This is not Holocaust guilt - it's entrenched German racist superiority
On 7 November 2024, the German Bundestag passed the resolution "Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany", against opposition from academics and civil society, with only ten votes out of 733 against it.
This resolution makes the infamous IHRA definition of what is antisemitism the basis of further German pro-Zionist policies. The German parliament, by adopting the ideologically motivated equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, has made itself finally the stooge of a racist, white supremacist ideology.
While it remains unclear what the resolution exactly means, with its claim to "protect Jewish life in Germany", its true intention is barely concealed.
In a rare unity, the representatives of the German people want to do everything to immunise the Zionist settler-colonial apartheid state - which has been committing genocide against the Palestinian people and slaughtered up to 200,000 human beings in Gaza for more than a year now - against any criticism.
As of now, the resolution will make the German state much stronger than before to sanction critical positions towards the Zionist genocidal settler colony, to discredit individuals who do not support the genocide, and to slander people who reject the Israeli apartheid system, to label them antisemites, to smear them with being antisemitic, to criminalise and condemn them.
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It is both sad and frightening at the same time to see that Germany has once again found an appetite for being an active part in a genocide of non-white peoples, by supporting the Zionist regime that perpetrates one of the worst genocides in modern history in Gaza, and that has also unleashed the same genocidal dynamics in the West Bank and Lebanon.
Spreading fear and silencing
Germany’s parliamentarians have cleared the way for any critique of these horrendous atrocities to be denounced.
As it silences and threatens to sanction any dissent against Israel, its apartheid system, and its crimes against humanity as antisemitic, it is obvious that the government and parliament intend to spread fear of being branded antisemitic, being criminalised and persecuted for expressing your opinion as a basic individual citizenship right.
However, a government that spreads fear among its own population ceases to be a democratic one that guarantees its citizens fundamental rights.
As the German parliament unreservedly supports the genocide of the Palestinian people; as it defends white supremacist Zionist ideology; as it supports the settler colony’s drive towards a Greater Israel; and as it supports the Zionist fantasies to finally create a pure Jewish state by means of genocide, while at the same time silencing any dissent against all that, one is reminded of a huge tragedy.
Yet, as Karl Marx once wrote: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."
And so, we do not witness a German tragedy but one of the worst farces in German history. Pretending to protect Jewish life by declaring a racist ideology to be a guiding principle for Germany that cannot be criticised is an unparalleled farce against the background of Germany’s history.
It comes as no surprise that Germany has taken the racist, genocidal Zionist regime’s side. Yet contrary to the political parties’ talk of consternation over German guilt, this step has little if anything to do with the Nazi genocide of white European Jews.
Rather, it follows from deeply entrenched German arrogance and its mentality of white supremacism that is consistent with the idea that while the "West" epitomises "civilisation", the "Rest" stands for "barbarism".
Thus, from the very beginning of Zionism in the late 19th century, Germany has joyfully and wholeheartedly embraced what Theodor Herzl offered to the "West".
By demanding support for the Zionist movement from European powers, he submitted the offer that in Palestine the Zionists would "form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism".
God's chosen people
Herzl seamlessly followed on from a discourse of Greek and Roman antiquity that had been revived by European states since the fifteenth century to legitimise and justify every European "civilizing" settler colonial effort and the extermination of the indigenous peoples who had been declared "barbarians".
In the 15th century, such a legitimisation of exterminating indigenous people came from the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the Old Testament, that allowed white Europeans to see themselves as God’s chosen people bringing civilisation to non-civilised, not fully human creatures with the Bible and the sword.
Later, liberalism served as the ideology of justification to take the land and eliminate indigenous people for the sake of western liberal civilisation. Among the ardent advocates of the settler-colonial land grab and the elimination of indigenous people, we find American presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, justifying genocide while being both a landowner and a slaveholder.
And also such fine liberal minds as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville were in favour of settler colonialism and the inevitable eradication of inferior races.
Today, neoliberalism has taken this place, with its clear biopolitical distinction between those whose lives are worth living and those who deserve to die - which is simply another variant of the civilisation-barbarism distinction.
Herzl’s seductive playing with the opposition of "civilisation-barbarism" was attractive for Germany as it opened the prospect that many Jews would leave the country, which was welcomed given antisemitic sentiment in Germany.
Furthermore, it connected to the narcissistically exaggerated German self-image of being the light of civilisation, a country that would be the saviour of the world: "The German way will be the world’s salvation." ("Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen").
This entrenched idea made it very easy for the Nazis to adopt this tradition. Murdering not only white European Jews, but about 27 million people in Eastern Europe and Russia who were all declared to be Untermenschen with regard to the German Ubermensch - a very German variant of the talk about civilisation versus barbarism.
