Genocide in Gaza: What weapons is Germany supplying to Israel?Interview of Shir Hever by Ignacio Rosaslanda

 

Ignacio Rosaslanda, Junge Welt Journalist: Thank you for talking with us today. Can you please introduce yourself very briefly?

Dr. Shir Hever: Gladly. My name is Shir Hever. I am a researcher of the arms industry, the Israeli arms industry. I am a supporter of the BDS movement. I am originally from Jerusalem and now I live in Germany.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: Today we are here in Leipzig. Can you explain a little why it is important to be here today?

Dr. Shir Hever: There is a suspicion here that weapons are also being delivered to Israel from the airport here in Leipzig. That is still under investigation, but the protest is everywhere against all weapon deliveries, not just here in Leipzig. There are protests all over Germany. It is very impressive that so many people in Leipzig are active and engaged against arms deals with Israel. And we see here, I believe, more than 1000 people.

Now, as Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, approximately one third of the weapons come from Germany, and that is a violation of international law.

Ignacio What kind of weapons are these that Germany is sending to Israel?

Dr. Shir Hever: There are very large quantities of weapons that Germany sends, from submarines to drones, from anti-tank missiles to warships that bomb with gas. Many of these weapons are used in Gaza. Most of these weapons are used in Gaza. And according to international agreements, it is forbidden to conduct this trade with Israel. Not only to sell weapons to Israel, but also to buy weapons from Israel or to transport weapons to Israel. Germany does that too. Germany also buys weapons from Israel. Germany buys and transports weapons from the USA through the Ramstein airbase, for example, or on German ships.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: We were in Ulm a few weeks ago, in the town where the Elbit factory is. We also have Rheinmetall here. How big is the industry involvement here in Germany?

Dr. Shir Hever: Germany overall is the fourth or fifth largest arms exporter in the world, so much larger even than Israel. Elbit Systems and also the other two large Israeli arms companies, IAI and Rafael, have subsidiaries in Germany. And this is very important for the Israeli military. They sell weapons to the Bundeswehr (German armed forces), but they also produce parts for weapons that they send to Israel. And that is, of course, forbidden. Germany must prohibit that. The statement by (German chancellor) Merz should also apply to the Israeli subsidiaries in Germany, meaning in Ulm and elsewhere. But I believe that the interests of the German arms industry are so strong that it is not so easy to stop them. But on the other hand, the people who want to profit greatly from this in large German companies like Rheinmetall, MTU, or RENK also don't want to end up in prison, and if they do something completely illegal, that will be the result.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: We see images every day of rockets destroying Gaza. How can we know if those bombs or those missiles or those rockets are of German origin?

Dr. Shir Hever: Well, that is very difficult to know because what Israel does after every bombardment is fire 155mm shells to destroy the traces, so that we cannot find the scraps of the devices. But sometimes we still find them. On July 1, 2024, a Palestinian journalist photographed a piece of a rocket. There was a small piece that said "Made in Germany". It was from a company in Fulda. The company is called Jumo. They produce air conditioners. But this pressure regulator from the air conditioner was used by Israel for a rocket that was used in the West Bank, not in Gaza, against the refugee camps in Jenin, and that is of course forbidden. This means these pressure regulators must be classified as dual-use products, and this company Jumo, if it continues to sell these products, it is illegal, they must then be punished.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: From when can one say that they are doing this? Is it punishable for these people, for the companies, but also for the politicians? What do we need?

Dr. Shir Hever: Yes. Well, Israel has always claimed the occupation is short-term, and then according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, military occupation is allowed for short periods. Of course, that doesn't work with the illegal settlements, but the weapon deliveries were a separate matter. But now, on December 29, 2023, South Africa sued Israel with the accusation of genocide, and on January 24, 2024, the ICJ (International Court of Justice) gave an order: Israel must stop the acts under the Genocide Convention. And immediately, in the second that Israel broke this order, meaning did not follow it, already on January 24, 2024, that creates an obligation for third countries like Germany to stop the weapons immediately. Since that moment, Germany is breaking international law.

Furthermore, there are additional steps. For example, on July 19, 2024, the ICJ wrote an advisory opinion that the occupation as such is illegal. Israel can no longer say it is only short-term. It is not short-term, it must be ended immediately, and third countries are compelled to impose sanctions against Israel and to stop weapon deliveries. And Germany has unfortunately ignored this ruling as well.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: What does Germany buy from Israel then?

