Last week, Germany lept at the opportunity to defend Israel against accusations of genocide levied by South Africa before the UN at the Hague.
South Africa is a country that emerged from its own human rights issues not long ago with the abolition of apartheid in 1994.
South Africa argued that Israel breached the UN Genocide Convention, which was signed in 1948 in the shadow of the Holocaust. This is contingent upon an immediate stop to IDF military operations in Gaza.
Namibia, a country that has a long, unfortunate history with Germany, took aim at the European country's eagerness to side with Israel. According to many historians, Namibia suffered the first genocide of the 20th century under German colonial rule.
"Germany's inability to draw lessons from its horrific history," Al Jazeera reports that Namibian President Hage Geingob expressed "deep concern" for the German government's announcement Friday that it "rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa."
Germany's Past
Germany was responsible for the massacres of more than 70,000 Indigenous Herero and Nama people in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, which historians widely consider the first genocide of the 20th century. The German government only recently agreed that it had committed genocide in Namibia after five years of negotiations.
The country even agreed to pay $1.1 billion in euros for development to the descendants of the tribes over 30 years. He further accused the Germans of reducing the deaths of over 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
On Friday, the German government rejected South Africa's accusations against Israel as a "political instrumentalization" of the UN Genocide Convention.
For its part, Israel still maintains that the majority of civilian deaths caused by the fighting with Hamas are to be blamed on the militant group, and not the IDF.
The IDF says that it has killed 8,500 operatives in Gaza, as well as over 1,000 operating elsewhere in Israel. By its own estimates, then, more than 11,000 Palestinian civilians have died because of this fight.
