Lobby Watch 23 January 2025
An important message, delivered during a recent protest in Berlin. (Michael Kuenne / PRESSCOV via ZUMA Press Wire)
Of all the nations that facilitated the Gaza genocide, the harshest censure should be reserved for the US and Germany.
The US and Germany manufactured 99 percent of the weapons imported by Israel in the decade before the genocide got underway. Both continued to supply arms when the genocide was at full tilt.
As well as offering practical support, Germans and Americans drive propaganda activities that help Israel to get away with its crimes.
Some of those activities are focused on ensuring that the smear campaign against UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine rights, culminates in the agency’s closure.
Earlier this month, the European Leadership Network (Elnet) – a pro-Israel group reliant on donations from the US – arranged for Hildegard Bentele, a German member of the European Parliament, to visit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Bentele has claimed that the trip exposed her to information she would not be able to find in Brussels.
Yet it is questionable how many solid facts she learned. Her interlocutors included Itamar Marcus from Palestinian Media Watch, which has been spreading lies about UNRWA for many years.
Speaking in the European Parliament this week, Bentele said that it was time “to stop teaching children to glorify terror.” She did not present evidence that UNRWA does such a thing.
Nor did she disclose that she was just back from a propaganda trip.
It is not hard to see why a pro-Israel group like Elnet courts Bentele.
She has been following discussions on foreign aid programs since first being elected to the European Parliament in 2019. Her party, the Christian Democrats, has a large bloc in that assembly and is expected to form or dominate Germany’s next national government following a February election.
Bentele could, therefore, prove influential when future funding to Palestinians is debated at European Union level.
Her Middle East trip took place just a few weeks before Israeli legislation that will ban UNRWA from the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza comes into force.
As UNRWA provides essential services such as education and healthcare, the ban is a deliberate attempt to dispossess Palestinians even more than they have been already.
Denying basic rights
Elnet is not the only group funded from the US and active in Europe that has been falsely claiming that UNRWA has been infiltrated by Hamas.
The Brussels office of the American Jewish Committee is headed by Daniel Schwammenthal, a German with a penchant for arguing that attacks on hospitals are justified.
Schwammenthal betrayed his anti-Palestinian racism recently when he alleged that UNRWA has worked to “indoctrinate kids about their ‘real’ home in Israel.”
The very existence of a UN agency for Palestine refugees is anathema to extremists like Schwammenthal.He is intent on denying the right of return and other rights to families uprooted during the Nakba – mass expulsions between 1947 and 1949. He wants Palestine’s refugees to be permanently excluded from historic Palestine – “Israel” as he calls it.
I recently read Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Its reflections on how German police killed infants reminded me of how Israel left babies to die in incubators after forcibly evacuating a northern Gaza pediatric hospital.
The Germans lobbying for Israel in Brussels will not tolerate any such analogies.
Katharina von Schnurbein, the Bavarian who coordinates the EU’s work on anti-Semitism, this week arranged a commemoration of the Holocaust along with several pro-Israel groups.
Von Schnurbein cannot be held responsible for things that occurred before she was born. But if she really feels a need to atone for the atrocities committed by her compatriots during the Holocaust, then she would be speaking out about how the current German government enabled a holocaust in Gaza.Of course, von Schnurbein would never dare to do so. Anything bar the mildest criticism of Israel is forbidden under the bogus definition of anti-Semitism which she champions.
Jews were depicted as subhuman in Germany during the 20th century. Palestinians are depicted as subhuman by German personalities in the 21st.
When will Germany actually learn something from its horrible past?
Add new comment