IF there is any country that should shoulder the sins of the Holocaust to the end of the world, then Germany must be it. But it may have found a clever way to shift the burden: by making Palestinians vicariously pay for German guilt.
This is an old story — as old as the Holocaust — but it has a recent twist. Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd was scheduled to speak on June 23 at Goethe-Institut Hamburg's forum, "Beyond the Lone Offender — the Dynamics of the Global Right", but on June 17 it disinvited him, thus denying the German audience at Kampnagel, the venue of the forum, and elsewhere in Germany the opportunity to hear the tragedy visited on the Palestinians by the dark sins of Germany.
Why the disinvite? Here is Goethe-Institut in its own June 17 tweet: After some consideration, the Goethe-Institut decided that El-Kurd was not an appropriate speaker for this forum: in his previous posts on his social media, he had made several comments about Israel in a way it does not find acceptable.
Inappropriate? Unacceptable? Deutsche diction? A preference for Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over "inappropriate" social media posts by a Palestinian? Perhaps the Palestinians should have read the rapidly surfacing warning signs.
One such was during May's Nakba Day protest in Berlin. Shouting "Free Palestine" earned a protester a day's detention. But to the Palestinians, freedom is something they have lost over and over again.
Abir Kopty, a Berliner, pointed to a dangerous standard set by the German state-funded cultural organisation. Writing in the Middle East Eye (MEE), she put it thus: "What the Goethe-Institut did is delegitimise Kurd's voice and everything he represents. It will be hard from now on for any German institution to invite Kurd."
We go further. The Goethe-Institut not only delegitimised Kurd's voice, but also all Palestinian voices and made it hard for German institutions to give them space to tell their side of the story. One side's tale is never the complete story. This is a dangerous development.
But here is another which is even more dangerous. The silence of the vast majority of the German society that greeted the Kurd disinvite. Perhaps Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, is right.
In much of his opinion pieces in the MEE, he said: "Germany is an enduring enemy of the Palestinian struggle." It is difficult to poke holes in Massad's argument as ideological, financial and military evidence is ample. It all starts at the highest office.
In June last year, as German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier was preparing to visit Tel Aviv, the bromides which were going out of his office were all about how Israel must be defended at all cost.
Put another way, let the occupation of Palestinian territories, settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing by Israel continue because there is no such thing as Palestine statehood.
In a similar vein, Steinmeier's warped sense of legal logic led him to say that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no jurisdiction over Israel.
This, despite the ICC ruling otherwise. We never thought guilt can be exported, but Germany has shown us how it has been doing it since the Holocaust. German guilt, Palestinan punishment.
Soon guilt will be tradeable. Guilt credit, anyone?