By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak
In memory of Aaron Bushnell. And of John Franklin and Ruth Asawa, two teachers who knew the Horror and who tried to teach their children well so that it would never again come back. And with thanks to JK.
“Have we learned nothing?”
— I.F. Stone
As Israel, refusing a cease-fire proposal formulated by Egypt and accepted by Hamas, intensifies its bombing and genocidal killing in Rafa, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, an Anglo-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon who returned in April from 43 days operating on civilians wounded and maimed by Israeli bombardments in al-Shifa hospital, the majority of them children, as a volunteer with the French NGO Doctors without Borders — before Gaza’s largest hospital was completely leveled last month by Israel, which left more than 300 bodies buried in mass graves — was prevented by Germany Saturday from entering France, where he had been invited to testify before the French Senate.
“I’m at Charles De Gaulle airport,” Dr. Abu-Sittah, rector of Glasgow University, tweeted Saturday morning, according to the Agence France Presse as reported in Le Figaro. “They’re preventing me from entering France. I’m supposed to speak before the French Senate today. They’re telling me that the Germans have banned my entry in Europe for a year.” A police source confirmed to the AFP that Germany had placed an “interdiction [to circulate in] the Schengen zone” order on Dr. Abu Sittah which effectively prevents him from entering any of the European countries covered by the Schengen convention, meant to regulate immigration and protect member states from terrorists.
In April, police in Berlin raided and forcibly shut down a three-day Palestine Congress whose co-organizers included Jewish Voice for Peace an hour after it had begun and banned from entering the country scheduled speakers including Dr. Abu-Sittah and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, citing concerns about “anti-Semitism”; governments in Germany, the United States, and other countries have informally adopted, as the New Yorker’s Masha Gesen has revealed, new standards for defining what constitutes anti-Semitism which include criticism of Israel. “This is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from anti-Semitism,” Varoufakis told Democracy Now April 16 after he was banned from entering Germany, also contending that among those arrested were a young Jewish Voice for Peace activist with a handmade sign reading “Jews against genocide.” “It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice.”
As for Dr. Abu-Sittah, he recounted to DN in the same broadcast that “upon arrival” in Berlin to participate in the congress in April, he was stopped at the passport office. “I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where I was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours. At the end of three-and-a-half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil…, and that this ban will last the whole of April. And not just that, that if I were to try to link up my Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.” Varoufakis said he was also warned by German authorities about participating by remote video-stream in the congress.
Following Dr. Abu-Sittah’s tweet that he was being prevented from entering France, where the Ecologist (formerly Green) party senatrice Raymonde Poncet had invited him to participate in a colloquium she’d organized at the Senate’s chambers in the Luxembourg Gardens, the president of the party’s Senate group tweeted, «Scandalous, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, plastic and reconstructive surgeon, has been prevented from participating in a Colloquium at the Senate. We are in discussions with the office of (interior minister) Gerald Darmanin and that of (foreign minister) Stéphane Séjourné,” the senator estimating nevertheless that Dr. Abu-Sittah would probably be sent back to Grand Britain, for which he already had an airline ticket for Saturday night.
His testimony before the French Senate having effectively been vetoed by the German government, the Dance Insider would like to share some of what Dr. Abu-Sittah might have said.
In an April 1 interview with Democracy Now after he returned from Gaza (and before Germany raided and pre-empted the Berlin event and banned him from German and effectively, it now appears, European soil), where he spent 43 days working at al-Shifa as a volunteer for the French NGO Doctors without Borders, Dr. Abu-Sittah said that half of the eight to 12 daily surgeries he conducted at al-Shifa involved operating on children, and that “the sheer ferocity of the bombing, the fact that the Israelis were targeting people’s homes, meant that a lot of these children, either their limbs were blown off at the explosion or were crushed beyond repair as a result of the debris and the collapsing buildings that they were taken from underneath,” and that “as the war progressed, as the health system became so overwhelmed, previously reconstructable limbs became unreconstructable and required amputation to save the patients’ lives from gangrene and infection.” As of April 1 (the time of the DN interview), Dr. Abu-Sittah estimated, between 4,000 and 5,000 of the Gazan children injured by Israeli bombing were “left with disabilities that will change the course of their lives” in what he decried as “a war Israel (has) declared on Palestinian children…. Israel wants to wipe out Palestinian children, because Palestinian children represent the Palestinian tomorrow that is incompatible with the Zionist settler-colonial project.”
