Volkswagen is planning to convert one of its factories to produce Iron Dome components
ByTarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/authors/tarik-cyril-amar/@tarikcyrilamartarikcyrilamar.substack.comtarikcyrilamar.com
FILE PHOTO: Rockets launched towards Israel from the northern Gaza Strip and response from the Israeli missile defense system © Fatima Shbair/Getty Images
One of Germany’s biggest and most iconic car manufacturers, Volkswagen (VW) and one of Israel’s most well-known arms manufacturers, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, part of the global Rafael Group, are planning to collaborate.
If the project is realized, VW will convert one of its German factories
in the historic city of Osnabrueck from making automobiles to producing
components of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
There
are good reasons why this has raised eyebrows. For one thing, it
reflects not only VW’s growing problems, but those of Germany’s vital
automobile sector and the German economy as a whole. As the Financial Times has noted, the VW-Rafael project would mark “the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged,” trying to save itself by entering the “booming defense sector.”
These
plunging profits are due to many factors: Chinese competition;
Germany’s failure to keep up with cutting-edge technology, communication
infrastructure, and business practices; American sabotage by tariff
warfare and filching German companies via subsidies; and last but not
least, the horrendous energy costs that the entire EU has inflicted on
itself by going to war – by Ukrainian proxy and sanctions – against
Russia.
The shift to making things for the military, meanwhile, is
just a small part of Germany’s breathtakingly misguided response:
Namely, a policy of going into massive public debt
– under a so-called conservative – to finance a bizarre form of
military Keynesianism that is based on illusions (no, Russia is not
about to attack), produces self-reinforcing Russophobia (which makes a return to normality even harder), and won’t work as an economic boost, as even the usually government-aligned Spiegel has admitted.
In
short, like a prism, the Osnabrueck plan bundles together many of
Germany’s worst – and self-inflicted – problems, and the single silliest
idea of how to tackle them.
Yet, there is obviously a whole other
dimension to the VW-Rafael project that is even worse: The plan also
encapsulates Germany’s complicity with Israel’s crimes, an obstinate policy that is deeply immoral, has twisted Germany’s domestic politics and discourse toward cynical racism, censorship, and authoritarian restrictions on free speech (as a UN report has confirmed),
and, moreover, is stupidly shortsighted as well, since it alienates
most of the world, and in particular, its rising part in the Global
South.
This complicity does not make the VW-Rafael project unique. On the
contrary, it is typical for decades of constantly expanding and
intensifying collaboration between Israel’s military, technology, and
industrial sectors and companies from all over the world, as recently
outlined in UN special rapporteur’s Francesca Albanese’s report From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide. Given
the many crimes committed not only by the Israeli state, but also large
numbers of individual Israelis as well as Israeli institutions and
businesses, that in itself is a global scandal.
And yet there it is, so massive that its outlines will have to be sketched in just a few highlights.
Computers, clouds, and AI? IBM, Hewlett Packard, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft
– to name only a few – are deeply and profitably involved not merely in
doing business with Israel but with the specific business of population
control, surveillance, and incarceration. That is, to be precise, the
very sharp end of Israel’s apartheid regime imposed on the Palestinians.
Apartheid is, of course, a UN-recognized atrocity crime (not just a
specific, criminal stage in South Africa’s history). And not only the
infernal Palantir but Microsoft as well – with its Azure and Nimbus
systems – has directly helped the Israeli military while it carries out
genocide.
Demolishing Palestinian homes, roads, wells, public
buildings, and all vital infrastructure, in short, the material basis of
life? Caterpillar, Hyundai as well as Doosan, and Volvo
have all been at Israel’s service, including in the massive, systematic
devastation of Gaza that has been part of Israel’s genocide and ethnic
cleansing campaign.
But then, Zionism doesn’t only destroy and
displace. To be fair, it also builds – namely, illegal settlements on
territories that are officially called ‘occupied’ but have in reality
been de facto annexed by Israel in its ceaseless, aggressive drive for
even more ‘Lebensraum’ in a ‘Greater Israel’ that has never even defined
its borders.
And don’t let the Israeli Hasbara propaganda fool you: There is no room for debate here. In 2024, the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the UN, unambiguously confirmed
that the Israeli post-1967 occupations, including that of East
Jerusalem as well as the exploitation of these territories’ resources,
and all settlements – really colonies – there are illegal because of “Israel’s violations, through its policies and practices, of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.” Israel must not only leave, as the court also made explicit, but provide “full reparations” to the Palestinians.
Unfortunately, making Israel obey the law – or basic moral precepts everyone else recognizes as binding intuitively (Don’t target children with snipers, for instance, or Don’t torture toddlers)
– has always been a challenge, not least because of Washington’s
criminal support for Israel’s criminal regime. None of this means the
law does not apply.
But those companies helping Israel build its
settlements and exploit the illegally held territories – such as the
German Heidelberg Materials AG with its subsidiary Hanson Israel,
Construcciones Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles from Spain, real estate
international Keller Williams RealtyLLC, and again, Caterpillar,
Hyundai, and Volvo, are all also involved in a very serious crime.
Unfortunately, it would be easy to greatly extend this list of
corporate collaboration and complicity with Israel. VW is not alone. Its
new project for colluding with Israel is not even a first for the
company. A decade ago, VW set up Cymotive Technologies with Israeli
partners. And not just any partners, but spooks from the infamous Shin Bet
intelligence service. Cymotive focuses on cybersecurity and cars. If
you have heard of how extraordinarily proud Israel has been of its
heinous weaponization of international supply chains to carry out its
2024 pager attacks in Lebanon – a form of terrorism, as a former CIA director rightly noted
– that might give you food for thought while driving. And if you have
the misfortune of being aware of one of Israel’s top spies – namely a
former head of Mossad – openly bragging of having planted devices for pager-attack-style terrorism and spying all over the world, maybe you will prefer walking.
But
then again, maybe there’s less need to worry, as it turns out that
Israeli technology – including that produced by Rafael – is not all it
is cracked up to be. Consider merely that, as even the Zionist-aligned
New York Times has to admit, Israeli missile defenses have not been doing well
since Iran has been striking back in earnest against Israeli and
American aggression. It is hard to assess the full damage in Israel
because its regime practices a censorship blackout, but we know it has
been taking bad hits. And then there are those famous Merkava tanks good at smashing through Gaza’s civilians but now being decimated in their invasion of Lebanon,
by brave and clearly well-trained but much less well-armed Hezbollah
fighters. Guess what company makes the Merkava’s anti-missile defense
system? Yes, that would be Rafael. It seems Volkswagen and its Berlin
backers have lost not only whatever sense of ethics they have ever had
but also quality.
There is something special about the VW-Rafael
deal-in-the-making. Obviously, there is the ugly irony of one of Nazi
Germany’s main arms makers shifting back to its old business model.
Then, while many companies and countries cultivate ties with the
genocidal apartheid state of Israel and neglect their legal obligations
to stop its crimes, Germany adds the very peculiar hypocrisy of
shielding its intense complicity with Israel by abusing the memory of
Germany’s own genocide of Europe’s Jews, the Holocaust. It is hard to imagine a greater moral and intellectual perversion.
If
Germany had to learn one lesson from its genocides – the Holocaust and
that of the Herero and Nama as well – then it was: This crime must never
be committed. By no one. Not by Nazis, not by Zionists, either. And it
cannot be done to anyone, not to Jews, not to Palestinians – even by
Jews. Finally, no one must ever side with the perpetrators. No
perpetrators, including Jewish ones