This article argues that genuine solidarity with Palestine must be rooted in an antiracist framework. It traces the history of Zionism from its colonial origins to the present genocide in Gaza and the entrenched apartheid in the West Bank, revealing how racial narratives underpin and sustain Western — and especially German — political support for these crimes. By exposing the global nature of these racial logics, it makes the case that confronting Zionism abroad is inseparable from dismantling racism wherever it operates.

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Early Zionist Thought and Colonial Self-Identification

Theodor Herzl, regarded as the father of political Zionism, articulated the movement’s colonial orientation from its inception. Writing in the context of European imperial expansion and the so-called “Scramble for Africa,” Herzl drew directly on the language and logic of settler colonialism. In his 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat¹, he referred to “important experiments in colonization” already underway in Palestine and argued that Jews “should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”². Such framing positioned the Zionist project not only as a nationalist endeavor but as a contribution to the broader “civilizing mission” of European colonial powers.

We should form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat)

Herzl also sought to align Zionism with prominent imperial figures of his time. In 1902, he wrote to Cecil Rhodes—the British imperialist, mining magnate, and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony whose colonization of southern Africa became emblematic of settler colonialism—explicitly describing the Zionist project as “something colonial”³. By appealing to Rhodes, Herzl signaled that Zionism was not opposed to colonialism, but rather saw itself as part of its global expansionist framework. This willingness to situate the Jewish national movement within the strategic and ideological currents of European imperialism would later shape the alliances Zionist leaders pursued with colonial powers, most notably Britain during the Mandate period.

This self-identification with colonialism was not limited to Theodor Herzl; it was shared across the early leadership of the Zionist movement. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, openly characterized the movement as “a colonization adventure”⁴. A staunch advocate of a maximalist territorial vision, Jabotinsky argued that Jewish settlement in Palestine required the open and unapologetic application of colonial methods, including the use of force to overcome Indigenous resistance—a view famously articulated in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall”⁵. For Jabotinsky, the aim was not merely agricultural colonization but the establishment of an ethnonational state secured through demographic transformation and military strength.

Max Nordau, Herzl’s close collaborator and vice president of the World Zionist Organization, likewise rejected gradualist or small-scale approaches. Speaking in 1905, he dismissed “all colonization on a small scale” in favor of a large, organized settler enterprise capable of transforming Palestine’s demographic and political realities⁶. Nordau’s position reflected a broader consensus among Zionist leaders that the project required systematic planning, substantial financial backing, and political sponsorship from imperial powers.

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Building the Colonial Infrastructure through the Kibbutzim

Such statements reveal that the terms “colonial” and “colonization” were not, in this context, derogatory labels applied by critics, but self-ascriptions embraced within the Zionist movement. This rhetorical openness illustrates both the deep integration of Zionist thought within the imperial culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the extent to which its leaders viewed their aims as part of the broader project of European settler colonialism⁷.

Major Zionist institutions embedded this colonial identity in their very names and organizational mandates. The Jewish Colonisation Association, founded in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, financed agricultural settlement for Jews in Palestine and other territories as part of a broader colonization program⁸. The Jewish Colonial Trust, established in 1899 as the financial arm of the World Zionist Organization, served as the central bank for settlement activities⁹. The Jewish Agency, which emerged from the Palestine Office of the Zionist Organization, maintained a dedicated colonization department responsible for land purchase, agricultural planning, and demographic engineering¹⁰. Land acquired through these bodies—whether purchased or allocated—was held under restrictive covenants administered by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which prohibited transfer or lease to non-Jews, thereby ensuring permanent Jewish control over territory¹¹.

By the early 20th century, Zionist policy extended beyond land acquisition to the regulation of labor. In 1905, elements within the movement formalized the principle of avoda ivrit (Hebrew labor), which required that Jewish-owned enterprises employ exclusively Jewish workers¹². This doctrine was explicitly designed to displace Palestinian Arab labor from the agricultural sector, restructure the rural economy to favor Jewish settlers, and cultivate self-sufficient agricultural communities capable of sustaining the Zionist national project¹³. The policy was enforced both economically—through preferential allocation of land and resources—and politically, via the institutional authority of Zionist labor organizations such as the Histadrut after its founding in 1920¹⁴.

