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Germany Pulls Legal Support for Israel in ICJ Gaza Genocide Case
Berlin says it needs to focus on its defense in a separate ICJ case in which Nicaragua accuses Germany of supporting Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
Mar 19, 2026
Germany said Wednesday that it will drop its planned intervention in the International Court of Justice genocide against Israel so that it can better focus on its own defense in a separate ICJ case filed by Nicaragua accusing Berlin of enabling Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza via arms sales.
Deputy German Foreign Minister Josef Hinterseher said during a press conference in Berlin that his country "will not intervene" on Israel's side in the South Africa v. Israel genocide case filed at the Hague-based tribunal in December 2023.
This is a marked departure from Germany's January 2024 announcement that it would intervene on behalf of Israel in the case, arguing that the genocide allegation made by South Africa had "no basis whatsoever."
Nearly two dozen nations, most recently the Netherlands, Namibia, and Iceland, have either formally intervened on the side of South Africa or announced their intent to do so. The Herero and Nama peoples of modern-day Namibia suffered a genocide during the region's colonization by Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A handful of countries including the United States, Hungary, and Fiji have also intervened on behalf of Israel.
In 2024, Nicaragua filed a case against Germany at the ICJ, arguing that the European nation “has not only failed to fulfill its obligation to prevent the genocide committed and being committed against the Palestinian people... but has contributed to the commission of genocide in violation" of the Genocide Convention.
Germany has provided financial, military, diplomatic, and political support to Israel. It also temporarily halted financial contributions to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) based on unsubstantiated Israeli claims that a dozen of its worjers were involved in the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
Unlike Germany, the US and Israel are not members of the ICJ. The US quit the tribunal after it ruled against the Reagan administration in Nicaragua v. United States, a 1984 ruling that determined the US illegally supported Contra terrorists and mined Nicaraguan harbors.
However, under the court's territorial jurisdiction powers, countries that are not members of the court can still be brought before it for crimes committed in member states.
Further complicating matters, Germany is one of numerous countries which have intervened in Gambia v. Myanmar, which the African nation filed at the ICJ in 2019 amid the Burmese junta's ongoing genocide against Rohingya Muslims.
The ICJ has issued several provisional orders in South Africa v. Israel, including directives to prevent genocidal acts and allow aid into the besieged Gaza Strip amid a burgeoning famine. Israel has been accused of ignoring these orders.
The US under the Biden and Trump administrations pressured ICJ members to refrain from intervening on behalf of South Africa. The Trump administration has also sanctioned members of the International Criminal Court (ICC)‚ which in 2024 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
In Germany, as in several other Western nations, authorities have cracked down on pro-Palestine protests, free expression of support for Palestinian rights, and criticism of Israel. Critics say the persistent framing of German national identity around enduring guilt for the Nazis' wholesale slaughter of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust is driving overzealous policing of dissent and conflation of pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism.
This perceived moral burden, say observers, risks stifling legitimate political debate, curtailing free speech, and criminalizing solidarity with Palestinians under the pretext of historical responsibility. This has driven German actions from secretly funding Israel's development of nuclear weapons over half a century ago to brutally assaulting and arresting pro-Palestine protesters—including women, elders, minors, and people with disabilities—after the October 2023 attack.
German police punch an anti-genocide woman in front of the cameras.
[image or embed]
— Antifa_Ultras (@antifa-ultras.bsky.social) October 7, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Amnesty International's latest annual human rights report on Germany notes "excessive use of force by police during peaceful protests by climate activists and supporters of Palestinians’ rights," as well as Berlin's "irresponsible arms transfers" to not only Israel but also Saudi Arabia.
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'Not Our War': US Allies Rebuff Trump Demands to Help Clean Up His Iran Disaster
"What does Trump expect from a handful of European frigates that the powerful US Navy cannot do?" said one German official.
Mar 16, 2026
US allies are giving President Donald Trump the cold shoulder after he demanded that they send their militaries to help him reopen and secure the Strait of Hormuz, which has been shut down by the Iranian government in response to US and Israeli attacks.
