No state has been as assiduous in attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza as Germany.
Today, it is impossible to hold a pro-Palestine demonstration in Berlin or elsewhere in Germany without facing attacks from the police, intimidation from the state and accusations of anti-Semitism from the press.
In April, the Palestine Assembly, a high-profile pro-Palestine conference in Berlin was broken up by hundreds of police officers. British Palestinian rector of Glasgow University, Ghassan Abu Sitta, was stopped from entering Germany to attend the conference and deported back to the UK. He was later banned from entering the entire Schengen area.
Abu Sitta, a surgeon who volunteered in several Gaza hospitals since last year, was planning to deliver a speech on the horrific condition Israeli attacks have left the Strip’s health system in. A German court later overturned the ban.
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from entering Germany and prevented from even participating in the Congress via a video link.
German authorities said they targeted Abu Sitta, Varoufakis and others at the conference because they deemed their speeches “anti-Semitic”.
There is no truth to this claim. Germany is not silencing pro-Palestinian voices to protect the rights of Jews and combat anti-Semitism. This is apparent not only in the content of the speech it censures, but also in the way Germany treats anti-Zionist Jews who speak in support of Palestinian rights.
Iris Hefets, a German-Israeli psychoanalyst in Berlin, for example, was arrested last October on charges of anti-Semitism. Her only “crime” was walking alone with a placard reading: “As an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.”
Within the same month, more than a hundred German-Jewish artists, writers, academics, journalists and cultural workers published an open letter condemning Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and accusations of anti-Semitism directed at everyone – including Jews like them – who criticise Israel’s conduct.
“What frightens us is the prevailing atmosphere of racism and xenophobia in Germany, hand in hand with a constraining and paternalistic philo-Semitism. We reject in particular the conflation of anti-Semitism and any criticism of the state of Israel.”
So why is Germany working so hard to ensure no one speaks against Israel’s conduct in Gaza, which triggered a genocide case at the ICJ?
The answer lies in Germany’s history – but it is not, as many assume tied to efforts to atone for the Nazi Holocaust and ensure that it never happens again.
Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler.
In the wake of World War II the German state’s reacceptance into the international community was made contingent on a process of de-Nazification. However, this process was soon abandoned. It was overtaken by the Cold War. Germany made amends for its crimes against the Jews – but not the Roma – by providing unconditional and unlimited backing to the newly founded “Jewish state”, the West’s military outpost in Palestine: Israel.
Eliminating the political structures that led to the rise of the Nazis – imperialism and the German military-industrial complex – would have run counter to the need to oppose the Soviet Union.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was strong opposition in the West to German rearmament. The 1944 Morgenthau Plan, supported by then US President Roosevelt, called for the complete elimination of the German arms industry and other industries that could contribute to the rebuilding of a German military. Post-war Germany was to be an agricultural and pastoral state.
However, the Cold War meant the West needed Germany as part of the Western alliance. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s closest aide, Hans Globke, had been integrally involved in the implementation of the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. During the 1961 Eichmann trial “extraordinary precautions” were taken by Prosecutor Gideon Hausner to prevent Globke’s name from being made public.
In 1953, Germany started paying reparations – not to individual survivors of the Holocaust, but the state of Israel in the form of industrial goods, including weaponry. The West focussed on the Soviet Union. De-Nazification was quietly forgotten as Germany was integrated into Western military alliances, joining NATO in 1955.
Instead of the elimination of the genocidal ideology that paved the way for the Holocaust, as was originally intended, there was substituted an unconditional embrace of Israel. Israel is treated as Germany’s “reason of state“.
This abandonment of de-Nazification transformed the Nazi Holocaust from a product of Germany’s social and economic crisis during the Weimar period into an inexplicable ahistorical anomaly, that emerged from nowhere and had no roots in German national psyche. It placed the rise of Hitler and the Nazis above class and politics.
The Holocaust was not Germany’s first genocide. Between 1904 and 1907 the German army under General Lothar von Trotha killed 80 percent of the Herero and 50 percent of the Nama peoples in Southwest Africa. Thousands were herded into concentration camps, where the majority died.
The Nazi concept of “lebensraum” or living space was developed in 1897 by Freidrich Ratzel. Trotha and the Germans campaigned mercilessly towards an “endlosung” or final solution.
In the “Genocidal Gaze” Elizabeth Baer described this genocide as “a kind of dress rehearsal” for the Nazi holocaust.
The colony’s imperial administrator, Heinrich Goring, was the father of Hermann Goring, Hitler’s deputy. Fischer performed gruesome experiments on the inmates, sending their severed heads back to Germany before going on to train the Nazi SS doctors, including Josef Mengele, the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz.
The German state’s embrace of Israel’s current onslaught in Gaza isn’t caused by guilt over the Holocaust so much as the need to normalise and relativise it. Supporting Israel’s holocaust, as an act of necessary “self-defence” allows Germany to hold on to the fictions it created about its own holocausts.
German authorities fully understand that Israel is committing a genocide, and has started this war with the intention of ethnically cleansing and exterminating the Palestinian people
They have seen the footage from Gaza. They are aware of the indiscriminate bombing and the starvation. They have heard the evidence South Africa presented at the ICJ.
They know how Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began the genocide by describing Palestinians as “human animals” – the same phrase Himmler used about the Jews on October 4, 1943, in a talk to SS generals. They are undoubtedly aware that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke about how “justified and moral” it would be to starve two million Palestinians.
In short, German authorities know what Israel is doing – they know that their ally is committing another Holocaust. They are simply trying to cast this as normal, just and inevitable, because they have done the same several times over in their not-so-distant history.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.