The German daily Stuttgarter Zeitung recently published a caricature of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to the drawing, Bibi is spilling poison from a bottle marked "settlement construction" onto a piece of bread, as the dove stands next to him, holding an olive branch.
According to the German media, "Jewish settlers" are toxic. Last month another German newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, portrayed Israel as an ugly monster, with a knife and sharp horns.
Lies and hatred against the Jews has always been a staple of German life. Is this the way the Germans try to cleanse themselves of their crimes against the Jews? According to the firebrand writer Henryk Broder, a new German rule has been epitomized by that cartoon: the guiltier the Zionists become, the less guilty the German ex-Nazis feel.
Germany is still very passionate about Jew-hate. And this German hatred had a mirror in the recent Jubiläumsjahr, the anniversary of the birth of Richard Wagner. Last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her husband - quantum chemist and Wagner enthusiast Joachim Sauer - arrived minutes before the start of the Bayreuth festival's opening performance of Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman".
It is "Kristallnachtmusik", the music of the Kristallnacht and the first Nazi pogroms against the Jews. In Israel the ban has already fallen for Richard Strauss (the violinist Jascha Heifetz was wounded with an iron bar because he played it) and other pro-Nazi musicians like Carl Orff. Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven's Ninth on the birthday of Hitler, and when Germany received the news of Hitler's death, the radio aired an Adagio of Bruckner played by Furtwängler. Yet the interpretations of Furtwängler are legal in Israel. And so those of Herbert von Karajan, who joined the Nazi, or Karl Bohm, who made the Nazi salute.
The current unconscious German attitude toward the Jews: It would be better if they had all perished.
Wagner is a unique case because for millions of Jews his notes, reproduced on the speakers inside the concentration camps (expecially in Dachau), were the last sounds heard in life. Since then, none of these notes has never officially echoed in Israel. Wagner once said of the Jews: "There is only one means to ward off the curse looming over you: the redemption of Ahasvero", the annihilation.
This is exactly what Germany is planning today with the State of Israel.
German public opinion contains - like during Wagner's time - elements that envision a world cleansed of the Jewish state. The modern German anti-Semite is not a denier, but the one who uses Auschwitz in order to inculpate the Israelis: "You are not any better!". Israel is a disturbing factor in the wellness consciousness of the Germans.
So Germans can redeem themselves by blaming "Jewish aggression". While Iraq's Scud missiles were raining down on Tel Aviv, the German concern was voiced in the demand that Israel refrain from firing back. At that time the spokesman of the Green Party, Hans-Christian Stroebele, said: "The Iraqi missile attacks on Israel are the logical, almost inevitable consequence of the policies of Israel."
Germans like dead Jews and are always ready to erect monuments to them. So now that the Iranian threat to commit genocide against Israel is the only real existential danger that Israel has experienced since 1973, too many Germans publicly say that Israel is the real threat to peace in the region.
When in Munich Arab terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes, a politically motivated murder of Jews near the place where tens of thousands of prisoners in the concentration camp at Dachau had been transported from life to death, the attack was commented in the German media as a failure of the German security organs and as a response to the Israeli policies towards the Palestinian Arabs.
The famous German journalist and editor Klaus Rainer Röhl then said that "Israel is a built with looted land". The Germans' hate for Israel means that they have some unfinished business that they would like concluded; a desire that someone would finish the job the Nazis couldn't finish. They had simply replaced "Jews" with "Zionists" and "world Jewry" with "Zionism". And the Germans reactivated a classic of the XX century: anti-Semitism is not a fault of the anti-Semites, but Jews are to blame for "the occupation".
In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play "The Garbage, the City, and Death", an anti-Semitic character declares: "And the Jew is guilty, because he makes us guilty—because he is there. … If they had gassed him, I’d sleep better today. They forgot to gas him. That’s no joke, that’s how the thinking goes inside me". Fassbinder himself was no anti-Semite, but he revealed the current unconscious German attitude toward the Jews: It would be better if they had all perished.
That is why I am totally convinced that these Wagnerian Germans would like to see a second Holocaust. They dribble to establish a monument "to the memory of the Jewish State in the Middle East" on the site of the no longer needed Israeli Embassy in Berlin.
And just as Germany paid the "compensation" to the Jews, the Germans would now ensure that the Palestinian Arabs would be compensated by the Zionists because they have been the "victims of the victims".