The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians

Palestinian American professor Sa’ ed Atshan and Israeli German American professor Katharina Galor’s book, The Moral Triangle: Germans, Israelis, Palestinians, tackles and wants to understand the complex histories and policies converging in Berlin through the triangulated ethnonational relationship between the Germans, Palestinians, and Israelis living there. The book grapples with the fact that Berlin is home to a large number of Israeli émigrés, while Germany is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian refugee population. The book presents such realities coexisting amid the backdrop of Germany’s unwavering pro-Israel policies as a paradox. Such exploration is compelling but would have been richer and more grounded had it been read alongside the literature on German colonialism, race, and empire politics. Unfortunately, most public decolonial critique, particularly by people of color, has been silenced in Germany, paving the way for The Moral Triangle to fill a gap that the authors call “groundbreaking” (p. 8). Both authors live and teach in the United States. Atshan is a sociocultural anthropologist of humanitarianism and Palestine studies, and Galor is a scholar of art history and Judaic studies. In the introduction both authors locate their expertise in the Middle East and elaborate on their own historical traumas, which are narrated as catalysts for their collaborative research in and on Berlin. It was especially the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza that brought the authors together in an attempt to place “the human qualities of trust, collegiality, and friendship above national animosity” (p. 4). In this vein, the book aligns itself with both academic and nonacademic literature that narrates historical legacies of violence through the frameworks of memory and trauma. The book shines in its impressionistic and fast-paced reportage style. Galor and Atshan tap into narratives of perpetrators and victims, trauma and its afterlives, responsibility and reconciliation, morality, and memory. The book is subdivided into eleven short chapters, each of which can be read independently. Chapter titles range from “Trauma, Holocaust, Nakba” to “Germany and Migration” to “Racism, Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia” and finally to “Restorative Justice.” A vaguely defined discourse analysis, which is not “meant to signal a particularly established methodology” (p. 8), gives attention to media coverage and social media of the triangular relationship. The authors conducted around one hundred interviews with interlocutors they knew or found through personal connections and social media, using what they refer to as the “snowball method” (p. 7). This analysis is augmented with taxi driver commentaries and public events during their ethnography, including street photos from their strolls through the “Arab quarter” of Neukölln and the Israeli restaurants therein. However, the many details of everyday German repression, encapsulated in its antiPalestinian activities and its expanding military-industrial complex, are absent in the two