Reuters chief national security correspondent Phil Stewart collected reactions from several US allies to Trump's demands in a Monday social media post, and they show little appetite for helping the president out of the jam he created when he launched an unprovoked and unconstitutional war with Iran more than two weeks ago.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius spoke bluntly about his country's unwillingness to get involved in what has become a regional conflict in the Middle East that has sent global energy prices soaring and is threatening to upend the global economy.
"What does Trump expect from a handful of European frigates that the powerful US Navy cannot do?" Pistorius asked. "This is not our war, we have not started it."
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated flatly that his nation would not be "drawn into the wider Iran war," and insisted that only a diplomatic solution could ease the crisis.
"We are working with others to come up with a credible plan for the Strait of Hormuz to ensure that we can reopen shipping and passage through the Strait," he said. "Let me be clear, that won't be and it's never been envisioned to be a NATO mission."
Catherine King, a member of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's cabinet, said there were no plans to have the Australian military participate in Trump's efforts to reopen the strait.
"We won't be sending a ship to the Strait of Hormuz," King said. "We know how incredibly important that is, but that's not something that we've been asked or that we're contributing to."
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi didn't completely rule out sending escort ships to help oil tankers navigate the strait, but she emphasized there are no plans to do so at the moment.
"We have not made any decisions whatsoever about dispatching escort ships," said Takaichi. "We are continuing to examine what Japan can do independently and what can be done within the legal framework."
Trump started publicly calling on US allies to assist in reopening the strait in a Saturday Truth Social post, in which he said "hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and others, that are affected by this artificial constraint, will send Ships to the area so that the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a Nation that has been totally decapitated."
Trump repeated his demands to US allies while talking with reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, arguing that getting the strait reopened was in the interest of all nations.
"Really, I'm demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory," Trump said. "You could make the case that maybe we shouldn't be there at all, because we don't need it. We have a lot of oil."
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The Only True Nuclear Protective Shield Is Global Disarmament
Politicians and the media use deliberately confusing terms that downplay the dangers of a military and nuclear arms race to the general population.
Feb 26, 2026
The use of key security policy terms in public discourse is intended to suggest facts that serve to calm people down. However, there are many reasons for concern that could also trigger peace forces.
The Illusion of a Nuclear Protective Shield
Political scientist and historian Herfried Münkler called for a European atomic bomb as early as 2023. There is currently an increasingly heated debate about whether Germany should seek refuge under France's nuclear protective shield in view of Russia's aggression in Ukraine. The leader of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, Katarina Barley, also raised the issue of acquiring nuclear bombs as part of European armament in 2024. The German and French heads of government, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron, are also paving the way for talks on European nuclear armament and the extension of France's nuclear umbrella, according to Merz in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in early 2026.
There is repeated talk of a nuclear umbrella. The problem is already clear in this choice of words. Such a protective shield, which one would only have to deploy to be protected, does not exist. This term suggests that Germany or even Europe would be protected from attacking missiles with nuclear warheads if the nuclear protective shield were installed. However, there is no protection against dozens of hypersonic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads attacking simultaneously. The few minutes of reaction time are not enough for a successful counterattack.
Anyone who promises a nuclear protective shield in this sense is trying to deceive people about the real danger of a nuclear conflict in order to achieve their actual military-strategic goals.
So-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Those who are more knowledgeable know that the term “nuclear protective shield” refers more to the nuclear deterrence of a potential attacker. This deterrence would result from the nuclear second-strike capability if a nuclear first strike is underway or has already taken place. The question here, of course, is whether a nuclear second strike is still possible if the first strike with nuclear weapons could not be repelled. Here, too, the talk of a nuclear protective shield is problematic.