Of the 35,000 Gazans Israel has killed (not counting the 7,500 still buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel) — the majority civilians according to Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the defense secretary of the United States — since Hamas massacred 1,400 people October 7, also mostly civilians, at least 14,500 are children.
As for those children the Israeli bombing has maimed, Dr. Abu-Sittah told DN, “We know from the medical literature that each child with a lower limb prosthetic will need a new prosthetic every six months, because their body outgrows the length of the prosthesis, and will need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re of adult age, because the bone grows faster than the soft tissues, or the nerves attach themselves to the skin and they can’t wear the prosthesis. And so, this is a lifelong trajectory of surgery and of disability and of mental health scarring as a result of the deformity. Take into account, in addition to that, that a lot of these children are orphaned. You know, there are 17,000 children in Gaza who have lost their parents, and many of these are wounded children. And so, to go through all of this with no family to look after you is just — the legacy will be the legacy of this war.”
Following Israel’s deadly siege of al-Shifa hospital — Gaza’s largest — last month, Palestinian civil authorities discovered hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves. One of those slain by Israel in an earlier attack on the hospital was Dr. Ahmad Maqadmeh, a “young, brilliant plastic surgeon” to whom Dr. Abu-Sittah paid tribute on Democracy Now on April 1.
“His body, alongside that of his mother, was found today when the Israeli troops withdrew, and they had been executed by the Israeli army while trying to escape Shifa. Dr. Ahmad was a brilliant and dedicated young surgeon who had won the humanitarian fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. And it’s critical that we remember their names and we remember their stories. And today I want to send my love to his wife and to his children, both under the age of 5, who are now left without a husband and a father. Along with so many of my colleagues who we’ve lost, this is the second plastic surgeon who I had worked with at Shifa who has been killed by the Israelis, and over 345 doctors and nurses and paramedics who have been killed by the Israelis….”
During their April 1 interview, DN host Amy Goodman quoted an interview with Dr. Abu-Sittah in the New Yorker in which Eliza Griswold writes of his operations on children maimed by Israeli bombs, ““To mark the gravity of these procedures, and to mourn, Abu-Sittah and other medical staff placed the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes. They labeled the boxes with masking tape, on which they wrote a name and body part, and buried them.” Dr. Abu-Sittah elaborated to DN:
“There was one night when I was in Ahli Hospital when the Israelis had targeted a mosque which had been used by the internally displaced, where, by five that morning, I had performed amputations on six children. And such is the aim, to dehumanize these children, the aim of the settler-colonialist genocidal war, to dehumanize these children, that my colleagues and I wanted to maintain their dignity and wanted to not just bear witness but to hold on to anything that makes us and them human in the face of this dehumanizing war machine. And so we insisted that whenever there was a limb that was amputated, that it gets the right burial and that this child’s name is on that amputated limb and that we maintain the dignity of our patient to the extent that we can.”
You can read, listen to, and watch more of Dr. Abu-Sittah’s interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in which the doctor describes his eye-witness view of what he qualifies as Israel’s “genocidal machine,” here.
