Collective Silence

Though opinion polls show that a significant majority of the German public has consistently opposed Israel’s war on Gaza and wishes to end weapons deliveries to Israel — Germany is Israel’s second largest arms supplier — the issue hardly factored into the election campaign. One could not find the word “genocide” on an election poster of any party in the Bundestag unless it had been spray-painted across the face of Chancellor Olaf Scholz or Green candidate Robert Habeck. When Scholz was asked in a preelection interview what it would mean for Germany to have participated in genocide for the first time since the Nazi regime, his contempt for the question was evident. “The accusation of genocide is absurd,” he said.

Voters for whom Gaza was the defining issue — among them many of Germany’s 5.6 million Muslims — were not spoiled for choice. The left-conservative Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which has been the only consistently critical voice against the war and anti-Palestine repression in the Bundestag, fell below the 5 percent entry hurdle. The result makes Die Linke the only plausible defender of Palestinian solidarity in the next parliament, though it has so far shirked the task. The party, which took 9 percent of the vote, supports an arms embargo and the recognition of Palestine, but internal fissures over Israel and Palestine still run deep, and the party is surely home to more openly pro-Israel MPs than any other European party that identifies itself as socialist.

During the campaign, the SPD, Greens, the Free Democrats, and Christian Democrats all advocated a business-as-usual approach to foreign policy on Israel. Their election programs endorsed the two-state solution, made no mention of rulings by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice against Israel, and described Germany’s support for Israel as a Staatsräson (or in the case of the Greens, said Israel’s right to existence is nonnegotiable).

The Christian Democrats’ program, however, did not grant even a cursory mention of Gaza or Palestinian suffering. Nor did it, like the SPD and Greens, condemn the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, or qualify that Israel’s right to self-defense must be conducted within the limits of humanitarian law. It also contained a lengthy section on addressing “Jew hate” in Germany, in which it called for the denial of Israel’s right to exist to be made a criminal offense. Against what it describes as “imported antisemitism,” the program recommended revoking residency or asylum status in the case of an antisemitic crime, and making the recognition of Israel a condition of naturalisation. In a TV debate, Merz also suggested stripping dual nationals of German citizenship for protesting against Israel.

Since the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant in November, Germany’s Green-led foreign office has maintained an ambiguous silence on the question of whether it would honor them. Merz, however, has rejected the ruling tout court. “Under my leadership, the Israeli prime minister will be able to travel to Germany unhindered. I will find ways and means to make this possible,” he said during an interview this month.

Right-Wing Pressure

The outgoing government, despite its occasional and perfunctory acknowledgements of the massive scale of suffering in Gaza, has wasted few opportunities to cheapen the lives of Palestinians: one need only look at Green foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s support for Israel’s bombing of civilian targets (as she explicitly expressed in the Bundestag); or the SPD-run interior ministry’s stalling of a plan by German doctors to evacuate dozens of severely injured children from Gaza to Germany, several of whom subsequently died. Nor has it hesitated to place Muslims and Arabs in Germany under general suspicion of antisemitism.

Yet, the Christian-Democrats — despite their relegation to the opposition in the 2021 federal election — have in many ways been the driving force behind anti-Palestinian repression. Channeling the rhetoric and demands of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Merz has said that an end to the “unhindered mass immigration” of Arab men is essential to limiting antisemitism in Germany. From opposition, the Christian Democrats and their allies in the right-wing Axel Springer press have put immense pressure on the government by portraying its support for Israel as conditional, and its fight against antisemitism to be weak and overly permissive to critics of Israel.

Germany’s abstention, rather than a vote against, a UN General Assembly resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza in late 2023 was seen by the conservatives as a betrayal of solidarity toward Israel; and the decision to pause the transfer of arms to Israel for several months in 2024, until Israel gave a written assurance it would not commit war crimes with them, unpardonable. “Our solidarity must not be allowed to crack when Israel does what is necessary to restore its security. But these cracks in solidarity now exist, and they are becoming more numerous,” Merz told the Bundestag when it marked the anniversary of the October 7 attacks last year.

The Christian Democrats were also instrumental in shaping the parliamentary resolution entitled “Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany,” passed by the Bundestag in November. Widely criticized by legal scholars and human rights organizations as a major attack on freedom of expression, the document was composed jointly by the three governing parties and the conservatives.

But several of its most controversial sections, including the demand to enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism across the arts and civil society, and the direct linking of antisemitism to immigrants from the Middle East, were pushed by the Christian Democrats against internal opposition from within the SPD and Greens. The resolution, which is plainly unconstitutional and not legally binding, is nonetheless intended to be implemented in full, and has already been cited by a Frankfurt court that rejected the appeal of a Palestinian man to block arms transfers to Israel.

An alternative draft resolution written up by the conservatives went even further, demanding that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers be employed in German army academies, no Muslim associations be funded unless they recognize Israel’s right to exist, and security mechanisms on German aid to the Palestinian territories be tightened to prevent the funding of terrorism.

