\n
![](\"https:\/\/media.tehrantimes.com\/d\/t\/2024\/11\/09\/4\/5242374.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
No state has been as assiduous in attacking the Palestine solidarity movement and supporting Israel\u2019s ongoing genocide in Gaza as Germany.<\/p>\n
Today, it is\u00a0impossible\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n
In April, the Palestine Assembly, a high-profile pro-Palestine conference in Berlin was\u00a0broken up\u00a0by 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.<\/p>\n
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 in the Strip\u2019s health system. A German court later\u00a0overturned\u00a0the ban.<\/p>\n
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from entering Germany and prevented from even participating in the Congress via a video link.<\/p>\n
German authorities said they targeted Abu Sitta, Varoufakis and others at the conference because they deemed their speeches \u201canti-Semitic\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The answer lies in Germany\u2019s history \u2013 but it is not, as many assume tied to efforts to atone for the Nazi Holocaust and ensure that it never happens again.<\/cite><\/p>\n Iris Hefets, a German-Israeli psychoanalyst in Berlin, for example, was arrested last October on charges of anti-Semitism. Her only \u201ccrime\u201d was walking alone with a placard reading: \u201cAs an Israeli and as a Jew, stop the genocide in Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n Within the same month, more than a hundred German-Jewish artists, writers, academics, journalists and cultural workers published an open letter condemning Germany\u2019s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and accusations of anti-Semitism directed at everyone \u2013 including Jews like them \u2013 who criticise Israel\u2019s conduct.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n So why is Germany working so hard to ensure no one speaks against Israel\u2019s conduct in Gaza, which triggered a genocide case at the ICJ?<\/p>\n The answer lies in Germany\u2019s history \u2013 but it is not, as many assume tied to efforts to atone for the Nazi Holocaust and ensure that it never happens again.<\/p>\n Germany was never fully de-Nazified. It never attempted to come to terms with the politics that had led to the rise of Hitler.<\/p>\n In the wake of World War II the German state\u2019s reacceptance into the international community was made contingent on a process of de-Nazification. However, this process was soon abandoned.\u00a0 It was overtaken by the Cold War. Germany made amends for its crimes against the Jews \u2013 but not the Roma \u2013 by providing unconditional and unlimited backing to the newly founded \u201cJewish state\u201d, the West\u2019s military outpost in Palestine: Israel.<\/p>\n Eliminating the political structures that led to the rise of the Nazis \u2013 imperialism and the German military-industrial complex \u2013 would have run counter to the need to oppose the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was strong opposition in the West to German rearmament. The 1944\u00a0Morgenthau 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.\u00a0 Post-war Germany was to be an agricultural and pastoral state.<\/p>\n However, the Cold War meant the West needed Germany as part of the Western alliance. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer\u2019s closest aide, Hans Globke, had been integrally involved in the implementation of the 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. During the 1961 Eichmann trial \u201cextraordinary precautions\u201d were\u00a0taken\u00a0by Prosecutor Gideon Hausner to prevent Globke\u2019s name from being made public.<\/p>\n In 1953, Germany started paying reparations \u2013 not to individual survivors of the Holocaust, but to Israel in the form of industrial goods, including weaponry. The West focused on the Soviet Union. De-Nazification was quietly forgotten as Germany was integrated into Western military alliances, joining NATO in 1955.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201creason of state\u201d.<\/p>\n This abandonment of de-Nazification transformed the Nazi Holocaust from a product of Germany\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The Holocaust was not Germany\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The Nazi concept of \u201clebensraum\u201d or living space was developed in 1897 by Freidrich Ratzel. Trotha and the Germans campaigned mercilessly towards an \u201cendlosung\u201d or final solution.<\/p>\n In the \u201cGenocidal Gaze\u201d Elizabeth Baer\u00a0described\u00a0this genocide as \u201ca kind of dress rehearsal\u201d for the Nazi holocaust.<\/p>\n The colony\u2019s imperial administrator, Heinrich Goring, was the father of Hermann Goring, Hitler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The German state\u2019s embrace of Israel\u2019s current onslaught in Gaza isn\u2019t caused by guilt over the Holocaust so much as the need to normalize and relativize it. Supporting Israel\u2019s holocaust, as an act of necessary \u201cself-defense\u201d allows Germany to hold on to the fictions it created about its own holocausts.<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n They know how Defence Minister Yoav Gallant began the genocide by\u00a0describing\u00a0Palestinians as \u201chuman animals\u201d \u2013 the same phrase Himmler\u00a0used\u00a0about the Jews on October 4, 1943, in a talk to SS generals. They are undoubtedly aware that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich\u00a0spoke\u00a0about how \u201cjustified and moral\u201d it would be to starve two million Palestinians.<\/p>\n In short, German authorities know what Israel is doing \u2013 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n