The price of safety is crushing humiliation

Syrians, go home; unless you’re a doctor.

Anas Modamani was so happy to meet the German Chancellor who had welcomed him as a refugee to her country, he took a selfie to commemorate the occasion.

Image: Berlin, 2015: Angela Merkel, the then German Chancellor, and an 18-year-old Mr Modamani, who hails from Syria and who may yet end up back there.

Merkel refused at the time to put any quota on the numbers of refugees who might come to Germany. It was she who made a public avowal that the raison d’être (or Staatsräson) of the German state includes ensuring the security of Israel. Here are her words, as spoken on 18 March 2008 before the Knesset in Jerusalem:

Gerade an dieser Stelle sage ich ausdrücklich: Jede Bundesregierung und jeder Bundeskanzler vor mir waren der besonderen historischen Verantwortung Deutschlands für die Sicherheit Israels verpflichtet. Diese historische Verantwortung Deutschlands ist Teil der Staatsräson meines Landes. Das heißt, die Sicherheit Israels ist für mich als deutsche Bundeskanzlerin niemals verhandelbar. Und wenn das so ist, dann dürfen das in der Stunde der Bewährung keine leeren Worte bleiben.

I’ll say it clearly: every German government and every chancellor before me has been committed to Germany’s special historical responsibility for Israel’s security. This historical responsibility is part of my country’s raison d’être. This means that, for me as German Chancellor, Israel’s security is never negotiable. And if that is the case, then these must not remain empty words in this hour of reckoning.

The context within which that speech was given was Israel’s concerns about an Iranian nuclear weapon:

Dabei muss eines klar sein …: Nicht die Welt muss Iran beweisen, dass Iran die Atombombe baut; der Iran muss die Welt überzeugen, dass er die Atombombe nicht will.

In this regard, one thing has to be clear …: it’s not for the world to prove to Iran that Iran is building an atom bomb; Iran has to convince the world that it doesn’t want an atom bomb.

We are now 18 years on from when those words were spoken. Ali Khamenei’s fatwa prohibiting the development of an atom bomb by Iran was seemingly not enough to convince the world of its intention not to do so. But I do wonder where is Germany’s commitment to its special historical responsibility for Israel’s security? Has Mr Merz decided that Germany’s Staatsräson lies perhaps somewhere else? In Germany, perchance?

Mrs Merkel has now left office and Mr Merz has just made a statement upon the occasion of a visit to Germany by Syria’s president Ahmed al-Sharaa, to the effect that Syria needs rebuilding, and so his aim is to have 80 per cent of the 900,000 Syrian refugees currently living in Germany return home by 2029, and especially those that have committed criminal offences.

It’s only right and proper, I suppose, that when you’re invited to someone else’s home, you mind your Ps and Qs. Last year, I held a barbecue and two of my guests ended up screaming at each other, to my great distress. Both parties later apologised to me, but not to each other, and I found that a crying shame. So, does that imply that Syrian or any other kind of refugees should never argue with a German, the German being at home, and the Syrian being the guest?

If any Syrian has set their heart on Germany as a place of refuge in terms of their entitlements under international law, then clearly home is not, nor can it ever for a refugee be, where the heart is. When your continued existence in the place from which you hail becomes aleatory to the extent that you are forced to leave, then it is iniquitous that your continued existence in the place that extends the hand of compassion to you should end up being just as aleatory. This has to stop.

My squabbling barbecue guests eventually stopped squabbling and apologised. I forgave them and the party continued. I didn’t much feel like throwing either of them out, but I suppose I could have done. At least they didn’t produce weapons. That must be the test, then, for acceptance as a foreigner in another man’s country. As long as you never fall foul of the law, you can stay. But you must work, and you must pay tax, and you must pay social security, and you must wear clothes we approve of, and you must not interfere in our religion or politics—don’t become a mayor of a city and not be of our religion, even if we’re a secular equal-opportunities nation. Then you can stay. For a while, anyway.

Immigration. It’s such a misunderstood concept. Everybody thinks they have the handle on it. They KNOW. Tell me: did they ever emigrate? Yet they know what these people are. What they do. Their dirty religions, and their crude ways of doing. How dare they impose themselves on US? Come here uninvited and sponge, sponge, sponge. I do wonder whether attitudes would be different if refugees all swam to England wearing England and Man U football shirts. To show they’re one of the lads.

Well, they dare impose themselves because of conditions back home, and because your country is a signatory to a refugee convention. Maybe you want to reconsider whether you want to welcome refugees? Maybe it’s okay to go to their countries and invade them and cause havoc and then withdraw and leave the economy in tatters and the bureaucracy in upheaval, but then the people whose lives you’ve shattered, they don’t have a right to come and invade you. So why don’t you just withdraw from the refugee treaties? Instead of signing them, write in big bold letters at the bottom: NO! GO AND GET YOUR OWN SAFETY.

We don’t make it a condition at birth that a child has to remain crime free for their entire life in order to hold onto their nationality. We educate our children to abide by our laws and we tell them, if they break the law, they will be punished. It can be no different for a refugee. If we applied the same standard of being crime-free to native-born people as we apply to refugees—i.e. that they will be expelled if they commit a crime—most western nations would be peopled by more refugees than native-born citizens. Refugees regularly commit far fewer criminal offences than do home-grown citizens. If anyone should leave on that score, it’s the home nationals. They could go to Syria, where, I hear, they need builders.

Pro Asyl, a German refugee-advocacy group, is issuing calls in response to Mr Merz, to think far more about human rights, protection and long-term stability. But these are not the arguments put forward by the Deutsche Krankenhausgesellschaft e.V., who fear the loss of 5,745 Syrian doctors working in German clinics, and 2,000 carers. I doubt if there’s a surfeit of medics in Syria, and these 5,745 could likely be usefully deployed back there, but it’s a pathetic cry that I’ve heard myself in my time. Faced with a hostile environment in the workplace, I advised the general manager that I would go home instead: “Who am I going to get to replace you?” was the plaintive response.

So, I stayed. But what would you do if one manager said stay and the other wanted you out? How welcome would you feel? Is your safety worth the crushing humiliation?