Raymond Deane explains the background to Germany’s unrepenting pro-Zionist stance.
Germany was unified in 1871 under the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck. He saw the attainment of German hegemony in Europe in terms of Realpolitik, the pragmatic negotiation of issues between the state and its neighbours. In 1890 Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed him, and Realpolitik gave way to Weltpolitik – Germany was to become a global hegemon through aggressive diplomacy and colonial expansion.
In 1884 Germany colonised South West Africa (now Namibia). Between 1904 and 1908 a rebellion by that territory’s Herero and Nama population was met with brutal repression, concentration camps, and the slaughter of perhaps 100,000 civilians – the first genocide of the 20th century. Germany failed to acknowledge this until 2021, and has yet to pay full reparations to the descendants of the Herero and Nama.The Israeli-German historian Dan Diner‘s coinage Zivilisationsbruch (“breach of civilisation”) for the Judeocide implies that Germany’s civilisation was only breached when the victims were white Europeans, and not by the mass slaughter of black Africans.
Germany’s defeat in World War I halted its advance to world power status. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) inaccurately ascribed war guilt exclusively to Germany; harsh reparations instigated hardship and resentment leading to the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of World War II during which, as Marxist historian Karl Korsch wrote in 1942, “the Nazis have extended to ‘civilized’ European peoples the methods hitherto reserved for the ‘natives’ or ‘savages’ living outside so-called civilization.”
This time there was no doubt about Germany’s war-guilt, culminating in the genocide of six million Jews. Nonetheless, the defeated state’s lingering aspirations to Weltpolitik were facilitated by the Allies’ Cold War priorities: denazifying Germany was deemed less important than enlisting it as an ally against communism, ensuring that National Socialism didn’t give way to socialism.
In 1949 a caretaker West German government was formed under Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Adenauer mused in 1952 that additional reparations to Jews and Israel were necessary, not as atonement, but because “the power of the Jews in the economic sphere is extraordinarily strong.” In 1966 he claimed that reparations would “regain Germany’s standing” because of “the power of the Jews, …especially in America.” Germany’s Weltpolitik expressed itself clearly in antisemitic tropes.
In 1959 a busily rearming Germany bought 50,000 Uzi machine-guns from Israel because, according to Adenauer’s adviser Rolf Vogel, “[the] Uzi in the hands of German soldiers is surely better than any brochure against antisemitism!” However, the Bundeswehr didn’t need so many Uzis, so 10,000 were sold to Portugal, at that time a fascist dictatorship within NATO, which used them to defeat the independence movement in its colony Angola at the cost of some 75,000 Angolan lives.
West Germany joined NATO in 1955; with German reunification in 1990, the former German Democratic Republic also joined. Nonetheless, the rise of the supposedly pacifist Green Party in the 1980s and its coalition government with the Social Democrats (SPD) in 1998 seemed to promise an exemplary, anti-war left-leaning Germany.
Such illusions evaporated when Germany joined in NATO’s 1999 bombing of Serbia without a UN mandate. Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer justified this as preventing “another Auschwitz”, not the last time that the Judeocide would be enlisted to whitewash German militarism. For the academic Joachim Jachnow “the German military’s return to offensive warfare, explicitly outlawed by the Constitution because of Nazi war crimes, was legitimated through the moral exploitation of the very same.”
In 2014 Germany advanced further towards Weltpolitik when it delivered arms to Northern Iraq. The magazine Stern hailed this as “opening a window”, “and it will be difficult to close this window ever again”. This window had been opened by Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen, dutiful daughter of the deeply reactionary CDU politician Ernst Albrecht. Five years later von der Leyen was elected president of the European Commission.
In June 2022, the SPD co-leader Lars Klingbeil announced at a conference in Berlin that “Germany must aspire to be a leading power. After almost 80 years of restraint, Germany has a new role in the international system. Over the last decades, Germany has earned itself a great amount of trust.”
That trust was reinforced by military cooperation with its NATO allies. By participating in the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, German soldiers could play obscene games with the skulls of dead Afghans and summon US fighter jets to massacre Afghan civilians. From 2013-2023 Germany “lived up to its responsibility” (Chancellor Scholz, SPD) by stationing troops alongside its French allies in the African Sahel region, a vital source of raw materials such as uranium.
Just a few weeks after Klingbeil’s speech, Green foreign minister Annelena Baerbock proclaimed in New York that “[w]e have to… engage in [a] partnership in leadership” with the US, “and it is for my country within the European Union to help lead the way.” Kaiser Wilhelm’s progression from Realpolitik to Weltpolitik was reborn.
At Israel’s Herzliya Security Conference in June 2024, Baerbock pronounced that “Israeli security is… part of Germany’s Staatsraison” [reason of state], echoing former chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2008 address to the Israeli parliament. The historian Enzo Traverso defines Staatsraison as “the transgression of law in the name of superior imperatives of state security… Thus, when [Germany] backs Israel by invoking Staatsraison, it implicitly admits the immorality of its policy.”
