(English Version)
‘We are being told that the only path to be a successful nation is to be a coloniser that genocides and loots other countries, that to be a strong and sovereign nation you have to bomb whole continents.’
(Laith Marouf, see this youtube video)
English version of the article „Israel macht frei“
Photo: A German Foreign Minister no longer tolerates contradiction.
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About
The ‘secure existence’ of Israel is part of the German „Staatsräson“, the ‚reason of state’, wrote Rudolf Dressler (SPD) in 2005. Angela Merkel picked up on this in a speech to the Knesset in Israel in 2008, and since then German politicians have been enthusiastically spreading it again and again, above all the ‘Greens’.
In doing so, they are making a declaration of support that does not want to deal with the causes of conflicts and that makes Israel’s definition of the security situation its own. This is quite unusual and points to the special relationship that links Israel and Germany.
According to the official interpretation, this relationship arises from the ‘special responsibility’ for Israel that Germany has incurred as a result of the Holocaust. However, anyone familiar with the history of these relations knows that the penitent shirt that German politicians like to put on when it comes to Israel is a blatant lie. In reality, this special relationship not only arose from the need to rebuild a German foreign policy and flourishing foreign trade, but also turns reality on its head in an almost obscene way.
An attempt to criticise a German fairy tale in 10 points.
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Obligation to a state?
An allegedly felt obligation towards the victims or descendants of the victims of the Nazi regime is, if anything, an obligation towards PEOPLE, but not towards a state. Especially not if this state did not even exist in 1945. Not even if this state defines itself as the ‘state of the Jews’.
Israel is neither ‘the state of the Jews’, nor can its foundation or its actions be explained by the religious principles of Judaism, as numerous Jews and rabbis, from the left to the ultra-Orthodox, never tire of emphasising. The state that the Zionist movement aspired to and which was bloodily realised in 1948 through terror and expulsion, mirrored the European, racist and anti-Semitic nation state in theory and practice – only under the opposite sign: A state whose civil rights were reserved EXCLUSIVELY FOR JEWS. This was and is its only ‘Jewish’ characteristic.
Israel is also not the ‘safe home’ for Jews who would be expelled anywhere in the world. In many countries of the Arab world, whose history (in contrast to Europe) knew no Jewish pogroms and in which Jews, Muslims and Christians lived peacefully side by side for generations, it was Zionism that brought discord into the country, sometimes even with attacks on synagogues in order to force the Jews from there to Israel. Attacks in Baghdad and Cairo are documented. After the founding of Israel in 1948, more than 250,000 Jews were forced to emigrate to Israel, particularly from Iraq and Morocco – a country that had protected Jews from the persecution of the Vichy regime.
Watch this videos:
(https://moroccanjews.org/…/moroccan-jewish…/israel/
(Alon Misrahi: https://substack.com/@alonmizrahi/note/c-65855086)
(Avi Schlaim: https://youtu.be/lfDhaWlqXf8?si=cqmtLbbPRGFl3AqE)
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German consciousness of guilt? Not at all!
The extent of the ‘obligation’ that the Germans (did not) feel towards their victims can easily be judged by who the newly founded successor state of the Nazi regime even granted a claim to compensation: only those who were victims AS JEWS on the territory of the German Reich of 1937 had a claim. Millions of Jews, however, had been murdered by the Germans outside this territory, 10 million citizens of the Soviet Union alone (civilians) and other non-Jewish victims were also excluded. The cynicism of the ‘reparation laws’ is breathtaking! Roma and Sinti, for example, had no claim, as they were not persecuted because of their race, but as ‘asocials’, and communists anyway, as opponents of the FRG.
(http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/…/bundesentschaedigungs…)(https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/2001_2_1_hockerts.pdf)
Contrary to legend, neither the German state under Adenauer nor the German population had a guilty conscience in the slightest. They all knew nothing of course, and if they did, then they themselves – as Germans – were victims of ‘the Nazis’. This was the narrative of the anti-Semite Adenauer and the fascists in the newly established administrations of the FRG in the 1950s.
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‘Commitment’ in the service of the USA.
The new West Germany only had one ‘obligation’, if you want to call it that: to the USA, which had founded the FRG to make it a bastion in its planned final campaign against Russia and the Soviet Union. That is why, after a few show trials in Nuremberg, the ‘denazification’ of Germany (West) quickly came to an end. The FRG was built and administered by Nazis, hundreds of thousands of whom were allowed to return to their leading offices and positions in the 1950s. As a former high-ranking Nazi, it was even possible to become Chancellor (Kurt Georg Kiesinger).