On the ground, these interlinked policies materialized most visibly in the creation of kibbutzim—collectivist, all-Jewish agricultural settlements. Established from the early 20th century onwards, kibbutzim were deliberately located in strategic-only settlements beyond Israel’s pre-1967 borders, embodying the combination of agricultural production, demographic exclusivity, and military preparedness that characterized the Zionist approach to colonization¹⁵. In many cases, the establishment of a kibbutz directly displaced Palestinian communities, appropriated cultivated fields, and integrated the land into the settler economy, further consolidating Jewish demographic dominance in targeted regions¹⁶.

These practices were not incidental byproducts of settlement but integral components of a deliberate strategy to create what Gershon Shafir has termed an “ethnic labor economy,” in which access to both land and employment was racially delimited in order to foster a self-contained settler society¹⁷. The insistence on avoda ivrit and the kibbutz model not only excluded Palestinian Arab labor, but also severed the economic interdependence that had historically existed between Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine¹⁸. This separation reinforced a dual economic structure: a relatively capital-intensive, mechanized, and subsidized Jewish sector oriented toward export markets, and an increasingly marginalized Arab sector subject to land dispossession, wage depression, and restricted access to resources¹⁹. By embedding these exclusions into the institutional framework of the Yishuv, Zionist leaders laid the groundwork for a system of spatial and economic segregation that would persist—and later be codified in law—well beyond the establishment of the State of Israel²⁰.

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The Nakba and the Settler-Colonial Structure

As historian Rashid Khalidi has noted, Zionism was both a colonial and a national project. In a Vox interview, he explained: “Zionism, of course, has a national aspect, but as early Zionists all understood and accepted and were not ashamed of, it was a colonial project. It was a settler-colonial movement to bring persecuted Jews from Europe to Palestine, where they would establish a Jewish majority state”²¹. In a separate Current Affairs interview, Khalidi emphasized the distinctiveness of the Zionist project: unlike English settlers in North America or Australia, or French settlers in Algeria, Zionist settlers were not the direct emanation of a “mother country.” Rather, it was an independent nationalist enterprise whose success depended on sustained support from European imperial powers, particularly Britain during the Mandate period. Khalidi stressed that “without the backing of great European colonial powers [it] would never have been able to succeed”²².

The settler-colonial nature of Zionism became fully evident in 1948 during the Nakba (“catastrophe”), when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes in present-day Israel. An Israeli Defense Forces intelligence report from that year acknowledged that “without a doubt, hostilities were the main factor in the population movement”²³. These refugees and their descendants were denied the right to return, even as the 1950 Law of Return granted automatic citizenship to Jews worldwide²⁴.

Patrick Wolfe’s influential model of settler colonialism helps explain this trajectory. In contrast to classical colonialism, which focuses on exploiting Indigenous labor and resources, settler colonialism is “a structure, not an event,” aimed at eliminating the native population and replacing it with a settler society²⁵. This elimination can occur through direct expulsion, assimilation, segregation, and legal disenfranchisement. Israel’s ongoing settlement expansion—currently including nearly 700,000 settlers in the occupied West Bank—alongside its control over Palestinian movement, land, and resources, has led numerous scholars and human rights organizations to classify it as a continuing form of settler colonialism²⁶.

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Genocide in Gaza

The Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 has been characterized by numerous human rights organizations, UN experts, and legal scholars as meeting the criteria for genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention²⁷. By early 2024, the death toll in Gaza had exceeded 30,000, with thousands more unaccounted for under rubble, the vast majority being civilians, including a disproportionately high number of children²⁸. The destruction extended to hospitals, schools, water and sanitation infrastructure, and the deliberate blocking of humanitarian aid — measures explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law²⁹.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in provisional measures ordered on 26 January 2024 in South Africa v. Israel, found that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and instructed Israel to prevent genocidal acts and allow humanitarian access³⁰. Despite this, reports from the UN and NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch indicate that Israel intensified its military operations, including indiscriminate bombardments and the weaponization of siege conditions to induce famine³¹.

