Germany's silence on Gaza while children starve reveals its dark colonial secret
For three months, Israel enforced a total blockade on Gaza, denying food, water, medicine and fuel to over two million Palestinians. Since the end of May, it has introduced a cruel system of aid distribution that is in fact a death trap used to exterminate starving Palestinians.
Even now, when Israel's sadistic lust for extermination has unleashed unimaginable suffering, and you can smell the burnt flesh of Palestinian children in western capitals and hear their screams of pain as they starve to death, Germany's elites remain silent.
The country where the smell of burning people and their starving to death once stood for one of the greatest crimes against humanity now remains steadfastly on the side of those whose heinous crimes spread that same smell and suffering again.
"Do you condemn the Zionists for their massacres of innocent Palestinian children?" one is tempted to ask these elites.
Their answer, however, would be little more than a variation on their favourite hollow refrain: "Israel has the right to burn children alive in the tents it forced them into, and the right to starve them to death."
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In 20 months of genocide, nothing has changed for Germany's ruling class. They supported Israel when the genocidal regime let newborn babies freeze to death or suffocate in incubators. They willingly accept that the Israeli army deliberately and purposefully kills Palestinian children, and they look the other way when they are left to starve and die of thirst.
This is today's Germany: a country without a moral compass or conscience, infected with an elite whose silence in the face of Israeli crimes has long crossed into the obscene.
But while it may appear that Germany's elites are simply waiting for the genocide to end in the hope that everything will return to normal, their Faustian pact with the Zionist regime has already made them all accomplices. Having sold their souls to a genocidal government, they are now silent in the face of its orgy of extermination.
However, this silence on the part of the elites inadvertently reveals what the country has tried so carefully to conceal for decades.
Unconfronted past
Germans grow up believing that their country is the most committed defender of human rights and international law.
From an early age, they are told that Germany is a good country - a model democracy that emerged after World War Two, with educated citizens who understand their regrettable past and do everything they can to prevent its recurrence.
And they believe it, fervently.
If denazification, re-education and democratisation had truly succeeded, the language and actions of the Zionist regime today would set off alarm bells
But this self-image is one of the nation's greatest self-deceptions. Denazification was superficial at best. Re-education was conducted by the wrong teachers. And as for confronting the country's settler-colonial legacy, that has never been on the agenda.
Prosecuting a few high-ranking Nazis at Nuremberg does not amount to the wholesale denazification of society or its institutions. As we know, far more continuity followed fascism than Germany is willing to admit.
Even the much-vaunted US-led "re‑education" programme was deeply flawed. As political scientist David Michael Smith has shown, American "democracy" was built on the genocide of millions of Indigenous people - an atrocity that inspired the Nazis and now serves as a model for the Zionists.
It is worse still when it comes to the concealment of Germany's own settler-colonial crimes, including genocide. The white supremacist worldview that dehumanised others and inspired Nazism has never been meaningfully addressed.
These truths remain excluded from Germany's collective memory, from its official discourse, and even from its commemorative rituals. They are unspeakable.
And yet what is repressed eventually erupts - or remains as the constant background music to everything a people pretend to be and do.
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In the 1930s, the Nazis unleashed the repressed sadism it had brought back from the German colonies. Today, the decades-long repression of historical truth and contempt for non-white life resurfaces in the genocide being carried out by Germany's murderous friends.
As Israel's campaign of annihilation continues, Germany's elites are forced to peer into the abyss of their own corruption - and still they defend, fund and promote the crime.
What is revealed is the ugly truth: the enduring force of Germany's white-supremacist settler-colonial mindset, now embodied in the elites' celebration of Palestinian death. If denazification, re-education and democratisation had truly succeeded, the language and actions of the Zionist regime today would set off alarm bells.
Announcing a Greater Israel; bombing and invading neighbouring countries; waging total war to annihilate another people; declaring a "final solution" in Gaza; calling human beings "human animals"; letting an entire population starve and die of thirst - all of this should remind Germans and their elites of their own history, of what their country once did to others. If only they were willing to face it.
If Germany's elites possessed the slightest sense of responsibility - a conscience worthy of the name - then the mass death in Gaza, and the destruction in the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, would confront them with the unbearable weight of history. The suffering would haunt them as a nightmare and deprive them of sleep.
Instead, they sleep soundly and abide by Germany's glorification of Zionism. They remain the "loyal subjects" described by Heinrich Mann more than a century ago.
Little has changed. Germany's elites remain submissive, fearful, and obedient.
Political theatre
With Friedrich Merz's election as chancellor, the obscenity of German support for Israel's genocide has reached new heights.