Lowering the Nuclear Threshold Through ‘Tactical’ Nuclear Weapons
The distinction between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons also poses a semantic problem. Here, technological language suggests that there is a clear distinction between the two. Tactical nuclear weapons are weapons that are intended for limited use due to their lower explosive power, shorter range, and deployment. However, the boundaries are fluid, and Russia also considers tactical weapons to be strategic. If this distinction is nevertheless used, the use of more limited (tactical) nuclear weapons could then be viewed fundamentally differently from the use of larger and longer-range nuclear weapons in terms of explosive power.
The conceptual problem is further exacerbated by so-called “mini-nukes.” Thus, the gradation and differentiation of nuclear weapons pretends that a nuclear war could be confined to a regional or local level. This merely lowers the nuclear threshold and thus downplays the risk of nuclear escalation. Incidentally, so-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is therefore also a linguistic distortion and trivialization of a terrible weapon.
Putin's Special Military Operation as a Crude Semantic Deception
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a clear act of war, albeit without a declaration of war. Russia's war against Ukraine, which has now been going on for over four years, has been disguised as a “special military operation.” To this day, the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge the conceptual truth of its war. In doing so, it attempts to downplay the illegality and barbarity of its aggression to its own population and to the world. "Special military operation" sounds more like a clean, technical intervention. Language could not be used in a more manipulative way, considering that hundreds of thousands of people have already fallen victim to this war, millions have fled, and Ukraine's vital infrastructure and ecology have been destroyed.
When people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them.
Equally problematic is the term "Russian world" (Russkij Mir), which Russian President Vladimir Putin uses repeatedly. A Russian world as such does not even exist in Russia, as it is a multiethnic state created by coercion and military force, with very different cultural characteristics among its peoples. Thus, talk of the "Russkij Mir" serves to justify military aggression against other states with the argument that the Russian world and the Russian-speaking people there are under threat.
This ethnically charged term is also the central ideological construct used to restrict the state independence of countries such as Belarus and Ukraine.
Deception Through the Term ‘Nuclear Sharing’
Since Germany is not permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the 2+4 Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NATO has agreed on the principle of "nuclear sharing." However, this term also serves to obscure harsh security policy realities. According to reports, up to 20 US B61-3/4 nuclear bombs are stored in Büchel (Rhineland-Palatinate), combined with German Air Force Tornadoes capable of delivering nuclear warheads to an enemy target.
However, the American nuclear capabilities stored there—and also in other European NATO countries—do not allow for participation by the German federal government. Participation implies the possibility of having a say. But the US government repeatedly makes it clear that the possible use of these nuclear weapons is exclusively subject to the respective US government. This undermines and circumvents the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear sharing among NATO countries, while at the same time obscuring the fact that these weapons are controlled by a foreign power.
Misuse of the Term ‘Modernization’ of Nuclear Weapons
The potential dangers of the "modernization" of nuclear weapons are also being downplayed. The term "modernization" as used in security policy also implies a positive development of nuclear weapons—after all, "modern" represents a positive innovation in language usage—and obscures the increasing danger of these weapon systems.
A particularly problematic aspect of this modernization is the integration of artificial intelligence and the expansion of its functionality within the framework of nuclear strategies. However, AI works on the principle of probability calculation and is extremely prone to error. The information from hundreds of sensors, which an AI uses to make a statement in a very short time, e.g., about attacking nuclear missile swarms, cannot be reliably verified by those responsible in the few minutes of time available. However, this development could make an accidental nuclear war more likely.
War Readiness Versus Defense Capability—the Importance of Conceptual Usage
When German Defense Minister Pistorius says that Germany must become “war ready,” this contradicts the defense mandate of the Basic Law and the prohibition of wars of aggression (GG Art. 26 (1) and 115a). The concept of war includes both defense and attack. Therefore, if the federal government adheres to the Basic Law, it should only talk about and take appropriate measures to become defensible.
War readiness is based on the postulate of military strength through deterrence. Since no state wants to voluntarily face the military superiority of an enemy state or military alliance, that state will devote an increasing share of its national budget to further armament measures in order to surpass its opponent in military strength. This leads to an arms race and—as World War I shows, for example—ultimately to war.
Defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties.
Defense capability means prioritizing military defense capabilities, e.g., with regard to defending against drone attacks, in conjunction with improved “resilience” of critical infrastructure. Even this kind of resilience is currently unachievable for any state. Today's industrialized nations in the digital age are virtually impossible to protect against hybrid attacks, especially hacking of power and heating networks. Anyone who suggests that this is entirely possible creates a false sense of security.
But when people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them. They are deprived of the civil society power to resist their government's risky course. This also characterizes the dilemma of the current peace movement. Although it clearly addresses the dangers of military escalation and nuclear war in its appeals, it does not find the resonance that would actually be expected in the current crisis situation.
Deployment of US Missiles in 2026 as a ‘Security Policy’ of Deterrence
The deployment of three different missile systems, including hypersonic weapons, planned for November 2026, follows the verdict of strength through deterrence. These weapon systems will be stationed in Germany under US command. This was agreed upon between former US President Joe Biden and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the sidelines of the NATO summit in New York in the summer of 2024, without any debate in the Bundestag. The deployment will take place without any accompanying offer of negotiation to Russia. These are so-called "decapitation weapons," i.e., weapons that are not primarily intended for defense, as stipulated in the Basic Law.
In this case, too, it is problematic to speak of "security policy" in relation to the US missile deployment. It could well be that this deployment could increase uncertainty and the risk of escalation for Germany. These weapon systems, which certainly pose a threat to Russia, could become targets for Russian missile attacks, which in turn would trigger a corresponding spiral of retaliation, possibly even nuclear.
But defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties. In this context, building up military defenses and attempting to secure critical infrastructure is entirely necessary and legitimate. However, the planned US missile deployment undermines this defense policy objective. What will Russia do in this case? It should not be forgotten that Russia has already deployed Zircon and Kinschal hypersonic missiles, for example in Kaliningrad, and has already used the Oreschnik hypersonic weapon, which is virtually impossible to defend against, at least twice in the war in Ukraine. If NATO's Western allies are not prepared to renegotiate the disarmament and control treaties, Russia will certainly attempt to expand and upgrade its own arsenal once the US missiles are deployed at the end of 2026.
Conclusion
Disclosing the dangers implied in security policy language in connection with nuclear weapons does not mean defeatism or resignation in the face of an opponent armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons.
However, if people allow themselves to be deceived by appeasing terminology and its use in public discourse on security policy, this leads to a dangerous lulling of these people into a false sense of security. The security policy promises behind this terminology give them a feeling of security that does not correspond to the actual risk when states focus on military armament, in particular the further development of nuclear weapons systems, and military escalation. The disclosure of real dangers is not intended to cause anxiety about security policy and paralysis, but rather to raise awareness of actual dangers as the basis for the priority need for improved defense capabilities, in particular through negotiations and diplomacy.
Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict.
In summary, it can therefore be said that the security policy goal must be defense capability. This also includes a disarmament proposal that has already been mentioned several times, within a framework controlled by the United Nations, that the two major military powers, the US and Russia, should gradually disarm all weapons systems, including nuclear weapons, to the level of the People's Republic of China. In a next step, under the transparent supervision of international institutions such as the UN and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, these three states would have to disarm to the level of smaller states until, for example, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is fully implemented.
This would be an effective and sensible security policy worthy of the name. Even though there are currently major geopolitical obstacles standing in the way of such controlled and transparent international disarmament, this peace-bringing disarmament strategy must not be lost sight of. The trillions that would be saved by all participating states as a result of disarmament and the elimination of further armament could also be a compelling argument for such an internationally coordinated and balanced disarmament strategy, at least in the medium term.
Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict. A security policy that is oriented toward defense capability rather than war capability would also have to use different language. Obscuring terms that are embedded in a context of meaning and semantically designed to conceal rather than reveal military risks are part of a media-mediated military strategy that will not lead to peace.
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