The Palestinian Messenger (of Old News)
Berlin, August 2025
In the course of the year that Bashir Bashir and I spent as co-fellows at Berlin’s renowned Wissenschaftskolleg, he presented himself to the German public twice, once in an interview and once in a lecture. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the country’s most influential newspapers, took these appearances as occasions to comment on him. How does a paper that considers itself to be the Iron Dome of Germany’s special relationship to Israel—infamously known as “Staatsräson”—respond to a partisan of Enlightenment? The case of an intellectual whose name can be translated as “Bringer of Good News” is a prime example of everything that Germans refuse to know, confirming once again: where moral judgments come easily, there is a lack of political thinking.
*
“At home, the sun almost always shines,” Bashir said as we were driving back from our trip to Thuringia, “and every day it’s a little different.” He was remarking on the German weather; on a summer that, despite our reassurances, never really began; on the windshield wipers that suddenly revealed a razor-sharp double rainbow; on the umbrellas that we had been annoyed at having to open in front of Goethe’s garden house that morning but which we had whipped out with practiced ease after we left the Nietzsche archive in the afternoon. They dried slowly as we drank tea in the museum-like scattered light of the Hotel Elephant; then we stowed them in our backpacks before entering the Herder Church (I was eager; he was hesitant), and finally, we had forgotten them in the car before walking around the windy wastelands that surround Buchenwald’s crematorium.
Where is this—“at home?”
Bashir Bashir’s passport identifies him as an Israeli citizen. But in his immaculate, rhythmically accented English, the country where the same sun shines on all the inhabitants, while the law makes so many distinctions between them, has a dazzling double name: “Israel/Palestine.” Or the other way around: “Palestine/Israel.” That may sound vague or even contradictory, but it is actually the precise designation of a geographic condition in which politics and religion, domination and population, identity and memory have never had a common denominator.
Dazzling names have also left their mark on the region that we now simply call Thuringia. When Goethe lived there, the destination of our trip was called the Herzogtum Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach and was divided into five territories, which bordered ten other states. Surrounded by the kingdoms of Saxony, Prussia, and Bavaria, they were stuck like puzzle pieces between the territorial lumps of the neighboring duchies and principalities: Sachsen-Meiningen, Reuß-Greiz, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, Reuß-Gera, Sachsen-Altenburg, and Schwarzburg-Sondershausen.
But what does it mean to say, “bordered ten other states?” In the sense of stark markings separating one area of political dominion from another, there have never been BORDERS here. (Thuringia is now one of three German Bundesländer that does not share a border with a foreign country.) The tiny principalities and miniature duchies owed their privileges to their unique position between great powers, none of whom had the power to subsume them at the expense of the competition. Can it be a surprise that skepticism about the dynastic principle was especially intense in this landscape, in which ‘States’—rather than public institutions—were scenic courts with quite curious names? The central question of the 19th and early 20th centuries—namely, how the political identity of a community relates to the territorial integrity of a sovereign power—was especially plausible in the context of central German micro-states. It is no coincidence that the tiny Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach produced two answers of world-historical significance.
They stand in marked contrast to one another.
Weimar, the royal seat, stands for the emergence of humanity as a philosophical concept, for the idea of a Kulturnation, and for the concept of the will of the people. Political power and military violence seemed so distant here that they could easily be forgotten. The classicism that flourished in Weimar imagined Rome with poets and villas, but without latifundia and legions; Greece with temples and myths, but without polis and hoplites; and Germany as a linguistic realm with a cultural mission, but without borders and a standing army. Goethe detested the French Revolution because it threatened his duchy with its dedication to the arts. He admired Napoleon because he preserved it. He had nothing but scorn and derision for the nationalist exuberance of the wars of liberation. But it was also in Weimar that Herder completed his ideas on the philosophy of human history, his magnum opus, in which he argues that the character of the landscape in a given Lebensraum forms the „genius“ of its PEOPLE, rather than shaping the „esprit“ of its laws and institutions as Montesquieu, who thought in similar but political terms, had argued.
The college town Jena, on the other hand, stands for the practical romanticization of the political, for the nationalist movement. When Germany’s very first fraternity, the local Urburschenschaft, called for a national celebration at Wartburg Castle near Eisenach in October 1817, they chose the date and location with care. Four years after the Battle of Leipzig, students from every German state would gather to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Reformation in the very place where Martin Luther had translated the Bible. The German language, German landscape, German history, and an anti-universalist interpretation of Christianity formed the cultural backdrop against which the nation took political shape. The national colors worn by the students—black, red, and gold—stood in stark contrast to the route they took on their two-day journey. To get to Eisenach, which was in the other part of the same state, they had to cross through a corner of Prussia as well as the Duchy of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha. Among the standard-bearers was the future historian and Hegel critic, Heinrich Leo. Born in neighboring Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, whose princes did their utmost to promote his career, my ancestor studied in Jena at the time, where he was one of the founding members of the Urburschenschaft.
The emerging age of the nation-state would later be mocked by Nietzsche (who in this respect is closer to Goethe than Herder) as the Europeanization of the micro-state’s mentality. What would he have said first about the Nazis and then about the ridiculousness of a political romanticism that knows only excesses of violence and not the art of politics. One that created no new states, but only a hellish empire of camps. It comes across as a diabolical echo of German nationalism that it was mostly political prisoners who were interred at the concentration camp on the Ettersberg, with its good view of the Kulturstadt Weimar.
*
Hasn’t the tension between these ideas also shaped the history of Israel-Palestine? Isn’t Zionism another of its children? For Herder, Judaism was the Urtyp of a national Volksgeist (national spirit). And amid this indifference to politics, Theodor Herzl’s project of a „Jewish homeland“ as well as his utopia of a cosmopolitan colony called „Altneuland“ sounded like an echo of the Weimar cultural mission. In contrast, real Zionism was marked by political romanticism from the very beginning. The State of Israel still has no fixed borders because it has never decided how its territory, recognized under international law, relates to the „Land of Israel,“ the mythical landscape of the Old Testament, which also includes Jordan, Gaza, and parts of Syria and Lebanon. While socialist-secular or „practical“ Zionism was, in principle, prepared to accept the 1949 armistice line as the state border, the revisionist or „political“ wing, from which the now dominant Likud party emerged, never gave up its „Greater Israel“ ambition. For one faction, expanding out into the territories occupied since 1967 was too important not to force after their assumption of power in 1977; for the other, self-restraint was not important enough to warrant an internal conflict when it came to the question of territory.
What does the second part of the name stand for—Palestine? Does it stand for a region in the “Orient,” which has served since the Crusades as a screen onto which the “Occident” projected its Othering, turning it into a focal point of Western identity? For an imperial administrative designation, long under the Ottomans and then, with slightly different borders, for a brief but consequential period, under British rule? For the site of Jewish longing, for the end of the diaspora and salvation from the Nazis? For the wounded space of remembrance of an abruptly destroyed society of Arab Christians and Muslims, whose former inhabitants now live scattered across half the world, in Israel and the Middle East, in Europe and America? For a territory that has been occupied, settled, and fought over and in which the Palestinian people have an internationally recognized, though disputed, right to SELF-DETERMINATION? For Gaza, the former pearl of the Middle East, which after the battles of 1917 is now being razed to the ground for the second time, and the West Bank, divided into three sovereign zones, the map of which is reminiscent of the Central German puzzle of Goethe’s time or, if you include the connecting roads between the Jewish settlements, of the Lofoten Islands?
As controversial as the land with the polyvalent double name might be, it has found a geographical description neutral enough to make sense to most of its inhabitants: from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
From the river to the sea.
That’s one answer to the question about Bashir’s heritage. The harmless one. It says everything there is to say—and doesn’t really say anything at all. Yet there’s another answer. One so clear and concrete that it could be the beginning of a long story. I come, Bashir said when we knew each other a little better, from Sakhnin.
The small city, whose inhabitants belong almost entirely to the Arab minority, lies in the middle of the Galilee Mountains, roughly equidistance between the Sea of Galilee, the Mediterranean, Nazareth, and the border to Lebanon. These names are known to us because they have resounded into the furthest reaches of the Christian world for centuries. They’re just as obviously included on historical maps in the New Testament as they are on Google Maps. But there are other historical names around Sakhnin. Places that are less associated with the good news than they are with the struggle against oblivion and denial. Names such as Deir al-Qassi. Ein al-Zeitun. Al-Kabri. Teitaba. Of these and over 400 other villages that were depopulated and destroyed in the wars of 1947/48, at most ruins remain today. Historian Walid Khalidi’s almost 650-page atlas reconstructing the history of these places and their current condition carries the title All That Remains.
(What will remain of Gaza?)
