By Russell A. Berman · Monday, December 18, 2023  In this brief interview, Martin Cüppers refers to Islamic antisemitism in Germany as a “reimport.” That terse designation builds on his core thesis that during the 1930s Nazi Germany exported its particular brand of antisemitism, with all its uncompromising viciousness, to the Arab world, where it spread and festered and eventually came to define the Arab–Israeli conflict. With the considerable immigration from the Arab world into Germany, especially after 2015, this same Nazi legacy has returned to Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany, which made serious efforts to develop a memory culture and to face up to the German culpability for the Shoah, had in effect opened its doors to carriers of some of the same Nazi values that it had done its best to overcome. The refugees from the Arab world were Germany’s own “return of the repressed.”
Cüppers’s argument about Nazi ideology as a source for Palestinian and more broadly Arab antisemitism is part of a larger body of scholarship that includes the publications by Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Elham Manea in particular. Thanks to this research, the claim has become incontrovertible that Nazi Germany played a significant role in shaping the ideology of the Arab–Israeli conflict in ways that continue today and that explain the unique brutality of the October 7 Hamas attacks as well as the aspiration for a massive elimination of Jews from the region. It is exactly that which finds expression in the frequent call for Arab Palestine––فلسطين عربية—which means Arabs only, and no one else (one looks in vain in the founding documents of the PLO or Hamas for any commitment to minority rights).
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By Bernhard Junginger · Monday, December 18, 2023 Editor’s note: Martin Cüppers directs the Research Unit Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He studies the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust, and how they were treated by postwar German society and its judiciary. Together with Klaus-Michael Mallmann he published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Half Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine] in 2006. His work belongs to a growing body of scholarship that exposes how Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general. Other contributions to this important line of research include books by Matthias Küntzel, such as Jihad and Jew-Hatred (Telos Press, 2009) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), and Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. The Nazi genealogy of Palestinian animosity toward the Jews helps understand the particular viciousness of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. This interview originally appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 5 and appears here with Cüppers’s permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose commentary appears here.
Mr. Cüppers, in your book Half Moon and Swastika you explore the connections between the Third Reich, the Arab world, and the Palestine conflict. What is your main finding?
In light of our current context, the book makes clear that the terrible Hamas massacre of October 7 was inconceivable without the historical influences of Nazi Germany.
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By The Telos-Paul Piccone Institute · Thursday, November 30, 2023 Updated Schedule and Format, Registration Information
Panel 1: “Critical Theory in Light of October 7”
The first panel in our series of webinars in response to October 7 will take place on Sunday, January 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. Register for the webinar here.
In light of the vigorous response we received to our recent conference announcement, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute is enhancing the format and expanding the schedule of its initiative about Israel, Hamas, critical theory, and the university. These changes will allow us to cultivate and refine a carefully sustained conversation while events in the Middle East and on campus continue to unfold.
Rather than—as originally announced—hosting just a single, digital gathering on January 12–13, we will instead be hosting a webinar series on different aspects of the topic each month for one full year.
We continue to plan for an in-person conference on the subject as well, to be convened in early October 2024, and we expect to make an announcement about its location shortly.
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By Eric Hendriks · Monday, November 27, 2023 The PVV, the anti-Islam party of parliamentary veteran and avid Israel supporter Geert Wilders, overran the Dutch general election. Wilders’s mega victory, which the polls had not predicted, sent Dutch polite society into turmoil. Still, it has a certain logic, at least in retrospect. The last six weeks of the Dutch election season overlapped with the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and attendant Muslim and leftist protests in Europe and the Netherlands. The public focus on Islamist violence and Islamic culture war issues played into Wilders’s hands.
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By David Pan · Tuesday, November 7, 2023 Last week I attended a conference on “AI and the Law, on the Battlefield and in Cyberspace” organized by Academic Exchange and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas, Austin. During the conference we received some updates about the situation in Israel and the Israeli efforts to comply with international law in their war against Hamas. Using rules of engagement and battlefield procedures similar to U.S. practices in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israelis have been trying to balance their need to fight a terrorist enemy against legal and moral imperatives to protect noncombatants. Their approach contrasts sharply with the way Hamas attempts to both terrorize and murder Israelis on the one hand and to use Palestinians as human shields on the other hand. We might say that this is a “morally asymmetric” war because Hamas does not abide by any legal or moral scruples and in fact takes advantage of the fact that Israel does maintain such scruples in its own conduct. By placing its command posts and ammunition stores underneath civilian structures such as schools, mosques, and hospitals, Hamas, with the help of Iran, forces Israel to choose between pursuing its military goals and protecting civilians. The asymmetric military advantage that Hamas enjoys consists in the fact that it would be clearly useless for Israel to employ similar human shields because Hamas would have absolutely no hesitation in killing Israeli civilians.
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By David Pan · Tuesday, October 31, 2023 As Israel begins its attack on Hamas, it will be important to remember the underlying sources of war that will ultimately be the target of Israel’s efforts. Most leftists in the United States and Europe attempt to blame Israel for the continuation of hostilities. But the variety of enmity that fuels the war comes primarily from the Palestinian side. Hamas’s attack on Israel demonstrates that it sees Israel and Israelis as what Carl Schmitt called an “absolute enemy,” against which there can be no compromise and against which the primary strategy is eradication. There clearly can be no peace as long as this attitude prevails. It is also clear that Israel does not share this kind of enemy thinking. In fact, it has worked over the decades to integrate Palestinians into its society and economy. Arabs and Palestinians continue to live and work within Israel, in stark contrast to the plight of Israelis who remain in Gaza primarily as hostages. If the war cannot end until each side stops treating the other side as an absolute enemy, then Israelis have shown their willingness to live alongside Palestinians—while Palestinian leaders have demonstrated the opposite.
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