When Merz hosted the president of the Zionist settler colony, Isaac Herzog, as his first official foreign guest, they posed before a giant photograph inside the Chancellery. The image showed what Israel now calls Livni Beach - a place they had agreed to visit together soon.
Of course, what the German public is not told is that Livni Beach sits atop the ruins of the Palestinian village of Hiribya, destroyed and ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the Nakba of 1948.
Germany's support for Israel's far-right alliance shatters its 'denazified' facade Read More »
Merz will soon stand on that beach admiring the sun, without giving a moment's thought to those who were murdered or expelled from there.
And even now, as the Zionist regime wages an illegal war of aggression against Iran, this chancellor does not speak of a clear violation of international law. Instead, he praises the western colony and declares that Israel is "doing the dirty work for all of us" - by which he means the West, of course.
How obscene can the actions of a German chancellor be?
Also in May, on his first overseas trip - which, naturally, took the new German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, to Israel - he, like many of his predecessors, was not above adopting Israel's mendacious propaganda.
After completing the obligatory visit to Yad Vashem, Wadephul expressed understanding for Israel's decision to block humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians in Gaza, citing claims that Hamas might exploit the supplies.
Again, the German public is not told that, like Livni Beach, Yad Vashem was also built on the ruins of the Nakba. As Palestinian anthropologist Honaida Ghanim has documented:
Yad Vashem was built upon the lands of Khirbet al-Hamama, which were public lands that belonged to the village of Ein Karem - one of the largest villages in the Jerusalem district in terms of space and population, home to 2,510 Muslims and 670 Christians. Unlike most other Palestinian villages, its houses and other structures were preserved from demolition - but only after the Arab residents were expelled from their homes, prevented from returning, and their houses were inhabited by Jews in their place.
Still, the message remains the same: because of Germany's past, its hands are tied. The Palestinians must starve and die of thirst - and the German government, of course, will regret this deeply.
Elite complicity
In May 2025, the Protestant Church in Germany, part of the country's moral elite, banned a travelling exhibition on the Nakba - not even on the current genocide - from its biennial nationwide convention.
Of course, they had no problem offering the stage to the ousted genocide supporter and denier, Olaf Scholz. Yet to this day, not a single word from the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on the Zionist genocide.
On 24 May 2025, as children starved - and many had already starved to death - Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's leading liberal newspaper and self-styled "opinion leader", argued that Germany could not criticise Israel as harshly as Canada, France or the UK, lest it be accused of abandoning a "traumatised people".
A prominent German columnist inviting readers to pity a regime whose Jewish population overwhelmingly supports the extermination of all Palestinians
In good German tradition, columnist Daniel Brossler made himself the stooge of the crime of the 21st century, repeating the old Zionist propaganda that casts Israel as the victim. This elite journalist is prepared to turn history on its head.
He joins the long line of elites who specialise in "blaming the victims" of Zionist settler-colonial oppression, and declares Israel traumatised, inviting German readers to pity a regime whose Jewish population overwhelmingly supports, and openly demands, the extermination of all Palestinians.
How mendaciously German can one be?
Brossler not only inverts victim and perpetrator, but conceals - and thus justifies - the decades-long traumatisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and within 1948 borders.
It is the Palestinians who have endured daily humiliation, siege and brutal war in an open-air prison, culminating in today's relentless genocide.
And then there are Germany's academic elites - the obedient heads of its "universities of excellence", including Ludwig Maximilian University and the Technical University in Munich, and the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin - who silence anyone who speaks out for the victims of genocide.
Some have even gone so far as to cancel appearances by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories - a figure who, unlike the German elite, lives up to the responsibilities of her position and speaks out against the silence and lies of the powerful.
What an abysmal disgrace the behaviour of these university presidents is for German science.
New guilt
Pretending not to smell the burning flesh of Palestinian children or hear their cries, Germany's submissive and fearful elites are doing precisely what Norman Finkelstein has condemned: using the Holocaust not to honour its victims, but to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Welcome to Berlin, the capital of Zionist repression
Jurgen Mackert Read More »
As he put it: "The biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it but using it to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people."
By despicably misusing the Holocaust in this way, Germany's elites have failed utterly.
They have lost all credibility and should never again raise their voices in the name of human rights or humanity. From their mouths, such values will only ring hollow.
These white elites will never raise their voices for non-white Palestinians.
They do not even shudder in the face of infanticide on a biblical scale. Their silence is deafening. Repulsive. Obscene.
This is Germany's new guilt.
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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