Germany's Greens need to be denazified

Genocide buddies: Annalena Baerbock and Benjamin Netanyahu. (Israeli Government Press Office)

Soon after joining Ireland’s Green Party in the 1990s, I attended a few discussions about the roots of ecological politics.

I don’t recall contributing much to those discussions. I just sat and listened to activists who were more clever and better informed than I was.

One such activist noted that there had previously been a political organization expressing a strong attachment to nature: The Nazis often talked about blood and soil.

At the time, I didn’t want to believe that Nazis could have influenced the international green movement in any way. The German Greens I had seen on television all appeared to be espousing a “make love not war” philosophy.

Today, the Greens’ Annalena Baerbock is foreign minister in the Berlin government. She talks about learning from her country’s past, while doing the opposite.

Baerbock identifies the Holocaust as “the worst crime the world has ever seen.” To atone for it, she is enabling a holocaust in Gaza, the worst crime that the world has seen so far this century.

Germany has just released new data showing that it approved military exports worth more than $100 million to Israel over the past three months.

The new revelation contradicts reports that Baerbock and a Green colleague were refusing to approve new weapons shipments destined for Israel. The Greens were said to be demanding a written guarantee that German weapons would not be used for genocide.

It is significant that Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has insisted that weapons deliveries to Israel are continuing – without any pushback (in public at least) from Baerbock.

There are reasons to be skeptical about the claims that she wanted a “genocide clause” in the paperwork covering arms deliveries.

Germany is actually shielding Israel against the charge of genocide.

When South Africa filed a case with the International Court of Justice alleging that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention, Germany hastily indicated that it would intervene on Israel’s side. Baerbock herself said in January that she could not see how Israel was intent on committing genocide in its war on Gaza, which she characterized as one of “self-defense.”

Abuse of history

In June, Baerbock gave a speech about Germany’s former colonies.

She stated unequivocally that her country has “historical responsibility” for the “genocide inflicted on the Herero and Nama peoples” in South West Africa (now Namibia) during the early 1900s.

Baerbock asked how Germany should deal with the past, without acknowledging that it is facilitating a genocide in the present.

About 30 percent of all major arms imported by Israel between 2019 and 2023 came from Germany. Only the US was a bigger external supplier of arms to Israel in that period.

And when the genocide got underway, Baerbock spent many weeks refusing to call for a ceasefire.

In a November 2023 interview with Deutsche Welle, Baerbock spoke of how “we are committed to our German responsibility.”

“And that means giving Jewish men and women, who Germany tried to annihilate under the Nazi dictatorship, a safe country,” she said. “That is the state of Israel and that’s why Israel’s security is Germany’s reason of state.”

It is an abuse of history to invoke the Holocaust in that way.

The Nazis saw the Jews as Untermensch – subhuman – and sought to exterminate them so that a vision of Aryan racial purity could be pursued.

Israel sees Palestinians as “human animals” and is waging a war of extermination against them. The “safe country” (Israel) to which Baerbock is committed is nuclear-armed and placing world peace in jeopardy so that Benjamin Netanyahu can remain prime minister and his far-right coalition partners can pursue a vision of ethno-religious supremacy.

The green movement clearly needs to be denazified.

If Annalena Baerbock and the German Greens keep supporting Israel’s crimes, it is vital that they are shunned by their sister parties elsewhere in Europe.

There is no room for difference of opinion on genocide. Greens are either for it or against it.