[News] Germany supports genocide – again

Mon Jan 15 12:14:37 EST 2024

electronicintifada.net 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/germany-supports-genocide-again> 

  Germany supports genocide – again

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> Rights 
and Accountability 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blog/rights-and-accountability> 14 
January 2024

------------------------------------------------------------------------
A group of women in bright flowing dresses and hats walk amid trees

Herero people gather at the verge of the desert of Omaheke, Namibia, to 
commemorate the beginning of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama 
peoples a century earlier, 4 October 2015.

DPA

Namibia is hitting back hard at Germany’s decision to defend Israel’s 
genocide in Gaza at the World Court.

“On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th 
century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians 
died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions,” Hage Geingob, 
president of the southwest African nation, said on Saturday. “The German 
government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on 
Namibian soil.”

“In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific 
history,” Geingob sharply denounced Berlin’s “shocking decision” to 
reject “the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa 
before the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing 
genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

“The German government has chosen to defend in the International Court 
of Justice the genocidal and gruesome acts of the Israeli government 
against innocent civilians in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian 
territories,” the Namibian leader said.

“Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations 
convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in 
Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in 
Gaza,” Geingob added.

Berlin’s support is far more than diplomatic and legal: Since Israel 
began its genocide in Gaza, Germany has boosted its arms exports to Tel 
Aviv tenfold 
<https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-military-exports-israel-up-nearly-10-fold-berlin-fast-tracks-permits-2023-11-08/>.

President Geingob’s statement was posted on the Facebook 
<https://www.facebook.com/NamibianPresidency/posts/pfbid02961ynCvmFUQBFCuFrENcEP1pCvQH3Fg3eZNPm8gr7CvfgviPWY1e6jvC3pR493V2l> 
and Twitter 
<https://twitter.com/NamPresidency/status/1746259880871149956> accounts 
linked from the official website of the Namibian presidency.

    Unprecedented scale of killing

On Thursday, South Africa presented its powerful case 
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/genocide-case-against-israel-opens-world-court> 
at a public hearing at the International Court of Justice – also known 
as the World Court – in The Hague.

Israel responded on Friday with a litany of lies, distortions and 
excuses <https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/icj-israel-genocide/> for 
its mass extermination of Palestinians that has so far killed more than 
23,000 people, wounded tens of thousands more and systematically 
destroyed Gaza’s healthcare system and other civilian infrastructure.

Thousands more are missing under the rubble.

“Israel’s military is killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 
people a day which massively exceeds the daily death toll of any other 
major conflict of recent years,” Oxfam said 
<https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam> 
last week.

The number of average deaths per day in Gaza is significantly higher 
than any recent major armed conflict including Syria (96.5 deaths per 
day), Sudan (51.6), Iraq (50.8), Ukraine (43.9) Afghanistan (23.8) and 
Yemen (15.8), according to the UK-based charity.

“On top of the already horrific death toll, many more people could die 
from hunger, preventable diseases, diarrhea and cold,” Oxfam added.

“It is unimaginable that the international community is watching the 
deadliest rate of conflict of the 21st century unfold, while 
continuously blocking calls for a ceasefire,” Oxfam said.

    Germany backs genocide – again

And yet, on the same day Israel’s representatives denied this 
deliberately engineered reality before the ICJ judges, Germany rejected 
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel as “unfounded” and vowed to 
intervene in the legal proceedings in support of Tel Aviv.

Namibia’s President Geingob urged Berlin “to reconsider its untimely 
decision to intervene as a third-party in defense and support of the 
genocidal acts of Israel before the International Court of Justice.”

Namibia has other good reasons to grant the International Court of 
Justice the respect Germany denies it.

