2023-2024 Israel–Hamas war #4

JohninMK wrote:Not sure how anyone can argue that this attack was not deliberate or a mistake.
Suribelle
@Syribelle
The World Central Kitchen, an international food charity announced Tuesday that it is halting aid operations after a U.S.-sponsored Israeli airstrike slaughtered 7 aid workers which included Foreign Nationals. Despite coordination with the Occupation Forces the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse.

an AI 

We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives

The extent of the German government’s support for Israel during its ongoing offensive in Gaza has taken many by surprise. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been even more restrained in his criticisms of Tel Aviv than US President Joe Biden. A central point of reference for German politicians is the notion of Staatsräson (“state reason”). This was a term first coined in an essay by Germany’s former ambassador to Israel, Rudolf Dreßler, in the early 2000s and repeated by Angela Merkel in a speech before the Knesset in 2008. It has since become a centerpiece of German public statements and an ideological tool to legitimize Israel’s “right to self-defense”. As Scholz said on 12 October 2023: “At this moment there is only one place for Germany. We stand with Israel. …This is what we mean when we say, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson.”

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, commonly referred to as “West Germany” during the Cold War) was founded in May 1949. In a similar way to South Korea and Taiwan, the FRG was created after the Second World War under the wing of the USA to act as a bulwark against socialism. As a central actor in the West’s “containment” and “rollback” strategies, the West German state had to be both aggressive towards the socialist East and docile towards the capitalist West. The influence of the corporations that had funded Hitler was thus intentionally restored and the businessmen with ties to the Nazi party were unofficially pardoned for their role in fascist Germany’s crimes against humanity, despite often directly profiting from forced labor during the Third Reich (e.g., Daimler, Siemens, Rheinmetall, etc.). At the same time, the FRG was tightly bound into the US-led order through the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which to this day includes the stationing of tens of thousands of US troops in Germany.

The leaders of the young FRG were immediately confronted with the problem of how to publicly address the Holocaust. Pictures of concentration camp inmates sent shock waves around the world and gave rise to the international call: Never again! Yet domestically, West Germany could not afford a thorough denazification of society, for this would destabilize the capitalist basis of the FRG as it had done in East Germany, where Nazi war criminals and businessmen had been rigorously expropriated. Thus, rather than addressing the economic roots of fascism and prosecuting sections of the ruling class for abetting Hitler, conservatives and liberals in the FRG fostered a narrative of collective German guilt that all citizens would have to atone for. It was not capitalism and the liberal system of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) that had enabled the rise of fascism, but the cultural propensities of the German people.

In this election poster from 1949, the Liberal Democratic party (FDP) – today a member of the governing coalition in Germany – lists an “End to Denazification” as its first demand. https://peoplesdispatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Germanelection-poster-FDP.jpg

This political strategy has been evident in West Germany’s support for the state of Israel, which had been founded one year prior to the FRG. The first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had publicly described the FRG’s first reparation agreement with Israel in 1952 as being “based on a compelling moral obligation”. In the face of domestic criticism over the three-billion-marks agreement – particularly from the Liberal Democratic party (FDP) and from his own Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) – Adenauer announced that “there are higher values than good business.” Yet, recently uncovered documents from the German Foreign Office reveal that Adenauer was in fact only “willing to negotiate reparations [with Israel] due to pressure from the USA”. The chancellor had referred to West Germany’s relationship with the USA and said that “breaking off negotiations with Israel without results would create the most serious political and economic dangers for the Federal Republic”.

In other words, it was stipulated by the USA that if the FRG wanted to become a powerful player in European politics again, it would have to provide significant political, economic, and military support to the state of Israel. While there was considerable domestic discontent over this precondition in the beginning, the leaders of the FRG have come to appreciate relations with Israel as conducive to their own interests, both in terms of geopolitical strategy and profitable ventures for German industries.

For instance, arms sales to Israel have skyrocketed in recent years; Siemens regularly profits from Israeli contracts, such as the 2018 tender by Israel Railways that was worth roughly one billion euros; and German drugmaker Merck (the founding family of which were staunch Nazis) also maintains research sites and projects worth millions across Israel. In the face of horrific images coming out of Palestine, the German media will justify the export of arms and capital to Israel by uncritically repeating the official government line: “In the past, Germany has above all supplied submarines to Israel and also subsidized exports with taxpayers’ money. The background to this is that Germany has declared Israel’s security to be Staatsräson in view of the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany.”

Concepts such as Staatsräson and collective German guilt have thus been developed as ideological instruments to both deflect responsibility from the German capitalist class for Nazi war crimes in the past and disguise the brutal pursuit of their economic and political interests in West Asia in the present day. This helps the German government to create extremely narrow confines for the public debate around these policies. Since October 7, Staatsräson has also been employed to drastically intensify anti-migrant measures. The most brazen of these is perhaps a new decree in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where applicants for German citizenship will now have to pledge allegiance to Israel’s “right to exist”.

The Federal Republic of Germany stands in the tradition of German capitalism, with all of the skeletons hiding in its closet. Its unconditional support for Israel is the product of, on the one hand, self-seeking economic and geopolitical interests in the region and, on the other, the effort to deflect responsibility for the holocaust and the unwillingness to denazify West German society. The other Germany – the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – stood in a very different tradition. It was governed by the communists and social democrats that had languished in exile or Hitler’s concentration camps during the Third Reich. There, the demand “Never again!” was understood not as collective guilt to be carried by all Germans, but as a militant duty to combat fascism and racism, regardless of the specific form they took. As such, the GDR was a staunch support for the Palestinian’s right to self-determination and resistance to occupation.

In the last year, Palestinian left groups and human rights organizations had intensified efforts to demand Daqqah’s release due to the systematic denial to adequate medical care by the Israeli occupation prison services. Additionally, Daqqah finished his original 37-year sentence in March 2023, but his release was blocked because in 2018 Israeli authorities charged him with attempting to smuggle mobile phones into prison and sentenced him for two more years in prison, knowing he was terminally ill.

ahmedfire wrote:More 4 terrorists were killed yesterday .