‘Is it right to think of the Nazi massacres on October 7? I think it is right to do so, because Hamas itself wanted to evoke the memory of the Shoah.’

Herta Muller is a German-language writer, originally from Romania, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. She has been appalled at how so much of the world has reacted both to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and to the war of self-defense that Israel has been waging in Gaza. Muller has now written an Open Letter to the world, expressing her disgust at the want of sympathy for, and of solidarity with, Israel, which has become the object of such grotesque and unjust hatred. She is particularly incensed by the “collective stupidity” of the young who have been busy screaming their support for Hamas. The terror group puts her in mind of only one thing: the Nazis and their Final Solution. And many keen observations about the diseased sympathy for Hamas are packed into this eloquent and furious letter, a letter that deserves your attention.

…The mullahs’ and Hamas’ obsession with war is so dominant that – when it comes to the extermination of Jews – it even transcends the religious divide between Shiites and Sunnis. Everything else is subordinated to this obsession with war. The population is deliberately kept in poverty, while at the same time the wealth of the Hamas leadership is increasing immeasurably – in Qatar, Ismael Haniye is said to have billions at his disposal. And the contempt for humanity knows no bounds. For the population, there is almost nothing left except martyrdom. Military plus religion as a complete surveillance. There is literally no room for dissenting opinions within Palestinian politics in Gaza. Hamas has driven out all other political currents from the Gaza Strip with incredible brutality. After Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2007, Fatah members were thrown from a fifteen-story building as a deterrent.

This is how Hamas seized control of the entire Gaza Strip and established an unchallenged dictatorship. Unchallenged because no one who questions it lives long. Instead of a social network for the population, Hamas has built a network of tunnels under the feet of the Palestinians. Even under hospitals, schools and kindergartens financed by the international community. Gaza is a single military barracks, a deep state of antisemitism underground. Complete and yet invisible. In Iran, there is a saying: Israel needs its weapons to protect its people. And Hamas needs its people to protect its weapons.

This saying is the shortest description of the dilemma that in Gaza you cannot separate the civilian from the military. And that applies not only to the buildings, but also to the personnel in the buildings. The Israeli army was forced into this trap in its response to October 7. Not lured, but forced. Forced to defend itself and to make itself guilty by destroying the infrastructure with all the civilian victims. And it is precisely this inevitability that Hamas wanted and is exploiting. Since then, it has been directing the news that goes out to the world. The sight of suffering disturbs us daily. But no war reporter can work independently in Gaza. Hamas controls the selection of images and orchestrates our feelings. Our feelings are their strongest weapon against Israel. And by selecting the images, it even manages to present itself as the sole defender of the Palestinians. This cynical calculation has paid off.

Since October 7, I have been thinking again and again about a book about the Nazi era, the book “Ganz normale Männer” by Christopher R. Browning. He describes the annihilation of Jewish villages in Poland by the Reserve Police Battalion 110, when the large gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz did not yet exist. It was like the bloodlust of the Hamas terrorists at the music festival and in the kibbutzim. In just one day in July 1942, the 1,500 Jewish inhabitants of the village of Józefów were slaughtered. Children and infants were shot in the street in front of their houses, the old and sick in their beds. All the others were driven into the forest, where they had to strip naked and crawl on the ground. They were mocked and tortured, then shot and left lying in a bloody forest. The murder became perverse.

The book is called “Ganz normale Männer” (Quite Normal Men) because this reserve police battalion did not consist of SS men or Wehrmacht soldiers, but of civilians who were no longer considered suitable for military service because they were too old. They came from completely normal professions and turned into monsters. It was not until 1962 that a trial began in this case of war crimes. The trial records show that some of the men “got a huge kick out of the whole thing.” The sadism went so far that a newly married captain brought his wife to the massacres to celebrate their honeymoon. Because the bloodlust continued in other villages. And the woman strolled around in the white wedding dress she had brought with her, among the Jews who had been herded together in the market square. She was not the only wife who was allowed to visit. In the trial documents, the wife of a lieutenant says: “One morning, I was sitting with my husband in the garden of his accommodation, having breakfast, when a simple man from his platoon approached us, took up a stiff posture and declared: ‘Mr. Lieutenant, I have not yet had breakfast! When my husband looked at him questioningly, he explained further: ’I have not yet killed a Jew.’

Is it right to think of the Nazi massacres on October 7? I think it is right to do so, because Hamas itself wanted to evoke the memory of the Shoah. And it wanted to demonstrate that the State of Israel is no longer a guarantee for the survival of the Jews. That their state is a mirage, that it will not save them. Logic forbids us to be close to the word Shoah. But why does it have to forbid it? Because the feeling that you have cannot avoid this pulsating proximity….

Not a jot or tittle need be changed in this letter to the world from Herta Muller, who carries with her, as an ethnic German, the historic memory of the Nazis, and as a former Romanian, her lived memory of the Communists. What now appalls her is the spectacle of the “collective stupidity” of those who reject Israel and embrace the murderers of Hamas. Please read all of it. Es ist ein sehr wichtiger Brief.