The direction of German policy was defined in the USA, especially in foreign policy, of course. This was Adenauer’s foundation, as he himself had repeatedly emphasised. He seized it eagerly because he recognised it as an opportunity for Germany to regain power and international influence. The German claim to a unified Germany, which the SU had incidentally supported, was therefore put on the back burner for the time being: ‚Westbindung vor Wiedervereinigung‘, meaning Western ties before reunification, was the slogan.
The Germans or the Federal Republic of Germany never felt an ‘obligation’ towards the victims of the Nazi regime, and certainly not today. What did exist, however, was a USA that not only wanted to develop and expand Germany into an anti-Soviet frontline state, but also had a few other plans for Germany – and these certainly included Israel. To understand this, you have to look at how the world looked from the US perspective after the Second World War.
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The reorganisation of the world and the struggle for zones of influence.
The USA was the only nation to emerge from the war without any war damage and was militarily and industrially superior to all other countries in the world. As a matter of course, they set about redefining and reorganising the entire globe according to their own criteria. The ‘Monroe Doctrine’ of 1823, which declared the whole of Latin America to be the USA’s exclusive zone of influence under threat of war against the European powers, was now to be extended worldwide. These endeavours were directed both against the exclusive colonialism of the old European powers, in particular England and France, and against the Soviet Union, which was identified by the USA as the main opponent with its ‘socialist internationalism’.
For the USA, it was particularly important to prevent the emerging Latin American, African, Arab and Asian nationalisms of anti-colonial liberation from becoming partners of the Soviet Union. There were plenty of candidates for this: Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Ho Chi Min in Vietnam, Kim Il-sung in Korea, Sukarno in Indonesia, Salvador Allende in Chile, Che Guevara in Latin America, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and many others. The USA fought all these nationalisms of liberation with wars, civil wars, assassinations and coups.
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The USA’s struggle for the Arab nations
In the 1950s and 1960s, when many of the former European colonies became independent, the US struggle against the growing global influence of the Soviet Union had not yet been decided. In the Arab world, Egypt, Syria and Iraq had turned towards the Soviet Union. In this environment, the newly founded state of Israel had a special task:
Israel was a state founded by Western-socialised, white and European Jews educated in European and American metropolises, who were determined to carve out their own space at the expense of the Arab population. Rockefeller and other wealthy families from the USA, both Jewish and non-Jewish, had supported the Zionist movement from the very beginning – the anti-Semites who wanted to get rid of ‘the Jews’ were often friends of Zionism.
This allowed them to kill two birds with one stone: Israel was to be created as a Western outpost in an Islamic and Arab-dominated world, the control of which they naturally did not want to leave to the Soviet Union or the Arabs themselves. And so it came about. The Holocaust gave this programme additional legitimacy, but Zionism is much older than the Third Reich.
(Photo: Anti-Semitic and pro-Zionist poster from 1935)
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Germany’s special role on behalf of the USA.
In this global political situation, America could not and did not want to appear as an open supporter or even supplier of arms to Israel – that would have driven the Arab states even further into the arms of the Soviet Union. This is where the re-emerging Germany came into play. In the 1950s and 1960s, West Germany became the main supplier of everything that Israel urgently needed: machinery, industrial plants, building materials and weapons. During this period, France and Germany were Israel’s most important suppliers of military equipment.
Germany took on – discreetly and secretly – its first foreign policy role in the interests and on behalf of the USA. Kurt Müller (KPD), a member of the Bundestag and himself a victim of the Nazi regime, declared indignantly in 1952 when the German-Israeli ‘reparations’ agreement was signed that this agreement did not benefit ‘the survivors’, but rather ‘served Israeli and German industrialists and ultimately the American purpose of expanding Israel as an operational base for their aggressive policy.’
(Quoted by Daniel Marwecki: ‚Germany and Israel – Whitewashing and Statebuilding‘, p. 32)
THAT is the real (background) reason for the ‘reconciliation’, and it still is today. It was only after the 6-Day War in 1967 and the impressive successes of the Israeli army that the USA decided that it no longer needed to take tactical account of Arab nationalism and the interests of the SU, and became an open financier and supporter of Israel’s aggressive colonialism.
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Germany’s return to imperial power – ‘in the passenger seat’.
Germany, writes Daniel Marwecki, now stepped back into the second row and ‘gratefully sat in the passenger seat(!)’. In the passenger seat of a geostrategic US project of violent control and economic exploitation of a region that – in Eurocentric framing – still functions as the ‘Middle East’ today. And not only there, of course.
