In an article titled “What is behind Germany’s complicity with Israel in the genocide in Gaza?”, Jürgen Mackert, a professor of sociology at the University of Potsdam in Germany, examines the reasons for Germany’s cooperation with the Zionist regime in crimes against the people of Gaza.
In the article, he writes that last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock defended Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians. Mackert continues that the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albans, condemned her remarks and warned that if Germany decided to support a state that commits international crimes, it would be a political choice but also have legal implications. The incident is the latest example of Germany’s full support for Israel’s operation to destroy Gaza.
There has been much valid criticism of Germany’s pro-Israel stance, and in return, censorship, arrests of activists, police raids, bans on the headscarf in schools, and suppression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
To understand why Germany is taking such a pro-Israel stance, despite the legal risks of complicity in Israeli crimes, we need to look at Germany’s previous and official positions and the reasons behind its support for Israel’s killing of the Palestinian people.
By supporting genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonization, and the invasion of a sovereign state by Israel, Germany is in an unresolved dilemma. In short, what is officially stated as the reasons for this support is twofold. First, Germany committed the Holocaust of European Jewry, thus passing on a collective guilt to new generations of Germans. Second, if Germans have learned from their history, they must fully support Israel in any situation and at any cost.
It seems that Germany has no other choice. Its dark history forces the country to support Israel all the way. Of course, such a narrative, which Germany tells its citizens and the world, is unacceptable.
Looking deeper, we find that Germany is not sufficiently aware of its past.
By reducing its history of brutality to the crime of the Holocaust, Germany has forgotten its crimes as a colonial power against the rest of the world and has therefore not yet learned from those events. It is this neglect of history that allows Germany to see the cure for its past mistakes as supporting a fascist and warmongering colonial regime.
As the number of victims in Gaza increases, this quote by William Faulkner best describes the situation. He says: “The past is never dead. It was not even past.” This is what Germany should learn from its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. By claiming that the Holocaust was an exceptional period in civilization and human history, Germany has for decades presented itself as a country that accepts its history. This simple and strategic move means that a civilized, enlightened, and peace-loving country has suddenly experienced an exceptional 12-year period of fascism.
Of course, this view is not at all true. Nazi Germany did not descend from the sky and disrupt civilization. It did not arise suddenly and unexpectedly. As Karl Polanyi argued in 1944, the Nazi regime was the result of the irrationality of Western liberal civilization. The transformation of societies into self-regulating markets in the 19th century led to the destruction of its social structure. The deep-rooted fascism of the German people was the result of their brutal colonization of Africa, which lasted from 1884 to 1914.
During this period, a racist mentality and a belief in white supremacy were formed, which later returned to the homeland, Germany, and became the norm. This belief inspired the Nazi concept of the German superman, who saw himself as superior to the Slavs, Russians, Jews, and many others, whom they classified as subhuman.
So these concepts were not invented by the Germans and were not first applied to European Jews. In fact, it was Germany’s colonial approach to Africans that created the boundaries between “us,” the German race, and “them,” the lowly people of Namibia. The people who became victims of the German genocide in the early 20th century. Unlike the Holocaust during the Third Reich, the genocide of the Namibian people never played a role in German collective memory.
Germany cannot claim to have learned from its past while denying the massacre of tens of thousands of indigenous Africans during Wilhelm’s empire or ignoring the 27 million victims of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
The strategy of separating the Nazi Holocaust from this bloody history has been successful so far. But now, in the face of Germany’s support for the worst genocide in human history, that cover has been torn away. Like many in the world, German society, which includes anti-Zionist Palestinians and Jews, has been witnessing a horrific genocide that has been broadcast live for the past 12 months. The daily massacre, torture and starvation of the civilian population, the majority of whom are children and women.
They no longer believe the official stories about Germany’s guilt and its commitment to supporting the Israeli regime. They no longer believe Baerbock’s false claims that he saw footage of Hamas soldiers raping Jewish women, which the UN has failed to prove.
The German government’s dehumanization of Palestinians is deeply rooted in policies that not only fund Israeli war crimes but also prevent the treatment of traumatized Palestinian children in Germany, on the pretext that they are a security threat.
The dehumanization of non-white people, their animalization, the collective punishment, the starvation of people to death, the thirsting of people, and so on [which is happening in Gaza], are exactly the same as the Germans did to the people of Namibia. It is also similar to the actions that the Nazis took to eradicate the Jews of Europe and Russia.
This mentality of belief in the superman is still prevalent [among German politicians]. Although officially denied. For this reason, its roots have not been examined. The Arabs, and especially the Palestinians, are the same people as the Namibians of the past. Instead of learning from its past, Germany supports the Zionist regime, which needs it and benefits from its existence. Germany’s complicity in this genocide shows that it has not learned from the past. A selective engagement with the past that focuses only on the genocide of white European Jews will not lead the state and society anywhere.
While German parties and politicians, along with the media, are busy spreading anti-Arab and anti-Muslim propaganda, Germany has turned its anti-fascist slogan “Never Again” into a political tool, rewarding only a select few and leaving the rest unscathed. In this way, the Palestinians do not deserve protection against genocide and fascism. Many German government and academic figures declared their firm support for Israel at the beginning of the genocide. The German churches, which consider themselves defenders of moral superiority, also said not a word about Israel’s genocide. Even for them, the Palestinians are not white enough to be worth defending. Since then, we have not heard a word from these elite institutions about the more than 200,000 victims in Gaza. We should also mention the German Cultural Council and the media that presented themselves as defenders of culture and made a lot of noise after the destruction of Palmyra in Syria by ISIS, but now they say nothing about the destruction of historical sites in Gaza by Israeli brutality.
Looking at the leading media in Germany, we notice more. It is no exaggeration to say that they all failed in their media mission. Instead of doing their duty, criticizing the government and presenting alternatives, they say the same thing that those in power say. All this behavior cannot be explained by the phrase “double standards”. Rather, we are witnessing a deep-rooted colonial mentality in German institutions and organizations that has not manifested itself in the past century.
The culture of remembering the Nazi genocide and the strategic definition of white European Jews as the only group that deserves to be called victims has turned Germany into a staunch defender of a regime that has been a reign of terror since its inception. That is, a state based on religious supremacy and white supremacy, implementing racial cleansing and apartheid, which has ultimately become, like other colonial regimes before it, a genocidal and fascist state.
As long as Germany refuses to confront its colonial tradition and mentality, it will support genocide.
