What is Germanys official position on the Israel Palestine conflict Why do they support Israel over Palestine ?
It appears that Germany is an enduring enemy of the Palestinian struggle.
Since Israel launched its latest genocidal war on Gaza, Germany has stood firmly by its ally. Even as warnings of a genocide committed by Israeli forces have mounted, the German government has not budged. On October 12, Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed that “there is only one place for Germany” which is “side by side with Israel” and indeed it has not moved from this stance.
The German government has not only provided wide-ranging political and diplomatic support for Israel, but has also fast-tracked arms exports to facilitate the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian civilians.
The German political elite has vehemently rejected calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and relentlessly repeated the false claim that under international law, Israel has the “right to defend itself” from the Palestinian population it occupies. It continues to disregard decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
The German political elite has justified its stance with the alleged feeling of guilt for the Holocaust and the need to make amends by supporting Israel, considering its security “Germany’s reason of state”. But under the cover of “acting morally” and “atoning for its crimes”, German politicians and officials are actually seeking to further normalise anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, justify more draconian anti-immigration policies, and downplay the persisting anti-Semitism among white Germans.
The marginalisation of Palestinians within German society and the suppression of pro-Palestinian activism are not a new phenomenon in Germany. Long before October 7, the anti-Palestinian tactics of the German authorities were already escalating. Protests were banned, pro-Palestinian voices, including those of Jewish activists, were silenced, and cultural events and award ceremonies were cancelled.
It is thus unsurprising that the crackdown on protests and police violence have increased in recent weeks. Numerous pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been banned, sometimes only minutes before they were supposed to begin, or allowed to take place only with heavy police presence. The few demonstrations that were authorized (due to their small size or palatable messaging), or that took place in defiance of the ban, were largely dispersed by police, some of them violently. Bureaucrats have cited threats to public safety and potential display of anti-Semitism as reasons for the bans.
Hundreds of protesters were detained in the first weeks after Israel launched its war on Gaza. Many have experienced police violence and some have been put under investigation for incitement to hatred. Even anti-Zionist voices among the small Jewish minority have come under attack.
The freedom of speech in regards to pro-Palestinian activism has also been suppressed. Recently, the Federal Ministry of the Interior banned the slogan “from the river to the sea”, considering it a call to destroy Israel. The state of Bavaria has labelled the phrase a “symbol of terrorism”. Police in Berlin even enforced the prohibition on variations like “From the river to the sea, we demand equality.”
In early November, when the federal government outlawed Hamas in Germany, “From the river to the sea” was defined as a forbidden slogan of the organization — in any language and regardless of what follows those words.
In practice, however, enforcement was blatantly one-sided. In one December video, pro-Israel protesters are seen holding up an Israeli flag at Berlin’s Humboldt University and mockingly calling: “From the river to the sea, that’s the only flag you’re gonna see.” The unnamed cameraman approaches police, asking them to intervene against the forbidden slogan, but they refuse, saying it is permissible.
Accordingly, just as explicitly pro-Palestinian protests were shut down, police often also suppressed calls for “ceasefire” or to “stop the war.” And in response to South Africa’s charge at the International Court of Justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, the German government rushed to defend Israel at the ICJ and insisted that this “accusation has no basis whatsoever,” and authorities within Germany have often treated the accusation as hate speech.
In January, Germany also suspended funding to UNRWA after false allegations that about 12 of the tens of thousands of Palestinians employed by the agency were suspected of participating in Hamas's October 7 attacks in Israel.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), one of Germany’s leading parties, has also made clear that the words “free Palestine” have no place in Germany and denounced the phrase as “a war cry of an internationally active terror gang”, claiming it would mean “the extinction of the Jewish state, the only democracy in the region, by Islamist terrorists”.
Free speech has been under attack in educational institutions as well. With German universities following the government’s pro-Israel stance, students who have protested on campus have faced police violence and smear campaigns in the media.
Pro-Palestinian symbols, such as the keffiyeh scarf, have been banned by some institutions. In one school in Berlin, a teacher physically assaulted a student who raised the Palestinian flag.
On November 8, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called on Germans of Palestinian and Arab descent to distance themselves from Hamas and anti-Semitism. Thus, he implicitly put an entire demographic under general suspicion of terrorism, as the Palestinian resistance movement has been designated a “terrorist organisation” by the German state.
