Updated May. 30, 2025 at 02:45 p.m.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has recently adopted a more critical stance toward Israel’s military operations in Gaza, marking a significant shift from Germany’s traditionally unwavering support. “Frankly speaking, I no longer understand what the goal of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip is. To harm the civilian population to such an extent, as has increasingly been the case in recent days, can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism,” the chancellor said in an interview broadcast on public television. This rhetorical shift might suggest a potential reevaluation of Germany’s policy, balancing its historical commitment to Israel with adherence to international humanitarian standards.
-Analysis-
BERLIN — This month, Germany and Israel are marking 60 years of diplomatic relations. But who’s really in the mood to celebrate? Certainly not the man in his mid-30s, with tear-filled eyes and raw anger, who stood protesting last week on Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Boulevard as a small photo exhibition opened to mark the anniversary.
“It’s a disgrace! Here we are, serving drinks and food, while our hostages are dying in Gaza,” he shouted at me. “Our government should be boycotted, including by Germany.”
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“Impossible Friendship?” is the title of the exhibition. And indeed, before ties were formally established in 1965, just 20 years after the Holocaust, it long seemed inconceivable that any kind of official contact could exist between the nation of perpetrators and that of survivors. But Israel needed financial help, and the Federal Republic needed support to shake off its international isolation, despite the unshakable weight of war guilt.
“From a pragmatic perspective, there were good reasons on both sides, after the World War II, to find common ground in terms of realpolitik,” wrote Jenny Hestermann, historian and former head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Tel Aviv, in an essay for the magazine Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte two years ago. “The accompanying music to the rhetoric of morality, friendship, and reconciliation played only on the German side. Israelis, by contrast, often boycotted the Federal Republic as they saw in it the legal successor to the National Socialist regime.”
A shared history
Sixty years on, the demands have flipped. Now it’s people like that desperate protester who say Germany should be boycotting Israel.
“Impossible,” I thought as he shouted at me, and it hit me: The idea of impossibility has shadowed this relationship from the moment it began. How are we supposed to speak to Israel today, in light of alleged war crimes in Gaza, in light of a government that seems to grow more aggressive the more loudly it is criticized, both at home and abroad? How should Germans respond?
If we want to understand what German policymakers can say about Israel’s actions in Gaza, we need to look at the phases of this shared history in detail. The impact and legacy of the Holocaust have been debated in Israeli society for decades, especially in literature and academia. The author Yishai Sarid explored the bleakest aspects in his 2019 novel Monster, in which a historian visits the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial with a group of students. One teacher asks the students to reflect on what they’ve seen. “I think we have to be a little bit like Nazis to survive,” one student says.
Worldcrunch 🗞 Extra!
Know more • The leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Canada issued a joint statement last week strongly opposing the expansion of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. They warned that if Israel does not halt its onslaught and lift restrictions on humanitarian aid, they are prepared to “take concrete actions.” The leaders also voiced firm opposition to ongoing settlement expansions in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu had initially promised to lift the siege of Gaza; yet after more than two days is still blocking the food supply from entering the enclave. With more than 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, the risk of famine is expanding after 11 weeks of sieging by Israeli forces.
There are appears to be a broader international reckoning, as the humanitarian crisis worsens and calls grow for a reassessment of relations with Israel — echoing earlier moves by the Netherlands to push the EU to review its trade agreement. — Rein Arnauts (read more about the Worldcrunch method here).
The novel leads us straight into the darkest corners of German-Israeli relations. And it’s only by staring into that abyss that we can begin to grasp why the humanist lessons drawn from the Holocaust might be admirable but by no means guaranteed
What would I have done?
There are, of course, stories of reconciliation and hope. Long before official ties were established, German youth groups went to Israel to work on socialist kibbutzim “to atone for the crimes of their parents through their own labor,” writer Amos Oz recalled in a 2005 essay on German-Israeli relations. Oz also described how his own view of the once-hated Nazi nation began to shift when, following normalization, German books became available in Israel: Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Siegfried Lenz’s The German Lesson. Post-war German literature helped him reckon with the German experience and ask himself: “What would I have done?”
