Nicaragua on Monday called on the United Nations’ top court to halt German military and other aid to Israel, arguing that Berlin’s support was enabling acts of genocide and breaches of international humanitarian law in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
Opening Nicaragua’s case at the International Court of Justice, the country’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Carlos José Argüello Gómez, told the 16-judge panel that “Germany is failing to honor its own obligation to prevent genocide or to ensure respect of international humanitarian law.”
While the case brought by Nicaragua centers on Germany, it indirectly takes aim at Israel’s military campaign in Gaza following the deadly Oct. 7 attacks when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Its toll doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, but it has said women and children make up the majority of the dead.
Israel strongly denies that its assault amounts to genocidal acts, saying it is acting in self defense. Israeli legal adviser Tal Becker told judges at the court earlier this year that the country is fighting a “war it did not start and did not want.”
But Nicaragua rejected that defense, in a reference to Germany’s support for Israel. “Surprisingly, Germany seems not to be able to differentiate between self-defense and genocide,” Argüello Gómez said. Germany, whose lawyers will address the court Tuesday morning, rejects the case brought by Nicaragua.
“Germany has breached neither the Genocide Convention nor international humanitarian law, and we will set this out in detail before the International Court of Justice,” German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Sebastian Fischer told reporters in Berlin on Friday.
Nicaragua has asked the court to hand down preliminary orders known as provisional measures, including that Germany “immediately suspend its aid to Israel, in particular its military assistance including military equipment in so far as this aid may be used in the violation of the Genocide Convention” and international law.
It also wants the court to order Germany to resume funding to the United Nations aid agency in Gaza in addition to the aid Berlin is already providing.
“It is indeed a pathetic excuse to the Palestinian children, women and men in Gaza to provide humanitarian aid, including through airdrops, on the one hand, and to furnish the weapons and military equipment that are used to kill and annihilate them” and humanitarian workers, Nicaragua lawyer Daniel Müller told judges.
The court will likely take weeks to deliver its preliminary decision, and Nicaragua’s case will probably drag on for years. Monday’s hearing at the world court came amid growing calls for allies to stop supplying arms to Israel as its six-month campaign continues to lay waste to Gaza.
On Friday, the UN’s top human rights body called on countries to stop selling or shipping weapons to Israel. The United States and Germany opposed the resolution.
Also, hundreds of British jurists, including three retired Supreme Court judges, have called on their government to suspend arms sales to Israel after three UK citizens were among seven aid workers from the charity World Central Kitchen killed in Israeli strikes. Israel said the attack on the aid workers was a mistake caused by “misidentification.”
Germany has for decades been a staunch supporter of Israel. Days after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Chancellor Olaf Scholz explained why: “Our own history, our responsibility arising from the Holocaust, makes it a perpetual task for us to stand up for the security of the state of Israel,” he told lawmakers.
Berlin, however, has gradually shifted its tone as civilian casualties in Gaza have soared, becoming increasingly critical of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and speaking out against a ground offensive in Rafah.
Nicaragua’s government, which has historical links with Palestinian organizations dating back to their support for the 1979 Sandinista revolution, was itself accused earlier this year by UN-backed human rights experts of systematic human rights abuses “tantamount to crimes against humanity.” The government of President Daniel Ortega fiercely rejected the allegations.
In January, the ICJ imposed provisional measures ordering Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and acts of genocide in Gaza. The orders came in a case filed by South Africa accusing Israel of breaching the Genocide Convention.
On March 28, the court ordered Israel to take measures to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including opening more land crossings to allow food, water, fuel and other supplies into the war-ravaged enclave.
‘Boycott Germany for forcing Palestinians to pay for its crimes’
Transcript thanks to Brian Robinson
I think it’s time for a boycott of the German state. Specifically, I mean a boycott of its public events. By artists, performers, writers. authors, musicians, those who care about human rights, who oppose mass murder, who oppose what the highest court on earth, the International Court of Justice, is investigating as an alleged genocide, that is, Israel’s mass murderous onslaught against Gaza and its people.
Here’s why. Now, if I were the German state at this particular juncture, I would simply keep a low profile. Let me just sit down and… just sit this one out. That is not the tactic they’ve gone for. Instead, they’ve settled on a particularly gruesome strategy to gain absolution for the attempt by the German state to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe in which two-thirds of Jews were murdered within living memory.
