As Gaza becomes a death camp, German complicity reveals the West's racist 'biopolitics'
As Gaza becomes a death camp, German complicity reveals the West's racist 'biopolitics'
It is impossible for Germans to see images of Palestinians being starved to death by the Zionist settler-colonial regime without being reminded of their own history.
Babies and children reduced to skin and bones, women and men emaciated to the point of collapse, apathy in the eyes of the dying - the scenes from Gaza recall the fate of the Nama and Herero, starved to death by German settlers in Namibia, as well as those who were deliberately starved during the Nazi sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in concentration camps.
Starving people to death is a settler-colonial and fascist practice. What the Germans did to millions of people, having first stripped them of their humanity, is what Zionists are doing today in Gaza and across Palestine.
Despite the horror, Germany's political establishment continues to make arms deals with the butchers and still refuses to call the Zionist genocide by its name.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who embarrassingly claims to have been one of the first to describe the situation in Gaza as "unbearable", now lets Germany participate in an airlift instead of simply severing all ties with the Zionists - something he could easily do to help end this crime.
Instead, Merz trivialises the genocide by reducing it to a vague humanitarian crisis, enabling the Zionists to continue their slaughter - and in doing so, he joins other western leaders in upholding the logic of western modernity, a system built on ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Politics of death
For decades, the West has pursued neoliberal biopolitics through its Zionist colony, using Palestine and Gaza as a testing ground to see how far it can go in the destruction of human beings - and what it can learn from this for its future dealings with its own populations.
Biopolitics, as Michel Foucault outlined in his famous 1979 lectures on neoliberalism, replaces the traditional understanding of sovereignty. Politics is always a matter of life and death, not of values and norms.
For decades, the West has pursued neoliberal biopolitics, using Palestine as a testing ground to see how far it can go in the destruction of human beings
Where the sovereignty of monarchs once lay in deciding who was allowed to live and who had to die, biopolitics has replaced this understanding, so that the modern state now acts according to the maxim "make live and let die". Modern health and population policies aim to create a healthy nation worthy of living, while defining those who do not belong as unworthy of life.
This biopolitical distinction is the guiding principle of the West towards the population of Gaza and all of Palestine: make the white Zionists live, for they belong to "us"; let the Palestinians die.
State racism is the basis of this fundamental biopolitical distinction. However, it did not begin, as Foucault assumed, in the 19th century, but dates back to the beginnings of western modernity. Political theorist Mahmood Mamdani aptly argued that modernity began in 1492 with two world-historical events on the Iberian Peninsula.
First, King Ferdinand II ethnically cleansed his country of Arabs and Jews in order to create a "pure" Catholic Spain. Second, he sent Christopher Columbus west to "discover" new land that he could claim for the Spanish crown - inaugurating the ethnic cleansing of that land and genocide against Indigenous peoples.
Since those two events in Europe and the settler colonies, western modernity has been inextricably linked to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Logic of elimination
Palestine and Gaza today represent the worst excesses of the urge on the part of the West to create white, western nations in other parts of the world.
As the late historian Patrick Wolfe showed, every settler-colonial regime is characterised by a "logic of elimination of the native". He also made clear that this logic can lead to genocide.
That is the essence of the Zionist colony, which has undoubtedly taken that step.
From the very beginning, the history of Zionist settler colonisation of Palestine was defined by the logic of eliminating the indigenous Palestinian people. Years before the Zionist-imposed blockade, Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling wrote in 2003 that Gaza had already become the "largest concentration camp ever to exist".
Today, this unprecedented biopolitical experiment has reached the point where the Zionist murderers openly declare their genocidal intent. They are establishing a concentration camp in Gaza that, after 22 months of genocide, resembles a vast death camp - cynically naming it a "humanitarian city".
Not even such announcements change anything for Germany's elites, who are usually so sensitive in their talk about concentration camps, genocide and German responsibility.
With their pettiness, they have discredited themselves and do nothing but wholeheartedly support state racism and biopolitical discrimination.
There can never be any excuse for establishing concentration camps, starving people to death and committing genocide. There can be no excuse either for supporting such actions.
Western racism
The Zionists may be committing all these crimes, but Merz excuses them and continues to side with the genocidal regime. At a federal press conference on 18 July, he declared:
Israel...is still a democracy. Israel...is a country that has been attacked, and Israel is defending itself against these attacks. If they hadn't done so, the State of Israel would no longer exist today...Israel has been under threat for years, if not decades, and since 7 October 2023, at the latest, we know that this threat can become bitterly serious.
Who should believe Merz's fairy tales anymore, which distort history by portraying a democracy besieged by hostile neighbours, constantly attacked, and forced to defend itself?
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All of this sounds like propaganda from a Zionist-led German "Ministry of Truth".
Yet the historical truth is that the settler-colonial regime, established by fascist paramilitary groups through terror, has oppressed and dehumanised Palestinians from the outset with excessive violence.
Since its inception, the spread of the colony has threatened all people in the Middle East and plunged the region into catastrophe for decades, orchestrated by the West.
In backing the genocidal regime, the West is not betraying its values, as these have always applied only to white people and were never intended for everyone
Within Palestine, it has placed the entire Indigenous population under military rule and proliferated colonisation through ever more settlements, which, like metastases, are suffocating Palestinian villages, towns, and life in the West Bank as a whole.
Outwardly, it has repeatedly attacked other countries, including Lebanon and Syria, to establish "Greater Israel" on stolen land. It has attacked Iraq and waged an illegitimate war of aggression against Iran - acts that Merz praised as Israel doing the West's "dirty work" rather than serious violations of sovereignty or international law.
In backing the genocidal regime, the West is not betraying its values, as these have always applied only to white people and were never intended for everyone.
Instead, the West is simply pushing ahead with its neoliberal biopolitics, which, in relation to occupied Palestine, distinguishes between Jews deemed worthy of life and Palestinians deemed unworthy.
This is the standard defined by western racism. There are no double standards - because there has only ever been one standard, reserved for white people in the West. The rest are left to die.
And that is why Germany is helping the Zionists to starve babies, children, and adults in Gaza - transforming it from a concentration camp into a vast death camp.
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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