A little more than a week later, a draft law was submitted to the German parliament that tied German citizenship to a formal commitment to “Israel’s right to exist”. A month later, the state of Saxony-Anhalt issued its own decree, demanding from applicants for citizenship to declare their support for “Israel’s right to exist”.
In November, Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann said in an interview:
“We do not want anti-Semites to become German citizens.”
The claims that immigrants pose a terror risk and carry and spread anti-Semitism have been used as a justification to change Germany’s migration and refugee policy.
CDU leader Friedrich Merz said Germany could not accommodate more refugees from Gaza, claiming, “We have enough anti-Semitic young men in the country.”
Already, legal measures are being taken to decrease immigration. In October, the federal government backed a draft law allowing for a tougher deportation policy that would make it easier to expel rejected asylum seekers.
But the unhinged racist and xenophobic sentiments in the country are not only reflected in policies. They now define what appears to be a society-wide consensus captured in a manifesto published by German right-wing tabloid BILD, lecturing immigrants on how they needed to behave in Germany.
Referencing the arrival of Arab refugees in the past decade, the newspaper laid out 50 points of instruction on what is permissible or not accepted in Germany.
The introduction to the manifesto states:
“Our world is in chaos, and we are right in the middle of it. Since the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel, we are experiencing a new dimension of hatred in our country – against our values, democracy, and against Germany.”
Then it goes on to declare that Germany must say “NO!” to anti-Semitism and that “we love life, not death”, “we say please and thank you”, “we don’t wear masks or veils” and “we don’t marry off children. And men can’t have more than one wife.”
The rabid Islamophobia of the manifesto is more than apparent. But beyond that, it reflects the absurdity of white Germans considering themselves “under threat” and “victims” at a time when the Palestinian population is facing genocide in their own homeland.
It also exposes the deep-rooted white supremacy in German society. Indeed, the reaction of the German authorities to what is going on in Gaza demonstrates that they want to strengthen and solidify racist hierarchies in German society: white Germans at the top and people from “the Third World”, including victims of Israeli violence, at the bottom, doing in silence dirty menial jobs and being expected to show their gratitude and “integrate” into German society.
In 2019, the Bundestag passed a non-binding anti-BDS resolution, calling on institutions not to give a platform to anyone who might be remotely associated with the boycott movement. This pattern of silencing, which has steadily increased in the form of both censorship and self-censorship, was immediately turbo-charged in the wake of October 7.
As a result, artists, journalists, and academics speaking out against Israel have lost their jobs; event after event has been canceled; and spaces for free debate and expression have been disappearing at a dizzying rate.
The scale of denunciation and paranoia has affected nearly every sector of life in Germany. This includes academia, the supposed bastion of free expression, such as when the Max Planck Institute fired the renowned anthropologist Ghassan Hage in February. But the illiberal turn has especially shaken Germany’s cultural scene, endangering not only individual careers but entire institutions.
Throughout October and beyond, singers, artists, publishers, activists, academics, and DJs saw their performances, museum talks, exhibitions, poetry book launches, and conferences canceled, or had interviews retracted. Some of them faced no particular accusation at all, as when a prize ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli, scheduled for the Frankfurt Book Fair, was indefinitely postponed.
In 2021 German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Israel and met Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, whose American parents came from San Francisco to colonise Palestine in July 1967. Bennett has boasted: “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life and there’s no problem with that.”
In preparation for his visit 3 years ago, Steinmeier actively defended Israeli officials from being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for colonial war crimes. He asserted that
“the German government’s position is that the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction in this matter due to the absence of Palestinian statehood”.
Outgoing Israeli President at that time Reuven Rivlin has thanked Steinmeier for Germany’s commitment to Israel’s security and for opposing the investigation.
Steinmeier, in the tradition of all post-war West German governments, explained Germany’s unwavering support for Jewish colonisation of Palestine because of the guilt it carries:
“Germany lives with the historical legacy of the monstrous abuses of political power perpetrated by the Nazi regime.”
That the post-WWII German political culture acquired a conscience about the genocidal murder of European Jews is amply clear, but it does not seem to have acquired much of a conscience about Germany’s other colonial and genocidal crimes since it was unified in 1870-71, and they are many.
