Not in Our Name! An Angry German Voice Speaks Out Against the German Federal Government’s Complicity in the Gaza Genocide
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Nicaragua’s accusation before the International Court of Justice is that Germany is actively participating in the genocide committed by the Israeli armed forces in the Gaza Strip. And I as a German learned in school that I have to resist when genocide is happening in front of my eyes.
I can hardly recognize my homeland Germany. Now people are talking about “fitness for war” again.
We’re supposed to march East again.
And please don’t show cowardice in front of the enemy!
We must make even more sacrifices for the German armament efforts. Hardness! Relentless harshness!
The people who are trumpeting like that don’t have a brushed hairstyle and they don’t wear military boots at all.
These are the same people who were just singing about understanding, tolerance and peace.
These are the people who, a quite short time ago, spoke out in favor of treating other peoples and ethnic groups with respect. And now we have this immature eternal teenage girl as head of the venerable Foreign Office, who behaves more imperialist, racist and colonialist than all German foreign ministers before her.
Which inevitably means that countries in the southern hemisphere deny Ms. Baerbock the essential diplomatic protocol. But I don’t want to deal with that embodiment of all embarrassment any further. You can insult green politicians as much as you want. However, here you only ever meet the shooting gallery figures on whom the people’s anger is unleashed, while the actual masterminds of this misery can sit back and relax.
After all, over 600 ministry officials have issued a public statement protesting support for the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
The signatories of this declaration did not introduce themselves with their real names. Can we seriously still expect these people to come out? After all the acts of feudalistic despotism that we experienced during the difficult Corona period? Where judges were prosecuted and subjected to home searches simply because they made a supposedly improper court ruling? Where the head of a health authority was reprimanded because he contradicted the official narrative about a pandemic?
No, the 600 ministry officials did it completely right. The misused state apparatus knows that there are still courageous self-thinkers in its ranks. And that the usurpers of our state apparatus must be careful. As long as the dissidents remain anonymous in the state apparatus, they can intervene at the crucial moment in accordance with the German constitution, the Grundgesetz. And for the benefit of the common good, as they once swore. There are these decent servants of the people with backbone, namely in the military, in the police, in the judiciary and in the government apparatus. And, as we know, now also in the German mainstream media.
And the 600 upright people in the public service address their open letter to the most important members of the federal government and tell them:
“… we are addressing you because, as federal civil servants and public servants, we are committed to the fundamental principles of the Grundgesetz. Article 25 sentence 1 of the Grundgesetz gives a general order to apply the law with regard to international law. According to the Federal Constitutional Court, this provision means that ‘the general rules of international law find their way into the German legal system without a transformation law, i.e. directly, and take precedence over German domestic law.’ Israel is committing crimes in Gaza that are in obvious contradiction to international law and thus stand by the Basic Law, to which we as federal civil servants and public servants are obliged. The Federal Republic of Germany supports politically, economically and militarily Israel’s policy in Gaza and the other Palestinian territories occupied in violation of international law. It is therefore our duty as federal employees to criticize this federal government policy and to remind us that the federal government must strictly observe the constitution and international law.”[1]
To put it bluntly again: the federal government can suck up as many laws and regulations as it wants.
They are all void if they are not compatible with higher international law.
It’s bad when the federal government has to be reminded of this so clearly from outside. The open letter points out that the Gaza Strip, with its approximately two million residents, has been bombed into rubble and ash by the Israeli armed forces since October 7th last year, so much so that life there is de facto no longer possible.
This led the International Court of Justice on January 26 this year to condemn the actions of the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip as “plausible acts of genocide.”
We have to be clear that the war in the Gaza Strip is not a so-called “symmetrical war” – that is, a war in which two armed forces with approximately the same strength fight against each other on the battlefield.
No, the Gaza war is an “asymmetric war”: a fully equipped and armed army fights a defenseless civilian population – until this civilian population either flees or is completely annihilated. The Netanyahu regime’s argument that it is fighting a Hamas army in a symmetrical way is not convincing. Hamas was able to claim some kind of residual vegetation in the underground tunnels. Militarily, Hamas plays no role at all – apart from a few sniper attacks on isolated Israeli soldiers. Potentially and verbally allied forces of Hezbollah and Iran have so far largely kept a low profile out of fear of Israeli nuclear bombs. The last attacks of Iran against Israel demonstrate this military weakness of the opponents of Israel in a clear manner.
Germany’s support for the Ukrainian armed forces at least refers to the symmetrical constellation of two supposedly equally strong armed forces waging a war of attrition. In contrast, Germany’s support of Israel’s asymmetric war against Palestinian civilians has clearly crossed the red line of international law. A lawsuit brought by the state of Nicaragua against Germany for precisely this reason is cheekily rejected by German lawyers at the International Court of Justice as “baseless”. The employees of the public broadcaster Tagesschau cannot essentially contradict this fact in their reporting. They resort to the popular method of framing: if Nicaragua is undoubtedly right on this issue, then this complaint must at least be discredited by branding the Nicaraguan government as “authoritarian”[2]. It should be noted that the Ortega government assumed responsibility through free and correct elections.
