The Last Good Europeans

Muselmann is a term from the Holocaust. It was used by prisoners of the camps to describe their fellow inmates, those who were utterly emaciated and resigned to impending death. The word is Yiddish for Muslim, deriving from the old Turkish word, müslüman. In the camps, its use was varied and there are many opinions on its origin and application, most notably from Victor Frankel, Eugen Kogon, and Primo Levi (all of whom were Holocaust survivors). Here is Levi’s powerful description: “Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmanner, the drowned form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand ...” 

The term also appears in works by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanislaw Klodzinski (who wrote a whole study on the word), Germaine Tillion (inmate of Ravensbrück), to name a few. ‘Muselmann’ is a remarkable word and concept, able to call up profound images and associations.

The pictures of starving children in Gaza have occasioned comparisons to the starving of the Nazi camps. In the West, the brutalized Holocaust victims are first equivalent that comes to mind when one sees any image of famished, emaciated bodies—the famous reportage from the Ethiopian famine, for example—or when one sees the terrible effects of anorexia on a woman passing on the street. The hollow-eyed concentration camp prisoner made an indelible image which we like to think belongs to the Middle Ages rather than the modern world. Those eyes edict the viewer, always staring directly into the lens, and out into the world beyond the barbed wire and the cold passive camera. The eyes restructure time, almost stilling it, and the passage of time becomes a solemn accusation.

In its blockade and engineered famine operations in Gaza, Israel has thus summoned up images from the Jewish past. It has created muselmanns from the mostly Muslim population of Gaza. But the Israelis are not the prisoners, they are the wardens and manufacturers of death. Thus, they have become Europeans. Transformed from being Jewish by the nature of their colonial project itself and their current outright genocide into being the historic persecutors of Jews and inventors of anti-Semitism as politics—Europeans. The inhabitants of Gaza have now become both Jewish (as the victims of colonialism and racism) and Muslim, as in Muselmann, as in their designation as a cultural group (which de facto includes Palestinian Christians), as a general term used by the West to mean the Arab/Oriental world. Aside from a small number of Ethiopians, Palestinians are now the only Semites left in the country. The rest of Israel has been basically Aryanized.

As a European project, the creation of traditional European intellectuals like Herzl and Jabotinsky, Zionism concerns itself with the West, with being part of the West even as it is geographically distant from it. Though the West has always persecuted its Jewish people, Zionism is wholly informed by the West, by the failure of the West to put into practice its Enlightenment ideals, and by Western colonial projects in Africa and Asia. Netanyahu has repeatedly called his state a bulwark of Western values against the Asiatic, barbaric hordes of Islam (and also, historically, Judaism). We are not muselmanns, he means. We are European and white, his New York accent ringing loud and clear in a roomful of born-again Calvinist zealots and Krupp-like arms dealers. Recent Ieaks from Israeli propaganda outlets aimed abroad show that Israelis are keen to be seen as white: Use the images of us that most look like them, urged one operative. They will see us and see that we are also white, not typically Semitic-looking and swarthy...

This acceptance of Israel as European is also taken on by the leaders of former bastions of antisemitism and the Holocaust such as Germany, France, and Hungary. The grandsons and great-grandsons and daughters of the SS and Vichy now supply Israel militarily, occasionally offering the same mild criticisms that they did during the rise of Fascism (an ideology they created themselves). Recently, these such tepid rebukes have increased, probably due to the flood of images of starving children which recall the Final Solution and European shame. The final proof of European acceptance is the entry of Israel into the Eurovision Song Contest, which caused much debate but is perfectly reasonable given the Zionist state’s imitation of European values such as ethnic cleansing, the manufactured starvation of indigenous peoples, and genocide. Celebrating its close-win at Eurovision, the Israelis celebrate their old ties to Europe and their entrance as a node in one of the West’s most impressive and devastating achievements: the mass entertainment industry.

So has Israel ceased being Jewish and become the last, atavistic expression of Europeanism. It does what Europe dare not do in the open these days—or does incrementally and more cautiously than the IDF with their carpet-bombing and targeting of hospitals. Israel has taken the burden of widely-documented extermination from the guilty hands of the architects of the Holocaust, who, by supporting genocide by an ethnic group they once inflicted genocide upon, hope to wash their hands of the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka, the false charges of Jewish blood-libel,the whole sickening apparatus of anti-Jewish persecution over the last odd millennium. This Christian absolution comes at the cost of Palestine, a price which Europe and America consider meagre, and also fitting because Palestine was the birthplace of Jesus Christ, whose name and mission Europe has always claimed as her own. Israel is assisting them graciously, telling them that all is forgiven and bygones will be bygones. 

Every racial law Israel that passes and every pogrom it enacts to erase the Palestinians brings Israelis an inch closer to being total Europeans and farther away from the designation as Jews and so, as muselmanns. That they once sought to become Palestinians by removing the real Palestinians, as Golda Meir's famous quote sought to prove, has been replaced by the lust to become Aryans. But I wouldn’t trust wily old Europe too much. It has a memory as long as America’s amnesia, and its shame may not be totally erased. This living shame leads to repetition, to old songs and old attitudes, and banners and… 

It is no longer a question of becoming what one hates but of becoming those who have always hated one. Not of becoming their hatred, but of literally becoming them in the flesh. A final plea for acceptance addressed to the makers of train timetables and insecticide: We are all Europeans, and maybe the Americans most of all. The Texan accent of a settler in Beitar Illit matches his German last name.

by Martin Billheimer