What I’d like to address now is the harrowing potential implications of the German government now not only cracking down on free speech critical of Israel’s war on Gaza in Germany (including by Jews), under the guise of any criticism of Israel being anti-Semitic (by all evidence, purely because the state implicated is putatively Jewish), even when backed-up by evidence and international court, UN, and NGO findings, but apparently also being able to prevent even eye-witness testimony from being heard in any European country in the Schengen zone, even when the witness is a doctor working with a European charity and even when he has been invited to testify by a European governmental body, by using a convention, the Schengen zone, which was set up to control immigration and protect European countries from the real physical threats posed by terrorists, not to protect them from by clamping down on free speech and thus stop legislative bodies from hearing evidence of potential war crimes, in this case preventing an expert witness from telling the French Senate what he saw while working as a doctor as a volunteer with a French association, Doctors without Borders, in a Gaza hospital later destroyed by Israel and where the French government itself has called for an investigation after 300 bodies were found buried in mass graves; a convention meant to protect European citizens from bodily harm, and not from hearing testimony that might make them uncomfortable, challenging them to disrupt the consent largely being manufactured by the mainstream media (although recent coverage is more balanced, at least in this domaine; no one here in France, even in the mainstream media, is any longer trying to blame the death and destruction Israel has reigned down on hospitals in Gaza on Hamas’s allegedly using civilians as human shields or having tunnels under the hospitals) — and activate them to engage their governments to do more to stop the war crimes and to stop what the International Court of Justice, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and others have agreed is at the least “plausibly” a genocide in progress.
I’m not going to mince words. As a Jew — thus, one of those on whose behalf and for whose ostensible protection Germany is putatively blocking an expert witness to what the IJC has described as a “plausible” genocide and other war crimes from entering not just its soil but that of any E.U. country governed by the Schengen convention and testifying to what he’s seen, perhaps (I can’t see any other reason) doing so because that genocide is being perpetrated by a purportedly Jewish state (purportedly because Israel’s complete and devastating devaluation of Palestinian lives does not represent Jewish values) and Germany (I guess) still feels (I don’t) it has to make up for the genocide it perpetrated on Jews yesterday by protecting a “Jewish” state committing genocide today — as a Jew I have the right (which doesn’t mean others don’t) to not mince words when it comes to giving my opinion on an action, in this case constriction of freedom of speech and especially where that speech bears witness to an ongoing genocide and the maiming for life of children, being conducted in my name, supposedly to protect me but in reality protecting no one but a rogue state in the process of committing a genocide, protecting it by blocking this witnessing from being heard in the country where I live and which I love. And where it goes to censoring eye-witness testimony of war crimes — including against children — and doing so not just in their own country, Germany, but even in the country where I live and which I love — as a Jew I have the moral obligation to speak out. (Not that there’s anything particularly courageous in doing so; I’m not one of the 140 journalists, the majority of them Palestinian, who have been killed by Israel documenting its war on Gaza on the ground, I’m just a commentator on the side-lines. And if in Germany even Jews denouncing genocide are sometimes muzzled — such as the 87-year-old American survivor of German concentration camps and the Allied bombing of Dresden whose speaking tour of German schools was “postponed” after she denounced the genocide being perpetrated by Israel, or the young male Jewish Voice for Peace member referred to above by Varoufakis who he claims was “apprehended, arrested, manhandled” outside the raided Palestine Congress for carrying a handmade placard reading “Jews against genocide” — in France, by contrast, the courts (if not all politicians and hardly all journalists) have been air-tight in drawing the distinction between anti-Semitic speech and free speech (including free speech critical of Israel), which is sacred in a country where journalists, cartoonists, psychologists, policemen and women, and teachers have been killed by fundamentalist terrorists for defending and practicing it, the courts even recently dismissing allegations of inciting anti-Semitic hate against a radio humorist after he made remarks which, in my view, actually are anti-Semitic, describing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on two occasions as a “sort of Nazi without a foreskin.”)
What we have here, then (here’s where I don’t mince words), is the country whose ancestors gave us the worse genocide of the 20th century trying to stop witnesses to the worse genocide of the 21st century from testifying — and not just in Germany — even when government bodies have invited them to do so, as was the case in France last week-end with Dr. Abu-Sittah, apparently (I can’t see any other reason for such drastic action) because the ancestors of today’s perpetrators were yesterday’s victims, because, perhaps out of some kind of twisted, ill-placed (I as a Jew am over it and don’t blame today’s Germans for what some of their ancestors did to some of mine eighty years ago) residual guilt complex, Germany (or its government anyway) seems to think it has to make up for its ancestors killing Six Million Jews eighty years ago by letting a supposedly Jewish state do to another Semitic people what the Germans did to them, or their ancestors, in the last century. (The pretense — or well-intentioned motivation, if you prefer — of such a draconian and geographically over-reaching free-speech crackdown being that any criticism of Israel, including for war crimes and plausible genocide amply documented by various governmental bodies, including the United Nations and various NGO’s, among them Amnesty International, is anti-Semitic.)
