With its shameful decision to defend "Israel" at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the genocide case brought by South Africa against the apartheid regime, Germany has crossed the point of no return. There is no coming back from this, and history will once again judge the nation that committed two horrific genocides in the span of four decades on two different continents harshly.

Liberal white supremacist Germany has hit the self-destruct button on the last vestiges of its plausible deniability with regard to "Israel’s" ongoing genocide in Gaza, positioning itself firmly and unmistakably on the side of the perpetrators whose war of attrition and annihilation has already surpassed the 100-day mark, with a Palestinian death toll exceeding 24,000.

Germany no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. It has forfeited that privilege through a long line of deplorable actions designed to shield "Israel" from culpability at every stage of its settler-colonial conquest of Palestine, of which support for genocide is the most heinous and irredeemable.

On the same day "Israel" tried to defend the indefensible at the public hearing in The Hague, Berlin, like the Zionist lapdog that it is, leaped to "Tel Aviv’s" rescue, announcing that it would intervene on "Israel’s" behalf as a third party at the UN-mandated World Court. “Third-party” may be accurate nomenclature in the legal procedure of the court, but outside the realm of jurisprudence, it is a blatant misnomer, as Germany is wholly complicit in "Israel’s" endless cycle of death and destruction in Gaza.

No one has expressed solidarity with "Israel" so fanatically as Germany. The country’s government, its state institutions and the media, its cultural institutions, and even civil society have all banded together since October 7 in a rare show of unity in what is essentially a polity as polarised as the US to further protect a violence-prone "Israel" running even more amok than usual from having to face even a modicum of accountability.

Germany, in its attempt to live out its racial superiority complex vicariously through "Israel", is so far gone that people of conscience are not only boycotting "Israel" today but also Germany: a recently launched campaign named Strike Germany has called on international cultural workers to boycott “German cultural institutions’ use of McCarthyist policies that suppresses freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine." Over 500 creatives have signed on, including such prominent names as Mohammed el-Kurd and French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux.

Related News

Georges Ibrahim Abdallah: Lebanon’s lion roars the truth

Regional Resistance after the Gaza Genocide

It should not come as a surprise that Germany, itself a former colonial power whose campaign of extermination against the Herero and Nama peoples of present-day Namibia between 1904-1908 formed the blueprint for the Nazi genocide of Jews in Europe (remember that concentration camps are not an invention of Nazi Germany but were birthed by European colonialism), would lend its loyal support to "Israel", a textbook settler colony currently engaging in a textbook genocide.

Until recently, Germany had never confronted its barbaric colonial history, and despite projecting to the world the image of a rehabilitated nation that has convincingly atoned for its Nazi past, the truth is that denazification in Germany never exceeded the threadbare minimum of disingenuous, performative cosmetics. Berlin’s unconditional support of "Israel", even as it is engaging in the most well-documented genocide in history, has further eviscerated false pretenses of successful reformation, bringing Germany’s colonial cultural DNA to the forefront once again.

Edward Said’s famous demand that “there has to be a limit” to the Jews’ victimization of Palestinians, simply because the former was a victim once, has always fallen on deaf ears in Germany. But in the now unfolding post-October 7 regional order, the former Jew-murderers are actively pursuing a policy of supporting and abetting Zionist conquistadors in their genocidal subjugation of Palestine’s Indigenous population.

Over the last few years, there have been multiple off-ramps on Germany’s pro-Zionist autobahn to hell that could have navigated Germans toward the right side of history for a change: Supporting international human rights organizations when they concluded that "Israel" was practicing apartheid, instead of attacking them, for example, or denouncing "Israel’s" most toxic and right-wing government to date when it came to power, instead of opting to get into bed with fascists.

Even between October 7 - described by Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa in The Electronic Intifada as the day “brave Palestinian fighters overtook Israeli colonies built on their ancestral villages, seeing their stolen lands for the first time in their lives even though they are less than a few miles away” - and January 12 - when South Africa convincingly made its case against "Israel" before the ICJ - there has not been a shortage of moments in which a groveling Germany could have committed the redemptive act of displaying a moral backbone.

But Germans have proven time and again to be beyond redemption, especially in the context of Palestine where they have routinely opted for the familiarity of moral turpitude in the service of the oppressor. When "Israel’s" Foreign Ministry went about attacking the South African delegation at The Hague as the “legal arm of Hamas," genocide Germany had nothing better to say than to dismiss South Africa’s case as having “no basis in fact," bringing Germany’s visceral anti-Palestinian and historic anti-Black racism full circle and unwittingly admitting that one of the world’s leading research nations has no idea what a fact is.

Incorrigible Germany’s continued unwillingness to confront "Israel" cannot be rationalized away with convenient references to historical guilt anymore. Germany’s steadfast support for Zionism, even when the murderous implementation of this inherently racist ideology is wiping out entire families from Gaza’s civil registry as the Israeli military continues to carpet bomb the densely populated besieged sliver of land, is entirely by choice, rendering all German talk of atonement and historic responsibility null and void.

It is high time to stop buying into the fiction that Germans have learned from their history. The present is proving that they have not and that their colonial racism is beyond remedy for the foreseeable future.