Now firstly, the German state has long loudly demanded that somebody else pay for the crimes committed by the German state, specifically the Palestinian people. It seems to believe, or does clearly believe, that compensation for what it did should be paid by Palestinians. Through being violently ethnically cleansed, repeatedly occupied, their land stolen, colonised, subjected to apartheid, huge state violence over and over again, mass incarceration, suspension of basic civil liberties, we could go on.
These are all horrors which clearly no German citizen would tolerate. Now I’m aware that it’s not just the German state responsible for 2,000 years of European antisemitism by any stretch. It is simply the case that firstly 19th century German antisemitism played a pivotal role in the racialisation of antisemitism, that is turning antisemitism into a race theory, which became a precondition for its particularly genocidal form, and the rise, obviously, of Nazism, and then the Shoah, the murder of six million Jews. All of that is a precondition for what is happening today.
Now, this attempt to force other people to pay the price for what Germany did as a state, now takes the form of being one of the world’s leading legitimisers and apologists and backers for the present mass murder of Palestinians. Now, that’s always been very profitable, I would note, for the German arms company since the arms trade between the two countries, Germany and Israel, began in the early 1960s. By November last year, military exports to Israel from Germany were up tenfold, thanks to fast tracks in the aftermath of the current… horror unfolding. Reading a headline in the Financial Times like “Israel-Hamas war boosts German investor interest in defence sector” says Renk Chief [Renk Group AG, a German arms manufacturer], that was the other day, or pass the sick bag.
Secondly, in a particularly perverse twist of history, not only is the German state targeting anyone who speaks out in support of the Palestinian people, they are disproportionately targeting Jewish people. You can’t make this shit up. Let’s just listen to Yuval Abraham, a brilliant Israeli Jewish journalist who I interviewed late last year. He’s one of the directors of No Other Land, a documentary film about the forced displacement of the Palestinian people of Masafer Yatta, where another co-director, Basel Adra, is from. Now, he made a speech at the Berlinale Film Festival. Let’s hear from him:
I want to say we are we are standing in front of you now, me and Basel are the same age. I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian, and in two days, we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under a civilian law, and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights. Basel is not having voting rights. I am free to move where I want. in this land. Basel is like millions of Palestinians locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.
Does the German state think treating people as inferior because of their ethnicity is redemption for Germany’s past? Does it really? Does it really think official statements issued by ministers, clarifying they’re not clapping someone based on their ethnicity. Is that redemption? I don’t think so. It’s bringing back memories, isn’t it? In the aftermath of the Berlinale, in a German newspaper, which is written in a hideous way, framed exactly on the terms of all of this outrage, it says government ministers threatened criminal action against those who said, for example, “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” claiming it’s an endorsement of the killings committed by Hamas on the 7th of October. Ludicrous nonsense!
I’d note “From the river to the sea” is in the founding platform of Likud, Israel’s ruling party. It’s also been stated, for example, by the Israeli ambassador to the UK. What they mean by it, “One Israeli state from the river to the sea” is apartheid. In practice, it can only mean the subjugation of the Palestinians who live there. But that’s fine: people who use it to mean equal rights for Palestinians across historic Palestine, turns out you’re going to jail in Germany!
Now, who thinks throwing people into police cells for thought crime is going to wash away the sins of Germany’s past? I don’t think so guys. I think all of this is having a pretty opposite effect to what you intend. The minister actually said that this was rewarding and they said rewarding and endorsing crimes as a criminal offence. Completely off their trees these people. He claimed that Berlinale suffered serious damage this weekend because antisemitism went too far unchallenged. No evidence of any antisemitism here. The newspaper offers evidence such as “calling for a ceasefire”. I repeat, you cannot make this shit up. You really can’t. Calling for peace and an end to a war machine and violence. That’s antisemitism.
It gets so much worse. The main targets of Germany’s offensive against those who believe in human rights and equality for Palestinians and oppose their mass murder are Muslim citizens. We’ll talk about that.
But according to the researcher Emily Dische-Becker, almost a third of those targeted by the German state, whether through de-platforming or arrests, are Jewish. Now as an article on this by Kenan Malik and the Observer points out, [ Denouncing critics of Israel as ‘un-Jews’ or antisemites is a perversion of history https://tinyurl.com/5aetdk6p ] according to Susan Neiman, who’s a Jewish-American philosopher and a director of the Einstein Forum, she says to be a left-wing Jew in today’s Germany is to live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance. German politicians and media talk incessantly about protecting Jews from antisemitism, but many who criticise the Israeli government and the war in Gaza have been cancelled and certainly attacked.
