It has become painstakingly clear that Germany unapologetically remains that “enduring enemy” of the Palestinians’ right to freedom and human dignity.

By Timo Al-FAROOQ

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In 2021, esteemed Columbia University professor and author Joseph Massad wrote an op-ed for Middle East Eye on the occasion of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s visit to “Israel”. Titled “Germany: an enduring enemy of the Palestinian struggle”, the piece attributes my country’s steadfast support for the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv to two factors: historical guilt over the Holocaust and considerations that are “crucially informed by German colonial racism towards non-white colonized peoples worldwide.”

Two years later, as I am writing these words amidst an ongoing Israeli-orchestrated genocide in Gaza following Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood surprise attack against the Occupation (and while a campaign led by a Columbia student who – as reported by the Electronic Intifada – ran the Twitter page for the Israeli army is trying to get Massad fired), it has become painstakingly clear that Germany unapologetically remains that “enduring enemy” of the Palestinians’ right to freedom and human dignity.

Far from changing its position regarding an asymmetrical “conflict” between a Western-funded colonial power and native armed resistance, Germany, the nation that wants you to believe that it has learned from its past mistakes, is doubling down on its racially motivated enmity toward the Palestinian people by staunchly supporting “Israel” as it unleashes hellfire on a defenseless civilian population of two and a half million in the world’s largest concentration camp.

Over the last days, this immoral German intransigence has found its expression in the physical violence of unprecedented police crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters in the capital Berlin, home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe, as well as in the symbolic violence of last-minute bans on solidarity rallies and vigils across Germany, anti-Palestinian defamation campaigns in the racist media which are framing anti-war protests as anti-Semitic rabble-rousing and support for terrorism and ironclad statements of support for “Israel’s right to defend itself” (basically a carte blanche for genocide).

This de-facto cheerleading of Israeli war crimes, such as the cowardly attack on Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab hospital which killed hundreds of people, is not only being perpetrated by Germany’s morally corrupt political class but also by the average indoctrinated German citizen who – like their elected leaders – religiously believe in the Big Lie of Israeli victimhood and Palestinian villainy.

The fact that Germany is tightening the noose around Palestinians and their allies in a vicious cycle of trauma and re-traumatization to the point where Black Lives Matter’s “I can’t breathe!” slogan is also gaining traction as a Palestinian rallying cry is by no means surprising, as anti-Palestinian bigotry, the most vicious sub-variant of the virus that is anti-Arab racism/Islamophobia, is endemic to allegedly anti-racist Germany.

BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors has called the Palestinian struggle “our generation’s South Africa”, and Germany has clearly chosen apartheid and what she describes as “the imperialist project that is called Israel” over native liberation.

What is surprising though is the sheer level and volume of pro-Zionazi solidarity and anti-Palestinian repression currently sweeping through Germany, the omnipresence of legally permitted and socially accepted bigotry being felt by Palestinians and their allies in all spheres of life, having infected every body part of the nation’s anatomy (state institutions, businesses, the media, cultural life, etc.).

Equally startling is the fact that this reactionary wave of misguided German support for “Israel” as it commits one barbaric war crime in Gaza after the other is being presided over by a self-acclaimed left-leaning liberal federal government whose hawkish and staunchly pro-“Israel” foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, is even a member of the nominally left-wing Green party (who would have thought that the once peace-loving Greens would become Germany’s most fanatical war-monger in Ukraine and shoulder-shruggingly greenlight a genocide in Gaza?).

In reaction to Hamas’ ongoing Al Aqsa Flood operation, political leaders in Germany are advocating to revoke the German citizenships of supporters of Palestinian armed resistance and grant future citizenships to immigrants only on the condition of their acknowledgment of “Israel’s” right to exist. What will come next, having to sing the German national anthem at your naturalization ceremony in front of an Israeli flag?

Furthermore; this year’s Frankfurter Buchmesse, the world’s largest book fair, in an act of anti-Palestinian collective punishment and erasure of Israeli human rights abuses canceled the prize ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli and her book “Minor Detail”, a fictionalized story of the real-life rape and murder of a Palestinian Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers in 1949.

While Germany’s interior ministry is preparing to ban the German chapter of Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network which is leading the resistance against violent and racist police repression in the Arab quarter of Berlin’s gentrified Neukölln district where night after night gangs of militarized police thugs are clashing with “Free Free Palestine!” chanting Arab-German youth, the liberal white supremacist German media is engaging in wholesale genocide-denialism, their Middle East news coverage focusing exclusively on the plight of an estimated 200 Israeli hostages while treating the over 4,000 Palestinians killed in “Israel’s” psychopathic Armageddon as a mere afterthought.

As if all this weren’t malicious enough, the inhuman carnage “Israel” is unleashing on Gaza and the immeasurable suffering Palestinians are experiencing is being celebrated by Germans in ways that are just cruel: lighting up Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg gate with the Israeli flag is not only triggering to every Palestinian in Germany, but to the entire Muslim and BPoC (Black, People of Colour) community in the country.

Why? Because it is a not-so-subtle reminder to Germany’s non-white second-class citizens that despite the country’s multi-racial reality and equality on paper, white Germans will always dictate the terms of hegemonic discourse, chimerical and anti-factual as they may be, as is the West’s image of “Israel” as the “good guy.”

Adding insult to injury is the name of the game in these depressing times: while the ATMs of Berlin’s largest bank Berliner Sparkasse are displaying pro-“Israel” condolences on their screens (but no pro-Palestinian ones: imagine being a Palestinian Berliner withdrawing cash while you are forced to read a discriminatory message that completely ignores the suffering of your people), Pinguin Druck, a Berlin-based printing company, thought it appropriate to ridicule Palestinian pain by placing slips of paper depicting hand-drawn Israeli flags into boxes of pro-Palestine stickers ordered by German solidarity group Palästina Kampagne (better known under their Instagram handle @nakba_75).

What must it feel like when you are grieving and everyone around you is kicking you while you are down and gleefully reveling in your anguish and sorrow? Germany-based Palestinian-American journalist Hebh Jamal said it best in a social media post after the city of Heidelberg (a Green party stronghold, mind you) banned an anti-war vigil for Gaza:

“We can’t mourn. We live in a fascist country. We are human animals according to Germans. […] I can’t mourn those beautiful lives lost. Germany you are an ugly ugly ugly place. I never hated you more than I do right now.”

Germany’s enmity towards the Palestinian people and their righteous struggle for justice, liberty, and peace is solely to blame for this wholly understandable and legitimate counter-hate, and the two-time genocidaire that is now whole-heartedly supporting “Israel’s” genocide in Gaza only has itself to blame.

You reap what you sow, dear Deutschland.

Germany continues to be “an enduring enemy of the Palestinian struggle” | Al Mayadeen English