All the names mentioned, both current and forgotten, can also be found on a map that precedes an epic tale of this Palestinian landscape. The narrative of Elias Khoury’s novel Bab al-Shams oscillates between the present and the catastrophe of 1948, while the protagonists—in an endless web of secret paths and hiding places, of barren memories and blossoming stories—commute between the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the mountains of Galilee, their places of origin and an exile, whose end no one can foretell. And here, too, there are no clear boundaries. Israel and Lebanon are nothing more than the name of a coincidence that decides whether one lived and died as a “Palestinian refugee” on the outskirts of Beirut or as a “48er” in a landscape of ruined Arabic villages and Jewish settlements in cities like Haifa, Nazareth, and Sakhnin.
Elias Khoury was a friend of Bashir’s. He died on September 15, 2024. The same day that our time together at the Wissenschaftskolleg began.
The shield of Sakhnin depicts a sun rising between two mountains.
Bab al-Shams means: Gate of the Sun.
Ex oriente lux.
Soccer fans might also recognize the name of Bashir’s native city. When FC Bnei Sakhnin won the Israeli Cup in 2004, it was the first time an Arab team had qualified for the UEFA Cup. It made the news in Europe, but it caused an outbreak of soccer fever in Galilee. Where were they headed? The polar circle? Georgia? To Stuttgart or Bochum? They drew Newcastle United. Alan Shearer, Patrick Kluivert, Jean-Alain Boumsong—not too shabby. But how should one get the largest travel delegation Sakhnin has ever seen to Northern England in one piece? Exactly like everything is done there. You book a flight to London and leave the rest to a son of the city who happens to be studying there at the moment.
There are memorable scenes from this apocryphal soccer story. While the entourage of dignitaries, family members, and fans drives the hotel manager to the brink of a nervous breakdown because the doors to many rooms are open and the hookahs keep setting off the fire alarm, aspiring political theorist Bashir, whose head is actually full of theoretical deficits in Habermas and Rawls, has to organize a bus convoy to Newcastle overnight. Somehow it works. The first game had ended in a 1:5 thrashing; the second wasn’t much better. And then another six hours on the highway, again hardly a minute of sleep. But the mood is sensational, and the adventure is unforgettable.
Bashir still laughs about it today.
The reaction of the ultras from Beitar Jerusalem, however, wasn’t so funny. Proud that no Arab had ever played on their team, they published an obituary after Sakhnin’s cup victory. Its subject: Israeli soccer.
The two teams stand for opposing visions of Israeli society. Bnei Sakhnin wants to be a “cultural rainbow,” whereas Beitar Jerusalem was named for revisionist Zionism’s youth movement—an emphatically Jewish club. Clashes between their fans are notorious. But since October 7, 2023, the tone in the entire league has been agitated. When the Israeli National Anthem was played in honor of six murdered Hamas hostages at an away game against Hapoel Beersheba, Sakhnin fans demonstratively turned their backs. The situation escalated within minutes; angry Hapoel fans stormed the bleachers, leading to fighting, injuries, and arrests.
The game was canceled.
If people in Europe were really interested in Israel and the Arab world, they would have known that such occurrences belonged to the prehistory of the ugly scenes that shook Western audiences in November of 2024. On the evening of the first Europa League game, against Ajax Amsterdam, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters tore Palestinian flags from windows, screamed, “Death to Arabs,” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left.” In response, Arab youth indiscriminately attacked fans from Israel the next day. But the transference of a murderous conflict into practices of symbolic VIOLENCE was not understood as what it was but taken—as is so often the case—as an occasion to stabilize one’s own view of the world. It was days before a young reporter working in his free time and the New York Times cast the matter in a more nuanced light.
When I talked to Bashir about the matter over lunch, he called coverage of the events “a disgrace.” His outrage was justified. But I was still astonished by how easily the strong word came out of his mouth.
And at how contemptuous he looked as he said it.
*
Our friendly, collegial chats found a repeated topic in the media coverage of the events in Amsterdam. We returned to it time and again. Our attitudes towards journalism were clearly different. I saw newspapers, radio, television, etc. as media in the simplest sense of the word: instances of mediation. A forum for good and bad news, for varied opinions. A communicative field that is, in principle, open to all. Missing information can be added, incorrect claims corrected, one-sided opinions contradicted. And then one looks and sees whether the view of the world doesn’t start to change a little bit—and whether one likes it. If not, then it just means it’s time to get back out there.
The passive voice says something about the way I move through this field of mediation. If someone wants my opinion, a journalist gets in touch with me. If one journalistic platform gets too dumb for me, I switch to another. I don’t have anything against journalists. Some of my best friends are journalists. They’re just colleagues who write faster than the rest of us and who tend to turn into critics and therefore potential enemies for a few weeks when you’ve just published a book.
For Bashir, however, as gradually became clear to me, this professional and personal nearness simply didn’t exist. While I thought that the reporting on Amsterdam had been an irritating but correctable error, he seemed to only recognize a tragic normalcy: not disappointment, but the confirmation of a deep mistrust, which expressed itself by turns in mistrust, resignation, and contempt, but almost always with caution.
It was striking how hesitant Bashir was to appear in PUBLIC in Germany, despite invitations. He regularly asked us whether people or institutions that had invited him to speak in front of an audience seemed trustworthy. He often declined requests. And he spoke about journalists, not only German ones, as if almost the entire profession had conspired against him. The only interview he gave during his stay in Germany was organized by the Wissenschaftskolleg. Because I helped him with the German translation, I know how meticulously he took care of even the smallest details. That he was satisfied with the result and that the response—at least initially—was positive, he told us as if it were a miracle.
How could this be the same fellow? The one who had shaped our colloquiums with his—never polemical—sharpness? Whose ironic wit was just as quick as his impromptu lectures? Whose arguments burned with conviction? Whose voice smoldered when he recited poetry? Who knew exactly when to be silent? The one who we had so obviously chosen as our spokesperson? How could he seem so irritated and so brusque, so vulnerable when he felt as if he had been targeted with a stereotype, even if only indirectly? It was clear that Bashir and I belonged to a small group of fellows who might be described using a somewhat outmoded word: intellectual. Which is meant to say that our writing and thinking are directed not simply at an audience within our own field, be it academic or literary, but also at the political public. Much less clear was what it meant in each individual case. For me, it meant that I could move within a network of institutions organized by a nation-state and in which my opinion could be traded, sooner or later, more or less directly, for political influence. Anyone who wants to see change in Germany must not shy away from the smoke and dust of the battlefield known as the public arena.
And for Bashir? There is no short answer to this question. But there is a point of departure for every answer that doesn’t want to run straight to the ground. Bashir is Palestinian. Which means he belongs to a nation without a STATE.
*
Palestinian IDENTITY is unspecific in many senses. Religiously, it is a mix of Muslim, Christian, and Druze elements. The regional language is Arabic, but many of the key works on the Palestinian question were published in English. Leading intellectual figures like Edward Said or Walid and Rashid Khalidi, two of the preeminent Palestinian historiographers, live or lived in the U.S., which is also where the brilliant historian Sherene Seikaly (who was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg with us) is co-editing the Journal for Palestinian Studies. The conditions under which Palestinians live are just as disparate. Said, Seikaly, and the cousins Khalidi belong to America’s educated elite; the inhabitants of the West Bank are subjected to the caprices of Israeli soldiers, settlers, and intelligence agencies. In Gaza, the very basis of the Palestinian existence there is being eradicated. The displaced who have been in Lebanon or Gaza since 1948 still count as stateless refugees, as do their descendants. Palestinians in Jordan enjoy full legal equality but often feel as though they don’t belong. Life is better in Israel than it is in the occupied territories, but Palestinians living there are still subjected to many forms of discrimination. The ancestors of these varied people might have been rich traders before 1948; they might have been masters of orange plantations with opulent villas and even slaves—or day workers; Ottoman dignitaries, British colonial officials, and Hashemite diplomats—or fellahin; highly educated notables—or illiterates.
These lives nevertheless share a common focus. There is no Palestinian identity without a national consciousness today. According to Benedict Anderson’s well-known definition, a NATION is an imagined community that makes a claim to political self-determination. Nations whose right to self-determination has been realized in a state tend to forget these political prerequisites as time goes on, though. Citizens of a sovereign nation-state can afford to consider their own individual existence. Those who wish to do so can vote every few years and otherwise concentrate on their family and career, leisure time and friends, faith, and self-realization.
For nations whose right to self-determination has been frustrated—whether by an imperial center, a colonial power, or an occupying power—the political remains acute. Such nations are faced with a choice: to resign themselves to their fate or to fight for their rights. The fact that the Palestinians are, in this sense, a struggling, acutely political nation does not mean, however, that there was agreement on the means and the goal of their struggle. On the contrary: violent or civil, diplomatic or confrontational, boycott or cooperation; pan-Arab superstate, sovereignty over all of Palestine, a state alongside Israel, autonomy within Israel, a federation with Israel, Islamic theocracy, Levantine union—the strategic options were and are as numerous as the models of self-determination. The only thing it means is that the knowledge of freedom denied is as impossible to forget as one’s own mother tongue. Every Palestinian wants an end to the Israeli occupation. And in this sense, there can be no Palestinian identity that is not political in one way or another.