Steinmeier’s remarks were denounced by a Hamas spokesperson, who said that Steinmeier “encourages the occupation to continue its crimes and aggression, and places the [Israeli] regime above international law”. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine described the German president’s remarks as “shameful and arrogant” and “an invitation for Israel to perpetrate more crimes”. Even the Palestinian Authority described them as a “departure from the rules of international law” and an “interference in the work of the ICC as well as its rulings”.
Germany has indeed been one of the most implacable enemies of the Palestinian people and their struggle against settler-colonialism since the 19th century. Its contributions to the colonisation of Palestine have been ideological, financial, physical and military.
A decade before Germany embarked on the colonisation of Africa, a small group of Germans expelled from the Lutheran Church for their millenarian beliefs reorganised themselves in 1861 as German Templers, and embarked on establishing settler-colonies in Palestine. The first was established in 1866 near Nazareth, and in 1869 they built a colony in the Palestinian city of Haifa. Three more colonies followed, including Rephaim, near the Old City of Jerusalem.
During the Ottoman-Russian war of 1877-78, German war ships came to the shores of Palestine to defend the German colonists in case they were attacked, and in the process, the German consul forced the Ottomans to recognise the Templers’ colonies, which they had previously refused to do.
Indeed, the Templers had wanted to turn Palestine into a Christian state, and were hoping that it would be awarded to Germany at the end of the war. When the 1908 uprising of the Young Turks erupted in Constantinople, Palestinian peasants attacked the German colonies and Zionist Jewish colonies. Again, the Germans dispatched a warship to Haifa.
Kaiser Wilhelm visited Palestine in 1898. A member of his entourage, Colonel Joseph Freiherr von Ellrichshausen, decided to form a society for the advancement of German colonies in Palestine and to extend credit to them. With the new money, in addition to Wilhelmia, the new wave of Templers built the colonies of Walhalla, Bethlehem of Galilee, and Waldheim in the early 20th century.
On the eve of WWI, there were close to 2,000 Templers in Palestine. In the 1930s, many of the colonists supported the Nazi regime and were ultimately chased out by the British and the Zionists, who took over their colonies.
Earlier, in 1871, newly unified Germany was in the throes of plans to colonise its eastern provinces, which had a majority Polish population. A Prussian Colonisation Commission was established to Germanise the provinces of West Prussia and Posen through colonisation and the suppression of Polish national identity. By 1914, the commission was able to transplant about 155,000 people to hundreds of small German settler-colonies, but resistance from Polish landlords, who established their own settlement organisation, effectively defeated the German efforts.
German colonisation of Posen became a model for early 20th-century Zionist efforts to colonise Palestine. The Palestine bureau of the Zionist Organization was headed by the German Jewish and Posen-born Arthur Ruppin, who had witnessed “the permanent struggle between the Polish majority living on the land and the dominant, mainly urban, German population”.
Two weeks after his arrival in Palestine in 1907 to explore Jewish colonisation of the country, a trip funded by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Ruppin wrote to the JNF:
“I see the work of the JNF as being similar to that of the Colonization Commission working in Posen and Western Prussia. The JNF will buy land whenever it is offered by non-Jews and will offer it for resale either partly or wholly to Jews.”
Ruppin created the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) in 1908, whose work, according to its founding document, would assume the methods used in the German colonisation of Posen. Zionist leader Otto Warburg explained that the PLDC did not
“propose new ways, new experiments whose nature is unknown. We assume instead the Prussian colonization method as it has been practiced in the last ten years by the Colonization Commission.”
Warburg had been himself a member of the Prussian Colonisation Commission and became the president of the ZO from 1911 to 1921.
Meanwhile, German settler-colonisation and genocidal massacres had proceeded apace especially in Namibia and Tanganyika. In Tanganyika, between 1891 and 1898 the Germans killed upwards of 150,000 Wahehe who had revolted against German colonialism, and in Namibia between 1904 and 1907, they killed at least 65,000 Hereros (about 75-80 percent of the Herero population), and 10,000 Namas (35-50 percent of the Nama population).
After WWI, and the loss of German settler-colonies in Poland, and across Africa and the South Pacific, the Weimar Republic tried - but failed - to restore German sovereignty over them at the League of Nations.
The Weimar regime’s policy towards Jewish colonisation of Palestine was manifest early on. While the majority of German Jews opposed Zionism (no more than 2000 German Jewish colonists, mostly Russian Jewish immigrants to Germany, went to Palestine between 1897 and 1933), the Weimar Republic quickly supported the Balfour Declaration, and after joining the League of Nations in 1926, became an active supporter of European Jewish colonisation in Palestine.
