With its shameful decision to defend “Israel” at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the genocide case brought by South Africa against the apartheid regime, Germany has crossed the point of no return. There is no coming back from this, and history will once again judge the sides that committed two horrific genocides in four decades on two different continents harshly.
Liberal white supremacist Germany has hit the self-destruct button on the last vestiges of its plausible deniability about “Israel’s” ongoing genocide in Gaza, positioning itself firmly and unmistakably on the side of the perpetrators whose war of attrition and annihilation has already surpassed the 100-day mark, with a Palestinian death toll exceeding 24,000.
Germany no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. It has forfeited that privilege through a long line of deplorable actions designed to shield “Israel” from culpability at every stage of its settler-colonial conquest of Palestine, of which support for genocide is the most heinous and irredeemable.
On the same day, “Israel” tried to defend the indefensible at the public hearing in The Hague, Berlin, like the Zionist lapdog that it is, leapt to “Tel Aviv’s” rescue, announcing that it would intervene on “Israel’s” behalf as a third party at the UN-mandated World Court. “Third-party” may be accurate nomenclature in the legal procedure of the court, but outside the realm of jurisprudence, it is a blatant misnomer, as Germany is wholly complicit in “Israel’s” endless cycle of death and destruction in Gaza.
No one has expressed solidarity with “Israel” so fanatically as Germany. The country’s government, its state institutions and the media, its cultural institutions, and even civil society have all banded together since October 7 in a rare show of unity in what is essentially a polity as polarised as the US to further protect a violence-prone “Israel” running even more amok than usual from having to face even a modicum of accountability.
Germany, in its attempt to live out its racial superiority complex vicariously through “Israel”, is so far gone that people of conscience are not only boycotting “Israel” today but also Germany: a recently launched campaign named Strike Germany has called on international cultural workers to boycott “German cultural institutions’ use of McCarthyist policies that suppresses freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine.” Over 500 creatives have signed on, including such prominent names as Mohammed el-Kurd and French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux.
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) condemned Germany’s plan to supply about 10,000 tank shells to the Israeli army. The movement stated that this move “makes Germany a direct accomplice in the war on our people in Gaza,” and holds Germany “fully accountable for the war crimes committed by the Nazi-Zionist regime and the genocide against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.”
Hamas asserted that the Palestinian people “will never forgive or forget anyone who took part in the aggression against them or provided cover for this criminal enemy who crossed all red lines.”
On Tuesday, the German magazine “Der Spiegel” disclosed that the German authorities had approved an Israeli request to acquire 10,000 guided 120-millimeter artillery shells.
Meanwhile, hundreds of intellectuals and artists from around the world signed a petition demanding a boycott of German cultural institutions for silencing the voice of the Palestinians amid the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip. The organisers of the “Boycott Germany” campaign said that their petition had gathered more than 1,000 signatures so far.
The campaign describes itself on its website as “a boycott of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship in its most sophisticated and official forms.” “At a time when Gaza is being obliterated, artists and cultural workers must stand for international solidarity and the right to speak out against the ongoing slaughter,” the campaign states.
On Wednesday, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that the death toll from the Israeli attack on Gaza since October 7th has reached 24,448, and the number of wounded has risen to 61,504.
The ministry said that the Israeli forces carried out 16 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, killing 163 people and injuring 350 in the last 24 hours. The ministry also warned of the outbreak of hepatitis A due to the lack of sanitation and overcrowding in the shelters for the displaced people in Gaza.
Incorrigible Germany’s continued unwillingness to confront “Israel” cannot be rationalized away with convenient references to historical guilt anymore. Germany’s steadfast support for Zionism, even when the murderous implementation of this inherently racist ideology is wiping out entire families from Gaza’s civil registry as the Israeli military continues to carpet bomb the densely populated besieged sliver of land, is entirely by choice, rendering all German talk of atonement and historic responsibility null and void.
It is high time to stop buying into the fiction that Germans have learned from their history. The present is proving that they have not and that their colonial racism is beyond remedy for the foreseeable future.
