History is a ship’s anchor, massive and crusted, dragging us down. This will be news to people who think the world scrubs up in the morning and takes each day fresh and new. Humans don’t get over things, not over dozens of generations, not over centuries.

Today I am thinking of Israel and Gaza and Germany.

On Sunday after the World Cup final ended, one great journalist sat in the stadium in Brazil, fed up with the huge relative fuss over a mere game while history was happening elsewhere, and wrote, “Sitting in this stadium shaking from the force of the fireworks and imaging how Gaza must feel.” She was dead right.

When bombs drop, that’s history stamping its huge elephantine foot for attention.

Germany had won, and the young players were alight with happiness. And as they do at such times, Germans said, tediously, that they had put history behind them. I’m not saying young Germans have anything to answer for. I’m saying history has aftershocks.

I don’t write about Israel because I try never to write about religion at all but Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza is beyond the pale. The attacks on civilians — children, disabled people — and the notion of Israel phoning people to say get out, we’re about to kill you was almost beyond belief.

The Hamas rocket strikes on Israel were madness, which is beyond my remit, and vile. Some brave Israelis condemned the attacks on Gaza, but it didn’t help. Yes, Israel should stop but it won’t and I do understand that. It’s not that Israel can’t learn from history, it’s that Israel is doomed to repeat its mistakes because it has learned from history. I submit that it learned the wrong thing.

Nearly 75 years ago, Germany tried to enslave most of the planet. The Holocaust was the worst thing humans have ever done. It’s in the number and the details, it’s the 6 million and the little gas chamber viewing windows. Nobody gets over that.

Palestinians are right to fight the Occupation but Israel will win. The U.S. backs and funds Israel, defending its behaviour for its own reasons, and the odds against Palestinians are crushing.

And years from now civilians in the West will be slaughtered by terrorists taking revenge for the Gaza bombings and one hopes we won’t react with panic as the Americans did. But history will dredge our water.

On a disastrous trip to Germany recently, my hotel handed me a long form for endless personal details, including not just my citizenship (Canada) but my country of birth (also Canada). This was information the government already had on me, a foreigner. “It is a preventative procedure to ensure everyone’s safety,” the hotel manager said later.

Well, go ahead and be an Onion headline — “Germans Humiliated After Winning World Cup 6.38 Seconds Behind Schedule” — but Germany isn’t a good place for multiculturalism, and that includes Jewishness.

Read Yascha Mounk’s remarkable and intelligent new book, Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany, about how he, born in Germany, found he couldn’t stay. He was treated with an excess of cruelty — or rigid kindness — but either way a Jew could not fit into German life.

It was too unpleasant to remain in a land rife with resurgent anti-Semitism, that called for a Schlusstrich, a “finish line” for apologizing, not that there are many Jews left to apologize to. I had bought Mounk’s book in Berlin in a desperate attempt to understand local rudeness.

If you’re Jewish and not big on religion, which Mounk wasn’t, you don’t go to Israel, you flee to the wide arms of multicultural Canada, or the relatively cheerful U.S. You finally relax. That said, Israel’s there.

I don’t think I’m overreacting on foreigner-fear. When I see “Wannsee” in a German train station, I feel faint. The critic Alain de Botton was invited to the new Washington residence of the German ambassador to the U.S. and realized to his horror that the place was almost a replica of a Nuremberg building by Nazi Albert Speer. That’s history talking.

Don’t mention the war? Germans don’t. Israelis do. I do. When you hear about Gaza, remember the horrible climax of anti-Semitism and study how humans lash out at the hurts of history.

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Note: this column will offend many, taking offence being the emotional currency of our times. Instead of complaining, go read history and try to link the moments when the ground shuddered. See any patterns?

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