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namibia
From Namibia to Gaza With Love
The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles.
Apr 21, 2024
The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in the thousands of kilometers. But the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a
strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Namibia was colonized by the Germans in 1884, while the British colonized Palestine in the 1920s, handing the territory to the Zionist colonizers in 1948.
Though the ethnic and religious fabric of both Palestine and Namibia are different, the historical experiences are similar.
Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.
It is easy, however, to assume that the history which unifies many countries in the Global South is only that of Western exploitation and victimization. It is also a history of collective struggle and resistance.
Namibia has been inhabited since prehistoric times. This long-rooted history has allowed Namibians, over the course of thousands of years, to establish a sense of belonging to the land and to one another, something that the Germans did not understand or appreciate.
When the Germans colonized Namibia, giving it the name of “German Southwest Africa,” they did what all other Western colonialists have done, from Palestine to South Africa to Algeria, to virtually all Global South countries. They attempted to divide the people, exploited their resources, and butchered those who resisted.
Although a country with a small population, Namibians resisted their colonizers, resulting in the German decision to simplyexterminate the natives, literally killing the majority of the population.
Since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Namibia answered the call of solidarity with the Palestinians, along with many African and South American countries, including Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, South Africa, Brazil, China, and many others.
Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.
So when Namibia took a strong stance against Israel’s largest military supporter in Europe—Germany—it did so based on Namibia’s total awareness of its history.
The German genocide of the Nama and Herero people (1904-1907), is known as the “first genocide of the 20th century.” The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza is the first genocide of the 21st century. The unity between Palestine and Namibia is now cemented through mutual suffering.
But it is not Namibia that has launched the legal case against Germany at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) but, rather, Nicaragua, a Central American country that is also thousands of miles away from both Palestine and Namibia.
The Nicaraguan case accuses Germany of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It rightly sees Germany as a partner in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians.
This accusation alone should terrify the German people, in fact the whole world, as Germany is affiliated with genocides from its early days as a colonial power. The horrific crime of the Holocaust, and other mass killings carried out by the German government against Jews and other minority groups in Europe during WWII, is a continuation of other German crimes committed against Africans, decades earlier.
The typical analysis of why Germany continues to support Israel is explained on the basis of German guilt over the Holocaust. This explanation, however, is partly illogical and partly erroneous.
Illogical, because, if Germany has, indeed, internalized any guilt from its previous mass killings, it would make no sense for Berlin to add yet more guilt by allowing Palestinians to be butchered, en masse. If guilt indeed exists, it is not genuine.
And erroneous, because it completely overlooks the German genocide in Namibia. In fact, it took the German government until 2021 to acknowledge the horrific butchery in that poor African country, ultimately agreeing to pay merely 1 billion euros in “community aid,” which will be allocated over the course of three decades.
The German government’s support of the Israeli war on Gaza is not motivated by guilt, but by a power paradigm that governs the relations among colonial countries. Many countries in the Global South understand this logic very well, thus the growing solidarity with Palestine.
The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles.
The revolution in the Global South outlook—culminating in South Africa’s case at the ICJ, and also the Nicaraguan lawsuit against Germany—indicates that the change is not the outcome of a collective emotional reaction. Instead, it is part and parcel of the shifting relationship between the Global South and the Global North.
Africa has been undergoing a process of geopolitical restructuring for years. The anti-French rebellions in West Africa, demanding true independence from the continent’s former colonial masters, in addition to the intense geopolitical competition—involving Russia, China and others—are all signs of changing times.
And, with this rapid rearrangement, a new political discourse and popular rhetoric are emerging, often expressed in the revolutionary language emanating from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and others.
But the shift is not happening on the rhetorical front only. The rise of BRICS as a powerful new platform for economic integration between Asia and the rest of the Global South has opened up the possibility that alternatives to Western financial and political institutions are very much possible.
In 2023, it was revealed that BRICS countries are now holding 32% of the world’s total GDP, compared to 30% held by the G7 countries. There is much political value to this as four of the five original founders of BRICS are strong and unapologetic supporters of the Palestinians.
While South Africa has been championing the legal front against Israel, Russia and China are battling the U.S. at the United Nations Security Council to institute a cease-fire. Beijing’s ambassador to The Hague went as far as defending the Palestinian armed struggle as legitimate under international law.
Now that global dynamics are working in favor of Palestinians, it is time for the Palestinian struggle to return to the embrace of the Global South, where common histories will always serve as a foundation for a meaningful solidarity.
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Lawsuit Accuses German Leaders of Complicity in Gaza Genocide
"This lawsuit sends a clear message to German officials: You cannot continue to remain accomplices of such crime without consequences."