Meanwhile Germany’s weapon exports flourished, including increased deliveries to Saudi Arabia which had previously received German arms for its brutal war against Yemen. These exports were suspended in 2018 when the Saudis murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, apparently a worse crime than the genocide of Yemenis. In 2024, renewed arming of the Saudi dictatorship was justified by Baerbock as follows: “Following the terror attack by the militant Islamist Hamas on Israel on October 7, Saudi Arabia has been making a significant contribution to Israel’s security…”
In the wake of October 7th, von der Leyen visited Israel and, without consulting European leaders, expressed unswerving solidarity with that rogue state on behalf of the EU. The backlash was immediate. An anonymous diplomat complained that this “is not the line member states agreed.” Iratxe García, leader of the Socialists and Democrats in the Ëuropean Parliament, opined that von der Leyen was “upholding an unacceptable bias that can only cause harm.” Despite this, on 18th July 2024 she was officially re-elected President of the EU Commission with 401 votes to 284, thus cementing German hegemony within the EU.
Already notorious for its repression of pro-Palestinian opinion, Germany has outdone itself since 7th October. Its cancelling of pro-Palestinian artists and academics now resembles the Berufsverbote (“professional bans”) of the Nazi period. In April 2024 2500 riot police were deployed to shut down a 3-day Palestine Congress in Berlin although its organisers had agreed to all conditions laid down by the police. Subsequent pro-Palestinian demonstrations, particularly in Berlin, have been met with appalling police brutality, often directed against anti-Zionist Jews.
Progressive Jews such as Deborah Feldman, Amos Goldberg, Emily Dische-Becker, or Ha’aretz journalist Ilana Hammerman who criticise Germany’s support for Israel are scorned by the state, for which the sole acceptable interlocutor is the right-wing Central Council (Zentralrat) of Jews. According to the Berlin historian Nathaniel Flakin, “here, …the Jewish community is endlessly diverse. The Central Council… only represents the Jews that the state wants to hear from.”
In his video address after October 7th 2023, Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck recalled that “it was the generation of my grandparents that wanted to exterminate Jewish life in Germany and Europe. After the Holocaust, the founding of Israel was the promise of protection to the Jews — and Germany is compelled to help ensure that this promise can be fulfilled”.
Such formulations should be read in the context of what the Egyptian conflict analyst Omar Sabbour defines as “guiltwashing”, which “postures as regret, but… works to further an ideal of German exceptionalism in the world and provide a cover of legitimacy for the German desire to remain a world power.”
The Berlin journalist Dave Braneck, citing Habeck’s assertion (frequently echoed by other politicians) “that non-German citizens who praise Hamas could… face deportation”, rightly queried “why exactly immigrants to Germany should have to atone for the crimes of his grandparents in the first place.” Meron Mendel, the Israeli-born head of the Anne Frank Centre (Frankfurt), explains that antisemitism is “supposed to be something that only occurs among ‘the others’, ‘the Arabs’, or ‘the migrants’.” In reality, surveys consistently show that most anti-Semitic hate crimes in Germany come from local right-wing extremists, a fact consistently downplayed by the authorities.
So Germany’s “drama of redemption” (German-Israeli psychoanalyst Iris Hefetz) entails unconditionally defending an outlaw state, enacting repressive legislation that cancels freedom of opinion for its critics including progressive Jews, remilitarising (after “80 years of restraint”), and exporting vast quantities of weapons to murderous regimes. Such radical unselfconsciousness suggests that “reason of state” greatly resembles a state of unreason.
While Klingbeil’s boast that “Germany has earned itself a great amount of trust” or Baerbock’s bid for “partnership in leadership” may seem far removed from the cheeky tropes with which Adenauer sought to advance “Germany’s standing”, ultimately both the premises and the desired conclusion are linked: that, in the words of Irish academic Maurice Coakley, “through subservience to US foreign policy [German leaders] can best advance the interests of German capital” and “Washington in turn would go along with the German ‘leadership’ of Europe.”
On 29 December 2023, South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing it of breaching the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip. On 12 January 2024 the German government announced its intention to intervene on Israel’s side under Article 63 of the ICJ Statute.
In its preliminary Advisory Opinion on 19th July 2024 the ICJ pronounced inter alia that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.
Perhaps this is the moment when Germany has at last overreached itself, provoking a major alignment of the Global South with South Africa and Gaza and the beginnings of a split in EU opinion. Persistence in Germany’s support for Israel’s crimes will now so clearly entail a rejection of its own obligations under international law that it will lose any lingering credibility. If a further Advisory Opinion affirms that Israel has breached the Genocide Convention, Germany will be seen to defend one genocide as a spurious atonement for its own – no further narcissistic subterfuge will be possible.
This is also the moment to stress that despite repression, pro-Palestinian demonstrations throughout Germany have continued to proliferate, and public opinion has shown itself refractory despite incessant propaganda from government and embedded media. In an opinion poll conducted by the ZDF (second television channel) last March, 69% found Israel’s military actions in Gaza unjustified. Germany has a growing population (particularly in Berlin) of expatriate anti-Zionist Israeli Jews, and the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe, making itself heard via the organisation Palästina Spricht (Palestine Speaks). Dissident Jewish organisations like Diaspora Alliance and Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost articulate perspectives that have hitherto been silenced.
It is time for activists everywhere to show solidarity with those fighting German complicity from within, for the sake both of Europe and Palestine. Cultural workers, for example, may sign up to the “Strike Germany” initiative with its “call to refuse German cultural institutions’ use of McCarthyist policies…” American complicity with Israel’s crimes must henceforth be linked with that of Germany and the EU which it aspires to lead. Such a “partnership in leadership” must be countered by a powerful “partnership in solidarity” to refuse German cultural institutions’ use of McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine.
Raymond Deane is a founder and former chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign. A professional composer, he divides his time between Ireland and Germany.