Indeed, mounting evidence shows that Israel has been using starvation as a deliberate tool of genocide. Amnesty International has documented that “Israel’s continued blocking of aid and attacks on food supplies point to the use of starvation to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza.”³² B’Tselem has described Israel’s policy as “manufacturing famine” and committing “the war crime of starvation in the Gaza Strip.”³³ Médecins Sans Frontières reports that their staff and patients are “wasting away as mass starvation spreads across Gaza,”³⁴ describing the siege as a “death trap” and part of a campaign of total destruction.³⁵

Reactions from Western political elites have largely failed to acknowledge or act upon these findings. In the United States, military aid and diplomatic cover at the UN Security Council continued unabated³⁶. In the European Union, while some member states expressed concern over humanitarian conditions, leading powers such as Germany, France, and the UK maintained arms exports to Israel and publicly defended its military actions as self-defense³⁷. The German government, in particular, not only rejected accusations of genocide but also filed to intervene on Israel’s behalf at the ICJ³⁸. This alignment with Israeli policy occurred despite Germany’s international legal obligations under the Genocide Convention to prevent and not be complicit in such crimes³⁹.

These responses reveal a consistent pattern: Western states, while often championing human rights in other contexts, have shielded Israel from accountability. This selective application of international law reflects entrenched geopolitical alliances and, as numerous scholars have argued, a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian life is systematically devalued⁴⁰.

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Germany between Genocide and Staatsräson

Germany’s political establishment has been one of Israel’s most steadfast defenders during the ongoing war on Gaza, even as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found a plausible risk of genocide in January 2024⁴¹. Across the political spectrum, from the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), senior leaders have framed unconditional support for Israel as a matter of “Staatsräson” — a core principle of German state policy⁴². This consensus even extends to Die Linke, a party once more critical of Israeli policy, whose parliamentary group in 2019 introduced the motion BDS-Bewegung ablehnen – Friedliche Lösung im Nahen Osten befördern in the Bundestag, explicitly rejecting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and framing it as incompatible with a peaceful resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.⁴³

(To clarify: In May 2019, the German Bundestag debated two motions regarding the BDS movement. The motion by Die Linke titled „BDS-Bewegung ablehnen – Friedliche Lösung im Nahen Osten befördern“⁴⁴ was rejected. In contrast, a joint motion by Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, CDU/CSU, SPD und FDP titled „Der BDS-Bewegung entschlossen entgegentreten – Antisemitismus bekämpfen“⁴⁵ was adopted, marking the official parliamentary stance against BDS)

In public statements, SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, CDU leader Friedrich Merz, and Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock have consistently defended Israel’s military actions in Gaza, framing them as self-defense, despite mounting evidence of war crimes and the use of starvation as a weapon of war⁴⁶. This political posture is reinforced by broad parliamentary support: in November 2023, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning Hamas, affirming Israel’s right to military action, and making no mention of the ICJ proceedings or calls for a ceasefire⁴⁷.

Even as footage from Gaza revealed mass civilian deaths, the destruction of entire neighborhoods, and UN warnings of famine, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz reaffirmed Germany’s alignment with Israel’s war policy. In an official statement on 8 August 2025, Merz maintained that “Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’ terror” while announcing only a temporary halt to exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip⁴⁸. By insisting on Israel’s “right to defend itself” even amidst allegations of genocide before the International Court of Justice—and having previously described Israel’s campaign as “the dirty work that Israel is doing for us all”⁴⁹—the German government reinforced the Staatsräson doctrine, ensuring political protection for Israeli policies despite mounting evidence of atrocity crimes.

Das ist die Drecksarbeit, die Israel macht für uns alle.
[This is the dirty work, that Israel does for us.]

Friedrich Merz, 17.06.2025

Public opinion in Germany has shifted notably under the impact of the war in Gaza. While decades of state policy have framed unconditional support for Israel as a moral imperative rooted in Holocaust remembrance, surveys now indicate a growing divergence from this official line. An ARD-DeutschlandTREND poll released on 7 August 2025 found that 66% of Germans wanted their government to put more pressure on Israel to change its conduct in Gaza, up from 57% in April 2024 according to a Forsa survey.⁵⁰ Nearly half (47%) believe Berlin is doing too little for Palestinians, and only 31% still feel Germany bears a “special responsibility” toward Israel because of its history, while 62% reject this core tenet of Staatsräson.⁵¹ These numbers reflect a hardening mood among the public, particularly among younger demographics and migrant communities, even as the political establishment remains committed to defending Israel’s military actions and limiting criticism to humanitarian appeals.

