Germany’s immoral policy toward the Palestinians (Khalid Amayreh )

German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Israel Sunday on a three-day visit during which she is expected to reassert Germany’s “solidarity” and “special relations” with the Zionist regime.

In her weekly video message broadcast last week, Merkel said she planned to stress Germany’s deep commitment to “defending” Israel when she addresses the Israeli Knesset or parliament on Tuesday.

Well, I am not quite sure that Israel, which possesses more than 300 nuclear bombs and warheads, along with their delivery systems, and also tightly controls the politics and policies of its guardian-ally, the United States, needs a foreign power to defend her against any real or imagined aggressor.

Hence, Merkel’s statement should only be construed as another cheap expression of Germany’s humiliating subservience to Zionism.

Besides, one really can’t understand why Merkel has chosen this time to show solidarity with Israel. Is Israel being attacked by a foreign power?  Are foreign predators occupying Israeli land and building goy settlements on Israeli territories? Are hostile politicians and military commanders threatening Jews with a “greater holocaust”? Are Palestinian lawmakers warning Jewish lawmakers that “Soon, we will kick you out of this land.” Or, indeed, Is a hostile state blockading millions of Jews and denying them access to food, water and medicine?

Earlier this month, the Israeli army, using state-of-the-art of the American technology of death, swooped on the thoroughly starved and hermetically blockaded Gaza civilians, killing and maiming hundreds, including two dozen toddlers, babies and minors.

Interestingly, the pornographic bloodshed left no impact on Merkel’s heart, let alone her mind. Do Germans still have the same mentality, the same collective mindset, that their Nazi forefathers had seven decade ago?  I am asking this question because it is amply clear that this whoring approach Germany is displaying  vis-à-vis Israel stems not from a real moral  feeling of guilt  over the holocaust, but rather from a clearly immoral policy  that Germany ought to appease Zionism to the  saturation point and even beyond, regardless of any moral and human considerations.

This explains Germany’s clarion  silence toward Israeli crimes and genocidal terror against a people who are being killed and hounded and surrounded by the “Israeli Defense Forces” each day and every day  very much as European Jewry were  being killed and hounded and surrounded by the Wehrmacht and SS in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War.

True, Germany occasionally gives the Palestinian Authority,  which is forced to  act and behave as the infamous Judenrate did, a few million Marks, or partially or fully  finance some small-size projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

However,  this meager assistance  is not given  in the spirit of genuine concern for the plight of the Palestinian people. It is rather extended for the purpose of creating a false impression of balance between Germany’s subservience to Zionism on the one hand,  and its shocking  callousness and indifference to institutionalized Israeli policies of  settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, on the other.

The latest German proposal for holding a “security conference” in Berlin in June is another expression of this wanton hypocrisy.

According to German officials, the conference, to which Israeli and PA officials have already been invited, is aimed at strengthening the Palestinian Police Forces.

Well, strengthening the police forces against whom, and for what purpose?

 Does the German leadership  really think that the real problem facing the Palestinian people under the Nazi-like Israeli occupation lie in the weakness of  their police forces? 

Germany, and the rest of Europe, and for that matter, the rest of the world, ought to understand that the Palestinian people, the Palestinian leadership as well as the Palestinian police forces and security agencies, are all languishing under an evil military occupation which makes terms like Palestinian authority, Palestinian President, officials, and police forces utterly meaningless.

Indeed, how can one really relate candidly to  “Palestinian police forces” when according to Israeli-PA security arrangements all Palestinian  policemen and security cadres must  immediately enter  their “coops” the moment an Israeli soldier appears anywhere on the horizon?

Besides, the Palestinian people don’t really need a big police force whose main function would be to persecute, torment and even torture their own people on Israel’s behalf as evident from the death-under-torture of a 43-year-old father of eight children in a Ramallah dungeon recently.

The Palestinians need someone to help them repulse the Nazi-like Israeli onslaught against them? They need a moral and powerful voice that would tell Israel to stop the ongoing theft of Palestinian land for Jewish-only settlement expansion. We need someone to tell Israel that it is wrong to turn Gaza, with its 1.5 million tormented human beings, into the Auschwitz of our time.

Can Merkel tell Israeli leaders that Gazans are human beings too? Can she tell Olmert and Barak that settlement aggrandizement in occupied Arab East Beit Ul Moqaddas is scandalously inconsistent with  all Israeli pretensions about peace with the Palestinians? Can she tell Barak that the continued existence of more than 600 Nazi-like roadblocks in the heart of the West Bank, despite all  American  and European calls to remove them,  is an affront to civility and human decency?

This is the ultimate test for German and western seriousness about peace in Palestine, not another display of hypocrisy in Berlin.

Comment By Khalid Amayreh, an expert and journalist in Occupied Al Qods