One can experience this dimension of politics passively, for example, when the existence of one’s own people is repeatedly denied, while at the same time, simply because one belongs to this people, one is constantly subjected to humiliating checks, surveillance by the secret services, or bombings with calculated collateral damage (not to mention ignorant journalists)—and therefore repeatedly feels anger, despair, grief, defiance, contempt, and hatred. One can, however, also pursue it actively by never losing sight of the political while doing things that others believe they do for themselves.
This is especially clear in the arts and in the academy. Palestinian writers have produced countless literary masterpieces including Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a depiction of three young adults who suffocate in an empty water tank while trying to flee to Kuwait, or his Return to Haifa, in which a married couple returns to the house from which they fled in 1947, only to discover that the son who had gone missing in the rubble during their escape had been raised by the Holocaust survivors who took their home and more than that unlike his four parents—the Jewish and the Arabs—he was a committed Zionist. Another example: Emile Habibi’s The Secret Life of Saeed, the tragicomic story of the “pessoptimist,” a Palestinian in Israel, which serves as a parable about the absurdity of human existence. Or Mahmoud Darwish’s great poem celebrating the art of waiting, which is never decisively about either the act of making love or about the liberation of his people. Or Wajdi Mouawad’s play The Birds, which stages a confrontation between the coincidence of biological descent and the false sense of heritage. Or his novel Anima, which interweaves a story about the massacres committed by Christian militias—with cover from the Israeli army—in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 with an account of the marginalized existence of Native Americans in Canada. Or Adania Shibli’s reconstruction of the story of a rape committed by an Israeli soldier against a young Arab woman in 1948, framed against an account of Shibli’s research trip from the West Bank to Israel, which seems like an expedition because of all the petty harassment. The literary energy of these works is fueled by knowledge of—and resistance to—the Palestinian situation, while their greatness lies in refraining from both lament and moralism.
In some sense this is also true of the research and thought of Palestinian scholars. It is true of Edward Said, whose Orientalism showed that the West needs an Other in order to speak of itself, while his The Question of Palestine recounts Europe’s displacement of its “Jewish question” to Palestine, posing the question of what it means to be robbed of one’s rights precisely by a group that has itself been the victim of an unspeakable crime. (Both books are in some ways outdated but still serve as essential points of departure for any understanding of the Palestinians.) It is true of Walid Khalidi’s historical research, which provides thousands of pages of evidence that there really are Palestinians, that their history did not begin in 1948, and that the knowledge of their losses cannot be erased. It is true of Rashid Khalidi’s study Palestinian Identity, which pursues the same aims and distinguishes precisely between the exemplary and the specific, between a national consciousness that is at once inevitably a construction and is also based on experiences only Palestinians have had; it is true for his The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, a comprehensive account of the conflict in Palestine that describes Zionism—at a critical remove from its own self-understanding—as a settler colonialist movement. It is true for Sherene Seikaly’s Men of Capital, a history of Palestinian society during the Mandate period, which shows how the attempt to integrate Palestine into a pan-Arab economic area under liberal auspices failed.
And of course it is true for Bashir Bashir’s scholarship. Though it would be too limited to call him a political scientist. A political theorist would come closer. But maybe it would be best to simply say that Bashir is searching for an answer to the question so masterfully posed by Said—the question of Palestine.
*
With the Holocaust in the background, it hardly needs to be said that Germany has a special relationship with Israel. But what is the relationship between this so-called historical responsibility and the Israel-Palestine conflict? What does it mean for criticism of Israeli policy, which can itself invoke both human rights and international law? How does the German state, which has declared Israel’s security to be its own Staatsräson deal with people who advocate for the legitimate rights of Palestinians? Such questions remained unasked for a long time, but they have been at the center of the discourse about German identity over the past few years. The current situation can therefore be summarized by saying that German politicians, civil servants, and journalists continue to adopt an approach that assumes that, if there is any doubt at all, criticism and protest in the name of the Palestinian cause is likely morally questionable, if not illegal hostility towards the German state.
But what does that mean concretely?
Freedom of speech is an important democratic value. A general ban on criticism or protest, no matter how one-sided, could not be upheld in a constitutional state like Germany. But when no clear laws can be formulated, legal gray areas and unwritten rules of the public sphere assume a special importance. In Germany, § 130 of the German Criminal Code plays a crucial role. Volksverhetzung, or “incitement to public hatred,” represents an effective instrument of state repression. When a given position is considered to be Volksverhetzung rather than a legitimate opinion, authorities and courts must act accordingly. And they act amid a bareknuckle fight over the difference between a legitimate expression of opinion and a moral scandal in the public sphere.
The term antisemitism stands at the center of this discussion. The German Bundestag, as well as regional parliaments and a highly influential network of specialized government commissioners, has adopted the so-called “working definition” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). In theory it recognizes the difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and vile antisemitism, but in practice this distinction is blurry. However, the question of interpretation is a question of power. And so, according to the currently prevailing opinion, calls for a boycott of Israel, the use of the slogan „From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,“ and other expressions of support for the Palestinians are considered antisemitic hatred rather than political statements. So a climate of opinion has emerged in which police and other authorities constantly find themselves in the position of restricting expressions of solidarity or protest in the name of “protecting Jewish life”—only to defer to the courts to determine the legality of these acts (though there are not always legal proceedings, especially because going to court comes with a financial risk.)
It hardly needs to be said that this climate of opinion has been intensified by sensationalist media in Germany and especially by the notoriously pro-Israeli Springer Press after October 7, 2023. More interesting, because less obvious, are the subtle mechanisms of journalism that commit themselves to upholding professional standards. How does one deal with a Palestinian intellectual whose clarity of vision is matched by the subtlety of his arguments and the restraint of his public appearances? The two articles commenting on Bashir’s only public appearances in the highly respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung provide the basis for an initial answer. On July 9, 2025, Patrick Bahners reported on a lecture Bashir had given two days earlier at Berlin’s Humboldt University. About three weeks later, his colleague Tania Martini commented on the aforementioned interview, which Bashir had given to a publication of the Wissenschaftskolleg. The details of the articles are not of interest here. But since they are, in several ways, symptomatic, I would like to take them as an occasion to point out some problems with the German coverage of Israel and Palestine more generally. (A more detailed critique, including textual analysis, can be found in the German version of this essay). What is it about? Let’s call it a mixture of sophistication and ignorance.
Let’s start with ignorance.
Ms. Martini accuses Bashir of four things.
First, his scholarship is camouflaged activism.
But she never says what the problem is supposed to be. Intellectuals who think politically often have a cause. The media, however, frequently asks about their causes rather than the theoretical foundation of their thoughts. Yet there can be no POLITICAL SCIENCE without a basis in lived experience on the one hand and the possibility of endeavors outside of scholarship on the other.
Who would deny the validity of Edmund Burke’s insights on the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville’s on modern democracy, Carl Schmitt’s on the constitutional state, Hannah Arendt’s on totalitarianism, Edward Said’s about Zionism, Judith Butler’s on the ordering of the genders, or Eric Hobsbawm’s on capitalism—even if none of them were particularly fond of their subjects, to put it mildly? In each of these cases, scholarship—the unending process of conceptual thinking and methodological research—took place in a space between ideological conviction and political practice. On the one hand, this restricted the autonomy of these scholars when compared to theoretical physicists, for example, but it also prevented them from arbitrariness. Thus, the polemical term for the accusation should rather be POLITICIZED science, that is to say, a practice of thought and research that is fully reducible to ideological doctrine.
Bashir Bashir is the textbook example of a political scientist. He has something in common with all the thinkers listed above—his work cannot be separated from his biography. If one asks for a concrete point of departure for the existential dimensions of his scientific curiosity, the answer remains: Sakhnin.
Bashir was born in a village still in shock. Two weeks before his birth on March 30, 1976, there was the first violent confrontation between the Arab population and Israeli security forces. Six demonstrators were killed and hundreds injured when 4000 police officers and IDF forces broke up a mass protest against Israeli territorial policy.
The conflict between Jewish Israelis and local Palestinians, like any truly political conflict, is about land, about controlling space. Until 1966, Bashir’s father required a permit from the military governor to work in Haifa. To this day, the Palestinian minority is granted only a very limited right to own land and property. The political core of the conflict is revealed most clearly, however, in Israeli efforts to Judaicize areas with notably Arabic populations. This is obviously true of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but it holds for Galilee as well. When the government announced wide-reaching expropriations in the region around Sakhnin in 1975—for the benefit of the Jewish settler city Karmiel—a regional protest movement formed. The result was the bloody events of March 30. In Palestinian memory, the event, which is now remembered as Land Day, holds a key position. And if this is true for Palestinians in general, it is especially true for those in Galilee.
