{"id":237343,"date":"2025-07-04T12:05:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T12:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/237343\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T12:05:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T12:05:10","slug":"irish-in-germany-are-caught-between-starkly-different-perspectives-on-the-war-in-gaza-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/237343\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish in Germany are caught between starkly different perspectives on the war in Gaza \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was plenty for T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris<\/a> to discuss on Friday in Berlin<\/a> with his new German<\/a> foreign minister colleague, Johann Wadephul. After a chilly meeting of Irish<\/a> and German foreign ministers last year, no joint press conference was planned this time around. <\/p>\n

Berlin and Dublin, traditionally close partners on EU<\/a> and foreign policy, have found themselves far apart following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7th 2023, which claimed at least 1,200 lives.<\/p>\n

In his January 2024 visit, then-t\u00e1naiste Miche\u00e1l Martin suggested Berlin\u2019s view of the Gaza conflict<\/a> was constrained \u201cby the historical prism of the Holocaust\u201d, though \u201cevolving\u201d. Germany\u2019s position has evolved quite a bit further since then, with growing public outrage here over Israel\u2019s Gaza blockade, settler violence in the West Bank and a Palestinian death toll nearing 60,000. A more critical tone towards Israel from the new German government, however, has yet to be matched in any significant policy shift.<\/p>\n

The current Israel-Hamas conflict, for many Irish people living in Germany, resembles what John le Carr\u00e9 once called a \u201clooking glass war\u201d. In their daily lives here and during visits back to Ireland, the German-Irish negotiate two separate minefields with one common denominator: dissent from the majority opinion \u2013 or attempts at differentiation in the public debate \u2013 are often denounced.<\/p>\n

The most visible sign of tension surrounds two Irish citizens who face expulsion from Germany<\/a> in connection with their alleged role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including a violent confrontation at a Berlin university.<\/p>\n

Their precise role in what happened there has yet to be established and, in an emergency injunction, a Berlin court has halted expulsion proceedings until after trial, likely in the autumn. That didn\u2019t stop Berlin\u2019s governing mayor Kai Wegner prejudging them, in a national newspaper, as \u201canti-Semitic criminals\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many Irish people here who join Gaza solidarity marches, as they would if they were in Ireland, report harassment in their workplace and police violence.<\/p>\n

Some face charges they view as spurious and \u2013 after 18 months and counting \u2013 the charges have neither come to trial nor been dropped. That keeps them flagged in police databases, making every re-entry to Germany a stressful business of arbitrary delays and border police questions. For them, this is official Germany\u2019s intentional chilling effect for holding the \u201cwrong\u201d views on Gaza. (A similar chilling effect, critics of Israel\u2019s Gaza war say, follows German efforts since November 2023 to outlaw every public utterance of \u201cfrom the river to the sea\u201d as an illegal slogan supporting the proscribed Hamas group. In May a Berlin court dismissed one such prosecution <\/a>as a politicised endeavour lacking evidence and any legal standing.)<\/p>\n

\n

The colonial framing of the Gaza conflict, as popularised by Kneecap, gets an airing in Germany, particularly in universities, but others reject it as ill fit for the complexities of the conflict<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

All of this is attracting outside attention. Last month the Council of Europe, the continent\u2019s leading human rights body, sent a two-page letter of concern to the Berlin federal government. Police violence, limits to freedom of assembly and \u201cthe blanket classification of criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism\u201d, the letter warned, do a disservice to democracy and may even endanger it\u201d.<\/p>\n

While German officials dismiss such concerns, campaigners are already collating information about the crackdown they see. And writer Maxim Biller has even devised a diagnosis for the motivation: Morbus Israel, Germany\u2019s Israel disorder. \u201cAt the core of [this] neo-German Orient neurosis is, very loosely: Germans\u2019 disappointed love for their former victims,\u201d he argued in a column for Die Zeit weekly. His polemical text was later removed from the Zeit website following protests over his description of the \u201cstrategically correct but inhumane hunger blockade of Gaza\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0An Irishman in Berlin: \u2018For Germans, everything is forbidden unless it allowed\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

As the conflict drags on, though, some Irish in Germany wonder \u2013 quietly and cautiously \u2013 if Ireland has a disorder of its own. Earlier in the conflict, before everything was eclipsed by the real and justified horror over children being starved \u2013 or shot dead by Israel soldiers \u2013 one Irish acquaintance asked: where was the Irish protest over Hamas contempt for \u2013 and human rights violations of \u2013 its own people?<\/p>\n

Given the unprecedented degradation in Gaza, such questions may seem like cynical what-aboutery. Yet another middle-aged Irish acquaintance, living in Germany as long as the Belfast Agreement, wondered aloud recently how Irish people, who resented the IRA killing people on their behalf, feel about Hamas doing the same for Palestinians?<\/p>\n

The colonial framing of the Gaza conflict, as popularised by Kneecap, gets an airing in Germany, particularly in universities, but others reject it as ill fit for the complexities of the conflict.<\/p>\n

After a strange start, Germany\u2019s debate has shifted radically in recent months. The popular Bild tabloid still ignores the reality in Gaza and denounces Palestinian solidarity marchers as \u201cJew haters\u201d, but other outlets offer a broader and more challenging range of views.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Israeli foreign minister finds shifting moods as he visits BerlinOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, the S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung daily printed a harrowing 5,000-word report on the starve-or-be-shot reality in Gaza. A day later, it ran a full-page essay by French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, asking \u201cIs anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism?\u201d<\/p>\n

With large Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian communities, Germany\u2019s Israel-Gaza-Hamas debate is messy, emotional, confused and conflicted. A diverse range of voices compete to be heard, airing grievances which not all share but are nonetheless real. Two conflicts are playing out, as Berlin arms one side and tries to feed the other. Attempting to meet two non-negotiable postwar obligations \u2013 to Israel and human dignity \u2013 has created a domestic conflict of conscience with an equally unpredictable outcome. <\/p>\n

By comparison, many Irish living in Germany perceive Ireland\u2019s debate as Irish people telling other Irish people, at no personal cost and from a safe distance, how terrible things are for the Palestinians. <\/p>\n

A recent public television poll here asked who respondents feel is responsible for the plight of the civilian population in Gaza. Some 69 per cent said the Israeli government was fully or partly to blame while 71 per cent said the same of Hamas. How would a similar poll look in Ireland?<\/p>\n

Ireland and Germany hold competing views on the conflict, yet both have considerable credibility among Palestinians and Israelis respectively. How can our two countries leverage that good will for a better future in the Middle East? That is a debate worth having.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There was plenty for T\u00e1naiste Simon Harris to discuss on Friday in Berlin with his new German foreign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2574,2000,299,10982,1824,20418,7160],"class_list":{"0":"post-237343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-berlin","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-gaza-strip","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-israel-hamas-conflict","14":"tag-simon-harris"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114794877594122105","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}