Dr. Shir Hever: Many things. But the biggest deal is the Arrow-3 system. That is a defense missile that Israel produces for Germany, for Germany against potential missile attacks. It is an untested system. It is not known if it works or not, but Germany was already prepared to pay 4 billion euros for this system. That is very, very much. It is the largest arms export in Israel's history. And it was signed 10 days in October, after the famous speech by the then Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, who said that Palestinians were "human animals" and would get "no water, no food, no medicine." So that was his declaration of genocide. 10 days later, Germany invited him, Boris Pistorius, the Defense Minister, to sign a deal for this Arrow-3. There are many other weapons that Israel sells to Germany. But that would be a long list, unfortunately.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: Okay. And why do you think it is important that we are here today at the airport?

Dr. Shir Hever: I believe that the declaration from Merz would not have been possible if he (the government) had not understood that public opinion in Germany is changing, that the majority in Germany is against the weapon deliveries and against the genocide. And so every pressure that we exert has a result. His declaration was only a first step, it is of course not enough. But if we continue to protest, continue to march and demonstrate, then further steps will come. We already see this in other countries. So Germany is very far behind the rest of the world here, but it is getting closer and closer. I read yesterday that the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, Kaspar Veldkamp, resigned from the government because he wanted sharp sanctions against Israel, which his government did not accept. They wanted fewer sanctions. That means it is coming to Germany's border, to the Netherlands. Germany is next.

Ignacio Rosaslanda: Thank you very much.

Leipzig-Halle Airport, 30/8/2025

PINO ARLACCHI The Great Hoax against Venezuela as a “narco-state”: oil geopolitics disguised as a war on drugs

 Pino Arlacchi, L’Antidplomatico, 27/8/2025
Translated by Tlaxcala

Pino Arlacchi (Gioia Tauro, 1951) is an Italian sociologist, politician, and civil servant. From 1997 to 2002 he was United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNODC, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

During my time heading the UNODC, the UN’s anti-drug and anti-crime agency, I spent much of my time in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil—but I was never in Venezuela. Simply put, there was no need. The Venezuelan government’s cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America, matched only by Cuba’s impeccable record. A fact which, in today’s delirious Trumpian narrative of the “narco-state Venezuela,” sounds like a geopolitically motivated slander.

But the real data, the hard evidence found in the 2025 World Drug Report of the very agency I had the honor to lead, tells a story completely opposite to the one being peddled by the Trump administration. A story that dismantles, piece by piece, the geopolitical fabrication built around the so-called Cartel de los soles—an entity as legendary as the Loch Ness monster, but useful for justifying sanctions, embargoes, and even threats of military intervention against a country which, not coincidentally, sits on one of the largest oil reserves on the planet.

Venezuela According to the UNODC: A Marginal Country on the Drug Trafficking Map

The 2025 UNODC report is crystal clear, and should be an embarrassment for those who crafted the rhetoric of demonizing Venezuela. The report barely mentions Venezuela, stating only that a marginal fraction of Colombian drug production passes through the country en route to the United States and Europe. According to the UN, Venezuela has consolidated its status as a territory free from coca leaf and marijuana cultivation, as well as from the presence of international criminal cartels.

The document merely confirms the 30 previous annual reports, none of which mention Venezuelan drug trafficking—because it doesn’t exist. Only 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela. To put that in perspective: in 2018, while 210 tons of cocaine crossed Venezuelan territory, a staggering 2,370 tons—ten times as much—were produced or traded through Colombia, and another 1,400 tons through Guatemala.

Yes, you read that right: Guatemala is a drug corridor seven times more significant than the supposedly fearsome Bolivarian “narco-state.” Yet no one talks about it because Guatemala is historically bone-dry—it produces just 0.01% of the global supply—of the only “drug” that Trump really cares about: oil.

The Fantastic Cartel of the Suns: Hollywood Fiction

The Cartel de los soles is a creature of Trumpian imagination. Supposedly led by Venezuela’s president, it is not mentioned once in the report of the world’s leading anti-drug body, nor in the documents of any European anti-crime agency, nor in nearly any other international source. Not even a footnote. A deafening silence that should make anyone with a shred of critical sense pause. How can a criminal organization allegedly so powerful that it warrants a $50 million bounty be completely ignored by every actual anti-drug authority?

In other words, what is sold as a Netflix-style super-cartel is in reality a patchwork of small local networks—the sort of petty crime you find in any country, including the United States, where, incidentally, nearly 100,000 people die each year from opioid overdoses. Deaths that have nothing to do with Venezuela and everything to do with USAmerican Big Pharma.

Ecuador: The Real Hub No One Wants to See

While Washington waves the Venezuelan bogeyman, the real drug hubs thrive almost unchallenged. Ecuador, for instance, with 57% of banana containers leaving Guayaquil for Antwerp loaded with cocaine. European authorities seized 13 tons of cocaine in a single Spanish ship that came directly from Ecuadorian ports controlled by companies tied to figures within Ecuador’s government.