For my politicization, Bashir says, the annual Land Day demonstrations played a decisive role.
And what does he talk about in the brief interview? About the general situation of the Palestinians. He does so not in statements of faith or in slogans, but in the context of his scholarship. Sometimes he is descriptive—about practices of surveillance and data collecting to which a population without a state is subjected, for example. Sometimes he speaks in historiographical terms, such as when he describes the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1947/1948, as a process whose character is revealed through the unfinished nature of the Zionist settler-colonial project; and sometimes in theoretical and normative terms, such as when he declares the equality of Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab nationalism to be the indisputable basis of any decolonized future order in Israel/Palestine. He does all of this with care and consideration and in a public forum. He does not deny that he is working for a cause. He even names it: it is a struggle. But the means of struggle is not a weapon but enlightenment. And his adversary is not an enemy but a wall made up of unknowing and propaganda.
Bashir therefore does not speak, as Ms. Martini claims in another of her provocative terms, as a “prophet” in the name of a revealed truth, but rather as the representative of his own cause. And as a participant in public discourse. He answers questions. Every term, every assumption, and every thesis can be called into question. Anyone who finds it unsuitable to describe the destruction of all material and cultural basis of shared existence in Gaza as a “genocide” can say what they find wrong about the description. Anyone who objects to the description of the occupied territories and increasingly within Israel itself as “Jewish supremacism” or “apartheid,” or that “decolonization” is the most important precondition for peace, is welcome to say what is wrong with these terms and find other descriptions for these phenomena. Anyone who thinks that the partition plan of UN Resolution 181 (II) of 1947, which—given a total population of approximately 1.2 million Arabs and approximately 600,000 Jews—provided for a larger Jewish state (57% of the area) with an Arab MINORITY of 45% and a smaller Arab state with a Jewish minority of 1%, was an irresistible offer for both sides, should say so instead of insinuating intransigence in suggestive talking-point prose („even in 1947, the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan, which would have given them 43% of the total area of the British Mandate“).
Secondly, the confusion between legality and legitimacy.
In the following passage of the interview, Bashir explains what he means by binationalism: “It offers to Israeli Jews that which they have lacked most profoundly, namely normalization and legitimacy in the eyes of their victims. Only Palestinians can provide Israeli Jews with this legitimacy and normalization in a way that is truly profound, transformative, and meaningful.”
Martini comments on this passage as follows: “It is no longer only Islamist groups, the mullahs, ultraorthodox Jews, BDS, and right-wing extremists who consider Israel to be illegitimate. Among scholars, too, this view seems to be gaining legitimacy in light of Israeli war crimes.”
Unfortunately, the only way to avoid understanding this claim as malicious is to conclude that it is clueless. LEGITIMACY refers to a relationship of recognition that cannot be compelled and that enables a collective to live in peace, both among its own members and with the world at large. In other words, states that are in conflict with their neighbors or with parts of their own population enjoy, at best, partial legitimacy. And this is exactly the case with Israel. There are still Arab states with which Israel has no peace treaty. And parts of its territory have been occupied illegally since 1967. But while the nearly unanimous opinion of both most specialists in international law and the International Criminal Court is that Israel’s settlements have no legal basis, the group who—by a consensus just as univocal—do have a legal claim to this territory and who continue to be displaced as a result of Jewish land grabs are supposed to declare the occupying state to be legitimate?
It is important to bear in mind that this is not about the claim to a Jewish state in Palestine, which was granted legal legitimacy in 1947. On this point, Palestinians do, in fact, disagree. But that is exactly the point of a “binationalism,” which recognizes the right to self-determination of two nations on one territory in principle, while actual recognition is conditional on attaining equality, decolonization, and historical reconciliation. Anyone who is subject to international law is allowed to recognize Israel exactly as it is. And anyone who thinks it would be fun is permitted to do so as a private person as well, with no legal consequences. But anyone who demands a pledge avowing Israel’s “right to exist” without considering the concrete reasons for rejecting a state without borders has, to put it nicely, a questionable understanding of international law and no concept of legitimacy at all.
Third, the defamation of global solidarity with Palestine.
Because this point renders Bashir’s skeptical, mistrustful relationship to journalists understandable, it is worth expanding a bit. A nation without a state generally has no or, at best, weak institutions with which it can communicate about itself. The German people and the German populace argue, mediated by German journalists, about Germany. The same is true for France, England, the USA, or Israel. This is true not only of national conversations; it is true of international relations as well. Even within Germany, if one speaks out about political representatives or causes of another state, one must reckon with the ambassador protesting or that Germany’s public discussion will be the subject of a public discussion in the foreign state. Israel is a perfect example of both phenomena. The Israeli ambassador regularly intervenes when the representation of his country is concerned; in the case of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Prime Minister Netanyahu even intervened directly. And when—in a reversal of this trend—artists and academics critical of Israel, including many Israelis, became the target of a campaign in the German public sphere, this was reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and critically so.
Because—in a word—the REPRESENTATION of nations without states is precarious in the best of cases, Palestinians often find themselves more subject to the caprices of national public spheres than the citizens of other nations. While they are now less in possession of a national public sphere than ever before, they are constantly confronted with the fact that the West is talking about them, frequently disparagingly or ignorantly, and nowhere so tendentiously as in Germany. Occasionally someone also talks with them, and, with a little luck, the intentions might even be good. But when it comes to the stateless, even goodwill can be tricky. Israeli journalists who were entirely sympathetic with his views have repeatedly described Bashir, against his explicit wishes, not as an “48 Palestinian” or a “Palestinian citizen of Israel,” as people like him usually call themselves, but as an “Arab Israeli,” as is typical of the national discourse. The difference might seem slight, but because it ignores his right to self-description, it is actually paradigmatic. Sometimes, the devil really is in the details. When Bashir told me about it, at any rate, it seemed to me like a primal scene of his anxiety about appearing in public.
But being at the mercy of others is not the same as being defenseless. Even the interests of a nation without a state can be represented in the public sphere. In the case of the Palestinians, this has taken place in three ways: through the media of Arab states, through exile organizations, and through a transnational counterculture. The Gaza coverage by Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera would be the obvious example of the first way. More important here, however, is the complementary relationship between the other two.
In his interview with the Wissenschaftskolleg, Bashir discusses the historical dimension of the global movement for solidarity with Palestine. A transnational network of actors, organizations, discourses, and symbols in the name of the Palestinian cause, which has been visible for the past two decades, is a reoccurrence of the movement that existed in the 60s and 70s. The fact that the forms, content, and guiding principles of that movement were characterized by revolutionary militancy, whereas today’s movement is concerned with the nonviolent enforcement of rights, does not alter their structural similarity. However, this similarity can best be understood by looking at the intervening period.
Why did “global Palestine” hardly seem to matter in the 80s and 90s? First, because the political and cultural context of solidarity with Palestine collapsed alongside the Maoist left. Secondly, because the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was driven out of Lebanon by the Israeli army in 1982, just as it had been from Jordan in 1970. It retreated into exile in Tunis; the global movement lost its local sounding board. Thirdly, and central to understanding the complementarity referred to, because the Palestinian exile organizations strategically realigned themselves in 1987/88 with the start of the first intifada, and thanks to a diplomatic initiative by the US government. For a good ten years, the possibility of Palestinian self-determination seemed like it might really be within reach. During the so-called Oslo peace process and through the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the PLO and the Palestinian National Congress (PNC) were granted a status approaching that of a state. Only when the idea of trilateral negotiations was finally decisively proved to be an illusion—unsurprisingly, given that an organization without any actual power or diplomatic experience was sitting across from two powerful, closely allied states—shortly thereafter, the second intifada broke out, and Palestinians once again needed global support.
The Palestinian situation has been marked by two opposing tendencies ever since. The local situation in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank can be described as orchestrated ANOMY. While the struggle against the occupation sometimes reverted to the crude means of terrorist violence, Israel, with its military, economic, technological, and intelligence superiority, used all its resources to weaken Palestinian nationalism. Separated from the core of Israeli territory by border installations and blockades, Palestinian territories were easily disconnected and politically divided.
In the West Bank, the PA, dominated by Fatah, is equally dependent on Israeli well-being and international financial backers. Because corruption blooms under these conditions and cooperation with Israeli security authorities is unavoidable while Jewish settlements continue to grow, the Palestinian Authority has a paradoxical double status: while it is still seen internationally as a legitimate representative of the Palestinian cause, it has lost the faith of the majority of its own population, which is among the reasons there have not been elections since 2006.