Germany (or at least its present government), which we thought — which swore to us — had learned from its ancestors’ criminal mistake (or rather deed; it was not a mistake, it was intentional) lethal to Six Million human beings, has in fact learned nothing.
If it had learned its lesson, it would recognize that the malady, the sickness, the pathology which was at the root of the crime its ancestors committed against the Jews in the last century is now at the root of the crime a supposedly Jewish state is perpetrating against another Semitic people in this one, today, right now: The dehumanization — the racist dehumanization — of the victim by the perpetrator (enabled by the rest of us, because after all they’re only Arabs, “used to living in filth,” as the acclaimed Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa ironically put it on Democracy Now after returning from Gaza, just as they were only smelly, usurious Jews before) to justify the killing, the forced starvation, the maiming for life of children, the assassinations of journalists and medical workers and teachers and poets, the destruction of universities and schools, the attacks on mosques, churches, homes, refugee camps, refugee refuges, hospitals, of those seeking nourishment desperately needed thanks to Israel’s blockages at food distribution points, of six-year-old girls fleeing with their families, of ambulance drivers sent to rescue the six-year-old girls with Israel’s approval, of other families killed while driving on routes or sheltering in places Israel has told them are safe. Of the “collateral damage” victims. I mean, my God, Israel has created, as the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham has revealed (in the Israeli magazines 972 and Local Call), one artificial intelligence program, “Lavender,” which enables it to augment the “collateral damage” allowance it accords itself to as many as 300 civilians for one individual target deemed legitimate by Israel (even there there is what Israel acknowledges is a 10 percent error rate), and another, “Where’s Daddy?,” which enables it to locate its “targets” in their homes, killing their families along with them. Because this is the other horror of what Germany did to Jews and that a self-proclaimed Jewish state, enabled by the German government in its muzzling of critics of and witnesses to the ongoing genocide, is now reproducing on Palestinians (and another comparison we’re not allowed to draw, according to the new unofficially expanded standards of what constitutes anti-Semitism): Wedding feudal barbarism and racist hate to modern technology to yield the maximum results, enabling the persecuting state to increase its genocidal killing exponentially, in plain English, to kill as many people as possible, including civilians, women, entire familes and generations of familles, and children. We are not allowed to make this historical comparison — to say that Jews are doing to Gazans now what Germans did to Jews then, but my God, what does the writing, study, consideration, contemplation, teaching, understanding, and regard of history exist for if not to keep us from repeating our mistakes or, in this case, from repeating the moral abdication of preceding generations because “we didn’t know,” in once again enabling the atrocities of new states when thanks to witnesses like Dr. Abu-Sittah, we cannot make this claim today? To paraphrase the dying words of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old marine who burned himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy last February: What would you do if you were alive then and knew? You’re doing it now.
Because at the root of that crime, of the Holocaust committed by Germany against my people (and against the world by the way the barbaric crime, and the usage of modern technology to commit it on a mass scale, debased all civilization) was exactly the same mindset (or lack of soul-set) that is at the root of this one: The dehumanization, fueled by racism, of one people by another, with the end of justifying and enabling the first’s annihilation by the second, yesterday the Jews by the Germans, today the Palestinians by a state that calls itself Jewish.
Germany did everything it could to hide its crime of 80 years ago while it was perpetrating it, not just from its own citizens not serving in the military but from the world.
Now it is doing everything in its power to hide this one, not just from its own citizens but from all the 550 million citizens of Europe.
But we will not let the witnesses be silenced.
The Dance Insider & Paris Arts Voyager 