But the framing doesn’t help at all. The respected Swedish institute SIPRI has found that almost all governments in the world have found the conduct of the Israeli armed forces so disreputable for many years that they have discreetly withdrawn from the arms deal with Israel[3]. Only two unconditional supporters of Israel’s rearmament remain. Please guess who these two could be. That’s right: the USA was the largest arms supplier to the Israeli armed forces in 2023 with 53 percent. This is closely followed by the Federal Republic of Germany, with 47 percent of Israel’s arms imports. And because other countries refuse to deliver weapons to Israel, the share of German equipment deliveries to Israel has increased tenfold from 2022 to 2023!
In addition, the federal government of Germany has temporarily frozen payments to the refugee organization UNRWA[4].
Not for the 2.4 million displaced Palestinians in Jordan, some of whom have been languishing in miserable camps for generations. And also not for their 600,000 fellow sufferers in Syria, or the half a million fellow sufferers in Lebanon[5]. No. But specifically the aid money for the two million Palestinians who are crowded together in the Gaza Strip and who face extinction at any moment. Who have no food, no medicine, no hospitals, no schools and no universities.
And no roof over their head. Even drinking water is no longer available in sufficient quantities.
The glorious German federal government is consistently withholding aid money for our fellow human beings in the Gaza Strip. Unlike the European Union, Spain, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark and Australia, which froze their aid funds for a short time, but have now even increased their aid payments. Only Germany remains loyal to the continued starvation of the Palestinians. I am in Spain right now. The German attitude cannot be conveyed to anyone here.
Even the Tagesschau correspondent Thilo Spanhel in Cairo is bravely trying to remedy the German filter bubble a bit by reporting that Germany’s reputation has been massively and permanently ruined by the recent solo attempts on the Gaza issue[6]. As I already said, a red line has been crossed here by the current federal government. And please don’t give anyone the impression that a possible new government coalition as the successor to the so called “Ampel-Koalition” (i.e. the Social Democrat SPD, the ecologist Green Party, and the liberal FDP) would act differently on the Gaza issue. Please just take a look at the X-Twitter statements from prominent opposition politicians to be cured of all illusions on this issue.
In contrast, all previous German politicians have distinguished themselves through their sense of proportion and modesty when it comes to the Middle East problem.
For example, there was the legendary SPD politician Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski, who repeatedly successfully mediated between Arabs and Israelis and was therefore given the affectionate nickname “Ben Wisch”.
Or the former FDP Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who was unable to speak out against an attack on Libyan leader Gaddafi that violated international law at the crucial meeting of the UN Security Council, but with his abstention from the vote signaled to the Arab world that Germany disapproved of the attack. As foreign minister of an American colony, he can only answer with one abstention[7]. That was received.
The Arabs also knew that Germany had to perform a dance on raw eggs due to its special history. The special German history also means that Germany has not had any colonies since the end of the First World War. And while the anger in the Third World against the colonial powers France and Great Britain can still be felt everywhere today, the Germans have earned a high reputation in these countries over the decades through their equally humble, competent and humane demeanor.
The Germans can organize many things well without much nonsensical chatter. You hear that everywhere. No amount of transatlantic re-education propaganda can deny this. The Germans as respectful partners and as people who can listen well. This has given us, among other things, good business relationships in future markets. All of that has now been shattered by supporting the genocide in Palestine in just a few months.
I don’t want to give the impression that it’s just about good business.
The indescribable misery of innocent people is unbearable!
And the fact that we have to increase this suffering with our tax money, which is not exactly small, is simply unacceptable.
We must raise our voice clearly: these crimes against international law are not happening in our name!
And what we do has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism”.
The overwhelming majority of Jews worldwide strongly condemn the crimes of the Netanyahu government, and these courageous people are expressing their protest in the streets.
Let’s not let these friends of ours alone with their courage.
When it comes to the Gaza issue, of all things, we really don’t have to take a special German Sonderweg. [a concept lined to rise of Nazism]
Let’s remember what we once learned in school: if another genocide occurs before our eyes, then our first civic duty is to resist this crime.
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AI Translation from German.
Minor Revisions by Global Research
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Notes
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/deutschland-nicaragua-klage-102.html
[3] https://counter-investigations.org/investigation/german-arms-exports-to-israel-2003-2023
[4] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/asien/stopp-finanzierung-unrwa-100.html
[6] https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/asien/nahost-krieg-rolle-deutschland-100.html