The situation with the Islamist Hamas is exactly the opposite. Autocratic rulers of the Gaza Strip since 2007’s inner-Palestinian civil war—up until 2023, at least—Hamas is despised internationally because of its terrorist militancy but enjoys a certain legitimacy among many Palestinians because it is the only force resisting Israeli occupation and blockade policies. And up until the massacres of October 7, Hamas also had a paradoxical double status: though it was financed by Iran and Qatar, who hoped to hold Israel in check, it was also supported behind the scenes by the Israeli government, who hoped to weaken the Fatah through a classic divide-et-impera game. But since this Machiavellian balance of power collapsed in 2023, Israel has been discussing annexation and displacement scenarios not only in Gaza, where military violence has adopted genocidal dimensions, but also for the West Bank.
In parallel with this increasingly desperate situation on the ground, a global struggle for alternatives has also become visible. As is so often the case, consciousness of defeat has mobilized intellectual energy. And once again, it was Edward Said who shed light on the Palestinian question in a furious series of articles after the turn of the millennium. As relentless in his criticism of Israel and the West as he was of the failures of his own leadership, he paved the way for a new paradigm from his exile in the United States. Dreamers call it the one-state solution; pragmatists call it the one-state reality.
With the failure of the trilateral negotiation process, the division of the Palestinian national movement, and the loss of legitimacy of its representative bodies, the realization dawned that Israel had created irreversible facts on the ground through its creeping annexation of the occupied territories. Only a vanishing minority of Palestinians still believe in a two-state solution today. And so, for the leading thinkers of the Palestinian cause, the end of the occupation is no longer synonymous with the division of the country. Rather, for them, the focus of the struggle now lies in enforcing equal rights in one territory. What this means in concrete terms, whether the focus should be more on individual or national rights, and, even more so, how all this might be achieved, is highly controversial. But the basic idea seems both just and clear enough to mobilize a global public in the digital age, demanding an end to military violence, freedom from occupation and blockade, decolonization, and equal rights—these are positions that many are willing to countersign, not least a growing number of Jews, especially the younger generation, particularly in the U.S.
The Palestinian situation has, however, been substantially complicated by the simultaneous growth of pro-Israeli publicity, which describes itself as “information” (hasbara), though others call it propaganda. In the context of Holocaust remembrance, which became a cultural symbol of the West following the Cold War, the concept of “israelbezogener Antisemitismus” (Israel-related antisemitism) has proven to be especially effective. The campaign against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is a textbook example of the success of this publicity work. Now officially condemned as “antisemitic” in all Western states—in Germany through a resolution of the Bundestag—there is now hardly a Palestinian official remaining who publicly supports the movement, while there are simultaneously hardly any who are not at least indirectly connected to it by family and friends. And however they might judge BDS (many are resolutely critical)—complaints about Western double standards are omnipresent: if one engages in armed resistance, one is condemned as a “terrorist,” but if one does so using the civil, voluntary, and fundamentally democratic means of a boycott, then one is defamed as an “antisemite” (because the alleged aim is to destroy the Jewish state).
But campaigns aren’t Bashir’s thing, anyway. Beginning in Israel, where he is connected to the Holocaust researcher Amos Goldberg as a part of an ongoing scholarly partnership, he mostly develops his intellectual and political energies through a network that unites scholars, intellectuals, writers, international law experts, and human rights activists from around the world. When they meet, they do so under the radar of the public, out of reach of diplomatic illusions. Directed by an ethics of reconciliation and decolonization, they discuss the situation of the Palestinians in all of its facets—political, theoretical, juridical, historical, and—not least of all—aesthetic. London, Vienna, and Jerusalem are the centers of a milieu that is as lively as it is intellectually stimulating. But it has a few outposts in Berlin. And thanks to the Wissenschaftskolleg, they’ve grown over the last year.
Fourth, and finally, the blindness for the politics of symbols.
Bashir says: “As soon as Israelis see a Palestinian flag, hear Arabic, or encounter some symbol of Palestinian identity, even the liberals among them are disturbed for a moment.”
It would be hard to grasp the core of the conflict more concisely.
Tania Martini responds to this passage as follows: „But why—to cite just one small but particularly telling example that puts the lie to such generalizations—did so many kibbutz residents, among others, initiate social and medical projects for Palestinians, only to be attacked by Hamas in way of thanks?“
It would be hard to miss the core of the conflict more concisely.
What Bashir is talking about is an identity whose mere visibility is of political significance. For him, Palestinian identity as such is a bold reminder that Israel has been built on the ruins of the Palestinian people, the oblivion of their existence, and the negation of both their peoplehood and nationality. Put differently, every cultural expression it finds, whether through language, the flag, or the Kufiya, reminds Israelis that there is a group on territory controlled by their state that wants to be more than a “minority” or a “civilian population.” The perception of Palestinians as Palestinians is unavoidably an irritation in the eyes of Jewish Israelis, who must respond to it in some way.
One can try to repress it violently, as during the first Intifada or during contemporary demonstrations in Israel. One can attempt to extinguish it by destroying, expelling, or killing the reality behind it. One can attempt to repress it by declaring every possible solution to be unrealistic or by watching TV instead of reading Haaretz. One can try to rationalize it by declaring oneself to be ready for peace, though the Palestinian side has, unfortunately, “rejected every offer” or “can’t provide a partner to negotiate with,” which forces one to “manage” the conflict instead of solving it. One can attempt to romanticize it by ostentatiously buying hummus and olive oil at an Arabic shop. Or, finally, one can decide to turn it into a cause of conscience by refusing to close one’s eyes to the situation of Palestinians in the occupied or blockaded territories. One can try to help.
And unlike the other reactions, this one deserves our admiration because, despite all the violence, it insists on a shared horizon—even after October 7. The great humanity with which some members of the attacked kibbutzim demanded an end to military actions can, in fact, render one speechless. No initiative for peace that wants to mobilize all sides will be able to refuse the ethical resources of Zionism, which is and has always been more than merely settler colonialism. (The question of where the abundance of humanism on the Palestinian side can be best observed is very interesting; my bet is on literature.)
The decisive thing, however, is that the only Israeli reaction that would be appropriate from a Palestinian point of view would consist in the recognition of their right to national self-determination. But for as animated as the violence, repression, rationalization, romanticization, and conscience are on the Israeli side, there is—with a few notable exceptions—little awareness of the political dimension of the conflict. That this decisive aspect remains unseen has always been a part of the experience of colonized people.
Violence or humanitarian aid—tertium non datur.
But that was not always the case.
Which means that it can change again.
After a painful learning process—the catastrophe of 1948, the defeat of 1967, and the crisis of the exile organizations in 1982—the Palestinian side was ready to accept a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The PLO recognized Israel programmatically in 1988 and diplomatically in 1993 (though this was suspended in 2018). The reverse, however, does not hold true. What the Rabin government offered the Palestinians with the Oslo accords was a right to representation and local self-administration, while the right to national self-determination was tied to preconditions over which the Israelis maintained control. Because the two-state project never had a political majority in Israel, there has never been a government that went beyond lip service and impractical ad-hoc plans. While the infrastructure of Israeli settlements spread ever further into the occupied territories, the “negotiated two-state solution” was used as a talking point for a Western audience in need of a diplomatic alibi.
The fact that a large part of Israeli society was not only able to imagine but actively wished for an end to the conflict with the Palestinians for a decade can hardly be overemphasized. But one can also hardly overemphasize the fact that while there was a shared perspective at the time, there was hardly anything like a shared political idea. On the Israeli side, the well-intentioned goal was peace, which is to say calm, normalcy, and an absence of violence. On the Palestinian side, it was freedom—an end to the occupation and political self-determination.
To overlook the inequality of these goals is also to fail to understand what the final collapse of the diplomatic process meant for the parties to the conflict. When negotiations between Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasir Arafat ended fruitlessly amidst mutual recriminations, the shared goal dissolved for both parties. But while it was the end of the peace process for Israelis, for Palestinians it pointed towards the endlessness of the occupation. Unlike in the conflict between Israel and its neighboring states Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, there was neither a ceasefire nor borders behind which the two sides could retreat. There were only divided territories under a de facto undivided Israeli sovereignty. And so, the conflict changed registers with the failure of diplomacy. While Palestinian national symbols had previously represented the possibility of a second sovereignty, they were once again what they had been prior to the rapprochement between Rabin and the PLO: a symbol of resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Score at the half: Four to nothing for Sakhnin.
Time to get to the sophistication.
*
When Bashir and I drove to Weimar after our year at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Tania Martini’s article had not yet appeared. But Patrick Bahners’ article had. Even a week after it was published, it still hung lead-thick in the air. On the rainy trip home, exhausted by the impressions of the long day, we talked of the weather and of private affairs. But on the trip to Weimar, we had discussed it at length.
