“Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view is silence about truth.” — A. Huxley.

“Israel is not the Jewish state; it has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewishness.” — Rabbi Y. Shapiro.

There are events that split the timeline into a before and an after, signaling the end of an era and leaving only uncertainty ahead. The Hamas attack and Israel’s retaliation against civilians mark such a turning point. The hope that the world had learned from the Second World War has proven to be an illusion.

The Israeli Air Force has dropped more than 80,000 tons of explosives on Gaza since collective punishment began. More bombs have fallen on this densely populated area than fell on Hamburg, Dresden, and London combined during the entirety of the Second World War.

It is not the first time a state has used its army for the collective punishment of a civilian population. For example, after attacks by the FLN in Algeria, the French military killed 10,000 people as retaliation, aiming to suppress resistance through widespread violence. Likewise, colonial powers often deployed their armies against civilians to punish local populations for uprisings, using collective punishment to maintain control. These historical cases, though each has distinct features, illustrate patterns of state action that inform understanding of the current situation in Gaza.

This campaign is unique in that it unfolds under global real-time observation. Video clips from Gaza broadcast the effects of policies rooted in 19th-century notions of collective punishment. The immediate visibility of these actions merges past strategies with present technology in a way that is both grotesque and historically resonant.

We now live in a time that forces us not to believe our own eyes just to preserve our sanity. We live in a time in which a German journalist, on behalf of a “quality” media outlet, tries to fluster the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Gaza with pedantic questions during a press conference. She is presenting her report. It is titled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” The German journalist demands further documents, written evidence, so he can really be sure that what is happening in Gaza actually constitutes genocide.

Because only if the German government has it in black and white — “We, the Israeli government, are now going to commit a genocide according to the definition of the Genocide Convention” — only then would it be prepared to acknowledge that a despicable crime is taking place in Palestine.

This kind of argument is reminiscent of the British historical revisionist and Holocaust denier David Irving, who exploited the absence of written proof that Hitler explicitly ordered the mass destruction of “unworthy” life to cast doubt on whether the Holocaust actually happened.

The strange new era we live in is a time of bitter historical ironies. A term coined by Raphael Lemkin — a Jewish thinker and Holocaust survivor — meant to help prevent genocides, is being reduced by a member of the people responsible for the Holocaust to an object of semantic fencing.

His aim is to distract from the real issue, so as to allow the state of the descendants of the Holocaust’s victims to continue killing. The government of the country that has inscribed “Never Again” on its banners considers this part of its raison d’état.

This is the point at which all satire becomes superfluous, and, consistent with that, during a German-government-backed genocide, Jan Böhmermann busies himself with the state of highway bridges and the stigmatization of “long Covid” patients.

The German government’s support for the mass killing of men, women, and children in Gaza makes clear that the ‘culture of remembrance’ was likely never intended to prevent Germans from dehumanizing another group of people once again.

Robert Habeck’s statement, quoted on the ZDF website, that Hamas bears responsibility for “this, yes, also terrible suffering happening in the Gaza Strip,” is a good example of how this dehumanization manifests itself linguistically.

For Palestinians, the ‘yes, also terrible suffering’ just ‘happens.’ Israelis are killed by Hamas; perpetrators and victims are clearly named. But the mass killing of Palestinian civilians just happens. The guilty party is not named; only Hamas is blamed.

It is a perverse logic. It is the logic of the gangster who, out of revenge, murders the entire family of his adversary and considers himself justified in doing so. It is the logic that the “civilized” West attributes to the “barbaric” terrorists of Hamas.

It seems as though invoking the memory of the crimes of the Third Reich has served above all to establish a morally cleansed German identity — an identity characterized by a particular readiness to acknowledge guilt for the Holocaust, without, however, drawing the right conclusion from that acknowledgment.

We find ourselves on unknown terrain, in a strange new world in which we have shifted attention from ending the mass killing of thousands and the starvation of a population to a debate about the definition of a concept. We must apparently all agree that it constitutes a genocide; only then is the mass killing in Gaza reprehensible.

It is interesting how different things were 20 years ago. Back then, the images from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq caused a global scandal. The outrage was worldwide and led to consequences — at least for lower-level perpetrators.

The Mask Shatters

Mistreatment in Abu Ghraib seems mild compared to Gaza’s carnage. Today, an Israeli prison guard who tortured Palestinians is seen as a folk hero. A member of Netanyahu’s party said on camera in parliament that he supports rectal rape of terrorists.

The West’s humanitarian mask, especially that of the United States, began slipping long ago. Now it has shattered. The illusion of being ‘the good guys’ blinds us to the reasons and feelings of those we dehumanize, kill, and starve.

My essay, ‘Journey to the Holy Land,’ aims to avoid propaganda and understand Palestine’s reality. It began as research, but true judgment required going there in person.

Many Germans likely feel the same way. I hope ‘Journey to the Holy Land’ encourages you to travel to the country whose well-being is Germany’s raison d’état.

As a young man, I wrote for a German newspaper. Later, for financial reasons, I switched to writing ‘corporate propaganda. I wrote articles that sounded like journalism but weren’t. I learned that lies are only a part of propaganda. Suppressing information is more important. Propaganda works mainly by shaping what is seen and what is ignored.

This journey is also the culmination of research I began twenty years ago during my political science studies at the London School of Economics, but which I later lost sight of. At the time I was just glad to have the degree behind me. The topics interested me, but I wasn’t an activist. What mattered to me most was padding my résumé with an “LSE” degree.

