TEHRAN – In a display of moral bankruptcy, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt declared Germany’s “100% support” for the Israeli regime’s military actions against Iran.

Accompanied by the regime’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, Dobrindt condemned Iran’s act of self-defense during the regime’s 12-day war against the country as an “attack on civilians” while ignoring Israel’s systematic slaughter of Palestinians and its unprovoked aggression against Tehran.

“There is no justification for attacks on a civilian population,” he proclaimed in Tel Aviv, a statement dripping with hypocrisy given Germany’s enabling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its support for the recent assault on Iran that killed over 935 Iranians, predominantly civilians.

The ‘dirty work’ of imperialism

Dobrindt’s visit—the first by a foreign official since the Israeli-imposed war on Iran came to a halt—was not merely symbolic. It crystallized Germany’s role as a patron of Israeli war crimes.

Just days earlier, Chancellor Friedrich Merz admitted the quiet part aloud: Israel is doing the “dirty work for all of us” by attacking Iran.

Merz praised the “courage” of the regime’s unprovoked aggression, framing it as a service to the West.

This admission lays bare the cynical division of labor within the Western imperialist project. Germany (alongside the United Kingdom and France), which has long portrayed itself as a champion of rationality and international law, has in practice revealed that it plays the same role the old colonial powers did in the 18th and 19th centuries: supporting blatant bullying to secure the supremacy of Western states.

This rhetoric echoes Germany’s historical alignment with colonial violence, from arming Ba'athist Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks on Iran in the 1980s to shielding Israel from accountability today.

This precise, unwritten division of labor—shaped over decades—assigns the United States and the Israeli regime the primary role in kinetic warfare and bombardments, while Europe manages political pressure, media narratives, and dubious legal sanctions.

Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, demolished Germany's moral posturing on this matter: "History reminder: Germany ignited two world wars. Iran sheltered Jews fleeing Hitler."

In a recent post on X, he urged German officials to "stay silent" rather than justify the Israeli regime's crimes, noting that those "perpetually on the wrong side of history" forfeit the right to lecture others.

Complicity and ‘Staatsrason’

While Dobrindt vowed solidarity with Tel Aviv, his government actively sabotaged efforts to hold Israel accountable.

On June 23, Germany blocked a move by Spain to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement—a pact conditional on human rights compliance—despite the European Commission's finding that Israel breached its obligations in Gaza and the West Bank.

This decision coincided with the regime's relentless bombardment of Gaza City, a strike that tragically claimed 80 Palestinian lives in a single day and triggered widespread forced evacuations.

Germany's "Staatsrason" (reason of state)—invoked by Merz to justify unwavering support for Israel—has become a license for genocide.

When Merz claimed Germany's duty is to "defend the state of Israel in its existence," he ignored that the regime's "existence" relies on erasing Palestinians and wreaking havoc across West Asia.

The Israeli regime has killed over 56,500 Palestinians since October 2023, with broader estimates suggesting the true figure, including those missing and presumed dead, is considerably higher. Yet Germany increased arms exports to the regime to €161 million in 2024.

Dobrindt’s visit even announced enhanced “cyber-defense cooperation,” further entrenching Germany’s complicity in the very aggression it funds and shields politically.

Nuclear hypocrisy and the ghost of Saddam

Dobrindt said Iran’s nuclear program “threatens” Europe—a claim amplified by Merz, who insisted Iran “must not have nuclear weapons.”

This division of labor led European officials, amid Iran’s exercise of its right to self-defense, to fill global platforms with recycled claims about “Iran’s nuclear and missile threat” instead of condemning the aggression.

This ignores three damning realities:

I.  Iran's nuclear program is peaceful and, as the most inspected country in IAEA history, has remained under its strict safeguards, while Israel possesses undeclared nuclear weapons.

II.  Israel brazenly attacked Iran and bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, killing scientists and violating international law—acts that Germany endorsed.

II.  Germany armed Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons used to massacre Iranians in the 1980s, including the 1987 Sardasht attack.

As Iran’s FM spokesman Baqaei emphasized, Germany bears “legal and moral responsibility” for enabling Saddam’s war crimes.

Yet it now funds Israel’s atrocities while lecturing Iran—a nation that has never launched a war of aggression—and dutifully performing its assigned role in the Western pressure campaign by amplifying baseless threats.

The wrong side of history, again

Berlin’s alignment with Tel Aviv reflects a broader pattern of Western imperialism, where it actively upholds the colonial-era division of roles.

Germany's function as an instrument of Western imperialism pervades various domains.

Culturally, the Berlinale film festival's censorship of pro-Palestinian voices—going so far as to report staff to police for solidarity with Gaza—reveals Germany's systematic repression of dissent, a mechanism used to uphold a veneer of rationality even as it facilitates barbarism.

This repression extends far beyond mere cultural censorship, however. Germany, in its perversion of the "Never Again is for everyone" principle, has, decades after the Luxembourg Agreement (1952) and the establishment of diplomatic ties (1965), warped its "special responsibility" for Holocaust victims into a blank check for Israeli crimes.

This insidious reality was further manifested in Dobrindt's Bat Yam performance, framing Iran's act of self-defense as terrorism while ignoring Israel's genocide, which proves Iran's FM spokesman’s warning: "History does not forgive easily, and the memory of nations is long."

While many nations of the Global South demand accountability for Israeli atrocities, Dobrindt and Merz, however, cling to a failed policy that stains Germany's moral standing and reaffirms its commitment to a neocolonial order.

By performing its designated role of political cover, sanctions enforcement, and narrative manipulation, Germany enables the worst excesses of US and Israeli aggression, proving its claims of championing law and rationality are nothing but a modern veneer for an age-old imperialist agenda.

Until Berlin confronts its complicity in Israeli terror, its own bloody history, and its active participation in this cynical Western division of imperial labor, it will remain on the wrong side of history, condemned by the very conscience it fraudulently claims to champion.