Central to Germany’s political and media discourse has been the weaponization of the term “antisemitism” to silence criticism of Israeli policy. The 2019 Bundestag resolution labeling the BDS movement as antisemitic⁵² has since been used to justify the cancellation of events, denial of public funding, and defamation of Palestinian activists and their allies⁵³. This expansive and politically charged definition conflates antisemitism — hostility toward Jews as Jews — with legitimate critique of a state’s policies. As scholars and human rights organizations have noted, such conflation undermines the fight against actual antisemitism by instrumentalizing it for foreign policy purposes⁵⁴.

In this context, Germany’s response to the Gaza genocide reflects a broader pattern in which solidarity with Palestinians is marginalized through legal, political, and rhetorical means. This dynamic not only shields Israeli policy from accountability but also reinforces a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian lives are systematically devalued⁵⁵.

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From Culture of Regret to a Racial Order of “Justice for Some”

Germany’s celebrated Erinnerungskultur—its culture of regret and remembrance—has produced important reckonings with the Nazi past, yet it has also hardened into a civil religion that often equates moral rectitude with state loyalty to Israel⁵⁶. In this frame, “antisemitism” is increasingly defined not as hostility toward Jews as Jews but as criticism of Israeli state policy, a shift codified politically (e.g., the 2019 Bundestag BDS resolution) and operationalized through cancellations, funding bans, and policing of Palestinian advocacy.^{57 58 59}The result is a narrowing of anti-racism into a state doctrine that, paradoxically, reproduces racial hierarchy: Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are rendered suspect publics whose speech is presumptively criminalized, while Jewish and non-Jewish critics of Israeli policy are surveilled or excluded. This is how a culture of regret, filtered through raison d’état, generates racial structures in the present.⁶⁰

This narrowing also helps explain the social acceptability of mass civilian destruction in Gaza: when the vocabulary to condemn state violence is pre-emptively pathologized as “antisemitic,” the legal and moral tools that would otherwise trigger prevention duties (under the Genocide Convention and reflected in the ICJ’s provisional measures) are blunted.⁶¹ In practice, Germany’s stance performs what Noura Erakat calls “justice for some”: international law and memory are mobilized selectively to shield allies and discipline dissenters, rather than to constrain power consistently.⁶²

Comparative memory sharpens the point. Germany’s 2021 declaration recognizing the genocide against the Herero and Nama was widely criticized by descendant communities as inadequate and negotiated without full representation, exposing the limits of contrition when it meets geopolitical and fiscal interests.^{63 64} At home, the enduring antigypsyism faced by Sinti and Roma—documented by European rights bodies—shows how racial orders persist beneath commemorative surfaces, even toward groups central to the Nazi genocide.^{65 66} Set against these patterns, the exceptionalism extended to Israel—despite findings and warnings by leading human rights organizations and UN bodies—reveals a continuity: remembrance becomes a national alibi, not an ethical constraint.

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Conclusion

If solidarity with Palestine is to be principled and effective, it must be antiracist by design. As Angela Davis reminds us, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” — a call that resonates across movements confronting racial domination and state violence.⁶⁷ Palestinian activist and scholar Noura Erakat argues that “Palestine is a litmus test for the international order — whether law serves as an instrument of justice or a tool of domination”⁶⁸, insisting that liberation requires dismantling racial hierarchies both in Palestine and in the countries that sustain Israeli apartheid. The 2016 platform of the Movement for Black Lives declares: “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror through its alliance with Israel, which is a key partner in the global militarization of police, border security, and the export of weapons”⁶⁹ — explicitly tying anti-Black state violence in the US to the Israeli occupation.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

International Indigenous and decolonial movements have long affirmed these connections. In 2014, Idle No More and Defenders of the Land stated: “We recognize the deep connections between the struggles of Indigenous peoples here and the Palestinian people’s fight against colonial dispossession and racial apartheid”⁷⁰. In a 2014 communiqué on Gaza, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) condemned Israel’s assault as “a war of extermination against the Palestinian people” and affirmed that, “as the Indigenous that we are, we know the people of Palestine will resist and rise up again… the Zapatistas embrace you now as we did before, as we always will, with our collective heart.”⁷¹ By framing Palestinian liberation as part of the global struggle of Indigenous and oppressed peoples against colonialism, the EZLN located Gaza’s resistance within a shared fight against dispossession and racism worldwide.

