The

The Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Brewer Rabner Hansen.

Israel's war on Gaza has brought into sharp focus the role

of its Western supporters, without whom Israel's genocide would likely have been brought to a halt by now.

Aside from the United States, the most important material backer of the genocide is Germany.

The country accounted for 30% of Israel's arms imports between 2019 and 2023, and last year

Germany's weapon sales were worth over €326 million, representing a tenfold increase

on sales in the previous year, with the majority of export licenses granted after October

7th.

Olaf Schultz's government has also been a staunch defender of Israel at the diplomatic level,

and within Germany itself, a McCarthy-esque witch hunt has been conducted against those

expressing even the mildest solidarity with Palestinians.

In part one of a two-part episode on the topic of Germany's relationship with Israel,

I spoke with Bua Rabna Hansen

about his recent essay, The New German Chauvinism. In the first part of our conversation, we discussed

the history of the German-Israel alliance and how its emergence was far more complicated than is

commonly supposed. We discussed the contrasting attitudes to Israel amongst the German public and the political

and media class and big business, and we went on to discuss the distinct memory culture around

the crimes of Nazism and the Holocaust that emerged in West Germany during the Cold War,

and how elements of that culture have fostered a political climate in Germany that is, at best,

deaf to the suffering of the

...