The European Union produced a detailed report on the ports of Guayaquil, documenting how “Colombian, Mexican, and Albanian mafias all operate extensively in Ecuador.” The murder rate in Ecuador skyrocketed from 7.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2020 to 45.7 in 2023. Yet little is said about Ecuador. Perhaps because Ecuador produces only 0.5% of global oil, and because its government does not make a habit of challenging U.S. hegemony in Latin America.

The Real Drug Routes: Geography vs. Propaganda

During my years at UNODC, one of the most important lessons I learned is that geography does not lie. Drug routes follow precise logics: proximity to production centers, ease of transport, corruption of local authorities, and the presence of established criminal networks. Venezuela meets almost none of these criteria.

Colombia produces over 70% of the world’s cocaine. Peru and Bolivia cover most of the remaining 30%. The logical routes to reach U.S. and European markets go across the Pacific to Asia, through the Eastern Caribbean to Europe, and overland via Central America into the U.S. Venezuela, facing the South Atlantic, is geographically disadvantaged for all three main routes. Criminal logistics make Venezuela a marginal actor in the grand theater of international drug trafficking.

Cuba: The Embarrassing Example

Geography does not lie, true—but politics can override it. Cuba remains today the gold standard of anti-drug cooperation in the Caribbean. An island just off the Florida coast, theoretically a perfect base for smuggling into the U.S., yet in practice absent from drug flows. I repeatedly witnessed DEA and FBI agents express admiration for the Cuban communists’ rigorous anti-drug policies.

Chavista Venezuela has consistently followed the Cuban model, pioneered by Fidel Castro himself: international cooperation, territorial control, repression of criminal activity. Neither Venezuela nor Cuba has ever had large tracts of land cultivated with coca and controlled by organized crime.

The European Union, while having no particular oil interest in Venezuela, does have a concrete interest in fighting the drug trade afflicting its cities. It has produced its own European Drug Report 2025, based on real data rather than geopolitical wishful thinking. That report does not mention Venezuela even once as a corridor for international drug trafficking.

This is the difference between an honest analysis and a false, insulting narrative. Europe needs reliable data to protect its citizens from drugs, so it produces accurate reports. The U.S. needs justifications for its oil policies, so it produces propaganda disguised as intelligence.

According to the European report, cocaine is the second most used drug in the EU 27 countries, but the main sources are clearly identified: Colombia for production, Central America for transit, and various routes through West Africa for distribution. In this picture, Venezuela and Cuba simply do not appear.

Yet Venezuela is systematically demonized against every principle of truth. The explanation was provided by former FBI Director James Comey in his post-resignation memoirs, where he revealed the unspoken motivations behind U.S. policy toward Venezuela: Trump had told him that Maduro’s government was “sitting on a mountain of oil that we need to buy.”

So it is not about drugs, crime, or national security. It is about oil that the U.S. would rather not pay for.

It is Donald Trump, therefore, who deserves an international warrant for a very specific crime: “systematic slander against a sovereign state aimed at appropriating its oil resources.”

 

AMENA EL ASHKARThe problem with Hamas equating the Gaza genocide to the Holocaust

“What [the highly distinguished, highly humanistic, highly Christian bourgeois of the 20th century] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man per se, it is the crime against white man, it is the humiliation of white man, and of having applied to Europe colonialist methods that until then had only been used on the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the negroes of Africa.”

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955

Hamas’s effort to gain Western sympathy by comparing the Gaza genocide to the Holocaust is understandable but ultimately shortsighted. Instead, putting the genocide in the larger context of colonial violence could build genuine solidarity.

Amena El Ashkar (bio), Mondoweiss, 29/8/2025

 

Palestinians bury the bodies of 110 people killed by Israeli attacks in a mass grave in the Khan Younis cemetery, November 22, 2023. (Photo: © Mohammed Talatene/dpa via ZUMA Press APA Images)

For over two years, Palestinians in Gaza have been declaring: “We are being exterminated.” These declarations did not emerge from official Israeli statements alone, but from lived experience, where Israeli military operations have turned Palestinian bodies into sites of extreme colonial violence. Yet, despite the visibility of mass displacement, bombardment, and starvation, much of the international community remains reluctant to categorize these actions as genocide.

In practice, Palestinian reality becomes “legitimate” only once it passes through the moral frameworks of international institutions—frameworks that often understate the scale of the violence. Recognition usually follows a lengthy process: assessment, verification, data collection, and the involvement of a “credible,” “neutral” authority to study and label the event. Only then can Palestinian suffering acquire a certain degree of legitimacy. In effect, Palestinians may die without restriction, but they are not permitted to name their own deaths without external approval.

In an effort to combat this, we have seen how Palestinian resistance figures, including Hamas itself, have attempted to contextualize the genocide in Gaza by using one of the most potent historical analogies in the Western lexicon: the Nazi holocaust.