Of course, Bashir was outraged by a representation of the talk he had given as a part of the Mosse Lecture series at Berlin’s Humboldt University—it was so distorted that it had entirely missed the point. But it was more than merely ignorance, which might be overcome relatively easily with facts and concepts. The symptomatic quality of Bahners’ article does not lie in ignorance. It lies in a subtle mode of discreditation, which parrots a differentiated Palestinian position, only to strip it of its political quality and dismiss it with moral contempt.
The first means of depoliticization is the accusation of antisemitism.
Because it is completely baseless in Bashir’s case, malicious suspicion must replace what the facts do not reveal. The following sentences from his presentation were quoted in the article:
“Zionism successfully revolutionized modern Jewish life. It introduced a number of arguments to the world, among them the argument that Jewish life would normalize if the Jews were treated like other people. But while Zionism has produced refined technologies of repression and ethnic cleansing, it has also succeeded in creating sophisticated institutions, science, Nobel Prize winners, and remarkable literary and poetic achievements—much that can be celebrated. Zionism, however, has failed miserably in achieving normalcy or legitimacy in the eyes of its victims.”
Referring to a comment made by the philosopher and Arendt specialist Thomas Meyer, Bahners makes the following comment on the passage:
“Meyer hears an echo of one of the oldest antisemitic clichés here, the rumor about intelligent Jews. ‚We mustn’t say things like that.‘ Admittedly, listing off Israeli Nobel Prize winners might be most widespread among advocates of the state of Israel. The problematic aspects of Bashir’s assessment of Zionism, with Nobelists as assets, can be discussed separately from whether his choice of words meets a definition of antisemitism, whose sense and nonsense will be the subject of the fourth and final Mosse Lecture by Shaul Magid from Harvard.”
Bashir’s response, which was convincing enough that Mayer let the point drop, remains unmentioned. But it doesn’t mean a thing. For the author himself points out that Israel’s advocates say exactly the same thing. But he fails to draw the inevitable conclusion, namely that—excluding the absurdity of pro-Israel antisemitism—the suspicion is completely unfounded. On the contrary, it is Bahners who lends weight to the allegation by leaving its validity open to further examination. I can’t say myself, but Arendt researcher Meyer has said we should leave these things to the experts—this is exactly how the logic of rumor works. Only here it does not apply, as is baselessly claimed, to Jews, but, as can be shown, to those who are accused of antisemitism.
The second means of depoliticization is the expectation of neutrality.
Bashir does, in fact, come to a conclusion in the passage cited. It isn’t particularly complicated, but it is mixed. The State of Israel has done remarkable things—but it also established a regime of repression. However, the question of how these two findings relate to each other is anything but simple. And for Bashir, it is of such central importance that one should take his answers seriously. This incredibly successful state, he believes, cannot enjoy its accomplishments because half of the people over whom it rules reject both its legitimacy and the normalcy of coexistence between the occupier and the occupied. But the significance of the argument cannot be fully grasped without its theoretical background. The real problem, the question behind the question, goes as follows: What would be an appropriate description of the relationship between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs? The assertion that two nationalist movements claim the same territory remains both accurate and vague as long as one fails to heed the historical narratives with which both sides justify their claims.
The anthology that made Bashir world-famous carries the title The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. Significantly, however, this book has two editors, whose nearly 100-page introduction is now considered a seminal text on the interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Israeli Palestinian Bashir Bashir and the Jewish Israeli Amos Goldberg. In regard to Bashir’s lecture, Bahners‘ article now claims:
“Bashir rattles off ‘the Holocaust and the Nakba’ like a mantra. His project offends the taboo against comparison, which Michael Rothberg, his colleague in Grunewald, is researching. But the really offensive thing is the strict asymmetry of his grammar: Jewish Israelis should accept the guilt that they supposedly carry simply because of their nationality—but we cannot expect a similar admission from the Palestinian side.”
We can forgive the journalist this much: There cannot be such a taboo among scholars. Without comparisons, we can neither establish the singularity of the Holocaust nor determine which aspects it shares with other genocides. We can also forgive him this: Our colleague Michael Rothberg does not investigate the taboo against Holocaust comparisons. Instead, he investigates its ubiquitous violations (to distinguish the reasonable from the unreasonable). What we cannot let slide is the suggestion that Bashir and Goldberg compare two historical events with one another. They do not. They don’t compare anything at all. And they can’t, because they understand the Israel-Palestine conflict to be a relationship. The formula is so general that it must either remain trivial—or it forces the question of the nature of this relationship. And actually, Bahners’ sure intuition leads him to a pair of key terms in this regard, even if he spectacularly misunderstands their meaning:
ASYMMETRY and RECIPROCITY.
Reciprocity, however, is a principle, while symmetry is a characteristic.
Taking the interwovenness of two different traumatic events as a point of departure, Goldberg and Bashir demand the overcoming of an “ideological grammar” that serves to stabilize two irreconcilable narratives. The Jewish side’s claim to Palestine is expounded with the same hermetic focus on the Holocaust that marks the Palestinian side’s relationship to the Nakba, that is to say, the foundation of a state that depended on their expulsion (Ben Gurion’s diaries speak a very clear language in this regard). This practically exemplary tragedy—two legitimate motives interwoven into collective guilt—is now confronted with a new grammar, which is supposed to replace imagined relationships with real ones. On an individual level, this implies an ethics of empathy and therefore a demand for a reciprocal, that is to say, mutual readiness to ‘unsettle’ one’s own certainties. Like the interweaving of the traumas, the ethical postulate demanding their overcoming is strictly symmetrical. And this is also true of the political principle that both offer as a point of orientation: egalitarian binationalism.
However, the point is that this political dimension can also be represented positionally. And that is precisely what Bashir did in his presentation, which thematized the relationship between the two conflicting parties from a Palestinian point of view. As long as it is clear about what it is doing, this kind of strategic one-sidedness is not merely defensible; it is essential. Only a historical-political analysis tied to a specific perspective can illuminate the emptiness of the demand for symmetrical reciprocity, which tends towards the ideological as soon as it ignores the asymmetry of the actual relationships. This conflict between two national movements is based on the equality of the right to self-determination and, viewed abstractly, also on the guiltlessly guilty suffering endured by both sides. Viewed concretely, however, this conflict has established an ever-increasing inequality over the last 100 years: through the process of land seizure—both legal and illegal—since the turn of the century between the colonizers and the colonized; since 1948, between a state and a stateless collective; since 1967, between an occupying power and a civilian population; since 1987, between insurgents and a monopoly on the use of force; since 1994, between terrorism (in Israel) and apartheid (in the occupied territories); since 2006, between homemade rockets and air warfare; since 2023, between a massacre and a genocide, etc. One can describe the genesis of these asymmetries without relying on morality, say, in the language of tragedy. Doing so acknowledges the shocking clarity of the result: the gains in land, institutions, sovereignty, prosperity, knowledge, infrastructure, Nobel Prize winners—in short, power—on the one hand are offset by corresponding losses on the other, not to mention countless human lives, degradation, and suffering.
Anyone who fails to see that must necessarily misunderstand an argument whose ethical demand for equality and reciprocity is conditioned on the recognition of asymmetry. That both parties have to grant each other something for the sake of peace is trivial. That the stakes are fundamentally different is not. Because of the balance of power, one key to peace lies in Israeli hands. Israel must acknowledge the structural injustice that Zionism represents for the Palestinians, make symbolic and material reparations, and end the occupation. Because of the same balance of power, however, the other key lies in the hands of the powerless Palestinians. Already in 1993, the PLO recognized the state of Israel; Palestinian members of the Knesset have repeatedly honored the suffering of the Holocaust. But because reciprocal acts and gestures from the Jewish side remain outstanding, the Palestinian side provisionally withdrew its recognition. Following the failure of bilateralism, that recognition has become conditional on decolonization—which does not mean the dismantling of Israeli Jewish self-determination, but rather the dismantling of all forms of Israeli Jewish privileges, the end of the occupation, and a change in the Israeli mentality. Until these goals are achieved, goes the conclusion, the Palestinian agenda must, in one way or another, amount to resistance—in forms that might be easier or harder to justify.
One need not agree with this argument to consider it thoughtfully, appreciate its elegance, and, above all, affirm its goal: the resolution of a tragic entanglement and the restoration of a shared horizon. From a Palestinian perspective, this can only mean, first, recognizing the reality and legitimacy of an Israeli Jewish right to self-determination. And second, to continue the struggle against the illegitimacy of the Israeli occupation, colonization, oppression, and supremacy. But how? Opinions are divided on this key Palestinian question. Bashir and Hamas embody opposing, even irreconcilable, answers. In the days of the PLO, the legitimate alternative to terrorism was still bilateral negotiations with Israel. Today, however, it is global pressure on Israel.
