Asa Winstanley, Electronic Intifada:

Vehicles stacked up near the southern Israeli town of Netivot, near Gaza, in November. They were destroyed soon after Palestinian fighters began taking captives on 7 October. A new investigation by Israeli journalists has concluded that 70 such vehicles were blown up by Israeli fire. (Jim Hollander UPI)

At midday on 7 October Israel’s supreme military command ordered all units to prevent the capture of Israeli citizens “at any cost” – even by firing on them.

The military “instructed all its fighting units to perform the Hannibal Directive in practice, although it did so without stating that name explicitly,” Israeli journalists revealed last weekend.

The revelations came in a new investigative article by Ronen Bergman and Yoav Zitun, two journalists with extensive sources inside Israel’s military and intelligence establishment.

They also revealed that “some 70 vehicles” driven by Palestinian fighters returning to Gaza were blown up by Israeli helicopter gunships, drones or tanks.

Many of these vehicles contained Israeli captives.

The journalists wrote that, “it is not clear at this stage how many of the captives were killed due to the operation of this order” to the air force that they should prevent return to Gaza at all costs.

“At least in some of the cases, everyone in the vehicle was killed,” the journalists explain.

Craig Murray: „It’s the International Court of Justice which is on trial. This is very plainly a genocide and if the International Court of Justice says anything else it means there is no working international law anymore. That it’s been totally undermined and destroyed by the NATO countries.“

Dining room of the villa where the 90 minute meeting took place.

I have walked those cobblestones. My apartment was near here.

When Muslim-minority German youth identify with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, not only because of the current visibility of their persecution but also due to their racialization, they appear to ethnic Germans to be competing with Jews for victim status, and face accusations of being antisemitic, thus losing their opportunity to be legitimately heard in Germany. When Muslim Germans express fear, they are judged to be lacking in the cognitive skills required to understand how different today’s Germany is from that of the 1930s. When they demand empathy for their own racialization, they are judged as too immature for full participation in German democracy and acceptance into the German social contract. Political legitimacy in postwar German national identity politics derives from adopting the repentant perpetrator position. As anthropologist Sultan Doughan (2022) asserts: „Historical perpetratorship is an inclusive concept in Germany and it includes the figure of the Jew as a sacrificial victim.”

—Esra Özyürek, Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory & Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 25.