“I’m an Israeli citizen, and I’ve been accused of being a Hamas supporter and even a Nazi in mainstream media. Need I add that I am neither.”
So what, calling an Israeli Jewish person a Nazi in mainstream German media because they support peace. Is that atoning for the past? As the Israeli-born architect and academic Eyal Weizmann has acidly put it, this is me quoting Kenan Malik again, talking about a certain irony of being lectured on how to be properly Jewish — to be properly Jewish — by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are anti-Semitic. Are they trying to gaslight people to death?
Here’s another example. One Jewish woman, again actually an Israeli, for the record, arrested earlier this month for holding a sign inscribed with “Another Jew for a Free Palestine”. A museum cancelled an exhibition by Jewish artist Candice Breitz after she spoke out over Gaza, silencing and cancelling Jews for calling for peace. Washing away the sins of the past, is it? Targeting Jews with leftist inclinations, including with police repression. Is that absolution for Germany’s past, really? How is the disproportionate targeting of Jews not antisemitism?
I would note, leftist Jews were particularly targeted in the run-up to the rise of the Nazis, obviously the Nazis killed and targeted all Jews, but the claim Jews being dangerous leftist subversives was an important plank of antisemitism at the time, the international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy, etc. Now you have German police attacking a Palestinian woman on film. because he called her “ridiculous”. Well, he clearly is ridiculous. A spot of police brutality, definitely washing away the past here!
In Berlin high schools, they’ve been ordered to distribute a leaflet describing the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, as a myth. German cities have been banning protests, Palestinian flags, the Palestinian keffiyah. In Berlin, a police officer stomped on candles for a vigil for the dead of Gaza. Banning protests. Silencing people. Authoritarianism. Is that atoning for the past?
A Palestinian author, Adania Shibli, had a ceremony for her award at the Frankfurt Book Festival indefinitely postponed. Now, the German authorities tried to strangle state support for artists deemed to cross extremely restrictive lines in criticising Israel, only backing down, you know, after outrage.
Meanwhile, rising discourse about the supposed antisemitism of Muslims has helped fuel already rising bigotry and prejudice towards the 5.5 million German Muslim population, ratcheting up bigotry against a minority which suffers high levels of discrimination and prejudice. Is that atoning for the past?
It should be known that the Berlinale Instagram feed was hacked into and someone posted “Genocide is genocide, we are all complicit.” Condemning the silence [indistinct] “[c]omplicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It says “after long internal discussion, we have decided to finally shed the idea that ‘German guilt’ absolves us of our country’s history or our current crimes as a nation.” They go on to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire. They add, “From our unresolved Nazi past to our genocidal present we have always been on the wrong side of history. It’s not too late to change our future.”
Well, that’s punchy, isn’t it? And that’s the point. The far right is on the rise in Germany. It is dangerous, it’s never been as powerful as it’s been since the end of World War II. It’s on the rise because of the abject failures of the German establishment, which itself is whipping up bigotry towards migrants and indeed Muslims, which is helping legitimise the far right, and we can see what’s happening here, we can see what’s happening here.
Particularly in these arts and books and films and literature and performance spaces. I know the brilliant author Vincent Bevins, who was due to give a keynote address in Germany on his new book, cancelled again due to pro-Palestine posts on social media.
Meanwhile, rising discourse about the supposed antisemitism of Muslims has helped fuel already rising bigotry and prejudice towards the 5.5 million German Muslim population, ratcheting up bigotry against a minority which suffers high levels of discrimination and prejudice. Is that atoning for the past?
It should be known that the Berlinale Instagram feed was hacked into and someone posted “Genocide is genocide, we are all complicit.” Condemning the silence [indistinct] “[c]omplicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. It says “after long internal discussion, we have decided to finally shed the idea that ‘German guilt’ absolves us of our country’s history or our current crimes as a nation.” They go on to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire. They add, “From our unresolved Nazi past to our genocidal present we have always been on the wrong side of history. It’s not too late to change our future.”
Well, that’s punchy, isn’t it? And that’s the point. The far right is on the rise in Germany. It is dangerous, it’s never been as powerful as it’s been since the end of World War II. It’s on the rise because of the abject failures of the German establishment, which itself is whipping up bigotry towards migrants and indeed Muslims, which is helping legitimise the far right, and we can see what’s happening here, we can see what’s happening here. Particularly in these arts and books and films and literature and performance spaces. I know the brilliant author Vincent Bevins, who was due to give a keynote address in Germany on his new book, cancelled again due to pro-Palestine posts on social media.
