Secular shame in Gaza

In April 1933, the German National Socialist party imposed the first anti-Semitic measures and decreed limitations for Jewish citizens, who were persecuted and murdered by their fellow German citizens, instigated by the Nazi authorities and possessed by anti-Semitism. The storefront windows of Jewish businesses filled up with insults, and hatred towards them grew. When his nine-year-old daughter, the product of his marriage to the Jewish intellectual Lola Landau, began to be discriminated against at school, her father, the German writer Armin T. Wegner, decided to write an open letter to Adolf Hitler. Wegner, a convinced pacifist who had photographed the crimes committed by the Turks against the Armenians in Anatolia and in the Mesopotamian desert, decided to write a letter that, however, no newspaper dared to publish, so he decided to send it directly to the Braunes Haus, the party headquarters in Munich. The letter reached Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, and the Gestapo arrested the pacifist writer in August 1933. After a long journey through different concentration camps, Wegner was able to go into exile in Italy and in 1968 he was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the institution that grants the title of to those who defended the Hebrew people without being Hebrew themselves: “Whoever saves one life saves the entire World,” says the Mishnah, 4:5.

In his letter to Hitler, Wegner underlined the fact that Germany had been built with the work and talent of Jews and that their participation in World War I, where he himself had served, was as German citizens. But the most interesting thing about the argument the pacifist addressed to Hitler involves a concept that was also in the mouths of other European intellectuals of the era, such as Günther Anders, and which today is in serious danger of disappearing: the concept of shame. We could define shame as a feeling of aversion, a hateful vision of ourselves, observed through the eyes of our ideal self, from which we distance ourselves in some aspect.

Well, Wegner believed that if Hitler did not stop the growing wave of anti-Semitism in Germany, he would be covered in shame, a secular shame. “On whom will the same blow that is intended to be inflicted on the Jews today fall if not on ourselves?” he asked, and appealed to another concept that is also clearly out of use today, that of dignity. “Defend the dignity of the German people!” he naïvely asked the future Führer.

A secular shame should fall on all of humanity because human dignity is in danger 90 years later, at the hands of those who represent the people that Wegner wanted to defend. And it is because the tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye, multiplied by a thousand, that the Israeli army is carrying out in Gaza and the West Bank is once again an ethnic cleansing, a genocide like the one that today’s executioners suffered in Nazi Germany. An intergenerational trauma has been transmitted between the victims of that time until they adopted tactics similar to those of their German attackers. Appealing to legitimate defense after the terrible murders and kidnappings by Hamas, the ultra-conservative government of Israel has turned the entire Palestinian people into things, into human animals as Netanyahu’s leaders call them, and is busy exterminating them, indiscriminately killing civilians, mostly children, as if they intended to wipe out the next generation. It is as if the status of victims that they once legitimately obtained gave them the right to use disproportionate violence (“expiatory mentality,” the writer Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio once called it), and the hatred of which they were the targets had turned against the Palestinians, dehumanized today as they themselves were then. It is important here that we differentiate between the State of Israel, its population, and the Jews of the world, although 57% of the Israeli Jewish majority thinks the force being used against the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank is insufficient, aligning themselves with their government.

Of the episodes of extermination that we have experienced throughout the 20th and 21st centuries (Tutsis, Armenians, Rohingyas, Kurds), this is one of the ones that most moves the consciences of the citizens of the world, including, and this fills us with hope, Orthodox and secular Jews who demand peace inside and outside Israel. Mass demonstrations are repeated in most countries yet, however, no one manages to stop the killing. It is said that there will be a before and after of this human catastrophe that will make us realize the ineffectiveness of both citizens and international institutions such as UNRWA or WHO, and NGOs such as Doctors Without Borders or Amnesty International, in demanding peace. The U.S. veto of the United Nations call for a ceasefire only confirms its government’s support for warmongering and the impotence of its citizens, along with Europe’s complicit lukewarm attitude.

Political disaffection appears here as an understandable reaction when learned helplessness, the deep feeling that nothing we do will change the situation, becomes the symptom of our times. Why commit? Taking refuge in individualism by deserting political life, being idiots, is a defense mechanism against the psychic suffering we feel by contemplating other people’s pain — pain that challenges us and invites us to be moved by it — and knowing we cannot prevent or manage that pain.

However, there will be no secular shame that will redeem us because we have erased the distance between what we are and our ideals, and because these, if any, have seriously lowered the threshold of what is human.

What to do in the face of the progressive decline in the value of life and dignity that this conflict reveals?

The fear of individual and collective shame, in the words of Hannah Arendt, is what moved the consciences of rulers, structuring a few just men and women. But today we lack that antidote. Dignity and morality, and the shame that makes us blush, is an effect of both, sometimes constituting a brake and an incentive to fight against violence that would turn against the perpetrators and their descendants like a boomerang, but today we no longer know what these concepts mean or where to go look for them.

Perhaps this is why appealing to dignity has prevailed in social movements in recent years, because attacks against it multiply, pushing us to become an unworthy society.

We have seen the nakedness of Noah, the uselessness of our global institutions to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people, or their inability to take urgent and sufficient measures against climate change, but we do not feel that secular shame to which Wegner alluded, but rather a dull, nameless pain whose effects we already perceive in our pained, hopeless young people, stripped of their future and their dignity, whose suicidal thoughts have grown to the point of affecting a third of the university population.

The complaint that South Africa has filed before the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, accusing the State of Israel of genocide, can provide a ray of light in which to place our battered hopes.

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