Friedrich Merz did one thing unprecedented for a German chancellor in late Could 2025: publicly criticize Israel in unvarnished, unequivocal phrases.
“What the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip, I no longer understand the goal,” he stated in a televised interview. He added, “To harm the civilian population in such a way … can no longer be justified as a fight against terrorism.”
A day later, throughout a summit with prime ministers of Nordic international locations in Finland, Merz doubled down. “I take a very, very critical view of what has happened in Gaza,” he stated in reference to Israel’s bombing marketing campaign and the blockade of meals and different support.
Merz just isn’t alone within the German authorities. Overseas Minister Johann Wadephul additionally weighed in, noting that Germany’s stance in opposition to antisemitism and its “full support” for the suitable of Israel to exist “must not be instrumentalized for the conflict and the warfare currently being waged in the Gaza Strip.”
Criticism by outdoors governments of Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, assaults by Hamas that killed near 1,200 individuals has been current for the reason that battle in Gaza started. At first, it was largely confined to international locations within the International South. However extra just lately it has included international locations within the West.
Nonetheless, as a scholar of the Shoah – the Hebrew time period for the Holocaust – I do know that this rebuke from Germany hits in another way. Submit-war Germany has a long-standing political dedication to Israel’s safety. It’s a dedication rooted within the nation’s historic accountability for the Nazis’ annihilation of European Jews and that has been staunchly reaffirmed by German governments for the reason that 1952 settlement of reparations between the primary chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, and the primary prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.
‘Staatsräson’ and its critics
In 2008, then-chancellor Angela Merkel went as far as to name this dedication to Israel’s safety Germany’s “Staatsräson,” or “reason of state.” In a speech she gave to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on March 18, 2008, Merkel emphasised that “only if Germany acknowledges its perpetual responsibility for the moral catastrophe of German history can we shape the future humanely.” She went on to say that Germany’s “historic responsibility” is “part of my country’s raison d’état.” She added: “Israel’s security is never negotiable for me as German chancellor.”
The argument that Israeli safety is Germany’s “reason of state” was reiterated by Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, throughout his go to to Israel on Oct. 17, 2023 – simply 10 days after the Hamas assault. Standing subsequent to Scholz, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to as the Palestinian militant group “the new Nazis.”
Tracing again the time period’s origins and historical past, famend historian Enzo Traverso just lately famous that theorists and practitioners of “reason of state” agree that the idea “denotes the violation by a political power of its own ethical principles in service to a higher interest, generally the safeguarding of its own power.”
The issue with Germany’s invocation of the “Staatsräson” as prioritizing the safety of Israel above different considerations is that it implies defending insurance policies even when they contravene Germany’s foundational moral rules, akin to these declared in its structure. Article 1 asserts that the German individuals “acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.”
Such rules have been born out of the popularity of the horrendous violation of human rights below the Nazi regime and the acknowledgment of Germany’s “perpetual responsibility,” as Merkel put it.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks forward of a particular session of the Israeli parliament on March 18, 2008.
Sebastian Scheiner/Pool/Getty Photographs
In Germany’s public discourse, in addition to faculty curricula, the Shoah is at all times described as completely distinctive.
However as Israeli-American genocide and Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has argued, this assertion can also be open to criticism:
“Germany’s commitment to the uniqueness of the Holocaust, from which it also derives its unique commitment to Israel, has arguably put it in a morally highly dubious position of both long denying its own past colonial crimes [in Namibia] and of denying Israel’s culpability in the present destruction of Gaza, including the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.”
Germany’s dedication to the individuality of the Shoah additionally leaves little room for an acknowledgment of the Nakba – the violent expulsion of round 800,000 Palestinians earlier than, throughout and after the inspiration of the state of Israel.
And it leaves no room for a recognition of how each catastrophes, the Shoah and the Nakba, are, as Bartov insists, “inextricably entangled.”
Antisemitism definitions — and their critics
As a consequence of Germany’s accountability for the Shoah and its dedication to its uniqueness, the nation has a number of the strictest legal guidelines to fight antisemitism on the earth. However critics additionally be aware widespread conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
Germany, like the US,
has adopted a definition of antisemitism authored in 2004 by American lawyer Kenneth Stern and espoused in 2016 by the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. That definition contains 11 examples of antisemitism, seven of which pertain to Israel.
It has been criticized for being too imprecise, resulting in the labeling of Jewish and non-Jewish individuals who oppose the present Israeli battle in Gaza as “antisemitic.”
Stern, who describes himself as Zionist, has sharply criticized the misuse of his definition to stifle educational freedom and criticism of the actions of the Israeli nation.
He applauded the latest adoption, by the German leftist occasion Die Linke, of a separate definition of antisemitism specified by the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Formulated in 2021 by greater than 350 revered students, a lot of them Jewish, the declaration rejects labeling as antisemitic political speech that “criticizes or opposes Zionism as a form of nationalism.”
Mann calls on the German authorities to implement insurance policies to “protect all Jews, including those who … reject the current Israeli government and insist on a vocabulary that allows us to be Jewish and to criticize Israel.”
A historic shift?
The latest remarks of Merz might characterize a delicate however certain shift in Germany’s “Staatsräson” and the way it engages with its historic debt, Israel and antisemitism.
And which may be a primary step in shifting away from a “Staatsräson” that, within the phrases of scholar of Center Japanese politics Lena Obermaier, is “detrimental for Palestinians and progressive Jews” and provides Israel worldwide cowl when accused of huge violations of worldwide regulation.
What Merkel referred to as Germany’s “perpetual responsibility for the moral catastrophe” of the Holocaust would, from my perspective as a scholar of the Shoah, demand nothing much less.