Today we live in a world where, for many years, Berlin and Tel Aviv were linked by a direct EasyJet flight, an entirely unromantic route where people sleepily met at the gate at 7 a.m. We also live in a world where, on the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, Israelis warned in German media of a potential genocide in Gaza. The Holocaust, said historian Omer Bartov in an interview with Der Spiegel, has “allowed Jewish Israelis to view themselves as beyond any moral or ethical boundaries that apply to others.”
It’s interviews like these that reveal the strain in this impossible friendship. Anyone claiming it’s not permissible to criticize Israel in Germany overlooks the fact that such criticism is just as routine as the obligatory visits to Yad Vashem by German officials. Ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties, Fania Oz-Salzberger, daughter of Amos Oz, looked back at how German views of Israel had shifted. After the Six-Day War in 1967, which led to the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, just two years after ties were formalized, the West German left, once committed to reconciliation, began to change course.
Israel in quotation marks
For her analysis, Oz-Salzberger cited a photo of graffiti from Hamburg’s Hafenstrasse in 1988. Beneath a large Kalashnikov were the words: “Boycott Israel! Goods, kibbutzim + beaches, Palestine — the people will liberate you.” The word “Israel” was in quotation marks. “The liberated Palestine in this image is not the free Palestine of my own political hope. It will not be a neighbor to Israel, but a replacement for it,” she wrote.
To strike the right tone with today’s Israeli government, we have to take that graffiti into account. And we must also remember that in the other half of divided Germany, the governing Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) regime armed Israel’s enemies while refusing to reckon with its own past crimes against the Jews. For me, born in East Germany just before the fall of the Wall, that’s still the most impossible part of this already impossible friendship. All the pathos, all the myths and all the critical reflection happened in only one part of Germany for decades. As someone from the East, I can’t lean on the reconciliation work done by others. My sense of responsibility doesn’t come from inherited guilt, but from a standardized West German school curriculum.
What made this impossible friendship possible was not emotion but pragmatic interests.
We have to put aside the pathos of reconciliation, as well as the hollow phrase “reason of state,” which Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is East German, first used in her 2008 Knesset speech. We need to face the dark corners of this relationship and admit that the idea that Germans aren’t allowed to criticize Israel is just as much a myth as that very “reason of state.” The the Bundeswehr is a parliamentary army. Without a mandate, Germany cannot intervene militarily. And in the event of an existential threat, Israel’s security doesn’t hinge on anything beyond military aid.
It’s a simplification of history to say that Germans blindly support Israel out of inherited guilt. West Germany had a lively critical debate from early on. In East Germany, there was none for 40 years. And today, right-wing extremism exists in both East and West, with the Far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) polling as the strongest force in some parliaments. Fewer than 30% of Germans have a positive view of Israel today. All of this takes me back to the beginnings of our diplomatic relationship and Hestermann’s observation: What made this impossible friendship possible was not emotion but pragmatic interests.
A dangerous position
As much as we need to confront the impossibility of this relationship, we also have to keep our focus on what made it possible in the first place. It wasn’t moral grandeur but shared strategic interests. That’s why, as we hear from diplomatic circles, even newly elected Chancellor Friedrich Merz is adjusting his tone toward the Israeli government. Within the EU, Germany now stands increasingly alone on Israel, a risky position as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration continues to turn away from Europe. The fact that Merz, in his first government address on Wednesday, reaffirmed support for Israel while also calling for action to prevent famine in Gaza may have been an effort to move away from that marginal position.
Merz’s words may seem like a small step, his tone quiet. Too small to ease the suffering in Gaza. Too quiet to comfort the angry protester in Tel Aviv. Still, focusing on shared strategic interests can allow us to offer clear, realistic criticism of Israel’s government, one that also acknowledges its limits.
If protesters call for Germany to boycott Israel’s government, we don’t need to respond with lectures about historical guilt or reminders of the Nazi-era boycotts of Jewish professionals. We can be specific, realistic and acknowledge that the German-Israeli relationship is not one-sided. Germany also needs Israel. Right now, for example, Berlin is waiting for delivery of Arrow 3 missile defense system ordered from Israel, designed to intercept the very kinds of ballistic missiles Russia has been launching into Ukraine for over three years.
*Originally published May. 21, 2025, this article was updated May. 30, 2025 with additional news and recent declarations from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
