Salaam – Peace

A baby girl, haloed by the flashlights of the Wise Men who rescued her from the rubble in Gaza. Her parents were found, lifeless.

No one knew her name, so her new uncles gave her a very special one: Salaam • Peace. One day, Salaam will ask all of us: where were you when my people in Gaza were starved, bombarded, obliterated?

Dear Salaam, I am an old woman of German descent. I want to speak my truth to your question. By that, I wish to honour your precious humanity, that of your parents, relatives, and historic Palestine.
There once was a wise man here in South Africa. Many people from the Global South will tell you about his fearless moral stance against Apartheid. And about his passionate solidarity with historic Palestine. His name is Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931 – 2021). He shines the light of hope, that human decency will always find torchbearers. “We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders”. Desmond Tutu.

I am thankful for his un-corruptible dignity and loving kindness and that of many women and men, young and old, and for Black Life in South Africa.

My parents were Nazis and enthusiastically participated in the genocide of Jewish people; and in killing millions of people in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Throughout my life, I sought to redeem my parents and their evil choices. My vision since young has been to build bridges across the divide of out-casting and othering people.

I call it intercultural communication: Engaging in healing dialog with each other, challenging normative and exclusionary barriers, superior entitlement, and the splitting off into an outer compliant persona and locked up inner frightened heart. During conversations with young South Africans about the Holocaust and as a benefitting white in Apartheid South Africa I often talk about that split-off; the stunning dichotomy of loving parents on the one hand and their monstrous aspects as accomplices in the Nazi killing machine.

This may one day haunt Israeli children too as they seek to navigate life in the aftermath of gross human rights violations and their country’s cruel wars on Palestinians.

I have been tracking (with an open heart) the vicious campaign of annihilation in your home country. I feel shame and great sadness about the cruel sadism of Israeli destructiveness; some perversely enjoying the deep pain they cause. A documentary film called “1920: The Other Palestine” depicts what Edward Said, called a (tragic) paradox; ‘that the goals of saving the Jews as a people from homelessness and anti-Semitism and restoring them to nationhood necessitated the dispossession of indigenous Palestinians’.

As I witness the suffering of Palestinians, Nazi-German and Israeli brutality overlap in my dreams and memory. I see so many similarities. The brainwashing of people to embrace an ideology of eliminating the demonized ‘Other’. Deceitful leaders who promise a safer, better life after annihilating the ‘scum of the earth’ enemy. I hear the language of Nazi demagogues and see those words flowing from the mouth of Zionist extremists.

My parents identified as victims and then turned into perpetrators. Their image dissolve into that of Israeli hate speakers becoming vicious tormentors; these are recurring dreams.

I researched the killing of guerilla fighters in Greece. Nazi killing squads hunted freedom fighters. My father was part of that. For every German soldier killed, entire villages and towns were erased; burnt to the ground, men, women children elderly were all shot and burnt. In my dreams, I see the hate in those German faces, the cruel sadistic glee in their eyes. These pictures merge with footage of Israeli snipers shooting terrified Palestinian civilians in schools and hospitals.

These images fade into nightmarish terror about the absence of any human emotion, void of even a sliver of compassion, or human decency. They were/are dehumanized killing machines both, Nazi-Germans and Israelis, so similar.

What humanness is left in a person ‘ordering’ that Palestinians are not allowed to ‘feel’ the pain or joy of reuniting with family? It is monstrous to ‘forbid’ Palestinian families a moment of celebrating the return of loved ones from Israeli imprisonment. I feel deep disappointment about today’s silence in Germany; no press coverage of the Israeli brutal obliteration of historic Palestine, its people, and their land. German media censorship agreed to biased language such as ‘The war on Hamas’, thus erasing the identity and suffering of Palestinian people.

So Salaam, to honor you, all Palestinians, I will not be silenced, I say:

NO. I do not owe loyalty to those in the Israeli government or society who enthusiastically support the obliteration of Palestinians and their land.

NO. to being manipulated or threatened into accepting Israeli killers as victims who need to be justified by German hero-worshipping. This makes us complicit, again! In genocide.

NO. to the horror Israeli killers unleash on Palestinians, the teacher, doctor, musician, artist, mother, grandfather, journalist, nurse, entrepreneur, the innocent children like Salaam.

I say to Israeli warmongors: “You cannot destroy the souls or the dignity of Palestinians. You can only destroy your own humanness. With each violent, hateful, destructive act you die a little, until your heart is frozen, ice cold; you become bitter, then broken, and unloved. I have witnessed that in my own family after the end of Nazi Germany; they were imprisoned by their evil choices; they destroyed each other and then themselves soon after.

I speak up because I know the destructive legacy you leave in the hearts and souls of your own children. The terror that burns inside them. They will hide it and silence it with self-pity (or rage); with drugs, alcohol, domestic violence or self-harming. Already we hear stories of young Israeli soldiers, women and men, who compulsively take showers all day. After killing Palestinians they desperately try to wash the blood off their hands, over and over again. We hear stories of soldiers who drink and drug before embarking on killing missions, then drink and drug during, and then even more after. That is what Nazi killers did too, My family told stories like that.

“When we see others as the enemy, we risk becoming what we hate. When we oppress others, we end up oppressing ourselves. All of our humanity is dependent upon recognizing the humanity in others”. Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Please Salaam, keep that flame of hope alive. You will hear testimonies of courageous Jewish people and others the world over who stand against the genocide of Palestinians, like these: “We cannot allow the moral soul of Judaism to perish with our collective silence on Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza” (Amanda Gelender)

“We are crying with Palestinians” Rabbi Zule Oskan, Jewish Anti-Zionist Group, Istanbul.

I pray for your well-being. dear Salaam, and that of your new uncles. And, that the grandchildren of my family here in South Africa and in Germany will greet you one day with respect, and loving kindness. May you explore and create together and honour human decency.

May peace be with you – soon!

Elke Geising – Cape Town, South Africa December 2023