationalist ideology of Zionism.
Zionism is the ideological superstructure for a settler colonial project devised in the nineteenth century, and it makes use of the Holocaust and the long history of Jewish suffering in Europe to maintain a constant sense of threat.
In this way, Zionism legitimizes the oppression, expulsion, and mistreatment of the indigenous population. The Zionist ideology is communicated and reinforced through demonizing propaganda — a form of communication that, according to Aldous Huxley’s famous definition, pursues the goal of making one group of people forget the humanity of other groups.
No Moral Progress Discernible
Today, this kind of propaganda is often associated with posters and slogans from the era of the World Wars. “Every shot a Russian, every thrust a Frenchman” is a famous slogan from the First World War; in 2024, it seems absurd and laughable. It would be easy to get the impression that we have evolved, that we are more humane and civilized in 2024. This impression is deceptive — the mass murder in Gaza, supported by the USA and Germany, leaves no doubt about that.
The dehumanizing caricatures of the Other are no longer posted on billboards. That is not necessary, because they are continually portrayed as characters in entertainment industry products. Bearded Arab terrorists and tattooed Russian gangsters are indispensable components of cozy German television evenings. Since the American elite is preparing for a confrontation with China, we will surely soon see even more mysteriously smiling, sadistic Chinese characters.
Demonizing propaganda continues to be capable of manipulating the understanding of the world in a way that suggests to at least part of the population that they are on the right side while ignoring or even supporting mass murder. The aesthetics are different, and the methods have become more sophisticated, but propaganda continues to supply the raw material to convince oneself of the rightness of a morally wrong position.
The World as a Superhero Movie
The dehumanization of the Other is cemented by a mass media machine that refuses to establish connections and presents events like October 7th as spontaneous evil acts, not as part of a chain of action and reaction.
This distortion of perception has created a situation in which everything seems possible. The reporting of Western mass media contributes to reducing the world’s understanding to the level of a superhero movie.
Dichotomous thinking — the classification of groups of people into “good guys” and “bad guys” — is a precursor to dehumanizing thinking. The others are evil. They are not driven by the motive of defending themselves against a brutal colonial power that, during the founding of the Israeli state, forcibly expelled nearly 800,000 people and treated more than 2 million descendants of the refugees in Gaza like convicts for decades.
Who Grants States the Right to Exist?
The Israeli state was “born in sin,” as the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling writes in his book Politicide. It was born in sin, like Australia, Canada, and the United States of America. Do these countries, therefore, have no right to exist? Is there even a country that has the right to exist? Who grants a country the right to exist?
The settlers in the USA, Australia, and Canada took that right for themselves. They expelled and murdered the majority of the indigenous population. That is how they broke their resistance. In Israel, this has so far not succeeded for various reasons, but the process continues.
If the killing is to stop, then the path South Africa took appears to be the only viable one: the “One-State Solution,” however unrealistic this idea may sound at the moment. ⁷⁴
The future of Israel and Palestine cannot be based on the annihilation or domination of one people by another. The one-state solution would require an honest reckoning with the past and a commitment to equal rights for all citizens of Israel.
The distinction between citizenship and nationality would have to disappear. There would only be Israelis of different religions and no ethnic subdivision into “Jews” and “Arabs.”
The Lessons from German History
It is my last day in Israel. It was my first and perhaps last visit. Nobody treated me badly. But it is precisely this bizarre contrast between the respect and friendliness I experienced and the murderous contempt with which the Palestinians in the occupied territories are treated that makes the country deeply unsettling to me.
Apart from that, I could imagine that the publication of this text would be enough to brand me as an enemy of Israel and deny me further entry. I am not “against the existence of Israel” or doubt “Israel’s right to exist,” to pick up two phrases of Israeli propaganda. I am against mass murder and against oppression; I am against ethnonationalism and against a two-class society.
I do not apply a “particularly strict standard” to Israel, nor am I “fixated” on the country. I did not choose this situation. I happen to be German and grew up with discussions about the lessons of German history. The German government supports the mass murder in Gaza. I am against it, and although I am of course aware of how little I can accomplish, I consider silent capitulation to be wrong. That is one of the lessons I have drawn from German history.
Human Beings Are Dangerous Creatures
Another lesson from German history is this: I understand it as the mandate to resist manipulation by nationalist propaganda and to stand against every form of dehumanization. The lesson from German history should be that a human nature shared by all members of the species exists. This commonality is more significant than all superficial labels.
Just as the long experience of injustice, persecution, and oppression did not prevent the Jews and their descendants from becoming perpetrators — but on the contrary supplied the fuel for the Zionist project — the long experience of injustice, persecution, and oppression has, in all probability, had a similar effect on the Palestinians.
All human beings, without exception, are dangerous creatures. We are inclined to exalt our own group, risking being blinded and manipulated by ideologies.
The Message
Join a time-honored tradition and embark on the journey to the Holy Land. At least since Hape Kerkeling walked the Way of St.James, pilgrimages have been popular in Germany. It could be the most important journey of your life and change the way you see the world, just as the visit to East Jerusalem and the occupied territories did for the African American author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
In his book The Message, he writes: “As surely as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel proved to be a country where no Palestinian was ever the equal of any Jew.” I hope “Journey to the Holy Land” inspires you to want to see for yourself.
I wrote this essay because I am horrified that the German government supported the massacre in Gaza. As a German citizen, I am disgusted by the abuse of Holocaust remembrance to support a genocide.
— René Lindner
