We are all Israel now
Shot in the back of the head in Berdytschiw on July 28, 1941: “70 Jews and one Aryan.” Photo: USHMM
by Tom Amarque
Call me biased. I am German, and I grew up in the nineties. The world was easy back then. The neo-Nazis were a small pack of dumb fucks in jumper boots. We called them Glatzen—skinheads. They were always poorly educated, except for a few agitators who were dangerous precisely because they were smarter than the rest. Police squads regularly raided these agitators, sometimes out of sheer fun. To be leftist meant you were against the state and orthodox religion, you were pro–women’s rights and gay rights, you used drugs, read great books that challenged your views, and listened to cool music. Yay. Good times.
I grew up with an explicit understanding of my German past and how to think about Israel. I am aware of these thought patterns now, but I can’t change them, and even if I could, frankly, I wouldn´t. It’s not only what Germany did to the Jews. It is also what Germany—a former great nation responsible for much of the cultural outlook that made the West what it is—did to herself. Except for Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, and Stauffenberg, there was no uprising against the Nazi regime. That was the coup de grâce that destroyed the German soul, if there is such a thing. After that, nothing worthwhile came out of German culture. We call it Kollektivschuld—collective guilt. We can’t just say or justify it was the Nazi Party, the SS, or the SA that forced us. We could have revolted. We didn’t. The Germans, that Preussian warrior-people, en masse, and by default, went along with the Party line. That knowledge was part of my education: that the Germans were all collectively responsible for the Shoah.
That should explain why basically every German today of the Bildungsbürgertum—the members of the educated classes—is unabashedly pro-Israel. We can’t say: “Well, not all Germans were killers and Nazis.” That doesn’t fly here. Please keep that in mind. We know we failed at mounting any kind of autoimmune reaction against our own excesses.
But there is another side when thinking about Israel.
Just last Sunday I was visiting a little outdoor market here in Palma, Spain. Some local businesses had put their products on display in the neighborhood-square, and there was a small crowd—maybe 200 people. And there were the obligatory 5 policemen observing the scene. If you go to Plaza España, the busiest and largest square in Palma next to the main train-station, you see a greater show of force, every day. It’s so much a part of daily life now that barely anybody notices it anymore. And this is Mallorca, of all places—not a deprived area like Königsberg in Berlin. But it’s not only here. You find police patrolling everywhere in Germany whenever there’s a Christmas market or another culturally ‘German’ festival, which nowadays itself is always heavily barricaded. Same goes for Palma, Barcelona, Madrid.
My brother-in-law is a police inspector who recently lamented how Germany in recent years has changed from a high-trust to a low-trust society. When he started his career, the purpose of his belt was simply to keep his trousers up over his protruding belly. Now it’s there to hold numerous weapons and restraining tools. Jews are being attacked again on a daily basis.
When I’m on X and Facebook, I don’t think my American friends really understand what has happened to Germany, Sweden, Spain, France, Italy, and the UK over the last 10 years—how it has changed our way of life. Young girls getting harrassed in school because singing is haram – this is part of the new reality. Sexual assault on women is daily news. What they especially don’t understand is the paradoxical effect 9/11 had on us. Before that fateful day, it was perfectly normal for high-ranking European politicians like Thatcher, Chancellors Kohl and Schmidt, and mainstream academics like Peter Scholl-Latour, to articulate that Islam is not compatible with Western culture. Then came the warnings of Christopher Hitchens: that “they” had already introduced the term “Islamophobia” to stifle any critique.
Up until then, it was a normal academic endeavour to ask whether Islam even qualified as a proper religion (in the sense that Christianity or Buddhism does), or whether it was rather a political ideology, much like Nazi-ism; whether or not there is a real separation between Islam and Islamism. Mohammed was a warlord, after all, and Jihad toward a religious state and Sharia law was one of its foremost goals. Now, after the practical Umwertung aller Werte that happend 2001—the revaluation of all values, as Nietzsche would call it—you are branded a Nazi if you question if Islam really is Religion of peace.
Israel, in itself no bigger in landmass than a tenth of Germany, exists in a vast ocean of Arab states that are hell-bent on killing every Jew in sight. The Jewish populations in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria and elsewhere have shrunk to nearly zero since 1945. The only population that has grown exponentially to this day are the Palestinians living in Israel. (You can google that yourself.) If there is a genocide, it is on the Muslim side—aimed at exterminating every inhabitant in the state of Israel.
Bill Clinton famously offered Arafat a two-state solution, which the latter declined. Then, between 2001 and 2024, there were roughly 65,000 Islamist attacks worldwide. These attacks caused the deaths of at least 242,000 people. Google this yourself. October 7th, killing 1195 mostly young people in the most harrowing way, was just one of them. This attack was accompanied by over 5000 rockets launched at Israel. Since 2001, Palestinian militants have launched tens of thousands of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
Yes, not all Muslims are terrorists. But nearly all terrorists today are Muslim.
But here is my point: like the Germans before, the Arab states don’t auto-regulate, they don’t show any effort to stop these attacks coming out of their own midst, their social immune system is failing utterly. Hamas and ISIS could have been overthrown by their own people a long time ago. And like the Germans, it’s because they are implicitly d´accord with their measures—by default, en masse. They are okay with Sharia law, Jihad and terrorism, beheadings and rape.
Whatever one may think of modernity and secularism, they have always acted as an immune system, a bulwark against their own religious excesses. Science itself was birthed out of the Christian councils. The problems Muslims are facing today, we in the West encountered roughly 600 years ago. Back then, we were killing and torturing people who refused to comply with our rules of faith. But we grew out of that.
That is a structural difference between the West and the East. Especially if you consider yourself an Integral thinker, you should honour the spiral of development here—and show some respect for what we have accomplished – and what we are up against, and what the issue of Isreal represents.
This is the reality of things. I do appreciate the enthusiastic students in Berlin to march for Palestine, because I was young once and idealistic and mostly wrong. That’s part of the game, and you wouldn´t expect nothing less of the student-corpus of the venerable Humboldt-University. I say this without irony. But I draw the line when some Americans from the safety of their upper-class penthouse write about the faults of Israel. Get a grip on reality, you know who you are.
Or, as Garry Kasparov said: “If you look around the Middle East and conclude that the biggest human rights problem is tiny, multicultural, democratic Israel—which deserves dozens of UN condemnations—while the murderous, misogynistic, freedom-hating dictatorships around it do not, then you are, at best, a useful idiot.”
Tom Amarque is writer, philosopher, podcast host, editor & publisher. His recent book is ‘Phenomenology of will’.
Check out his upcomming online-course on will
He founded the German publishing house Phänomen-Verlag in 2009 and Parallax-Media in 2019. Tom currently lives in Palma, Spain. Contact him a tomamarque@yahoo.de