Germany Used To See Itself Reflected In Israel. But Now...

Jost Kaiser, a writer for the German edition of Vanity Fair magazine, discusses Germans and Israel: 60 Years of a Neurotic Obsession:

[political commentator Heribert ] Prantl forms part of a long tradition of German reflection on Israel, which once upon a time started out in a quite different vein. But no matter what the tenor was, Israel was always the object of all sorts of projections. When Germans talk about Israel, they are always only talking about themselves.

Until well into the 1960s, Israel had an ecstatically positive image in West Germany: it was the land of pioneers and Kibbutzim. Germans — the original fans of cooperative arrangements — found this appealing.

The military played a particular role in this fascination. With their own curious army (as one common joke among the ranks put it: “The Bundeswehr exists in order to hold off the enemy until a real army comes”), Germans felt themselves curiously attracted by the heroic deeds of precisely a real army: namely, the Israeli army.

In 1967, the German weekly Der Spiegel wrote enthusiastically about “Israel’s Blitzkrieg”: “By virtue of an exemplary demonstration of iron-willed soldierly virtues — for Germans always the most impressive of all qualities — they captured the hearts of the very nation in whose name all Jews were supposed once to be exterminated. In contrast to the German master race, Jews of all people — whom German Nazis regarded as cowardly, lazy, and decadent — won a war for the third time against an overwhelmingly superior force.”

This view was in fact widespread back then in a Germany where the “economic miracle” was losing steam and that projected its own military fantasies on the mini-state on the Mediterranean.

The same sort of projection exists still today. Thus in a recent interview with the German edition of Vanity Fair, Ulrich K. Wegener, a former commander of Germany’s GSG-9 anti-terror unit, claims that the Israeli Army studied and adopted the guerrilla tactics of the SS “Brandenburg” unit — a fact that was supposed indeed to speak for the quality of the Nazi paramilitary formation.

(Implicit in similar remarks made by more malicious spirits than Wegener is the idea that Nazis and Israelis are hardly distinguishable and that the Palestinians are the “Jews of the Jews” — as it used to be put in left-wing terrorist circles in the 1970s.)

The enthusiasm for Israel (which was also apparent in the popularity of Israeli artists like Abi and Esther Ofraim or Daliah Lavi) reached a high point in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And then Israel's image began to change, as it did around the world, as:

a new tone began to be heard. First emerging on the far left, it has come in the meanwhile to express the repressed, but quietly festering sentiment of many Germans.

The sympathy for the Kibbutz-nation was driven out by a sort of new version of the ideal of the “noble savage” as embodied in the oppressed Palestinians (and later too Latinos and Kurds).

Read the whole thing.

Image really is everything--though you have to wonder how much longer you can honestly refer to Palestinian terrorists as 'noble savages'.

Technorati Tag: Israel.