The third means of depoliticization is the compulsive demand for distance.
The argument that ethical reciprocity requires the recognition of political asymmetry is, in fact, complex. Still, considering a tragic conflict, one might expect—or even demand—that both sides be allowed to take partisan positions. The core of the problem faced especially by Palestinians in Germany lies not in the open bias with which Springer publications, for example, take a pro-Israeli stance, often with blatantly racist tendencies. It lies in the one-sided imperative to take a balanced position in a conflict in which both sides can make good claims. It is perfectly apparent that it does not apply to Israel’s partisans. Nobody would think of calling the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (German-Israeli Society) illegitimate. Lobbyists are a part of democracy. One can be offended by their positions, but not their existence.
But obviously, the Palestinian side is not entitled to this fairness. Instead, the requirement of neutrality is rephrased into a one-sided demand to distance oneself from extremism. Anyone who speaks of the genocide of the Palestinians, writes Tania Martini, must not remain silent about genocidal Palestinian antisemitism. But why not, actually? Should those who speak of Palestinian antisemitism not also remain silent about the genocide of the Palestinians? It is striking that the requirement of balance is accompanied by a compulsion to distance oneself on the Palestinian side. And Bahners is ultimately no different. When Bashir describes the Palestinian national movement as the legitimate subject of their “agency,” Bahners responds with an observation that robs the statement of all its political significance: “However, he did not mention that the most effective actions of this movement were and are acts of terrorism.” Why should he have? Bashir has good reasons to see the nation as the main bearer of Palestinian rights, which is why he cannot help but see the revival of Palestinian nationalism after the Nakba of 1948 as the PLO’s most momentous achievement. And why should a declared antipode of Hamas formulate his demonstrably unambiguous relationship to violence and his distance from Hamas as a confession?
Of course, we know the answer. But apparently it needs to be spelled out: in a country that has elevated solidarity with Israel to a doctrine, there are only two legitimate positions. One can be openly pro-Israel and say so, as Foreign Minister Wadephul did when he bluntly described Germany’s position as „biased,“ or one can show it by hoisting the Israeli flag in front of countless public buildings (at least until the first gloomy days of August, when once again the humanitarian emergency suspended the rules of politics). Or one can demand a balance that, due to the unequal distribution of speaking positions and asymmetrical power relations, is at best tantamount to hidden partisanship for Israel. At worst, however, the requirement of neutrality amounts to a cynical depoliticization that consists of granting both sides good arguments in this tragic conflict but only allowing one of them the right to fight. Journalist Hanin Majadli recently described this asymmetry in Haaretz as follows: „A Palestinian cannot have a political identity because that identity is necessarily that of a terrorist, while the occupying Israeli is allowed to carry a weapon in one hand and a microphone in the other—without anyone doubting their right to tell the story.“
Final result: seven to one for Sakhnin.
But let’s look further, past Germany. To where the music of political thought is really playing—the Middle East and the U.S.
*
Among the more fascinating aspects of the contemporary situation is the rediscovery of the heritage of revisionism among Jewish intellectuals who tend to be critical of Israel. Since Israel’s irreversible settlement expansion into the Palestinian-occupied territories seems to have rendered the paradigm of the two-state solution obsolete, there has been a clear choice: either apartheid, repression, and finally genocide—or egalitarian joint-dwelling on a single territory. Whether that means legal equality at an individual level or at a national level, a single state for everyone or separate institutions for two nations, a federation on the former Mandate territory, or regional integration—all these questions remain open. The fascinating thing is that the step-by-step realization of a Greater Israel has raised the question of how advocates of Zionist maximalism envisioned such a state. And the answer is: the best among them did not think things through to the end—but they did see the problem.
When two peoples live in one country that claims to be a DEMOCRACY, the basic rights of all citizens must be protected. That was exactly what the plan presented by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin during peace negotiations with Egypt did. That it was tactically motivated and received an unsatisfactory response because the political rights of the Arab population were not considered does not change the fact that it pointed towards a horizon of peaceful coexistence, not division or expulsion. And why do I even know that? Because the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm addresses the Begin Plan in his book Haifa Republic, a relentless critique of the two-state illusion, which nevertheless offers hope by interrogating the Zionist tradition for ideas about coexistence with the Palestinians.
It will surprise no one that figures like Martin Buber and the pacifist organization Brit Shalom make an appearance. More surprising is that not only Menachem Begin but also his mentor Zeev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Zionist right, plays a central role. But it makes sense. Oriented equally towards greater Israel and towards liberalism, Jabotinsky refused to consider either the division of the land or—at least up until briefly before his death—the violent homogenization of its people. “The future of Palestine,” wrote Jabotinsky, “must be founded, legally speaking, on a ‘binational state’”—this citation serves as an epigraph to the third chapter of Boehm’s book. He sees Jabotinsky as a right-liberal visionary of binationalism. Perhaps even more important was his rediscovery as a political thinker by the American-Jewish political scientist Ian Lustick and—following in his footsteps—by the historian Avi Shlaim.
The repulsive forms assumed by revisionism—both Netanyahu’s Likud and the Greater Israel fantasies of the messianic settlers—have forced Jabotinsky’s clear and early recognition of the political nature of the Jewish-Arab conflict into obscurity. In The Iron Wall, a short, hard, clear text from 1923, he already unmistakably pronounced a conclusion that cannot be escaped by anyone who cares to look today: a settler colonialist movement that claims a particular territory will encounter resistance from the population settled there. Which means, he concludes, that the Jewish side will be unable to avoid armed conflict. Jabotinsky is now rightly seen as the first theorist of militant Zionism and therefore as the founder of Israel’s security doctrine. What is often overlooked is the fact that he was by no means a militarist, but rather, a political thinker in Clausewitz’ school. After all, what was the goal of the “Iron Wall” behind which the fragile settler project was supposed to protect itself from resistance? To force conditions under which the Arab side would give up its resistance and declare itself ready to negotiate a mode of coexistence with the Zionist Jews.
Lustick’s contribution was the reconstruction of Jabotinsky’s military-political double horizon, rendering him legible to the present. His greatest accomplishment, however, can be found in his readiness to use Jabotinsky to think beyond him. Jabotinsky, who died in 1940, could not have guessed that the relation of powers would be dramatically reversed after the establishment of the state. Over the course of a few decades, the militant minority was transformed into a military power, which—armed with nukes and backed by American patronage—is now not only unrivaled in the region but also dominates the majority throughout the territory of the former mandate in every sense. And so, the dialectical insight is this: because the parties have swapped roles in this asymmetrical conflict, there has never been a military stalemate that would have frustrated the ambitions of both sides so thoroughly that political negotiations would have appeared expedient. In a bold twist, Lustick interprets the current situation as meaning that the Palestinians today find themselves in the same situation as the Zionist Jews a hundred years ago. It is now up to them to show Israel through their fighting spirit that they will neither be subjugated nor driven out. The outcome is open. But the fact that a Jewish-American political theorist and a leading figure of the Zionist right have come to similar conclusions as a Palestinian intellectual in solidarity with his Israeli friend and colleague gives pause for thought. And a reason for hope.
With this, the circle to Bashir’s heritage has closed. What was the crucial claim from his interview, the one that serves as its title?
“I observe the whole land.”
Let us observe him in his land.
If we take the political thinker back to where he came from, then, after the fog of the unpolitical has lifted, his contours will appear much more clearly.
Where does he find himself?
He is standing in a landscape.
And he is swaying in a field.
*
Every nation establishes itself through collective self-assertion. If this does not take place on an established territory, such as in the French case, where a speech act transformed the monarchical assembly of estates into an organ of self-representation, it is—Herder’s tragedy—inevitably dependent on romanticism. Because nations without a state can only assert themselves through resistance, whether against fragmentation as in the case of Italy or Germany, against an imperial center as in the case of the successor states of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, against a colonial mother country as in the case of the U.S., or against settler colonialism without a mother country as in the case of the Palestinians—they can only exist if they develop a lasting conception of themselves. To realize their ambitions, they need the powers of imagination, belief, sensuality, and memory.
If there is a striking example of the political effectiveness of these forces, indeed of the miracles they can perform, it is Zionism. Without its willpower and steadfastness, there would be no Palestinian nationalism. But that does not mean it can be reduced to anti-Zionism. The Palestinian Arabs‘ attachment to their land predates the Jewish settlement movement. So, Zionism did not create Palestinian identity. But it did politicize it. And if there is a striking example of how this politicization is based not only on theories and ideas but also on the mediation of nature and culture, then it is my friend from the strange land between the two waters.
