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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Germany supports genocide –
again</h1>
<p class="gmail-node__submitted">
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah"
moz-do-not-send="true">Ali Abunimah</a></span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-blog"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blog/rights-and-accountability"
moz-do-not-send="true">Rights and Accountability</a></span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publication-date"><span
class="gmail-date-display-single">14 January 2024</span></span>
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<p>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.</p>
<small>
<span>DPA</span></small>
<p>Namibia is hitting back hard at Germany’s decision to
defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the World Court.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>“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.”
</p>
“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.
<p>“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.</p>
<p>Berlin’s support is far more than diplomatic and
legal: Since Israel began its genocide in Gaza,
Germany has <a
href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-military-exports-israel-up-nearly-10-fold-berlin-fast-tracks-permits-2023-11-08/"
moz-do-not-send="true">boosted its arms exports to
Tel Aviv tenfold</a>.</p>
<p>President Geingob’s statement was posted on the <a
href="https://www.facebook.com/NamibianPresidency/posts/pfbid02961ynCvmFUQBFCuFrENcEP1pCvQH3Fg3eZNPm8gr7CvfgviPWY1e6jvC3pR493V2l"
moz-do-not-send="true">Facebook</a> and <a
href="https://twitter.com/NamPresidency/status/1746259880871149956"
moz-do-not-send="true">Twitter</a> accounts linked
from the official website of the Namibian presidency.</p>
<h2>Unprecedented scale of killing</h2>
<p>On Thursday, South Africa <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/genocide-case-against-israel-opens-world-court"
moz-do-not-send="true">presented its powerful case</a>
at a public hearing at the International Court of
Justice – also known as the World Court – in The
Hague.</p>
<p>Israel responded on Friday with a <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2024/01/12/icj-israel-genocide/"
moz-do-not-send="true">litany of lies, distortions
and excuses</a> 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.</p>
<p>Thousands more are missing under the rubble.</p>
<p>“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 <a
href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/daily-death-rate-gaza-higher-any-other-major-21st-century-conflict-oxfam"
moz-do-not-send="true">said</a> last week.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“On top of the already horrific death toll, many more
people could die from hunger, preventable diseases,
diarrhea and cold,” Oxfam added.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<h2>Germany backs genocide – again</h2>
<p>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.
</p>
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.”
<p>Namibia has other good reasons to grant the
International Court of Justice the respect Germany
denies it.</p>
<p>The court’s 1971 decision that apartheid South
Africa’s occupation of Namibia was illegal is seen as
a <a
href="https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1365&context=faculty_articles"
moz-do-not-send="true">key moment</a> in Namibia’s
long struggle for freedom from the barbarity of
European colonial rule – finally achieved with <a
href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/namibia-gains-independence"
moz-do-not-send="true">independence</a> from the <a
href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/unspoken-alliance-israels-secret-relationship-apartheid-south-africa-sasha-polakow-suransky"
moz-do-not-send="true">Israel-allied</a> white
supremacist Pretoria regime in 1990.</p>
<h2>German genocide in Africa</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the early 20th century, German
settler-colonialists carried out extermination
campaigns in several parts of Africa.</p>
<p>“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 <a
href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/germany-palestine-israel-enduring-enemy"
moz-do-not-send="true">notes</a>.</p>
<p>Germany has made unconditional support for Israel –
including <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/ta-nehisi-coates-sings-zionism/15776"
moz-do-not-send="true">supplying arms and paying
billions of dollars</a> – central to its identity
and state policy, and Berlin continues to <a
href="https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4362806-germanys-unprecedented-crackdown-on-pro-palestinian-speech/"
moz-do-not-send="true">violently repress</a> any
expressions of support for Palestinians.</p>
<p>Notably, Germany considers its vast support for
Israel to be “<a
href="https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205817.PDF"
moz-do-not-send="true">reparations</a>” 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Little and late</h2>
<p>Germany has belatedly acknowledged that its crimes in
Namibia constituted genocide – an admission that came
in the form of an “<a
href="https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/germany-officially-calls-colonial-era-killings-namibia-genocide-2021-05-28/"
moz-do-not-send="true">apology</a>” in May 2021,
more than a century after the fact.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.dw.com/en/germany-adheres-to-contested-namibia-genocide-deal/a-65081066"
moz-do-not-send="true">challenging in court</a>.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/news/military-support-ukraine-2054992"
moz-do-not-send="true">weapons for Ukraine</a> just
since 2022.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://files.libcom.org/files/zz_aime_cesaire_robin_d.g._kelley_discourse_on_colbook4me.org_.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true"><em>Discourse on Colonialism</em></a>.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“That for Césaire the Nazi wars and holocaust were
European colonialism turned inwards is true enough,” <a
href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/5/21/the-last-of-the-semites"
moz-do-not-send="true">observes Massad</a>. “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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
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