When the old Nazis of the Adenauer govt started supporting Israel (and the genocide convention), they did that not out of genuine guilt, but because the US said so, and so they could use it as in their anti-communist propaganda ("See we are morally superior and you're doing all these terrible things over there in the east. Maybe we need to do something about that!").

Perhaps later generations actually started to feel ashamed for their opas, but they too used this as justification. "Oh we're sooo repentant, that makes us so much better than all you unrepentant sinners and btw it means we definitely need to bomb Belgrade."

And now they're using it to pummel Palestinians (and also all Muslims, both in Germany and elsewhere), because those have not accepted they're also filthy sinners/antisemites, and the Germans can put all their opas' sins on that scapegoat and be cleansed. And who better to put this on and punish, than the people they already hate, and whose resources they want to steal.

tl;dr It was originally fake abuser logic, and now se Germans have it internalized, because it makes them feel superior and can be used as a weapon.

They don't need get rid of their guilt, they can just stop abusing it for their selfish desires.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What does Germany get out of supporting Israel? The Arab countries are much more powerful then Israel, in terms of trade and so forth.

[–] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml -1 points 6 months ago

They trade with all of them, so it's not like they have to choose.

Germany sells a ton of weapons to Israel, and they also buy weapons and surveillance tech from Israel. German foreign policy is basically copy-pasted from Washington, and they are all-in on the US empire (which the German capitalists benefit(ted) from massively, at least up to recently), so every reason the US has to support Israel also applies to Germany.

It also allows them to transfer their guilt/responsibility to Muslims, which are convenient punching bags for politicians to use in order to gather votes from the Islamophobic German public. And it makes (made?) them look good: they can pretend to have learned from the Nazi past, and pretend not be antisemites by getting approval from (Zionist) Jews, which, in the past, actually improved their image domestically and internationally (in the all-important West at least). And, like I said before, it gives them an air of moral superiority and righteousness to pretend they're totally reformed, no longer Nazis, seen the error of their ways (swear to god!). And they can lord that over their enemies, and use it to convince the public to support military aggression in the name of defeating another Hitler, or preventing another Holocaust (which is Germany's special responsibility, you see!).

With what Israel is doing right now, and social media showing the utter horror, it no longer looks very good internationally, but domestically, pro-Israel sentiment among the German public (and even more so institutionally and and in the press) is still incredibly high, so saying the most unhinged pro-Israel shit is actually genuinely popular. And with the repression of pro-Palestinian voices that's not going to change anytime soon either. People are genuinely afraid to speak up, lest they get fired, smeared, blacklisted, or arrested. German language media is like US media from 30 years ago in terms of uncritical pro-Israel views.