With Gaza bombarded, with thousands dead and its infrastructure largely in ruins, is it ever acceptable for a German to criticise Israel? Almost the entire German political establishment and most of those in public life apparently think not.
Since 7 October, the day Hamas fighters inflicted carnage on a music festival and on kibbutzim inside Israel, all the main parties – the three making up the government, plus the Conservative CDU opposition and even the far-right AfD – have spoken with one voice, in solidarity with Israel. It is not lost on Germans that more Jews were killed on that one day than on any single day since the defeat of the Third Reich.
“I thought that after the Holocaust, after the extermination of 6 million Jews, we might have learned from history,” wrote Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the company that owns the tabloid Bild, and one of the most influential people in the land. In a comment piece for last Sunday’s Bild, entitled Not Again!, Döpfner wrote that two Jewish members of his staff had gone abroad because they didn’t feel safe, while another, with a Jewish wife, had expressed his desire to take his child out of nursery school. Döpfner criticised the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement. When it comes to support for Israel, he contended, “there is no ‘yes but’”.
On Wednesday, the German vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, one of the Greens’ most senior figures, accused leftist protesters of turning on Israel as part of a “great resistance narrative”. Habeck called on the police to clamp down hard, including deporting those without residence permits found guilty in the courts.
The consensus strengthened after a spate of antisemitic incidents, including the firebombing of a synagogue in central Berlin. The majority of pro-Palestinian protests have been banned – even a small Jewish protest criticising Israel’s actions in Gaza was told to disperse. Even so, commentators on the right have accused the German government of going soft on these protests, while civil liberties groups have accused German police of censorship and heavy-handedness.
In Germany it is all particularly raw. Only this week, the family of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old German-Israeli woman believed to have been kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October, said her remains had been found. The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was the first western leader to visit Israel after the attacks, declaring it had “every right to defend itself”. This dynamic has deep roots. Within a few years of the second world war, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion had struck up a close relationship.
It reached its apogee with a speech by Angela Merkel before the Knesset in March 2008, marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Israeli state. She declared that support for Israel was part of the Staatsräson, raison d’etre, of the Federal Republic. Yet even these remarks were deemed unacceptable by some Israeli politicians, who denounced the very idea of the German language being spoken in their parliament.
With a few bumps along the way, the relationship has remained solid. Over the years, Germany has ventured exhortations to a two-state solution and a revival of the peace process. But on occasions when statements are hardened beyond that, such as criticism of the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, or the treatment of Palestinians more generally, they are invariably denounced as unacceptable.
Christoph Heusgen, a former chief foreign policy adviser and now head of the Munich Security Conference, recently defended the UN secretary general for stating that the events of the past few weeks should be seen in the context of “years of suffocating occupation” inflicted on Palestinians. Describing Guterres as a “very level-headed man”, Heusgen said in a television interview: “He was right to both condemn the Hamas action while also noting that it didn’t happen in a vacuum.” Heusgen could have chosen his words more felicitously. But he was denounced by politicians from several parties for “relativising” suffering.
Since 7 October, politicians in Berlin are more reluctant than ever to mention Benjamin Netanyahu’s record – the corruption allegations, the populist clampdown on the courts and the extraordinary intelligence and security failings of the past month.
The notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the past, is one of the great success stories of modern Germany. It provides a moral compass for state and society. But, longer term, it cannot act as a straitjacket or a stifler of difficult discussion.
The next phase of the conflict should require a new dynamic, a determined diplomacy involving Israel, the US and Arab states to help find a long-term political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. The EU should make sure it is involved too. Germany, in spite of its terrible past – indeed because of it – could play a useful role. That will require sensitivity, nuance – and no little steel.
John Kampfner’s latest book is In Search of Berlin
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