The Planetary Class War.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gaza-israel-deutschland-100.html
Now and then, even in Germany, snippets of sense enter the mainstream media’s otherwise completely uncritical accounts of the genocide in Gaza. Although most of these snippets are generally not framed directly with reference to Germany’s complicity in the genocide, they do articulate broader issues regarding the role of International Law and Human Rights.
On the 23rd of July 2025, the German state television, ARD, in its news program Tageschau discussed the declaration by 30 (western) nation states that condemns the state of Israel’s continuous blockade of food, water, medication and fuel to the civilian population in Gaza. The German government had not signed this declaration, thereby making itself visible as an outlier, similar to the USA and Israel itself. This resonates with a growing critique within Germany towards the German government that focuses on the question, why the successive German governments seems so keen to keep the genocide off the political agenda?
The fact that the previous German government, which consisted of quite a strong “Green Party” presence – the foreign minister Annalena Baerbock is a member of the Green Party and she was a very vocal supporter of justifications of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity and a denial that Israel is committing genocide – and the current, more right-wing oriented German Government have identical foreign policies regarding Palestine, suggests that the answer to the question why has very little to do with political ideology: Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals share the same views as the right-wing extremists of the AfD. This “view” consists of a range of layers: (1) denying that there is any genocide or that there are any serious, systematic human rights violations; (2) blaming Hamas; (3) insisting that Israel has right to defend itself; and (4) accusing critics of Israel of anti-Semitism. At the start of the war on Gaza, when it was not yet clear that it was a genocide, even the Linke, Germany’s only left wing party, were very quiet and merely regurgitating the slogan that “Israel has a right to defend itself” without ever stipulating whether this right has any limits. De facto, those proclaiming that “Israel has a right to defend itself” actually imply that this is “at all costs”. This avoidance of “at all costs” is logically necessary to prevent having to answer the question, whether Palestinians have a right to defend themselves, which – by the very same logic – would mean “at all costs”, thus including the actions of Hamas.
The racism encapsulated by the justification “Israel has a right to defend itself” is obvious: Palestinians are denied the right to defend themselves. This racism is exacerbated by the fact (not opinion), that Gaza is occupied by the State of Israel. In international law, people have the right to resist illegal occupation, with violence if necessary. So we have a reversal of law, sugar-coated with racism. The word racism is easily misused, but in this case it is obvious, because it is so extreme. To justify war crimes and crimes against humanity against a civilian population with reference to a state having the right to defend itself is based on the assumption that this state is itself threatened by the existence of Palestinian civilians.
In a later post, I want to engage in more depth with semantics and law to explain why every intelligent legal scholar and every intelligent genocide scholar does not flinch when calling the current situation in Gaza a genocide. Most legal scholars and genocide scholars are not left-wing radicals. They have been disciplined to accept the semantic impositions of the logos of law as given. They are part of the Professional Managerial Class. However, still they recognize a genocide without having to negotiate “matters of fact” in relation to political considerations.
Explaining this process not only requires an analysis of semantic politics, but also an analysis of functions. Legal scholars who are specialized in International Law and Human Rights Law have a primary matter of concern, i.e. interest, namely the establishment of the unity of Logos and Truth as a matter of legal doctrine. This unity may appear as non-political, thereby generating the suggestion that legal scholarship obeys the core principle of science as a striving towards value-neutrality and objectivity. However, trying to establish the unity of Logos and Truth in legal doctrine is not a-political. It merely shifts the notion of politics to a different articulation of interests, namely the foundation of the political itself.
The striving towards the unity of Logos and Truth in legal doctrine is at the same time an attempt to overcome the arbitrariness of law. Contrary to what political theologians such as Carl Schmitt have preached, not all friend-foe distinctions are necessarily arbitrary. The one pursued by International Law and Human Rights Law is a striving towards the establishment of a planetary political community that does have an enemy, namely those who oppose it, including Carl Schmitt and his ilk. This is not arbitrary as it concerns the fundamental inauguration of the political itself.
This becomes perhaps clearer when we take the example of the German Federal Republic. When confronted with the issue of violations of international law by the state of Israel, it uses the concept of Staatsräson (raison d’étât). Staatsräson is a concept rooted in early modern state theory, adopted and adapted in German political thought to signify the primacy of state preservation over normative constraints. Its evolution—from Botero to Schmitt—tracks a deep tension between power and legitimacy, and remains a critical notion in debates over sovereignty, law, and emergency politics.