European anti-racist networks have underscored that the same political culture which criminalizes criticism of Israel in Germany also fuels the marginalization of Roma, Sinti, and Muslim communities, showing that remembrance, when weaponized, reproduces racial ordering at home.⁷²

Principled solidarity means naming and opposing this racial ordering — one that turns remembrance into a tool of exclusion, recasts critique as bigotry, and normalizes catastrophe. Fighting Zionism “there” requires dismantling the racial logics “here” that make justice for some thinkable.

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References

1. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (Leipzig & Vienna: M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896). ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 29. ↩︎
3. Theodor Herzl to Cecil Rhodes, January 11, 1902, in The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, vol. 4 (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), pp. 1501–1502. ↩︎
4. Vladimir Jabotinsky, quoted in Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 220. ↩︎
5. Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” Rassvyet (November 4, 1923), reprinted in Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed Books, 1984), pp. 33–40. ↩︎
6. Max Nordau, speech to the Seventh Zionist Congress, Basel, 1905, in Proceedings of the Zionist Congresses, vol. 2 (Basel: Zionist Organization, 1911), pp. 72–74. ↩︎
7. Derek Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870–1918 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 16–19. ↩︎
8. Alex Bein, The Jewish Colonization Association (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1961). ↩︎
9. The Jewish Colonial Trust, “Prospectus,” 1899, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), L3/27. ↩︎
10. Anita Shapira, Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 45–47. ↩︎
11. Kenneth W. Stein, “The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 14, no. 2 (1982): 197–223. ↩︎
12. Gur Alroey, “The Concept of Hebrew Labor in the Second Aliyah,” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 3 (2011): 1–28. ↩︎
13. Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 92–110. ↩︎
14. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 53–60. ↩︎
15. Shapira, Land and Power, pp. 163–170. ↩︎
16. Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). ↩︎
17. Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 15–17. ↩︎
18. Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 45–50. ↩︎
19. Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 30–33. ↩︎
20. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 102–104. ↩︎
21. Rashid Khalidi, interview by Jonathan Guyer, “Is Israel a Settler-Colonial State?,” Vox, November 10, 2023, https://www.vox.com/world-politics/24128715/israel-palestine-conflict-settler-colonialism-zionism-history-debate. ↩︎
22. Rashid Khalidi, interview by Nathan J. Robinson, “The War on Palestine,” Current Affairs, October 18, 2022, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/10/the-war-on-palestine. ↩︎
23. Quoted in Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 239; original document available in English via Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, IDF Intelligence Branch, The Emigration of the Arabs of Palestine, June 1948, https://www.akevot.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/1948ISReport-Eng.pdf. ↩︎
24. Law of Return, 5710–1950, State of Israel, passed July 5, 1950. ↩︎
25. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. ↩︎
26. See, for example, Amnesty International, Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity (London: Amnesty International, 2022); Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution (New York: HRW, 2021). ↩︎
27. United Nations Office of the Special Advisers on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect, “Statement on the Situation in Gaza,” 15 November 2023. ↩︎
28. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel,” Situation Report, 5 March 2024. ↩︎
29. Amnesty International, Gaza: Israeli Attacks on Medical Facilities and Blockade Amount to War Crimes, 23 October 2023. ↩︎
30. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order of 26 January 2024. ↩︎
31. Human Rights Watch, Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza, 18 December 2023. ↩︎
32. Amnesty International, “Gaza: Evidence Points to Israel’s Continued Use of Starvation to Inflict Genocide against Palestinians,” 17 July 2025, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/gaza-evidence-points-to-israels-continued-use-of-starvation-to-inflict-genocide-against-palestinians/. ↩︎
33. B’Tselem, “Manufacturing Famine: Israel is Committing the War Crime of Starvation in the Gaza Strip,” 2 April 2024, https://www.btselem.org/publications/202404_manufacturing_famine; B’Tselem, “Our Genocide: Israel’s War on Gaza,” July 2025, https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide. ↩︎
34. Médecins Sans Frontières, “MSF Staff and Patients Are Wasting Away as Mass Starvation Spreads across Gaza,” 4 July 2024. ↩︎