Once, when we were looking at pictures by an Israeli portrait painter whose art he greatly admired, Bashir was surprised to notice that her paintings lacked a local landscape in the background. It seemed to me that this remark suddenly transformed the conflict between two nations into the complementarity of two physiognomies: on the one hand, a context-free sensitivity to the human face, a grace that was evident in the material and color nuances of the naked body; on the other, the magnetism of a concrete space with its barren mountains, its forests, its herbs along the wayside, its ancient olive trees, its river and its lake, and, of course, its sun, which almost always shines, but a little differently every day. Anyone who has ever been given a jar of za’atar by Bashir, a mixture of dried wild herbs prepared by his mother; who has seen him mix it with olive oil and then dip a chunk of bread into it; who has tasted his delicious hummus; who has heard him talk about Mahmoud Darwish’s nature poetry or Elias Khoury’s epic in the Galilee—has the sense that what is being shared is not the private life of a political existence, but rather the landscape from which it draws its strength.
The hard political language of the West refers to this legitimacy as “telluric,” which is to say, connected to the earth, while its representatives are “partisans,” which is to say they can’t be impartial. But at the same time, it obscures the fact that in any situation where partisans exist at all, their opposition must also be rooted in concepts that—the godlike state and the legitimacy of its army—are, themselves, irredeemably impartial.
The situation of the Palestinians is defined by the fact that they not only have to assert themselves in a contested landscape but also with regard to the political Kraftfeld of a region. It was never ambitious enough to reduce their struggle to the competing claims of two nations. And it was also always wrong to reduce Israel to an island in a hostile sea defined as—take your pick—Muslim or Arabic. Israel does, in fact, have relations both, on the one hand, with a stateless people who have a legitimate right to the territory they rule on and, on the other, with regional states, with whom they can make war or peace as they choose. The Palestinians, however, deal both with a Jewish nation-state that merely tolerates them as “minorities” or the “civilian population,” while the Arabic “brother states” have had an ambivalent relationship with them from the beginning.
As long as the Arab League continued to operate under the banner of the three „no’s“ addressed to Israel—no peace, no negotiation, no recognition—the unresolved Palestinian question, and in particular the fate of the Palestinian refugees, was a political lever against a state that was described as a „Zionist entity,“ a foreign body in their own world. However, since American mediation has paved the way for Israel—starting with peace treaties with Egypt (1978) and Jordan (1994), followed by the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco (2020), and extending now to the emerging possible reconciliation with Saudi Arabia—the path to bilateral relations with Arab states has opened up more and more. Palestinians now run the risk of being left without a regional protective power and withering away in the shadows of world public opinion. Over and over, only one thing has helped against the overwhelming force of raison d’etat: militancy. Whether in legitimate forms of resistance to Israeli oppression, occupation, and colonization, as in the first intifada, or in reprehensible ones, such as the hostage-takings of the 1970s, the suicide bombings of the 1990s during the second intifada, or on October 7, 2023—each time, local violence was followed by a global surge of political attention.
The target of Palestinian terror is Israeli civilians. Its goal, however, is the provocation of disproportionate violence in reaction, which is intended to mobilize the global public. That these are not increasingly addressed also to Middle Eastern states can be attributed to the importance that civilian populations there gained over the course of the Arab Spring. From the point of view of the Palestinians, however, this development is ambivalent. On the one hand, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently admitted frankly to a truth that certainly does not hold only for him: “Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t. But my people do.” Even autocratic leaders cannot afford to ignore public opinion. But from the Palestinian point of view, there is another side to demonstrations of Arab and Muslim solidarity. Since the democratic revolutions of 2010/11, a renewed sense of community has animated Arab intellectuals, which can make Palestinian nationalism seem particularistic to them because they themselves think in terms of post-Pan-Arabism and want to keep the revolutionary legacy alive.
Then add the fact that many Palestinians as well as the global movement for Palestine continue to think in an anti-Zionist manner, which means that they must see an egalitarian binationalism that also affirms the Jewish right to self-determination as an irritant and a challenge—and you begin to see how fragile Bashir’s position on the political field of the Middle East really is. But when one follows the dizzying tapestry of its multifold vectors, then one might appreciate something else: the immensity of his vision, which extends around the world, far beyond the attachment to a landscape and his personal identity. Bashir has always thought about the history of the Middle East alongside that of Europe and the West. The fact, for example, that our society currently considers ‘Muslims’ and ‘Arabs’ to be vehicles for antisemitism while we assign ourselves a pseudo-historical role as protector of the Jews seems like an absurd inversion of the historical reality to him. After all, the “Arab question,” the “Palestinian question,” and the “Muslim question” all have the same origin. These complex and violent dynamics could unfold only after Europe had carried the „Jewish question,“ i.e., the consequences of its own antisemitism, to the Middle East alongside its own imperial ambitions.
And finally, against the backdrop of all these unresolved conflicts, which are so deeply intertwined, we can recognize something else: the dizzying openness of the future.
And with it, the possibility of hope.
*
When Jordan renounced its ambitions to West Jordania and East Jerusalem in 1988 and then sealed this decision with a peace treaty in 1994, the last door for a regional solution to the Palestinian question was closed. The so-called “Jordanian solution,” which would have presented a bilateral solution to the refugee problem, was naturally opposed by the PLO, which meant that it was also naturally endorsed by Israel and by American strategists like Henry Kissinger. But while the integration of the Palestinians into the Hashemite Kingdom would have amounted to their depoliticization, the regional alternative was to intertwine Palestinian resistance with Arab nationalism. However, the door to this possibility, which had long dominated expectations, was slammed shut with the defeat of 1967. Since then, the political horizon for Palestinians has narrowed steadily. At the same time, their situation has become so desperate and their problem so burningly acute that suddenly anything seems conceivable.
Let’s take it to both extremes.
Pessimists, who like to call themselves realists, see nothing more than a maelstrom of unimpeded violence, which will seal the fate of the Palestinians sooner or later. In Gaza, the destruction has already reached such a scale that the dreary prognosis anticipates that it will be decades before anyone can live a normal life there again. According to Israel’s sinister calculations, more and more inhabitants of the territory will leave »voluntarily.« And in the West Bank, pressure from the settlers, along with complicity from the Israeli military and the political will of most Israelis, will force the Palestinians into ever smaller enclaves until it becomes intolerable there, too.
But it still might be possible that it is the optimists who can claim to be realists right now. Conditions in Israel and in Palestine have become so intolerable that a process might have begun, which would have been unthinkable a short while ago. Europe has alienated itself from the U.S. while it converges with the Middle East in one way and with the Global South in another. Public opinion, which has always been on the side of the Palestinians in the Arab world, has now shifted against Israel in European countries; even in Germany, the bastions of Staatsräson are crumbling. And since countries such as South Africa and Nicaragua have discovered international law, they present us with a dilemma: either side with „democratic“ Israel against international law or side with „Western“ universalism against the law of might. It could well be that the UK and the EU are about to bow to this double pressure and join a political community of convenience that wants to rein in Israel, disarm Hamas, and help the Palestinians achieve self-determination.
And it was perhaps more than a coincidence that an article appeared in Foreign Affairs at the same time, describing the 2002 Arab peace initiative as „the most comprehensive and underutilized framework for resolution.“ At that time, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League had proposed linking Israeli recognition of Palestinian sovereignty with collective recognition of Israel by the states of the Middle East (except Iran). And who was the author of the article? Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli internal intelligence service Shin Bet.
If one expands one’s view into history, this convergence becomes a reflection.
Just as the Palestinian question has created lasting unrest in the Middle East, no post-Westphalian peace could be established in Europe until the “deutsche Frage” was unsolved. Internally, German nationalism strove for the sovereignty of a state and for unity. Externally, however, ambitions were tied to it, which, though they were kept in check for a while by political prudence, were only put to rest by two catastrophic world wars. At first glance, Palestinian nationalism could not be more contradictory. Its ambition is not aimed at dominance, but at the absolute minimum of a self-determined existence. And yet its pacification is just as much the key to political order there as the frustration of Greater German nationalism was here.
The key lies in the hands of Israel.
And what is Israel?
Israel is the hinge that connects Europe to the Middle East, for better and for worse. Zionism was not merely born out of Ashkenazi culture; it was born from antisemitic barbarism. People in Europe, and especially people in Germany, are not aware that Germans, and the Europeans in general, solved their “Jewish question” in part through mass murder and in part by exporting it through the unconditional support of Israel at the cost of the Palestinians. That must change. But we might need support from abroad. Palestine does not have an ambassador (Botschafter). But it has a messenger (Bote). It has Bashir. And his visit could help us to finally put a piece of European-German history to rest.
It would do our world as much good as his, which Goethe could have told us:
Gottes ist der Orient!
Gottes ist der Occident!
Nord- und südliches Gelände
Ruht im Frieden seiner Hände!
Translation by Peter Kuras, with generous support from the
Wissenschaftskolleg
(This essay was published in German on August 20, 2025, before the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. It has been moderately revised for the English translation.)
Angebot