The court’s 1971 decision that apartheid South Africa’s occupation of 
Namibia was illegal is seen as a key moment 
<https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1365&context=faculty_articles> 
in Namibia’s long struggle for freedom from the barbarity of European 
colonial rule – finally achieved with independence 
<https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/namibia-gains-independence> 
from the Israel-allied 
<https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/unspoken-alliance-israels-secret-relationship-apartheid-south-africa-sasha-polakow-suransky> 
white supremacist Pretoria regime in 1990.

    German genocide in Africa

While Germany is best known for its genocide of millions of European 
Jews, Roma and others during World War II, this was not its first 
genocide – as President Geingob reminded Berlin.

In the early 20th century, German settler-colonialists carried out 
extermination campaigns in several parts of Africa.

“In Tanganyika, between 1891 and 1898 the Germans killed upwards of 
150,000 Wahehe who had revolted against German colonialism, and in 
Namibia between 1904 and 1907, they killed at least 65,000 Hereros 
(about 75-80 percent of the Herero population), and 10,000 Namas (35-50 
percent of the Nama population),” Columbia University professor Joseph 
Massad notes 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/germany-palestine-israel-enduring-enemy>.

Germany has made unconditional support for Israel – including supplying 
arms and paying billions of dollars 
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/ta-nehisi-coates-sings-zionism/15776> 
– central to its identity and state policy, and Berlin continues to 
violently repress 
<https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4362806-germanys-unprecedented-crackdown-on-pro-palestinian-speech/> 
any expressions of support for Palestinians.

Notably, Germany considers its vast support for Israel to be 
“reparations 
<https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205817.PDF>” 
for the Holocaust, even though Israel did not exist at the time and was 
not the victim. It was European Jews, citizens of European countries, 
who were the victims of the genocidal German government and its 
collaborating European partners during World War II.

The German “reparations” and weapons supplied to Israel since the 1950s 
have enabled Israel to further dispossess and colonize Palestinians from 
their land, and now to perpetrate genocide against them.

But it is only the German state’s anti-Semitic equation of all Jews with 
Israel that allows this complicity with Tel Aviv’s crimes against the 
Indigenous people of Palestine to be marketed as “atonement” for 
Germany’s crimes against European Jews.

    Little and late

Germany has belatedly acknowledged that its crimes in Namibia 
constituted genocide – an admission that came in the form of an “apology 
<https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/germany-officially-calls-colonial-era-killings-namibia-genocide-2021-05-28/>” 
in May 2021, more than a century after the fact.

But while committing a paltry $1.3 billion to “development” projects 
over 30 years, Germany is adamantly refusing to pay reparations to 
Namibia – a position Herero and Nama descendants of Germany’s genocide 
victims are challenging in court 
<https://www.dw.com/en/germany-adheres-to-contested-namibia-genocide-deal/a-65081066>.

The so-called development aid pledged to Namibia by Germany averages to 
about $43 million per year, a tiny fraction of, say, the $8 billion 
Berlin has spent on weapons for Ukraine 
<https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/military-support-ukraine-2054992> 
just since 2022.

Perhaps the best explanation for Germany’s racist double-standard 
towards Namibia, let alone its full support for the Zionist genocide in 
Palestine, remains the one provided by Aimé Césaire in his /Discourse on 
Colonialism/ 
<https://files.libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf>.

Césaire writes that before Europeans were the victims of Nazism, “they 
were its accomplices; and they tolerated that Nazism before it was 
inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, 
legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to 
non-European peoples.”

“That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were European colonialism 
turned inwards is true enough,” observes Massad 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/5/21/the-last-of-the-semites>. 
“But since the rehabilitation of Nazism’s victims as white people, 
Europe and its American accomplice would continue their Nazi policy of 
visiting horrors on non-white people around the world, on Korea, on 
Vietnam and Indochina, on Algeria, on Indonesia, on Central and South 
America, on Central and Southern Africa, on Palestine, on Iran and on 
Iraq and Afghanistan.”

This is why Germany perceives no contradiction between its constant 
self-flagellation over its past industrial scale murder of European Jews 
and its full support for Israel’s industrial scale murder of 
Palestinians today.

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