35. Médecins Sans Frontières, “Gaza Death Trap: MSF Report Exposes Israel’s Campaign of Total Destruction,” 10 July 2024, https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gaza-death-trap-msf-report-exposes-israels-campaign-total-destruction. ↩︎
36. Congressional Research Service, U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel, updated 7 February 2024. ↩︎
37. European Council on Foreign Relations, “Europe’s Reactions to the Gaza War,” Policy Brief, February 2024. ↩︎
38. Federal Republic of Germany, “Declaration of Intervention in the Case South Africa v. Israel,” ICJ, 12 February 2024. ↩︎
39. William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 345–347. ↩︎
40. Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), pp. 217–223. ↩︎
41. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order of 26 January 2024. ↩︎
42. Angela Merkel, “Rede von Bundeskanzlerin Dr. Angela Merkel vor der Knesset am 18. März 2008 in Jerusalem,” Bundesregierung, 18 March 2008, https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/service/newsletter-und-abos/bulletin/rede-von-bundeskanzlerin-dr-angela-merkel-796170. ↩︎
43. BDS-Bewegung ablehnen – Friedliche Lösung im Nahen Osten befördern,” Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 19/10261, 15. Mai 2019, https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2019/kw20-de-bds-642892 ↩︎
44. https://dip.bundestag.de/vorgang/bds-bewegung-ablehnen-friedliche-l%C3%B6sung-im-nahen-osten-bef%C3%B6rdern/248240 ↩︎
45. https://dip.bundestag.de/vorgang/der-bds-bewegung-entschlossen-entgegentreten-antisemitismus-bek%C3%A4mpfen/248201 ↩︎
46. Federal Government of Germany, Press Statement by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, 12 October 2023; Foreign Office, “Statement by Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on the Situation in the Middle East,” 20 October 2023; CDU Press Release, “Merz: Israel hat das Recht auf Selbstverteidigung,” 13 October 2023. ↩︎
47. Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 20/9195, 16 November 2023. ↩︎
48. “Statement by Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz on the development in Gaza,” Press and Information Office of the Federal Government, 8 August 2025, bundeskanzler.de. ↩︎
49. Friedrich Merz, interview with ZDF, 17 June 2025, zdf.de ↩︎
50. “As Gaza faces starvation, reluctant Germany starts to curb support for Israel,” Reuters, 9 August 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-faces-starvation-reluctant-germany-starts-curb-support-israel-2025-08-09/. ↩︎
51. Ibid. ↩︎
52. Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 19/10191, 17 May 2019. ↩︎
53. European Legal Support Center, Suppressing Palestinian Advocacy Through the Misuse of Antisemitism Definitions in Germany, 2021. ↩︎
54. Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, 13 December 2019. ↩︎
55. Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), pp. 217–223. ↩︎
56. Aleida Assmann, The Long Shadow of the Past: Memory Culture and Historical Responsibility (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). ↩︎
57. Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 19/10191, 17 May 2019. ↩︎
58. European Legal Support Center, Suppressing Palestinian Advocacy Through the Misuse of Antisemitism Definitions in Germany (2021). ↩︎
59. Kenneth Stern, “I Drafted the Definition of Antisemitism. Rightwing Jews Are Weaponizing It,” The Guardian, 13 December 2019. ↩︎
60. European Legal Support Center, Suppressing Palestinian Advocacy Through the Misuse of Antisemitism Definitions in Germany (2021). ↩︎
61. International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order of 26 January 2024. ↩︎
62. Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), pp. 217–223. ↩︎
63. German Federal Foreign Office, “Joint Declaration by Germany and Namibia,” 28 May 2021. ↩︎
64. Jürgen Zimmerer, “German Colonial Genocide: The Case of the Herero and Nama,” in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 403–422; Reinhart Kößler, Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015). ↩︎
65. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Roma and Travellers in Six Countries (2019); Council of Europe, ECRI, Report on Germany (2020) on antigypsyism. ↩︎
66. Zentralrat Deutscher Sinti und Roma, Antigypsyism Report (various years). ↩︎
67. Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), p. 15. ↩︎
68. Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), p. 228. ↩︎
69. Movement for Black Lives, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” 2016, https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/. ↩︎
70. Quoted in Marion Kawas, “Solidarity between Palestinians and Indigenous Activists has Deep Roots,” Palestine Chronicle, February 18, 2020, www.palestinechronicle.com/solidarity-between-palestinians-and-indigenous-activists-has-deep-roots/. ↩︎
71. Chiapas Support Committee. “Zapatistas Speak Out on Massacre in Gaza.” Chiapas Support Committee, August 5, 2014. https://chiapas-support.org/2014/08/05/zapatistas-speak-out-on-massacre-in-gaza/ ↩︎
72. European Legal Support Center, Suppressing Palestinian Advocacy Through the Misuse of Antisemitism Definitions in Germany (2021). ↩︎