Germany’s leading Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the opposition Christian Democratic Party (CDU) have ordered high schools in Berlin’s borough of Neukolln to distribute brochures titled The Myth of Israel #1948.
The brochure states there are five “myths” around the creation of the state of Israel, which are subsequently refuted in short essays by various authors.
In the first section, debunking myth #1, that Jews and Arabs lived together in peace before Israel was founded, Israel’s pre-state militia, the Haganah, responsible for the destruction of 531 Palestinian villages and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians between December 1947 and the summer of 1948, is promoted as a merely “defensive” Jewish resistance movement.
“Myth #5: Israel is to blame for the Nakba”, includes a text by researcher Shany Mor titled “the UN is distorting the meaning of the Nakba: its view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is extremely one-sided”.
In the text, Mor states that “displacement during war - then and now - was nothing unusual”.
He also labels the UN’s attention to the Palestinian cause “obsessive” and the Arab defeat of 1948 a myth.
I’ve concluded that Germans were taught “never again” as a very specific “Germans” vs “Jews” thing rather than the Humanist “never again shall people be murder en masse because of their etnicity” that does not include any specifics about the etnicity or credo of the perpetrators or the victims.
Certainly, that would be very consistent with not just the current behaviour of German politicians when it comes to Israel’s Genocide but also how the past events which Germans regret are invariably framed and talked about in race terms, i.e. “Germans” and “Jews”, even to the point of excluding other etnicities that the Germans also targetted and murdered in large numbers during WWII such as the Roma.
If one doesn’t destroy the racist framework of thinking of people as members of a race first, one is still a racist (even if some races one before though of as “lesser”, one now thinks of as “like us”), because one is still running around judging and acting based on prejudices about entire races and credos when dealing with human beings - not treating them as persons but rather treating them as members of groups they were born into.