Feb 23, 2024
Lawyers in Germany representing Palestinian families announced Friday that they are suing senior German officials, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for "aiding and abetting" Israel's genocide in Gaza.
The criminal complaint, filed Thursday with federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, accuses Scholz, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, and Economy Minister Robert Habeck of "complicity in the genocide in Gaza" by approving the export of approximately $350 million worth of military aid to Israel.
The suit also lists the German government's diplomatic support for Israel and its suspension of payments to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—even as Israeli forces have killed and maimed over 100,000 Palestinians, forcibly displaced around 90% of the besieged strip's 2.3 million people, obliterated the territory's infrastructure, and pushed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to the brink of starvation.
"We Palestinians in the diaspora will not stand by and watch a genocide being committed against our families and our people."
"Our governments in Europe have a legal obligation not to provide Israel any support in perpetrating the current genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This has to stop and this is what we hope to achieve by going to court," Nadija Samour, a Palestinian German lawyer who co-filed the suit, said Friday at a Berlin press conference.
"This lawsuit sends a clear message to German officials: You cannot continue to remain accomplices of such crime without consequences," she added. "We want accountability."
Last month, a provisional International Court of Justice ruling that found Israel is "plausibly" perpetrating genocide in Gaza and ordering the country's government and military to "take all measures within its power" to prevent genocidal acts.
Noting that German law requires initial suspicion for such lawsuits to proceed, Samour said that the ICJ's interim ruling "clearly showed that there is such ground for initial suspicion when it comes to the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza."
Germany staunchly opposes the South Africa-led ICJ case. Berlin's stance has infuriated much of the Global South, including Namibia, which was colonized by Germans who perpetrated the 20th century's first genocide in the African nation.
Namibian President Hage Geingob, who died earlier this month, said in January that "Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza."
Legal experts, genocide scholars, human rights campaigners, world leaders, and others have accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Raz Segal, one of Israel's leading Holocaust scholars, has repeatedly said his country is perpetrating a "textbook case of genocide" against the people of Gaza.
Nora Ragab, a Palestinian German migration scholar and plaintiff in the lawsuit whose uncle was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza, said in a statement that "we Palestinians in the diaspora will not stand by and watch a genocide being committed against our families and our people."
"We will use all means at our disposal... to hold the German government accountable for its complicity in the genocide in Gaza," she added.
Advocacy groups supporting the German lawsuit include the European Legal Support Center (ELSC), the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, and Law for Palestine.
Germany "is one of the countries that has shown some of the strongest political and material support to Israel in its assault on the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians, with many German officials also inciting to genocide in their statements," ELSC said in a statement.
German arms export approvals to Israel soared last year, especially after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks. Reutersreported in November that 2023 military export authorizations through the first week of that month rose tenfold from 2022 levels, with the majority of export permits issued after October 7. German weapons and support sales to Israel totaled over $320 million last year.
Although that amount pales in comparison to the billions of dollars in annual armed aid and sales the United States provides to Israel, it does not affect the legality of such transfers. On Friday, a group of United Nations experts asserted that "any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law and must cease immediately."
Earlier this month, a Dutch court blocked the proposed export of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel, finding a "clear risk" that those parts would be used to commit war crimes.
Many observers contend that Germany's actions are driven by historical guilt over the Holocaust. Numerous critics claim the German government is weaponizing that guilt in order to demonize Palestinians and their defenders.
"Since October 7, 2023, the Palestinian community in Germany, especially in Berlin, has been subjected to intense suppression of their protests, cultural symbols, voices, and narratives," Ragab wrote last week. "This crackdown has significantly hindered their ability to publicly express grief and outrage against the state of Israel's bombardment of Gaza."
Ragab called bans or restrictions on pro-Palestine demonstrations—sometimes enforced through police violence—"notably severe."
"By banning protests, the German state not only negates Palestinians their right to free expression and peaceful assembly, but also seeks to control the public narrative and visibility of Palestine and Palestinian life in Germany," she wrote. "Although the intensity of this suppression escalated on October 7, it is part of a historical politics of erasure, diminishing, and eradicating the collective existence and identity of Palestinians in Germany, through repression, censorship, and discrimination."
Dave Braneck, a freelance journalist in Berlin, called Germany's stance on the Gaza genocide "truly repugnant."
"You don't need a Ph.D in Middle East studies to acknowledge that children in Gaza are human," Braneck asserted. "Yet Germans fail to see the sickening irony of sanctioning the mass death of innocents and leveling of entire communities as a necessary act of atonement for the Holocaust."
He added that "if Germany had real interest in learning lessons from its appalling history, it would recognize that categorizing entire nations of people as inhuman and unworthy of sympathy or safety must be made untenable—regardless of who it's happening to."
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