The German government is playing a key role in the escalation of the war fronts in the Middle East and Ukraine. At the end of last week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democrat, SPD) announced new arms deliveries for Israel and another multi-billion arms package for Ukraine.
At a joint press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin on Friday, Scholz boasted that Germany was “the strongest military supporter of Ukraine in Europe and the second strongest in the world” and that it would remain so. His government “has just delivered a new comprehensive military support package worth over 600 million euros to Ukraine.” This included, among other things, an air defence system, armoured personnel carriers, battle tanks, self-propelled howitzers, artillery ammunition and drones.
By the end of the year, “with the support of our partners Belgium, Denmark and Norway, we will also deliver a further military support package worth around 1.4 billion to Ukraine” and “vigorously continue our military support for Ukraine” next year as well. Four billion euros “in direct bilateral aid” had already been earmarked in the budget for this. A Russian “dictated peace” would not be accepted.
Despite the risk of a nuclear escalation, the NATO powers are constantly fanning the flames of the conflict in order to avert a complete defeat of the Ukrainian army in the proxy war with Russia. NATO is currently practising for nuclear war. On Monday, the two-week manoeuvres “Steadfast Noon” began over the North Sea, in which, according to Brussels, around 2,000 military personnel from eight air bases and 60 aircraft will be involved. Among them are German fighter jets, which would drop US nuclear bombs on Russia in an emergency as part of the nuclear sharing programme.
Berlin is acting just as provocatively and aggressively in the Middle East. Last Thursday, Scholz promised Israel further arms deliveries in the Bundestag (federal parliament). Refuting claims in the media of a pause in German weapons supplies to Israel, he said, “We have not decided not to deliver weapons. We have delivered weapons and we will deliver weapons. That is the position of the German government.” He would not violate the “secrecy rules of the Federal Security Council; but we have also made decisions in government that will ensure that there will be further deliveries soon.”
This once again underlines Germany’s complicity in the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Immediately after the beginning of the Israeli campaign of annihilation, Berlin increased its arms deliveries to Tel Aviv tenfold. Now the government is preparing further deliveries behind the backs of the population, which will bring death to tens of thousands more and enable the Israeli army to reduce the entire region to ashes and ruins.
Over the past year, well over 40,000 people—the majority of them women and children—were killed in Gaza alone. According to an estimate by the renowned medical journal The Lancet, as many as 186,000 people had lost their lives by July, counting deaths from starvation, disease and other consequences of the Israeli bombardment. Although practically the entire Gaza Strip has now been bombed, Israel continues its murderous attacks without pause and is now expanding the war to the entire region. In Lebanon, thousands have already died in the Israeli bombing and tens of thousands have been injured. An Israeli attack on Iran, which would plunge the entire region into a catastrophic maelstrom of war, is imminent.
In their speeches, representatives of the government and opposition parties left no doubt that they support the genocide in Gaza and the expansion of the war. “For a year now, Israel has been defending itself; it must defend itself and has every right to do so,” said Gabriela Heinrich, deputy parliamentary leader of the SPD. She cynically said that Israel and the imperialist powers were not responsible for the mass murder, but Hamas and Hezbollah. “They claim to be fighting for the Palestinian cause, but they abuse people as human shields. The consequences: immense suffering, dead and malnourished children, refugee movements, terror.”
The Green foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, took the same line. “International humanitarian law and Israel’s right to exist are inextricably linked,” she claimed. This was a “reason of state for Germany.” And then:
That is why we have repeatedly made it clear: self-defence naturally means not only attacking terrorists, but destroying them… When Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools, then we enter very difficult areas. But we do not duck away from this. That is why I made it clear at the United Nations: civilian places can also lose their protected status.
Everyone should remember these words. The former pacifists of the Greens, who for a long time continued to use phrases about human rights and democracy to justify imperialist wars, are now openly defending the destruction of hospitals and schools and the mass murder of civilians. They say one should not “duck away” from this. Nor from further arms deliveries. The Federal Republic of Germany has “made it clear that we are supplying weapons to support Israel.”
Similar to the representatives of the coalition government—the SPD, Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP)—the leader of the opposition and designated chancellor candidate of the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), Friedrich Merz (CDU), also repeated the propaganda lies of the right-wing extremist Netanyahu regime to justify the deadly attacks on hospitals, old people’s homes, kindergartens and densely populated residential areas.
“Yes, many innocent people are dying in Gaza and, for several weeks now, in Lebanon too. But in Israel there are no hidden weapons depots under hospitals,” he exclaimed, to applause from members of parliament from the governing parties and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). And in Israel, he continued, there were also “no rocket launchers next to old people’s homes and kindergartens.” The “terrorists” of Hamas and Hezbollah abused “innocent civilians, including women and children, as human shields for their horrific deeds.”
No amount of abuse, calling Palestinians “terrorists,” can hide the fact that they are the oppressed and that the actions of the oppressors—the Zionist state and its imperialist backers—are fascistic in character. In supporting the Gaza genocide, the ruling class in Germany is continuing its genocidal traditions. This is also underscored by the fact that Israel’s actions are being celebrated by the AfD, an extreme right-wing party whose leading personnel openly glorify Hitler’s army and agitate against the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
In the Bundestag, AfD representatives combined their expressions of support for Israel’s genocide with fascist attacks against refugees and Muslims—and this in the name of the alleged fight against “antisemitism.” This vile campaign is also being adopted by the establishment parties. It serves two purposes: to play down the real antisemitism that emanates from the ruling class itself, and to criminalise the enormous opposition to the genocide and the return of German imperialism and suppress it with ever more brutal methods.
In addition, there are concrete imperialist goals behind the defence of Israel. Washington, Berlin and Brussels want to subjugate the entire oil-rich and geo-strategically critical Middle East, also to escalate the confrontation with Russia and China. The recent deployment of US ground troops to Israel indicates that Washington and Tel Aviv are preparing to launch a massive attack on Iran in the very near future. The genocidal incitement by those in the Bundestag shows that the ruling class in Germany also supports this escalation.
Christian Dürr, the leader of the FDP parliamentary group, demanded in his speech: “In everything we do, we must be clear about who and what is at the core of the decades-long violence in the Middle East—it is the Iranian mullah regime that is the cause, that is the mastermind behind the violence of Hezbollah and Hamas against the state of Israel and its citizens.” Therefore, one must “take a closer look at Iran.” This, too, was “the geopolitical responsibility of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
The Left Party was particularly aggressive in this regard. After former parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch had already called for more aggressive action against Iran, he repeated this in the Bundestag. One conclusion the government should have drawn “from the cruel events of a year ago should have been a radical departure from Germany’s previous policy on Iran.” The transfer of knowledge and technology to Iran should have been “stopped immediately,” because “the engineers behind the Hamas bombs have been getting their know-how from Iran for years.”