In praising Israel's 'dirty work', Merz exposes the orientalist roots of German genocidal Zionism

Middle East Eye

2 days ago

At the G7 summit in Canada last month, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was asked by a German journalist whether Israel might again carry out military strikes on Iran.
The journalist described such actions as Drecksarbeit - "dirty work" - a term that, as the Lemkin Institute points out, was once used by Nazi officials "to justify their actions" and is steeped in the fascist, dehumanising language of genocide.
Merz embraced the framing enthusiastically, declaring: "This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us." He then added, with perfect imperial clarity: "The Iranian regime has brought death and destruction to the world."
This is, of course, in stark contrast to Germany under Hitler and Israel throughout its history - both of which have brought nothing but life, liberty and joy to the world, especially to Palestinians!
Merz's remarks exposed what use Israel is to Germany and to Europe more broadly: to do the dirty work they can no longer commit directly, straight from the horse's mouth.
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These psychopaths run the world - and they think they can define it too.
When Israel slaughters tens of thousands of Palestinians, it does so not only with Germany's blessing, but as part of a continuum of German state violence
Should we be surprised that Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels - or Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir - have emerged from this very culture, this very sentiment, this very language and this very vocabulary?
As former Chancellor Angela Merkel famously proclaimed, Israel is integral to Germany's "reason of state", with its security tied to Germany's very existence.
In other words, without Israel, there would be no Germany. One must take such declarations seriously.
When Israel slaughters tens of thousands of Palestinians, it does so not only with Germany's blessing, but as part of a continuum of German state violence - a genocide of Palestinians built atop the genocide of Jews, and alongside the earlier genocide of Africans in Namibia.
The former German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock carried that same legacy when she defended Israel's mass murder of Palestinians with a passion reminiscent of her Nazi predecessor, Joachim von Ribbentrop.
In a just world, these people would be on trial at the International Court of Justice.
German Islamophobia
German genocidal Zionism - now openly championed by elected officials, unelected journalists and popular neofascist parties alike - is rooted in German Islamophobia, which in turn draws from a long tradition of German Orientalism, and from "Islamic Studies" in particular.
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I have already argued that Germany's genocidal Zionism can be traced back to its colonial history and philosophical racism, from Hegel to Habermas.
Here, I wish to draw a more direct line between this genocidal Zionism and Germany's tradition of Orientalism. The aim of "Islamic Studies" was never to "understand" Islam or Muslims, but to silence and pacify them - to treat them as oriental objects of curiosity, while denying them moral and political agency.
Reports of rising Islamophobia in Germany are consistent and well-documented. The rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party did not come out of nowhere. It reflects proto-fascist tendencies, rooted in Nazism, with broad support and severe consequences across the country.
There is a prevailing hatred of Muslims within Germany's ruling regime - as across much of Europe - and Merz's vulgar racism emerges directly from it. The swastikas may have been scrubbed from Germany's public spaces, but they remain carved and tattooed in the mind of its chancellor. Jews may have been replaced with Muslims, but the genocidal instinct endures.
Each time Merz opens his mouth to defend Israeli genocide in Palestine, or Israel's attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Iran, you can hear Hitler screaming in the tone of his voice.
Orientalist foundations
Why, one might ask, does a country with an extensive history of Islamwissenschaft - the academic study of Islam - harbour such visceral hatred for Muslims?
Are Germans not reading their own leading scholars of Islam, Iran, and the Arab world?
There's the rub. The rise of Islamophobia in Germany - and Europe at large - is not despite the long history of Orientalism and Islamic Studies, but precisely because of it.
How so? Allow me to explain.
We must dismantle the entire regime des savoirs of Europe - Germany in particular - through which the West has sought to decode and dominate the world. We must then recode the world beyond and after that colonial regime of knowledge.
The problem is not only the contempt Orientalists have shown for Muslims and their histories, theology and scholarship, nor their disregard for the existential terror inflicted on them by Israel. It is also the epistemic insularity of their field: a wilful ignorance, or condescending dismissal, of work produced in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu and other non-European languages.
