Good Germans
By 
M. Gessen (gift link) has a sobering piece on complicity and resistance within nations in which egregiously criminal and immoral behavior has become an overt feature of the government’s policies.
“In a free society, all are involved in what some are doing,” said Abraham Joshua Heschel, an American rabbi who opposed the Vietnam War and participated in the civil rights movement. “Some are guilty; all are responsible.” Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer who has spent much of his professional life representing Palestinians in Israeli courts, has adopted this understanding. Over the years, Sfard has come to consider himself a dissident rather than a member of the opposition: There is no political party that represents his views, and it has grown increasingly difficult to pursue justice through the Israeli court system. And yet, he said, “As a citizen and a resident, I benefit.”
We were having breakfast at one of Tel Aviv’s myriad lovely cafes where one could have good coffee and fresh food while some 40 miles away people were starving. One could reasonably assume that many people at the cafe were at least somewhat uneasy about that starvation, but the discomfort wasn’t visible; what was, Sfard pointed out, were three different displays devoted to Israeli hostages in Gaza, who were still captive when we spoke. He had no objection to these displays, he hastened to add; it was the lack of any acknowledgment of the genocide that concerned him. Both the genocide and the obliviousness were policies of a state to which, Sfard stressed, he continued to contribute, “not just by paying taxes, but even now, as I’m talking to you, I contribute to an understanding of Israel, which Israel benefits from.”
Over the summer, Sfard told me, “I had to get away.” He and his family went to Italy. While they were there, some of the most dire reports of mass starvation started coming out. The distance helped put things in perspective. When Sfard returned, he wrote an essay that Haaretz, a left-wing newspaper, published with the headline “We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It’s Our Job to Fight Against It From Within.” Many people look at the far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, “these two petty fascists, who — unlike their Italian or German counterparts — have neither class nor aesthetics, only raw racism and sadistic cruelty,” Sfard wrote, and think, with relief, “This doesn’t represent us.” But, he continued, “the criminal, felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction is an all-Israeli project. It could not have happened without the cooperation — whether through active contribution or silence — of all parts of Jewish Israeli society.” Admitting one’s complicity means being called to action, including action that many Israelis perceive as disloyal. Sfard called on his readers to get behind people who refuse to serve in Gaza, and to support sanctions, political isolation and international investigations into Israel’s actions.
Gessen’s piece focuses on Israel-Palestine, which is a subject I don’t know nearly enough about, although I don’t think one needs to know a great deal about a subject to opine that intentionally starving children to death is always wrong, even or perhaps especially as a form of military strategy.
I do know a great deal about the political situation in the United States, and I thought about Gessen’s piece more in that context. I was a child in the second half of the 1960s, and have only fragmented and confused memories of the politics of the time — my first really distinct political memories are of LBJ’s speech announcing he wasn’t running for re-election, and a few days later my father coming up the steps and telling my mother “han matado a King” (they’ve killed King — it’s always “they” for some reason) and her cry of disbelief.
Heschel’s quote must have resonated for people who rightly saw support of basic civil rights for black Americans and opposition to the Vietnam War as fundamental moral issues, that in some sense felt outside of normal politics as usual. The fight over those two issues was in many ways what people mean by “the Sixties,” which is a fight that in many ways has never ended. (This is what Rick Perlstein’s histories of the 1964-1980 era capture very powerfully).
I sense we are now at a similar moment, except it feels more existential, or more accurately, what’s happening in America is a matter of life and death for liberal democracy, as the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were matters of life and death to real people on the ground in the Jim Crow south and the Vietnam countryside. How much complicity and how much resistance each one of us offers up in this circumstance is something that each of us has to work out for ourselves, but ignoring the daily reality of that choice doesn’t make it go away.