Thread by @tobiaschneider

I remember one thing that set me apart from a lot of other Western students in Middle Eastern studies was my being German. Not because it provided me with some unique insight, but because people across the region would regularly come up to me and congratulate me on the Holocaust.

I mean sometimes you do sometimes you don't. I can argue with a good and smart friend over drinks. But one time an acquaintance took me to a family retreat in the mountains and when I walked in half the room - incl grandma - got up and did a Hitler salute.

https://twitter.com/richardfbourke/status/1718878429418778903

Sometimes it even gets amusing. You attend a Track II for Syria and the factions would spend the whole day tearing into each other, only to sit together in the evening and solemnly agree that Israel was behind it all anyway, and that there would be peace when the Jews decided so.

In a similar vein, Israeli/Jewish researcher friends sometimes find their background surprisingly useful across the region. Some Arab countries have strict laws against engaging with Israelis. But their officials also all believe Jews run the world and want them on their side.

It's just a sort of background noise to regional politics. Easy enough to tune out if you aren't particularly sensitive to it. And it's naturally a matter of degrees everywhere. For many Arab liberals, the idea of an Israeli is more of an abstraction taken from news stories.

Importantly, I generally experienced less of this among Palestinians (in the Westbank) for whom oppression was a real material condition tied to specific indignities and demands. Israelis in their breadth of attitudes were not an abstraction and their history not a punchline.

The real psychos were oftentimes far removed from the conflict. Some of the most insane ones were Westerners waving Hezbollah flags (or those t-shirts you can buy in the Baalbek parking lot) for edgy thrills.

A lot of liberal-minded people who work in the region are very good at tuning this out or setting it aside or sometimes rationalizing as lack of education or whatever. But important to occasionally state the obvious.