Belgian Minister Berates Germany For Supporting ‘Israeli Colonization and Ethnic Cleansing’

Belgium’s Development Minister has attacked the German government for its policy of supporting Israel, a country which, she claims, is engaged in “colonization and ethnic cleansing.” More on this scandalous charge, right out of the Palestinian playbook, can be found here: “German government is backing Israel’s ‘shameless colonization policy’ and ‘ethnic cleansing,’ claims Belgian socialist minister,” by Denes Albert, Remix News, January 15, 2024:

Belgian Development Minister Caroline Gennez, who belongs to the Socialist party, has sharply criticized the German government’s policy of backing Israel.

“It is difficult to understand why Germany is allowing itself to be pulled along by this Israeli government, which is pursuing a shameless colonization policy,” the Social Democrat politician from the Vooruit party told Knack magazine.

“The question arises as to whether our German friends will really be on the wrong side of history twice and whether they will continue to stand by and watch ethnic cleansing take place,” she said.

So according to Caroline Gennez, German support for Israel means it is again on “the wrong side of history,” just as it was in the Nazi period. That’s quite a comparison that she is making. Israel’s acts in Gaza are being likened to the tactics of the Nazis, an intolerable comparison. The German ambassador to Belgium, Martin Kotthaus, was quick to respond.

Martin Kotthaus, who serves as German Ambassador to Belgium, sharply criticized Gennez’s statement comparing Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip with the tactics of the Nazi government during World War II. Comparisons of the Holocaust with what is currently happening are out of the question, said Kotthaus.

Have you seen the Gazans being herded into the “showers” that turn out to be filled with Zyklon-B, the way Jews were by the Nazis? Or heard the running motors of the mobile killing vans? Have you noticed the Gazans being shoved into cattle cars, locked in, and then transported to places similar to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec? Have you seen IDF soldiers murdering tens of thousands of Palestinians by shooting them in the back of their necks, as one by one they toppled into vast open pits, where they will be buried, dead or even while alive?

He [Kotthaus] wrote that the German government’s position on the Gaza war and the situation in the Middle East is that Israel had the right to defend itself against the continuing terror of Hamas. At the same time, he said Israel must do everything in its power to protect the civilian population and adapt its military action accordingly.

Of course Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas, a designated terrorist group that declares in its 1988 charter that its goal is the “obliteration” of the Jewish state, and of the Jews living in it, who will either be killed or expelled. Israel did not start the current war in Gaza. It began, we need to keep reminding the world, on October 7, when 3,000 members of Hamas pushed into Israel, and proceeded to murder as many Israelis as they could. They killed 360 young people at the Re’imi dance festival. They attacked 22 kibbutzim, where they beheaded babies, burned children alive, gang-raped, tortured, and killed young girls, sliced the breasts off women, gouged out the eyes and cut off the genitalia of men, murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. It was the largest murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Caroline Gennez surely knows all this.

When the IDF went into Gaza to crush Hamas, so that it no longer would pose a military threat, the IDF made enormous effort, and still does, to minimize civilian casualties. It warned Palestinians to leave areas of Gaza that were about to become battlefields. First, the IDF dropped 1.5 million leaflets, telling people to leave northern Gaza and to move south of the Wadi Gaza. They also made robo-calls and tens of thousands of personal calls. Later, when the IDF was about to move its main operation to southern Gaza, it again leafletted, telephoned, emailed information about the exact areas where the IDF would not be attacking, giving precise instructions as to which parts of southern Gaza would be free from IDF attack, and urging Gazans to move there. And as the IDF always does, it also warned people to leave civilian buildings — schools, mosques, apartment buildings — that were about to be hit. Of course, such warnings also helped Hamas fighters to escape attacks. No other army in the world warns its enemies of imminent attacks, a practice that led British Colonel Richard Kemp, who commanded British troops in Afghanistan, to describe the IDF as “the most moral army in the world.”