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OK, so imagine you know a guy. He’s a bit of an oddball — socks and sandals? — but nice enough. That wasn’t always the case, though. Awhile back he went a little crazy and blamed all his problems on you. First he tried to isolate you, then pushed you away. When that wasn’t enough, he got obsessed with this idea of needing to get rid of you for good.
There was no talking sense into this guy, and boy was it close! He got you real good. You managed to limp away in the end, just as some other guys took notice and swooped in to restrain him.
It’s taken a long time, but things are pretty cool between you two now. Maybe, though, a little too good? Like, this guy has swung so far back in the other direction to prove how much he’s changed that his affection sometimes comes off as a little creepy. Everything is always, “Hey, whatever you need, I got you, achi.” And, “I am always there for you. No matter what. Like mishpocha.” Or, “Yo, you my kelev. I’m not good if you’re not good, you know? I need you to be good so I can be good. I’ll do anything for you.”
It’s just a bit much, you know?
The thing is, you’re something of a nudnik yourself. You can’t shake this feeling that everyone’s out to get you. Always have, always will. And that last experience, with this guy, really got to you. What more proof do you need? Hard to blame you for wanting to get away from it all, start fresh — a whole new you!
So you moved into this new neighborhood far away from all that trouble. Some R&R in the sunshine is just what bubbe ordered. Best of all, nobody wanted to be there, anyway, so you got a great deal. There were a couple locals to deal with, but you were told that they’re just some backwater loafers. Never mind them. Sure, the house needed work, but you know what they say: location, location, location!
Then a strange thing started to happen. There were quite a few more local loafers than you were led to believe and they weren’t thrilled with you being there. You thought you were making things nice — so nice, in fact, you started inviting your whole family to join you — but for them you were driving up prices and pushing them out. Stuff escalated until one of them threw a pack of dates through your window with a note wrapped around it reading, "GENTRIFIER RAUS.”
At least that’s what you thought it said. Maybe it didn’t; it was getting hard to tell and things were starting to blur together. Who knows, who cares? What matters is you’re scared. Lately, the tensions have been getting so bad that all your old traumas from that guy trying to get rid of you in a totally different time and place were coming back to haunt you in the here and now. Everywhere you looked all you could see was him. Pretty soon, you found yourself projecting all these old fears, of him, onto everyone and everything around you. Who could blame you for taking a few defensive precautions? It made sense to occupy some buffer space.
Things just kinda spiraled from there. One thing led to another and now the whole thing feels pretty hopeless. It’s you or them. Shame it’s gotta be that way, but obviously if it comes down to it, it’s gonna be you every time.
Needless to say, a lot of people are worried about you. Some of them are saying you’ve started repeating patterns you yourself suffered from. Red flag! Even some of your family members are starting to wonder. They’re like, “Who even are you anymore? I love you, but you’re hurting me. Please stop.”
Fortunately, there’s that guy. He’s got you. He keeps telling you how “all these other goyim just don’t get it.” And who knows you better than the guy who once tried to eliminate you?
The guy’s got a point. All these other goyim don’t get it. They think you’re both nuts, which is why some of them are pushing to have you both committed. There’s a fancy institution that got built explicitly for this purpose, back when that guy showed everyone how necessary it was to have one by doing the things to you that you’re now accused of doing to others.
Fortunately for you, there are norms and rules and recourse that apply equally to everyone. So it’s hardly a done deal. You have to be proven to be crazy — or at least at very serious risk of being crazy — before they can lock you up and throw away the key. And crazy is really hard to prove.
Now you might not care all that much if others think you’re crazy, but that guy certainly does because he’s been there, done that, and really wants to avoid a repeat even as he’s been acting kinda crazy at home recently. So he’s in a bit of a bind. The guy’s gotta show that he loves you and that love means something, and he’s gotta show that he doesn’t love you so much that it might make him seem batshit crazy again. That would be bad for his street cred and everything he’s said he’s worked on for such a long time.
That is the conundrum that a row of lawyers had to confront on Tuesday, when they presented Germany’s defense before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in a case brought by Nicaragua. The day before, Nicaragua laid out its arguments that Germany is violating the Genocide Convention, among other aspects of international law, by maintaining its support for Israel despite widespread and well-documented concerns that Israel is perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, in particular, and the occupied territories more broadly. The ICJ already said about as much in an earlier case that South Africa brought against Israel.
I will leave the legal aspects to the legal experts, only to note that the convention is called the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (emphasis added), and it’s a bit hard to prevent something that has already happened. Yet the judges may find otherwise, as Team Germany argued and hopes they will.
No genocide, no violations. Either way, the defense argument went, Nicaragua’s beef is with Israel, not Germany, so leave us alone.