The early usage of raison d’étât was inspired by machiavellian conceptions of sovereign rule as self-preservation, existing in sharp contrast with notions of the political in terms of virtue that one could find with, for example, thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Acquinas. The latter sought to stipulate a universal moral foundation of the political, which had to remain beyond the political. At the time of Machiavelli, Religion, as embodied by the Catholic Church, provided the function of that extra-political anchoring of moral virtue, whilst simultaneously collapsing under its own corruption, caused by its institutionalization of power.
The reason why towards the end of the middle ages, the Catholic Church collapsed as the unified voice of extra-political moral virtue was because it has sought to uphold that claim by political means. For the Church too, self-preservation had become the dominant force. Self preservation is the complete opposite of the Christian notion of kenosis. That is to say, by focusing on institutionalizing itself as a religious authority, the Catholic Church became increasingly estranged from the practice of following Christ. Whereas it continued to preach the way of the cross, it certainly did not lead by example.
This matters tremendously however. If the main interest is self-preservation rather than life, the difference between the political and politics collapses. Every constitution of sovereignty will derive from an inaugural violent act (conquest, state of emergency). Self-preservation then replaces life. Whereas the first requires an identification of boundaries of community, the second is a striving towards collective symbiosis. Self-preservation is always a zero-sum game. Capitalism, Imperialism, Patriarchy are three forms of a world ecology driven by self-preservation. This explains why the Nation-State has grown into the hegemonic form of the political community. This is also why Schmittian notions of sovereignty do not question the primacy of the Nation-State.
Life is not a zero-sum game. In fact, life grows additively and symbiotically. Life has no upper limits. Understanding Life also requires understanding death. Death is the universal condition of Life and not its opposite. That is, the recognition of death as the universal condition of life makes the primacy of self-preservation contradictory. The commonality of life as being-towards-death opens a possibility for a notion of the political that is not reduced to politics. This is what Roberto Esposito referred to as “Communitas”.
Whereas Esposito himself may have understood Communitas in a non-dialectical sense, his notion of a commonality of lack, rather than substance, enables us to think Communitas in relation to kenosis and kenotic solidarity. Esposito does not explicitly engage with negative theology, but his argument of refusing any substantivist notion of communitas and thereby also refusing any substantivist notion of immunitas, does enable us to draw parallels in support of the argument that International Law and Human Rights Law are a striving towards establishing a notion of the political that is not anchored in self-preservation (substantial immunitas) but life.
Esposito derives Communitas from munus, meaning gift, obligation and debt. It is not accumulative but understood as loss, emptiness or lack. At the same time, this loss allows for the inclusivity of life and affirmation of life as gift. It is only by substantiating the lack – for example with a reference to a shared victimhood in relation to a call for self-preservation – that immunitas comes into play through arbitrary violence. There is however, one notable exception: the call for self-preservation is itself the opposite of life, because it asserts itself as the opposite of death. Life is additive because Communitas is not. Self-Preservation is subtractive because it opposes being alive with death.
This explains why International Law and Staatsräson are inherently contradictory, with one exception: a Staatsräson that strives towards prioritizing International Law at the expense of prioritizing self-preservation: a kenotic Staatsräson. By invoking Staatsräson as the legitimation of Germany’s unwavering support for Israel, the successive German governments argue that the interests of self-preservation of the Israeli and German nation states have a higher priority than International Law and Human Rights. The statement “Israel has the right to defend itself” thereby becomes a legitimation of genocide, because Staatsräson trumps international law.
In Germany, Staatsräson also appears in a more formal way. Both Sachsen-Anhalt and Brandenburg have now incorporated a “Bekenntnis zu Israel” (commitment to Israel) as a formal aspect of citizenship applications. All other Bundesländer have a Bekenntnis zu Deutschlands Verantwortung für die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit und den Schutz jüdischen Lebens (“Commitment to Germany’s responsibility for the National Socialist past and to the protection of Jewish life.”). Although the latter does not specify Israel, this does not mean that it is not being interpeted as such, because Zionism itself proclaims that in the last instance, Jewish life can only be protected by a strong Jewish state. This is the foundation of Jabotinsky’s concept of the Iron Wall. Anti-Semitism would of course applaud that “protecting Jewish life” only requires the iron wall of the state of Israel, so that all Jewish life outside of Israel does not necessarily require protection.
At any rate, the connection between German Staatsräson and “Israel having a right to protect itself” clearly prioritizes self-preservation over life and thereby is not perturbed by a genocide against Palestinians. Since Palestinian life has been defined by Netanyahu and his ilk as inherently an existential threat to the existence of Israel, the statement “Israel has a right to defend itself” has actually become the basis of the assertion that Palestinian life should be eradicated, or at least removed from the territories of “Greater Israel”.