In contrast to the outgoing government, which has put a modicum of pressure on Israel to allow aid into Gaza, the Christian Democratic economic spokesperson Julia Klöckner has denied that Israel obstructs aid, and accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) of brainwashing children “so that they learn to hate or even kill Jews.” In parliamentary questions submitted to the government last year, the Christian Democrats repeated many of Israel’s attack lines on UNRWA and asked whether the government had considered proposals to dissolve the organization, to which Germany is one of the largest donors.

A rare surfacing of the disquiet brewing among some government politicians occurred in November, when SPD vice president Aydan Özoğuz shared an Instagram post from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), in which a photo of hospital beds burning after the bombing of Gaza’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital is captioned “This is Zionism.” In response, Christian Democratic hard-liner Jens Spahn compared her to Nazi minister Hermann Göring, and Merz, in a letter to the SPD, wrote that she had shared “anti-Israel statements by an antisemitic and anti-Zionist organisation,” JVP’s Jewishness apparently being irrelevant. After she apologized, her own party allowed her to remain in post.

The state of Berlin — ruled by a Christian Democrat–led coalition, but also the country’s most active site of antiwar activity — offers a glimpse at how the party might act at the federal level. Wegner, the city’s mayor, has demanded that university leaders use the police to immediately clear any pro-Palestine protests or occupations from their campuses, and publicly cheered the ensuing violence. When the president of the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences accused police officers of threatening her students at an occupation in January, Wegner began an investigation into her conduct, and a senior party colleague demanded her resignation.

The city’s culture senator Joe Chialo has displayed special zeal in using state funding for the arts to enforce compliance with the Staatsräson. He stripped funding from Oyoun, a migrant- and queer-led culture center, after it held an event hosted by anti-Zionist Jews, leading to its closure; and unsuccessfully attempted to implement a mandatory IHRA pledge for all culture grant applicants. For his efforts, Chialo is tipped to be a favorite for the position of Germany’s next federal culture minister. Berlin’s justice senator Felor Badenberg, who suggested that Germany’s domestic intelligence service could screen artists who apply for state funding for antisemitism, is also a serious contender for a cabinet position in the next federal government.

Harder McCarthyism

Among Israel’s most incorrigible supporters in the German public sphere, there is some relief that the Christian Democrats and Merz will soon be in charge. According to the chief editor of the Jüdische Allgemeine, the state-funded house newspaper of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, where one might read that the ICC is “bankrupt” and “the civilians in Gaza are not innocent,” Merz compares favorably to Scholz and Habeck. Their actions, Philipp Peyman Engel said, fell far short of their lofty words: “When it comes to questions about Israel, he (Merz) has everything well thought out. It’s not just learnt by rote like other parties. . . . He really means it.”

Volker Beck, head of the German-Israel Society lobby group, who last year called for the tightening of the siege on Rafah, and recently expressed his doubts that babies had frozen to death in Gaza, has also praised Merz. By guaranteeing the continued flow of German arms to Israel and explicitly condemning the ICC, he has “set himself slightly apart from discussions and statements from the governing coalition.”

The Christian Democrat leader has some limits. Springer-owned tabloid Bild may have expressed a willingness to give Donald Trump’s Madagascar solution for expelling Gazans a shot, but Merz, when asked in a TV debate, agreed with Scholz that it was “a scandal,” and hoped it was not a serious proposal. There is little indication that Germany will depart from its muddled position of simultaneously supporting a two-state solution, the Abraham Accords, and as much genocide as Israel sees fit to mete out. But domestically, the Christian Democrats have prepared the ground for a more thoroughgoing McCarthyism, in which even those who have expressed no solidarity at all with Palestinians will be cast as leftist or immigrant fifth-columnists.

In January, the Christian Democrats openly cooperated with the AfD to pass a parliamentary resolution demanding a full border shutdown, thereby collapsing the so-called “firewall” between the mainstream parties and the extreme right. The hundreds of thousands who subsequently took to the streets across Germany soon found themselves targeted by conservative media, who demanded to know where these dutiful citizens were when Israel needed defending.

“Anyone who remains away from antisemitism among Muslims or even makes a common cause with Islamists cannot be taken seriously in alleged anti-racism,” wrote Springer-owned Die Welt. Merz, in his final campaign speech, demanded to know what protesters had done to stop the burning of the “Jewish flag.” Over the course of the next government, new flourishings can be expected on this most fertile ground of collaboration between the right and far right: the linking of anti-antisemitism and the demonization of migrants.

How much resistance will this agenda face? The SPD, which is lined up to be the junior coalition partner in the next government, has shown little ability or willingness to counter the conservatives, even when Scholz led the government. Die Linke will bring a number of firmly pro-Palestine MPs into the Bundestag, and cochair Ines Schwerdtner’s defense of Albanese last week indicates the party is becoming more vocal on an issue that has previously caused it extreme discomfort.

Some of the thousands of politicians, journalists, academics, artists, and union representatives who have remained silent in the face of Germany’s democratic backsliding may summon the courage to speak out if and when they find themselves in the firing line of the new government. But if the Christian Democrats deliver on even a small part of the authoritarian vision they have laid out, many may wish they had done so when the conditions were more favorable. After the two men spoke on Monday morning, following Sunday’s election, Netanyahu said that Merz had already delivered on one campaign promise: the Israeli prime minister, a fugitive from international justice, has been invited to make an official visit to Germany.