There is a word in German that perfectly describes Germany’s hubris and unwillingness to change its unwavering support for "Israel" as it intensifies its genocidal bombing campaign against the already devastated Gaza Strip, launches a ground invasion, and starves a civilian population to death: Beratungsresistenz, literally meaning resistance to advice.

I am increasingly reminded of this uniquely German word as Western governments belatedly start to realise that it might be bad optics for liberal democracy to betray its fundamental values and be caught on the wrong side of what historiography is already referring to as "Israel’s Vietnam" and "the first holocaust of the 21^st century."

Western governments with the exception of Germany, that is.

When the leaders of Canada, the UK and France released their unusually confrontational joint statement on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank in which they "strongly oppose the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza", describing "the level of human suffering in Gaza" as "intolerable" and "Israel’s" war in reaction to the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks as "wholly disproportionate", even threatening "to take further action, including targeted sanctions", there was marked silence from Berlin.

Speaking at this year‘s WDR Europaforum in Berlin a week later, the best German chancellor Friedrich Merz was willing to do was to say that he didn’t "understand the goal anymore" of "Israel‘s" strategy in Gaza, urging the Israeli government "not to do anything that even its best friends are no longer willing to accept."

A non-committal and lukewarm statement that is not exactly oozing outrage or condemnation.

When 17 EU foreign ministers, representing almost two-thirds of the bloc’s member states, called for a review of the EU-"Israel" Association Agreement in light of the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza due to "Israel’s" blocking of all aid into the strip, Germany’s top diplomat was not among them.

As Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what UN Secretary-General António Guterres called "the cruelest phase in a cruel conflict", "Israel", drunk on power and impunity, has managed to alienate key allies, with the UK suspending trade negotiations and imposing sanctions on leading figures in the settler movement.

But Germany remains obstinate in its refusal to review its pro-genocide foreign policy, with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier even hosting his Israeli counterpart, Isaac Herzog, in Berlin two weeks ago.

Shortly after October 7, Herzog said that "an entire nation" in Gaza "is responsible" for not having rebelled against Hamas, a statement that can be read as victim-blaming Palestinians in Gaza for "Israel’s" genocidal onslaught and justifying their collective punishment.

State support for the imperial creation that is "Israel", envisioned by Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, as "a rampart of Europe against Asia" and "an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism", has always been a minority position of the handful of nations that make up the Global North, forced upon the Majority World through coercive Western hegemony.

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Within the "Israel"-adoring Occident, Germany is an outlier in its extreme support for the apartheid entity’s systematic oppression and erasure of native Palestinians on their own land.

The country conveniently uses its (allegedly atoned for) Nazi history and performative holocaust guilt as an excuse to sell weapons to "Israel". Berlin, unperturbed by over 19 months of Israeli-orchestrated carnage in Gaza, remains the second largest supplier of killing machinery to Tel Aviv after the US.

Palestine is not the only issue where Germany refuses to listen to reason, and which reveals the country’s inability to learn from its atrocious mistakes of the past. The steady rise of German militarism in the course of the Russia-Ukraine war has also broken one taboo after the other.

When at the beginning of the war, Germany’s then-chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that his government would use an off-budget fund of €100 billion to boost defence spending, this controversial move was considered a historic policy shift at the time.

Three years later, under the new centre-right coalition government led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Germany is set to permanently station German troops in a foreign country for the first time since World War II.

5000 Bundeswehr soldiers and personnel will be stationed in Lithuania in order to defend NATO’s Eastern flank against "any aggression" from Russia, Merz said on his trip to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius last week, signalling a "new era" for Germany’s armed forces.

While the Bundeswehr as the successor of the Nazi-era Wehrmacht has been part of NATO missions in the past, this unprecedented escalation of German military force projection is the latest expression of the country’s reaction to the much-talked about Zeitenwende, (literally: a changing of the times), which conveniently uses the Russia-Ukraine war as an excuse to re-establish Germany as a military power.

Not only has Germany not learned from its Nazi and bellicose history, it is actively falsifying it by infringing upon long-standing traditions of memory culture with the aim of downplaying the role of the Soviet Union in defeating German fascism.

This year’s 80th anniversary of Liberation Day, which marks the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht on May 8, 1945, and the end of the Second World War in Europe, saw Russian officials once again not invited to commemorative events.

Authorities in the capital Berlin also banned the display of the Russian and Soviet flags and symbols at the city’s three Soviet memorial sites, a move condemned by the Russian embassy as a "manifestation of historical revisionism."

Berlin’s unwavering support for "Israel" as it freely perpetrates a genocide, and the liberal flow of German-manufactured weaponry to Ukraine, which is now being bolstered by boots on the ground in neighbouring Lithuania have one thing in common: They both show how a once remorseful post-World War II Germany (at least in outward expression) has become too big for its britches again and is increasingly endangering regional and world peace.

Nothing learned, nothing gained, Germany is at it again.