The image of the ‘passenger seat’ sums it up pretty well: the passenger determines neither the direction nor the speed of the journey, but is allowed to ride along. Under Adenauer, Germany decided – not without controversial debates – to see the USA’s demands on Germany as a unique opportunity to become ‘someone again’: a nation that can face as many states as possible from a POSITION OF STRENGTH, especially those in the Arab world and Iran. With no other state did this manifest itself as quickly as with Israel – today’s Israel is ALSO a creature of Germany! Germany helped Israel to become a nuclear power and to threaten the Arab nations with nuclear annihilation, and it still supplies the submarines that form the basis of this nuclear power.
The price for this was the complete subjugation of West Germany to the hegemonic interests of the USA, which the anti-imperialist left, when it still existed, did not like, as didn’t the nationalist right, which only saw subjugation. German ‘special paths’ were repeatedly sought and taken under this primacy, from Adenauer to Merkel (keyword Hallstein Doctrine, EU dominance, Iraq war or Russia policy), but were regularly thwarted by Washington when they appeared inappropriate. Most recently, as we know, quite drastically with an explosives attack on a pipeline from Russia.
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Striving for power as ‘reparation’ and ‘responsibility’
The particular charm of this German resurgence as a ‘world power in the passenger seat’ now lies in the fact that it is discussed as an acknowledgement of guilt and acceptance of responsibility – in other words, as the exact opposite. The fact that the successor state of the nation that killed 6 million Jews is now helping to build the state that defines itself as the ‘safe hometown’ of these persecuted Jews is simply too good in terms of moral exaltation and cannot be topped as hypocrisy.
However, there is only a connection between the Shoah and the establishment of Israel insofar as the Nazi genocide served the Zionists as additional proof of the necessity of a Jewish state, and many European Jews actually associated Israel with the hope of a better life. Germany did not and still does not care about the majority of the 30 million victims of Nazi Germany and their descendants – whether Jews or communists, Russians or Poles, victims of the Wehrmacht or the SS, gays or Sinti, forced labourers or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Nothing about its Israel policy has anything to do with Germany wanting to ‘make amends’ – ‚wieder gut machen‘. The only thing Germany wanted to make ‚wieder gut’ was the powerful position it was entitled to in the competition between nations. Israel was its means to do so.
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Israel and Germany – an imperial alliance.
The German mea culpa, no matter how pompous and dishonest it was and still is today, was the second cheap price that Germany had to pay, alongside its subordination to US interests. This kowtowing did not come easily to the unwaveringly proud German master race in Bonn and in the media houses in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin. But they soon realised what a lever this ‘admission of guilt’ was and what gates were to open for a Germany that was allowed to present itself as a purified sun of responsibility – from the passenger seat of a vehicle whose driver cleared everything out of the way, murdered and bombed everything that displeased him. It was the perfect division of labour – for America, Germany and Israel.
Thanks to Israel, Germany was back in the game. Israel had made Germany FREE, free of the diplomatic, political and economic hurdles that the victorious powers had erected for it, free of restrained rhetoric and a loser’s code of behaviour. With its unconditional support of the colonial apartheid state of Israel, Germany has QUALIFIED and LEGITIMISED itself to play a leading role within the US hegemonic system: It is capable of anything.
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Israel makes FREE – to genocide.
With Israel’s decision to use the violent provocations by Hamas on 7 October 2023 as an opportunity to wipe the Gaza Strip and with it two million people off the map, Germany’s ‘Israel is part of our reason of state’ doctrine is being put to a particular test. Germany must now take a stand against a state that spits in the face of all criteria of a modern democracy and foreign policy committed to humanist values, openly disregards the UN and also wants to wipe it off the map, not only commits genocide but openly postulates it, uses hunger and water deprivation as a means of war, has children and journalists deliberately murdered by snipers, attacks neighbouring nations under the protective shield of the USA and kills their politicians, to name just a few features of current Israeli policy.
We have to realise: Germany passes this endurance test with flying colours. Without batting an eyelid, the Federal Chancellor informs the world press that Israel is complying with international law, that it is merely shooting back and that there is only one place for Germany, namely on Israel’s side. As if the catalogue of criteria for identifying good and ‘rogue states’ had never existed (and while this catalogue is still being used against Russia!), as if there were no international law and no international institutions that condemn Israel, Germany’s government brazenly and bluntly declares that there is no reason to criticise Israel.
This FREEDOM OF GERMANY is new. It is the freedom of a power that believes itself to be superior, which assumes as a matter of course, both internally and externally, that its biased view of the course of the world will be accepted as truth by people, institutions, media and parties without being asked, even when it comes to denying a crime that is taking place before our very eyes. The USA is the role model. The USA knows no different, they have never been accused of any of their crimes, because THEY are the ones who determine the narratives and write the history books.
This freedom of power is Germany’s goal. It arises from the “special responsibility” that Germany cannot escape due to its past.