I held the idiotic but, at the time, widely shared view that the decisive political battles had already been fought and that one could focus entirely on one’s own life. The Cold War was over, the good guys had won. There seemed no need to concern oneself with the bigger picture anymore. In 2025, 20 years later, I find the attitude of my country’s government toward the Israeli mass killing of civilians in Gaza shameful, and I want to do something.

I can help inform the German public about the conflict and its background. Much of what I have read in German media on the subject is of poor quality. Many authors do not regard Palestinian civilians as full human beings and refuse to place events such as October 7th in context.

German journalist Richard C. Schneider’s commentary on the release of four Israeli hostages on June 9, 2024, published in “Der Spiegel,” is a good example of this kind of journalism. Schneider is a successful journalist, longtime head of ARD’s Tel Aviv studio, and a co-founder of the Berlin PEN Club.

On June 8, 2024, an Israeli army special commando freed four Israeli hostages from the densely populated “al-Nuseirat” refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. It was an extremely bloody operation, in which more than 200 Palestinians lost their lives.

Even Voice of America — the media organization directly funded by the U.S. government, a relic of the Cold War and not suspected of any sympathy for “Hamas” — chose the following headline: “Israel Rescues 4 Hostages, Kills 200 Palestinians in Accompanying Attack.”

The Spiegel editorial team gave Schneider’s text this headline: “The Day Israel Weeps with Joy.” He begins his commentary with these sentences: “Yesterday it was back again, this united Israel. This Israel feels like one big family.” It is such moments, Schneider continues, “that make Israelis perceive that they are a community of fate, that they are all actually ‘in the same boat’ together. And above all, that every soldier, or now every hostage, is the child of all Israelis.”

In Hebrew, Schneider notes, people address one another by first name, which turns strangers into acquaintances, and he lets his readers share in the ecstatic feeling of connection: “The video in which the wife of (hostage) Shlomi Ziv speaks to her husband for the first time is also shown repeatedly. She is sitting in the car, apparently on her way to him, and both are crying, calling out over each other, how much they love each other. There is no shame in Israel about sharing such intimate moments with everyone, since everyone feels the same.”

Schneider ends the article with a reminder of October 7th, the day “when Hamas was able to carry out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on Israeli territory.” He does not mention the more than 200 dead Palestinians with a single word.

There is no doubt that many of the Palestinians killed were not Hamas fighters. Voice of America quotes the Israeli general in charge, who gives a lower figure for the Palestinian dead, but even he says: “I don’t know how many of the Palestinian casualties were terrorists.” How would people here react if so many uninvolved German civilians were killed during a hostage-rescue operation?

What Robert Jensen — now an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin — said during a conference on the American media industry applies in many respects to his German counterparts as well: “American journalists are entangled in symbiotic relationships with the powerful. Rather than being independent and critical, journalists are generally dependent on political decision-makers and unwilling to ask the crucial, critical questions. Rather than observing the game of power, most journalists are part of the game.”

I do not have to adhere to the written and unwritten rules of the journalistic profession; I do not have to worry about access to important interview partners; I do not have to worry about length requirements or the preferences and political views of the responsible editor. The only criteria that interest me in writing this text are clarity, thoroughness, and accuracy.

Where the CDU Is Right

As is so often the case, the facts are not hidden away in secret archives known only to a select inner circle. They are freely available — in books, reports, and newspaper articles. It is possible to form a judgment without speaking Hebrew or Arabic and without having written a dissertation on the Middle East conflict. It takes some time and effort, but it is possible — especially for the many millions of Germans who are fluent in English and can afford to spend thousands of euros traveling every year.

“The Federal Republic of Germany bears a special historical responsibility due to the crimes of the National Socialist regime of violence and tyranny,” writes the CDU in its draft bill to amend the Criminal Code for combating antisemitism, terror, hatred, and incitement. I can only agree with the CDU. The German government bears a special historical responsibility, and it is shameful that it does not live up to this responsibility.

Countless books have already been written on this subject. My goal was to keep the text as short as possible and publish it online as a free resource with links to sources. It still turned out to be more than 100 pages. Despite extensive research, I found that I was only fully certain of my judgment after I had been to East Jerusalem and the West Bank myself.

I have been following the media in England and the USA for many years. There, voices that receive little attention in Germany are heard — such as Palestinian author Rashid Khalidi, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, and Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. What they have to say reaches the German public far too rarely. It was important to me to give German readers access to these authors and their ideas.

The gap between the critical reporting in English-language media — including Israeli publications that publish partly in English, such as “Haaretz” and “+972” — and the German media is enormous. Editors at German newspapers are certainly capable of reading articles written in English and could therefore research the facts described there further and make them accessible to German readers. Why this does not happen is an interesting question but attempting to answer it would go beyond the scope of this introduction.

To close this gap, I have also compiled many facts from extensive English-language reports by organizations such as the UN and Human Rights Watch, making them accessible in a more compact format and in German.

Another focus of this essay is an analysis of the nationalist ideology of Zionism, because in Germany, outside of universities, hardly anyone has an accurate idea of what it is, and many Germans believe that Zionism is religiously motivated and arose only as a reaction to the Holocaust.

I hope this text helps you form your own judgment. But don’t take my word for it unquestioningly. Especially on this topic, it is advisable to remain skeptical and go to the sources. I have compiled all sources not directly linked in the text in a folder, which you will also find on the website.