But contextualisation must not lead to relativisation. "

Media debate recurs, at times when Palestine-Israel enmity intensifies, as to whether Western governments are guilty of double-standards in calibrating, invariably in unison, their policy response to military hostilities. In the wake of the attack led by armed factions of Hamas across the Green Line into Israel on 7 October 2023, a recent television talk-show in Germany (Markus Lanz, ZDF, 1 November 2023) tackled the issue of hypocrisy in prevailing views of the either parties' actions, and the permitted boundaries of acceptable dialogue, when publicly addressing the motives and conduct of each.

The programme particularly catches attention because of the forthright participation of Deborah Feldman, a Jewish writer resident in Germany (holding dual American/German citizenship), who was outspoken about the difficulty there of addressing the conflict beyond impenetrable exchanges simply deferring to its complexity, the prevailing viewpoint consisting in most criticism of Israel being judged anti-Semitic.

The pervasiveness of the phenomenon reveals itself through curtailed cultural events, awards deferred or cancelled invitations for public appearances of personalities at odds with said prevailing perspective. In one such instance, organisers at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair annulled the 2023 LiBeraturpreis award presentation to Palestinian-born Adania Shibli for her novel 'Minor Detail' due to the hostilities in Israel-Palestine (the novel develops an investigative narrative around the true story of the gang rape and murder of a young Arab girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949). Feldman highlighted that, in order to gain media space to comment at all, it is a pre-requisite to condemn Hamas' attacks on Israel to the extent of erasing the continuous oppression inflicted by the Israeli occupation on Palestinians.

In her recently published book, Judenfetisch, Feldman had identified a dominant behavioural archetype that crowds out the viewpoints of the majority of Jewish communities through fetishisation of Jewishness and Jewish heritage, a "transactional" acquiescence (amongst "single-minded opportunists") gaining in return state support through its implicit purging of lurking Holocaust guilt. The potency of this favoured stance has resulted in extreme marginalisation of any comment critical of German government policy, most evidently following Hamas' recent Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. It relies upon:

i - A reflex response to the assault of 7 October 2023 that 'Israel has the right to defend itself';

ii - The contention that contextual analysis should not enter into the question of political support for Israel under indiscriminate attack from 'terror' operatives.