—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative
The following text is an expanded English-language version of the German article “Palestine Avenue,” published in Konkret 2/24, pp. 38–39.
I remember it well. It was in the spring of 1987 when I commenced my lecture in Osnabrück on the German left with these remarks: “So that we understand each other: Regardless of my heavy criticisms and profound objections to many facets of its current affairs, I fully accept the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and do not want its destruction!” People looked at me as if I had lost my mind!
But I said: “Such a fundamental statement of situating the speaker’s normative orientation is de rigueur at the beginning of every discussion involving anything relating to Israeli politics, society, and culture. The very existence of the country has simply never been accepted as a matter of course. Thus, it must be affirmed in every case.” Nothing has changed in the ensuing forty years. None of the 193 UN members must experience this every day in the most varied discussions all over the world, be it about their politics or society, culture or food, language or habits. None of these items are legitimate in Israel’s case. Just witness the bitter conflicts involving “inauthentic” Israeli food and its alleged appropriation of “authentic” Palestinian food, conveniently forgetting that all foods everywhere are appropriations and amalgams of various cultures. The more appropriation, the better, I would argue. Look at how much better food in Germany has become by appropriating Italian, Turkish, and Greek food.
Following violent conflicts, hostile neighbors may not accept each other’s post-conflict existence for a while, but none have had the temporal length (seventy-five years and counting) or the spatial dimension (reaching across the globe, far from the respective country’s borders) that pertains in the case of Israel. Serbia may not accept the existence of Kosovo, nor Georgia that of Abkhazia, but either’s alleged nonexistence does not matter in a discussion about them in Nigeria or Thailand. What makes the Israeli situation so unique is that this ubiquitous unacceptance exists in all corners of the globe and among the most varied publics. Making it more pernicious still is that this unacceptance is perhaps more prominent in spaces of civil society than in those of governments. Even in the case of apartheid-ruled South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s (with which Israel is always associated), it was South Africa’s apartheid regime that was anathema, not the country’s existence per se. One did not have to begin any discussion about South African apartheid by stating that one did not desire the destruction of South Africa as a country.
