Palestine: Germany's Moral Failure

This essay is a critical examination of the German State's use of the memory of the Holocaust to justify its political alignment with Israel, particularly in terms of censorship, anti-Palestinian racism, unwavering support for Zionism, and genocidal complicity. While Germany has failed to achieve genuine moral reckoning with its Nazi past and the othering of Jewishness resulting from Nazi-Zionist collaborations during the Holocaust and WWII, the country has contemporarily adopted "philo-Semitism" as a Staatsräson, which conflates anti-Zionism and all criticisms of Israel with antisemitism. This essay concludes that Germany's current philo-Semitism, proxy-nationalism, and neo-imperialism perpetuate a morally failed national memory culture that has led to widespread suppression of pro-Palestinian voices, narratives, the criminalization of activism, artistic censorship, and complicity in Israel's ongoing colonization, apartheid, and genocide against the Palestinian people.