Long before National Socialism, Germany was concerned with supporting a project that was a settler colonial one from its very beginnings
In this way, the Nazis took the long-standing juxtaposition of "civilisation versus barbarism" to the extreme and led Europe into a catastrophe on its basis.
However, Germany’s support for the Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine did not begin after the Holocaust and is not due to the suffering it caused.
Long before National Socialism, Germany was concerned with supporting a project that, as Edward Said has made clear, was a settler-colonial one from its very beginnings at the end of the 19th century.
While conducting Germany’s own brutal settler colonial project in Namibia, German Emperor Wilhelm II was enthusiastic about the Zionist idea and in 1898 "received Theodor Herzl, who asked the kaiser for diplomatic help from the sultan so that he would grant a charter for the Jewish colonisation society to be founded for the settlement of Palestine".
The emperor did not do what Herzl had asked him to do but supported the idea, as he wanted to get rid of the Jews.
On 20 January 1927, none other than Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, happily joined the "German Committee 'Pro Palestine', Berlin", founded on 25 April 1918, which promoted and aimed at the Jewish settlement of Palestine.
Not even during National Socialism was this support for Zionism interrupted. As only a few Germans know, shall know, or want to know, the Zionists also made common cause with the Nazis.
As is well known, after the collapse of Nazi Germany, Adenauer, the great friend of the Zionist project, became the first German chancellor of West Germany, which shows even more continuity for finally bringing Jewish Europeans out of Europe to the Zionist colony.
Palestinians as barbarians
After the Second World War, every West German government and parliament, and likewise after 1990 in reunified Germany, has supported the Zionist settler colonial regime, sided with Israel and defended and welcomed its colonial oppression of the Palestinian people.
Never in German history, as far as it is concerned with supporting the Zionist project, have Palestinians, their right to their land, their right to have rights and to live, or the protection of their culture played a role in German politics.
Rather, the support for the Zionist settler colony was always based on the distinction of civilisation versus barbarism that allowed those who saw themselves as "civilised" to do to the Palestinians whatever seemed necessary to promote western civilisation.
In contrast to this ideological idea of civilization versus barbarism that justifies violence, expulsion and annihilation, little more than half a century after Herzl’s generous offer to the West to establish a zionist settler colony in Palestine that should operate as an outpost of civilisation against barbarism, in a series of publications on the problems of racism published by Unesco, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in his book Race and History in 1952:
"The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most 'savage' or 'barbarous' of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism."
In contrast to Herzl’s racist juxtaposing of western civilisation with Asian barbarism, Levi-Strauss’s insights into the meaning of "races", and the problem of ethnocentrism, rejected all these depraved ideas of western hubris that are still virulent today.
Thus, the founder of Zionism who believed in the barbarism of the indigenous Palestinians did not make an offer in favour of civilisation but only expressed his own barbaric ideas.
And in the same way, the Zionist settler colony is not a spearhead of civilisation in the middle of the Arab world but the consequence of this barbaric idea, and an ideology that until today finds unreserved support among western statesmen and parliamentarians who also believe in barbarism.
Unforgivable
By passing the resolution in the Bundestag, Germany's parliamentarians have shown whose brainchild they are. They firmly believe in barbarism and do not hesitate to side with those who do the same.
Thus, German parliamentarians deny the Palestinians, whom they declare to be barbarians, the right to be treated and recognised as humans. It is thus only logical that Germany unreservedly supports the Zionist genocidal state.
German parliamentarians deny the Palestinians, whom they declare to be barbarians, the right to be treated and recognised as humans
Even after watching the Zionists' live-streamed genocide, IDF soldiers’ videos and postings bragging in the most repulsive way with their "civilised" war crimes, nothing has changed for the German parliamentarians.
So deeply entrenched is the belief in the civilisation-barbarism divide and the typical German attitude to be a shining example to the world, always knowing what is right and good, that they have not the slightest doubt about the rightness and necessity of the Zionist crimes.
Supporting the Zionist regime’s genocide of the Palestinian people is unforgivable and exposes the real German mentality of a parliament in near unanimity strongly believing in barbarism.
Passing a resolution that slams as antisemitic to mention that Israel starves Palestinians to death or lets them die of thirst (which Zionist politicians have announced), that declares historical, well-documented facts such as the destruction of a health system, an education system, the complete infrastructure for more than two million people and their houses, the destruction of libraries, churches, hospitals, schools, universities, historic sites and so forth as obviously neglegible, like during all the centuries of Europe’s settler colonial destruction of other people, cultures, and civilisations, is only possible if you believe that Palestinians do not have the right to exist.
By voting for the resolution that justifies the Zionist genocide and by suppressing any criticism of it expressed in the name of humanity, the representatives of the German people have declared a simple truth: we are the barbarians.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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