Germany’s 'historical responsibility' is not an excuse to support 'Israel’s' genocide

Timo Al-Farooq 

Source: Al Mayadeen English

If Germany truly felt responsible for its past, it would immediately end its shameful support for "Israel’s" genocide in the present.

One of the most apt characterisations of Germany’s unholy alliance with the Israeli regime I have come across in a book on climate change: In David Wallace Wells’s 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth, the author uses the phrase "carceral model of history", which he explains as "progress arrested by the consequences of past behavior."

Though written in the context of global warming and meant to illustrate how climate change has made us "prisoners of the Industrial Revolution", this formulation can also be applied to Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (the work of dealing with the past): Many argue that Germany’s blind fealty to "Israel" has rendered the nation a "prisoner" of its Nazi history, much to the detriment of Palestinians who continue to pay the price for the Jewish holocaust almost eighty years after it occurred as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues unabated.

Steadfast support for the self-professed "Jewish state" as a means to offset Nazi Germany's anti- Semitic footprint is one of the guiding principles of these self-imposed and singularly German processes of atonement. Yet with the official Palestinian death toll in Gaza having surpassed 40,000, it has become painstakingly clear that Germany’s uncompromising adherence to this "carceral model of history" has proven to be equally calamitous as anthropogenic climate change, as Berlin continues to aid and abet the colonial slaughter of Palestine’s native inhabitants under the guise of penance.

Germany remains a vociferous pro-genocide outlier even among reliably pro-Zionist European nations such as Britain or France. When even Western governments condemned Tel Aviv’s heinous attack on Gaza’s al-Tabieen school this month, which killed over 100 displaced Palestinians who had sought shelter there, Berlin again went against the grain of universalist decency when its government deputy spokesman blindly recited the banal mantra of "Israel’s" "right to defend itself."

Apart from being its second largest weapons supplier, Germany has routinely come to "Israel’s" defence at international courts as they try to hold the latter accountable for its indefensible war crimes, crimes against humanity and full-blown genocide.

The country that is home to the largest Palestinian community in Europe also boasts the most vicious anti-Palestinian state apparatus in Europe, as the brutal police crackdowns on anti-genocide protests continue to show week after week. Not to mention the numerous cases of weaponised lawfare against protagonists of the Free Palestine movement and a slew of repressive legislative measures designed to silence and punish voices critical of "Israel’s" genocidal conduct and (expanding) settler colonialism.

All these behaviours are predicated on the misguided belief that the security of what is effectively a Euro-Western colony violently erected and expanded on stolen Arab land is an integral part of Germany’s Staatsräson (raison d’état), as former chancellor Angela Merkel (in)famously proclaimed in front of the Knesset in 2008. 16 years later, her successor, Olaf Scholz, and other cabinet members are using this warped, foreign policy manifestation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung to justify full German support for a war that is increasingly being described in holocaust analogies.

Misappropriating the concept of Germany’s "historical responsibility" as a crude excuse to lend proactive support to a settler colonial project’s crusade to violently drive an indigenous population from its homeland well predates the events of October 7: Months before the Hamas-led attack on "Israel", Berlin-based advocacy group Palestine Speaks voiced the long overdue need for a paradigm shift in relation to Germany’s flawed Erinnerungskultur, or culture of remembrance, and concomitant loyalty to the apartheid regime when it posted a graphic on social media featuring the slogan "Free Palestine from German guilt" on the occasion of Nakba Day actions.

However, as the last 10 and a half months of unbridled support for "Israel’s" war and intense state crackdowns on Palestine solidarity have shown, Germany still vehemently refuses to universalise its exclusivistic, post-Shoah responsibility and apply the rallying cry of "Never Again" (ironically popularised in the West by Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish extremist Kahanist movement, of which Itmar Ben-Gvir, "Israel’s" right-wing police minister, is a devoted follower) to Palestinians.

Instead, the notoriously anti-Palestinian German Bundestag is set to pass a controversial resolution with the working title, "Never again is now: protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany" in its latest attempt to obfuscate who is really under threat in these times of "hyper- criminalisation of Palestine solidarity in Germany", as abolitionist academic Vanessa E. Thomson puts it.

Jerzy Montag, a German politician and honorary constitutional court judge who lost several family members in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, views this revamped version of an earlier draft as "damaging" to Germany’s "liberal-democratic basic order" and having "hints of racism" against immigrants from the Muslim-majority world, while classical musician Michael Barenboim, who has been vocal in his condemnations of both "Israel’s" war on Gaza and Germany’s crackdown on Palestine solidarity, voiced similar concerns, criticising the "repression of Palestinian voices" under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism.

Needless to say, the German government is doing absolutely nothing to protect, preserve, and strengthen Palestinian life in the country, or Arab or Muslim life, for that matter. Alas, what can one expect from a nation which in the 20th century committed two white supremacist genocides in the space of four decades and has been described as an "active participant" in the ongoing racially motivated extermination campaign in Gaza, one that bears striking resemblance to both the execution of Lothar von Throta’s infamous Vernichtungsbefehl (order to annihilate) against the Herero and Nama and Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question?

If Germany truly felt responsible for its past, it would immediately end its shameful support for "Israel’s" genocide in the present. As the self-acclaimed "most moral army in the world" continues to rain down hellfire on the civilian population of Gaza and launches its largest offensive on the Occupied West Bank since the Second Intifada, that would go a long way in proving that Germany has actually learned something from its pitch-dark history.