Logically speaking, this makes any German official who proclaims that “Israel has a right to defend itself” a potential accomplice in genocide. However, like the 400,000 members of the NSDAP who were reinstated as civil servants a few years after the end of the Second World War, there is very little reason to believe that these German officials will ever face the consequences. It is very unlikely that they actually understand that their Staatsräson is structrurally and functionally identical to that of the Third Reich. The Shoah was never the product of irrationality or madness, it was deliberate, calculated and intentional. It was also legitimated with the self-preservationist logic of Staatsräson. For the Third Reich, the presence of Jewish people within the confines of the nation state was deemed an existential threat. It can be assumed that officials of the Third Reich would also have been able to say that “Germany had the right to defend itself”. Just like Netanyahu depicts Palestinians as “enemies within”, so did Göbbels depict Jews as enemies within.
Now of course, one might say that the Vernichtungslager are not the same as the planned concentration camp for 600,000 Palestinians in Raffah, because it does not have gas chambers, as if gas chambers are what defines the specificity of the Shoah. But then Auschwitz did not have drones and could only house 150,000 people at the same time (divided over several camps). There will always be differences. However, the methods of killing do not define what counts as genocide. Genocide is the intentional killing of civilians because of their race, ethnicity, religion or nationality. Intention and Killing matter, not numbers, speed or technologies used.
Staatsräson is therefore an extremely troubling justification for the continued support of Israel despite the ICJ’s conclusion that based on the evidence that had been presented, a genocide in Gaza is very plausible. By trying to dismiss the conclusions of the ICJ, the German nation state exposed itself as an enemy of International Law, very similar to the Third Reich. This however also means that it violates its own constitution. By adopting de facto the Israeli interpretation of Palestinians as enemies within, it also violated article 1 of its own constitution. And by doing so, the German state additionally violates what it demands from all those wanting to obtain German citizenship: accepting Germany’s responsibility for the “National Socialist past”. If it thinks that “never again” only applies to Jewish life, the German State once again deploys the arbitrary violence of self-preservation at the expense of life.
There is however a completely different reason for the deployment of Staatsräson: Profits. Several major German companies manufacture the weapons and receive direct payment, whether from Germany, Israel, or through subsidized deals. These include: (a) Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) as they build Dolphin-class submarines (among the most expensive items Germany has ever exported); (b) Rheinmetall AG which supplies ammunition, artillery systems and vehicle components; (c) Hensholdt AG which supplies electronic systems such as radars and sensors; and (c) Airbus Defence and Space, which contributes to missile systems and air defence collaboration with Israel. However, there are also Israeli arms manufacturers than directly benefit from German support, most notably: Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and of course Elbit Systems.
These companies are currently making huge profits. The costs of these arms supplies are primarily covered by German taxpayers. That is, those who pay taxes in Germany at once enrich the shareholders of these arms industries and finance the genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It is thus very probable that among those who actively support the ongoing genocide in Gaza are people who financially benefit from this. Some of these beneficiaries may themselves be the politicians who approve financing military support, which may remain completely intransparent as the bulk of their share portfolios are managed by large asset managers such as BlackRock.
Between 2016 and 2020, the current German head of government, Friedrich Merz, was Chairman of the Supervisory Board of BlackRock Germany. BlackRock is a major shareholder in the aforementioned companies Rheinmetall, Airbus, TKMS, Elbit Systems and Rafael. Of course, it is impossible to find out if Merz himself directly benefited from his decision to increase Germany’s defence spending or continuing the arms exports to Israel, but it cannot be ruled out either. This is why military Keynesianism, as it is now called, is just another scheme to transfer public money (taxes) into private ownership (share dividends).
This empirically evidenced and logical link between Staatsräson and profiteering through defence contracts and arms exports probably explains much better, why Germany continues to violate International Law and support the genocide in Gaza despite massive public opposition to it. Because of the USA, financial resources for military expenditure channelled through Israel are almost limitless and outside of any market operation. It thus makes perfect financial sense to continue doing it as the few who benefit from it, do not have to live with the consequences. Thus, what happens in Palestine should not be framed as merely a settler-colonial and racially motivated system of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is, first and foremost, the cutting edge of planetary class war. The enemies of life are not merely those whose insatiable thirst for profits destroys the world ecology through climate change and the depletion of bio-diversity, they are the same as those who deploy Staatsräson to justify the genocide of “enemies within” and they are the same as those who never cease to find ways to channel public funds and assets into private wealth. It is one and the same system and it is best described as planetary class war as self-preservation becomes the destruction of life.
Disaffected Sociology 
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