Most of these European Orientalists write solely for one another. They have no organic link or moral investment in the countries, cultures or communities they study. They ignore a vast body of scholarship in the languages they claim to know, treating texts not as subjects of interpretation, but as objects of pathological curiosity.
Equally troubling, this Orientalism, as a colonial mode of knowledge production, remains impervious to intellectual developments in the social sciences and humanities, even in European contexts.
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They operate like members of an Orientalist fraternity or country club, complete with secret handshakes and absurd rites of initiation: how to place diacritical marks on Arabic or Persian words, how to cite one another, how to ignore relevant scholarship in the original languages they pretend to know.
We should therefore read them for what they are: not authorities, but objects of anthropological curiosity - not to learn anything serious from them, but to study them as a pathologist would the symptoms of a terminal disease.
It is worth asking what compels figures like Patricia Crone (1945–2015) or Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), two notorious European Orientalists, to devote their lives to studying something they so clearly detested. This, too, is a dark and twisted pathology that must one day be examined.
Meanwhile, Joseph Massad, a scholar of Arab politics and intellectual history, offers in Islam in Liberalism (2014) a compelling account of how "the West" fabricates and sustains its fantasy of freedom, equality and tolerance by manufacturing an imagined alterity - "Islam" - which it portrays as oppressive, intolerant, cruel and homophobic.
Remove that falsifying mirror and "the West" is left flailing, stripped of the self-delusional fantasies through which it recognises itself.
Western fantasies
The pathology did not end with the classical period of European Orientalism, best analysed by Edward Said. It continues apace in today's European manifestations of Orientalism - particularly its Germanic variations - evident in such useless and clueless gems as Annäherung und Distanz: Schia, Azhar und die islamische Ökumene im 20. Jahrhundert (1996) and Die Schia und die Koranfälschung (2018).
The effect of these 'studies' is akin to misogynists writing about women, or Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein co-authoring a study on the girls they abused
These works aim to sow hatred and hostility between Sunnis and Shia, just as British colonialists once incited Hindus against Muslims in India, or Catholics against Protestants in Ireland.
Said is sometimes criticised for not engaging with German Orientalism in his transformative scholarship.
Whatever his reasons, I believe he did them a great favour. Had he included them, the organic link between German Orientalism and German fascism, colonial violence in Africa, and present-day Islamophobia and support for Palestinian genocide would have been even more fully exposed.
Since the publication of Said's 1978 book Orientalism, a significant body of serious scholarship on German Orientalism has emerged, including Nina Berman's Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne (1997) and Suzanne L. Marchand's German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (2010).
Paramount in these studies is the recognition that Orientalism and colonialism were not accidentally connected, but epistemically intertwined - not always through overt malice, but through structures of domination, fascination and exoticism. These systems operated for the benefit of the observer, always at the expense of the observed.
You may think these "studies" are merely useless, but they are worse than useless. They are instrumental in keeping Muslims as Orientals - stripped of moral and intellectual agency, reduced to objects of juvenile European curiosity.
The effect is akin to misogynists writing about women, or Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein co-authoring a study on the girls they abused. It is like white supremacists writing about Black people, or Immanuel Kant dehumanising Africans as constitutionally stupid and subhuman.
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Years ago, at the Venice Biennale, I saw an African artist with white ink scrawled across his bare chest: "Please do not study me!"
Indeed, European and American anthropologists and Orientalists have studied us enough in their hegemonic pursuits.
It is time we return the favour and study them as they have studied us - not to subjugate, but to liberate them from their psychotic delusions, ingrained racism, colonial conquest, and murderous domination of others.
Today, Israel is the state-of-the-art laboratory for the accumulated terror Europe has unleashed upon the world. This is what Merz celebrates when he says Israel is doing its "dirty work".
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.