Germany’s defense was, in fact, rather compelling and unsurprisingly highly German: technical and very procedural. Look, we don’t like what’s going on in Gaza either, but we’re not responsible for it — a refrain people who live in Germany are accustomed to hearing from people with responsibility — and Nicaragua cherrypicked the details to make us look more culpable than we really are.
We don’t even help Israel all that much.
“Three of the four final export licenses for ‘war weapons’ concerned items that are unsuitable for use in combat operations,” Christian Tams, one of Germany’s lead lawyers, told the court. “Nicaragua’s references yesterday referring to artillery shells or to munitions that would be used in Gaza simply bear no relation to reality. Germany rejects them.”
In other words, forget about helping carry out genocide — we don’t even help out normal war-fighting! We couldn’t even if we wanted to.
Gotta say, that’s a pretty solid defense, especially since Germany is known for being the guys whose tanks don’t drive, planes don’t fly, and guns don’t shoot. If there’s one major weakness in the claims getting filed against Germany right now for its military support, in particular, of Israel, it’s Germany’s own defense delinquency. It can’t possibly be that big of a deadly weapons dealer for Israel when it can barely arm itself. A lot of those exports, Team Germany said, were actually for Israel to improve upon and send back to Germany for its own use.
So who’s helping whose national security? To the extent it’s Germany to Israel, well, Germany has rules for that. The rules can’t be wrong and we followed the rules. Case closed. Sitting there watching from the press room, I couldn’t help but wonder what Hannah Arendt, who literally wrote the book on how civil servants stoically going about administrative processes can lead to really bad things, might think of that line of argument.
Therein lies a tacit admission. All that talk of Staatsräson that “makes it our permanent duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel,” as Chancellor Olaf Scholz said shortly after Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7 — a quote repeated at the ICJ by both sides — is meaningless. It also has, by Germany’s own reasoning, no legal merit. It’s political rhetoric, at best.
Just don’t tell that to the Germans. They have to believe it means something, otherwise does Germany mean anything? Despite its questionable presence in a court of law, Tania von Uslar-Gleichen, the captain of Team Germany whose day job is Director-General for Legal Affairs at the Foreign Office, couldn’t resist flashing her French in her opening statement with "raison d’État.”
“Germany has learned from its past — a past that includes the responsibility for one of the most horrific crimes in human history, the Shoa. This explains one of the principles upon which our foreign policy with regard to all Middle East issues rests. Our history is the reason why Israel’s security has been at the core of German foreign policy,” she said.
Remember that guy I describe above? Totally no relation to Tania.
It’s a very German kind of delirium that leans into “raison d’État” in a case in which you stand accused of that very concept having led you down a path towards aiding and abetting genocide. It took the Nicaraguan side to point out that the “Israeli State, and particularly its present government, should not be confused and equated with the Jewish people. The real friends of the Jewish people should emphasize the difference.”
Because to do so is not only inaccurate and kinda dumb, but also at least vaguely antisemitic and harmful to Jews everywhere. Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews, but Germany often ignores that distinction if not actively denies it.
The case before the ICJ is foremost a legal one, based on interpretation and implementation of international law. The judges will have their say on that in due course. Meanwhile, the oral hearings brought to the fore an adjacent tension that is no less compelling. It is the contradiction that sits at the center of Germany’s postwar existence. You cannot say the rules apply to everyone equally (international law) and that one country is a first among equals (Staatsräson).
If it’s the latter, then Germany is bound to whatever “hell” Israel conjures, as both sides noted Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock saying about life in Gaza. In that case, German history, which persecuted groups exactly on the basis of a meshuga superiority ranking, is meaningless. If it’s the former, then any notion of “reason of state” is anything but reasonable. You can’t compensate for crimes you committed against humans by chaining your national destiny to that of another, especially if the other one wasn’t even around at the time the crimes you’re compensating for were committed.
Evidently, before an international court that arose out of those crimes, Germany has made its choice even if it doesn’t realize it has. Or, it just doesn’t think either Israel’s security or its own deserves much more than “protective gear such as helmets or body protection plates, communication equipment, camouflage paint and components, parts and other equipment of a subordinate character.”
Sounds like the original Ukraine treatment to me.
Those are the types of items Germany’s lawyers presented as making up the bulk of what was delivered in 2023 and since Oct. 7, in particular. Maybe so, but since history did not start on Oct. 7, if you zoom out to a 20-year period, “war weapons” exceeds, slightly, those for “other military equipment” — plus more in the last five years that we may not know about.
It could be that “the minute we look closely, Nicaragua’s accusations fall apart,” as Germany’s defense argued before the court. We will likely need at least a few weeks to see if the judges agree. Perhaps they will. What we do already know, however, is that Germany’s claims to credibility fell apart quite a while ago. At best, its “Staatsräson” is a fair-weather friend.