Germany’s shameful foreign policy of aiding and abetting what Amnesty International in its new landmark report has described as "Israel’s" “unprecedented destruction” of Gaza “at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century” continues without remorse.

Just a day after the western world's foremost human rights organisation published its damning 296-page report titled ‘You feel like you are subhuman’: Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, thereby finally joining a host of civil society groups, the International Court of Justice and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, in labelling "Israel’s" conduct in Gaza a genocide, Israeli Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi hosted his German counterpart, General Carsten Breuer, in an unambiguous show of where Germany stands on the issue, namely firmly by the side of the perpetrator.

Deutschland’s double standard 

A diabolical pattern has emerged with regards to Germany’s unconditional support for "Israel": Every time an international body tries to hold the apartheid entity accountable, Germany comes-a-running to its master’s rescue like the heteronomous lapdog it is. In the lead up to the October release of a report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory in which it accused "Israel" of “committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination” in Gaza, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to keep sending weapons of war to Tel Aviv.

When the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on November 21 after dragging its feet for months, Germany, a signatory to the Rome Statute and thereby obligated to make an arrest should either of them set foot on German soil, suggested it would not honour the court’s warrants due to the country’s Nazi history.

“I find it hard to imagine that arrests could be carried out in Germany on this basis,” said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit, The Telegraph reported. Now contrast this noncommittal stance with German officialdom’s robust reaction to the ICC’s March 2023 arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin: “If Putin shows up in German territory, he will be arrested for sure,” said Anka Feldhusen, Germany’s ambassador to Ukraine at the time.

The egregious double standard of supporting the western-dominated international rules-based order when it works in one’s ideological favour and undermining it the rare moment it refuses to make an exception for western hegemony is eroding people’s already lacklustre faith in the ability of global institutions to deliver justice and equity and has irrevocably damaged Germany’s reputation. 

“The Palestinians are the biggest victim of this Israeli aggression. But the credibility of international law is also a victim. The standing…of countries like Germany in the region is also a victim,” said Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi to his visibly embarrassed German counterpart on her September visit to Amman, his guest's facial expression betraying how Germany’s arrogant political elite is clearly not used to being rebuked by those its colonial mindset deems inferior.

Germany's genocidal Sonderweg

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Nothing learned, nothing gained, Germany is at it again

Civil liberties, equality, and rule of law are hallmarks of the western political and moral philosophy of liberalism. Yet since October 7, 2023, when "Israel" launched its genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza as retaliatory punishment for their audacity to rise up against their oppressors, Germany has been destroying the same liberal order it routinely claims to uphold, both internationally and domestically.

The supremacist German Sonderweg with regards to Palestine/"Israel" of safeguarding Israeli impunity at all costs and in contradiction to majority world opinion and rulings by international bodies has seen the German state even turn against its own citizens who predominantly oppose their government’s complicity in the Zionist regime’s genocidal savagery in Gaza. 

Utterly unbefitting of a democracy, Germany’s post-October 7 culture of anti-Palestinian repression with its systematic police brutality, the frantic passing of authoritarian legislation in order to quash dissent and an overall McCarthyist climate of fear has become the new normal in Europe’s biggest economy and second-largest backer of "Israel" after the United States in terms of arms shipments and (im)moral fervour. 

In August, Amnesty International slammed Berlin police for using excessive force at an anti-genocide protest (something they have been doing with impunity for over a year now), demanding independent investigations into the officers involved.

In October, the group condemned a controversial resolution passed by the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, under the guise of protecting Jewish life for its racism and “criminalisation of legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.”

A paper published in May by scholars Vanessa E. Thompson and Pinar Tuzcu of Canada’s Queen’s University in which they detail the German state’s crackdown on Palestine solidarity and reference an article I wrote for The New Arab on how Germany has sacrificed its democracy for the sake of "Israel" concluded that “the spectre of authoritarianism has returned to Germany in full force.”

This statement sadly still holds true today, with anti-Palestinian state repression in Germany showing no signs of abating, despite the combined Palestinian death toll in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank having surpassed 45,500, with most of those killed being women and children. 

Liberal cannibalism

The bitter irony is that it is not the far-right that is destroying Germany’s liberal order, but liberals themselves. Why waste time painting the crudely manufactured bogeyman of “imported antisemitism” from Muslim-majority countries or even the very real right-wing AfD party as existential threats to German democracy when the Social Democratic, Green party and neoliberal FDP coalition government has spent its entire post-October 7 time in power transforming Germany into an authoritarian vassal state of a foreign power, to the absurd point where the granting of German citizenship is now contingent on an applicant’s readiness to accept a euro-western colony’s “right” to exist on stolen land in West Asia?

How infuriating the German liberal elite’s cannibalistic behaviour of destroying one’s own liberal democratic basic order can be, especially when the only rationale behind doing so is to please the fascist leaders of an intransigent settler colonial society three thousand kilometres away, is best described by Swedish climate justice activist Greta Thunberg, whose steadfast support for Palestinian liberation has made her the enemy of choice of the same fickle German establishment that not too long ago adored her to death.

Speaking in the German city of Mannheim last Friday at an open-air panel discussion hosted by local Palestine solidarity group Zaytouna on the topic of the intersectionality of climate justice and Palestinian liberation, she told the large crowd that had come to hear her speak:

“It’s outrageous. We are all running out of words to describe what is currently happening. I can not speak about this without using swear words. F**k Germany. And f**k Israel.”

A sentiment that should resonate deeply with anyone who is on the right side of history.