In the context of colonial struggle, this is not simply a matter of terminology—it is a strategic challenge.

At first glance, Hamas’s media strategy to use the Nazi holocaust during World War II appears logical: spokespersons aim to evoke the Western moral memory of the Holocaust and Nazism, hoping to mobilize public opinion in Western societies in a way that would pressure governments to act and end the suffering in Gaza.

Yet, after more than two years, this effect has not materialized. Why?

In the Western political imagination, the Second World War is a central moral reference point, and the Holocaust lies at its core. Within the framework of Western epistemic dominance, these states have been able to impose their ethical standards and define unacceptable behavours, shaping the very foundations of the concept of “humanity.” The Holocaust was not a historical anomaly; the same states’ colonial histories are replete with genocides and famines perpetrated against colonized peoples. What rendered the Holocaust a moral absolute was not the act of mass killing itself, but the identity of the targeted body — the European body. In this sense, global moral frameworks have been built on a Eurocentric foundation.

By choosing to frame the events in Gaza through the Holocaust, Hamas reveals two dynamics: first, that the Palestinian tragedy is not being presented as a self-standing experience but rather through the lens of another catastrophe — one that Western powers have designated as the archetype of atrocity. This reinforces the authority of a moral system that is selectively deaf to Palestinian suffering and inevitably grants primacy to Western trauma. Second, the use of this analogy sends a message to Western audiences: “Believe us because what is happening to us resembles your own history.” This reinforces the idea that Western pain is the benchmark for all suffering, and that other tragedies require comparison to it to be deemed credible. This dynamic risks undermining the Palestinian historical experience by situating it within the moral order from which it seeks to break free.

There is also a structural problem in the comparison itself. By invoking the Holocaust and Nazism, the Gaza war is placed in an unwinnable position, because the comparison is judged against a metric designed to keep the Holocaust at the top of the hierarchy of atrocities. This overlooks the fact that the Holocaust occupies a protected space in Western collective memory, one maintained through decades of investment in museums, films, literature, and education. The enormity of Nazi crimes is thus preserved as unmatched. In this framework, if the violence in Gaza is perceived as falling short of that standard — for example, lacking the iconic imagery of gas chambers — it becomes easier for skeptics to reject the label of genocide.

Furthermore, the term “Zio-Nazism” frequently used by Hamas is imprecise. While similarities exist, including advancing an ideology of racial supremacy, Zionism is a settler colonial project, and Nazism was not. While both have committed grave crimes, these crimes differ in substance and purpose. Israeli policies in Gaza are best understood as part of the longer historical continuum of settler-colonial violence, not as a direct iteration of Nazi methods. Technically and politically, the analogy risks obscuring the structural logics of Israeli violence and allows Israel to dismiss the charge by discrediting the comparison.

When Hamas chose to employ the Holocaust and Nazi comparisons, its intended audience was clearly the Western international community. This reveals two related problems. The first is a misreading of the structural nature of Western support for Israel — seemingly assuming that the West’s position is driven by ignorance or moral blindness, rather than by long-standing strategic and colonial interests that position Israel as a functional ally in the region. In this view, Western securitization of Palestinians and of the resistance could be reversed if the public were persuaded to see Israel through a different moral frame, such as that of the Holocaust.

It also overestimates the likely impact of Western public pressure on state policy, misjudges which alliances are viable, and constrains its diplomatic maneuvering to frameworks set by others. In such a context, the Holocaust analogy does not merely fail to persuade — it signals an underlying strategic posture that risks hindering the movement’s ability to convert battlefield gains into long-term political advantage.

Resistance and liberation are not solely about reclaiming land; they are equally about reclaiming imagination, consciousness, and language. At first glance, speaking of decolonizing knowledge frameworks during a war of extermination may seem secondary — yet it remains essential. What is happening in Gaza today is not an exceptional event, nor does it resemble the Holocaust as the West has constructed it in its moral imagination. Rather, it is the continuation of a long colonial legacy — one that has shaped not only the fate of Palestinians but that of other peoples across the Global South.

Seeing Gaza’s present as part of this broader colonial continuum is essential for building new alliances in a shifting geopolitical order. The region’s own colonial history offers ample comparative frames to expose atrocity, without reinforcing moral regimes that — after more than two years — have yielded very limited diplomatic and political returns for the Palestinian struggle.

The way we name what is happening is not a symbolic act; it fundamentally shapes the trajectory of strategic thinking and is an indicator of how we perceive things and how we think we are perceived by others. Decolonizing the frameworks through which we speak is therefore not merely a symbolic goal, but a strategic pathway toward a political and diplomatic practice capable of translating tactical gains on the ground into long-term strategic victories — using terms we define ourselves, rather than those imposed from outside.