The Nazis proved no exception to the German commitment to settler-colonialism in Asia and Africa, although the Nazis mainly targeted eastern Europe. Nazi antisemitic policies in the 1930s were in fact instrumental in increasing the pace of Zionist colonisation of Palestine. During the first few months of the Nazi regime in 1933, the Zionist movement signed an agreement with the Nazis to transfer the funds of Jews leaving the country to Palestine, an agreement that remained in effect until 1939.
The deal facilitated the transfer of about $40m of German Jewish wealth to Palestine by 1939 - a substantial amount for the Zionist movement, which used the funds to further the colonisation of Palestine and the dispossession of its indigenous people. Indeed, 60 percent of all capital invested in Palestine between 1933 and September 1939 came as a result of the agreement.
At the League of Nations, Germany’s representative reassured members in October 1933 - days before Nazi Germany withdrew from the league - that the government was making every effort to “ensure the smooth emigration of Jews from Germany to Palestine”. These efforts were supported by Germany’s consul general in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, who secured in the summer of 1934 a loan of 100,000 Palestinian pounds for the Jewish colony of Netanya to purchase German machinery.
As head of the Jewish department of the SS’s secret service, Leopold von Mildenstein was a hardened Zionist. He had returned from a six-month visit to Palestine in the 1930s singing the praises of Jewish settler-colonialism. He published a 12-part report in Joseph Goebbels’ Der Angriff, the propaganda organ of the Nazi party, in praise of the Jewish colonies:
“The soil has reformed [the Jew] and his kind in a decade. This new Jew will be a new people.”
In May 1935, the head of the SS Reinhard Heydrich himself wrote an article in Das Schwarze Korps, the official organ of the SS, in which he extolled the Zionists:
"The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state…Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them.”
Haganah agent Feivel Polkes was dispatched to Berlin in 1937 and partnered up with von Mildenstein’s protege, Adolf Eichmann, as his negotiating partner. Polkes thanked Eichmann for the Mauser pistols and ammunition the Haganah had received from Germany between 1933 and 1935, which “rendered valuable service” to the Zionist militias in shooting Palestinians during the latter's anti-colonial revolt that erupted in 1936.
The Zionists invited Eichmann and Herbert Hagen, also of the SS, to visit their colonies in Palestine, where they arrived in October 1937, disguised as journalists. Upon their arrival, Polkes took them to Mount Carmel and to visit a kibbutz. Eichmann would reminisce in his hideout in Argentina decades later that he was most “impressed by the way the Jewish colonists were building up their land”. He averred after his visit that “had I been a Jew … I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable”.
All in all, around 50,000 of the approximately half a million German Jews left to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.
Nazi leader and war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Jerusalem in 1961 (AFP).
Following the establishment of West Germany after WWII, every government (and every German government since reunification in 1990) continued the German pro-settler-colonial policies, that never abated since the 1870-71 unification, regardless of the type of ruling regime - with the major exception of East Germany during the GDR period. As Steinmeier would later do, West Germany justified its alliance with Zionism and Israel after WWII as a form of compensation for the genocide that the German people helped the Nazi regime perpetrate.
West Germany supplied Israel with huge economic and military aid in the 1950s and ‘60s, including tanks, which Israel has used to kill Palestinians and other Arabs. Since the 1970s, the Germans have also provided Israel with nuclear-ready submarines; in recent years, Israel has armed German-supplied submarines with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles.
In 2012, Ehud Barak, then Israel’s defence minister, told Der Spiegel that Germans should be “proud” that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel “for many years”. That this makes post-1990 reunified Germany an accomplice in the dispossession of Palestinians is of no more concern in Berlin than it was in the 1960s to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who affirmed that “the Federal Republic has neither the right nor the responsibility to take a position on the Palestinian refugees”.
This is to be added to the billions of dollars that Germany has paid the Israeli government as compensation for the Holocaust, as if Israel and Zionism were the victims of Nazism, when in reality it was European Jews who refused to colonise Palestine who were killed by the Nazis.
Since the late 1960s, West German governments have denounced Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler-colonialism as “criminal” and “terrorist”. They banned Palestinian solidarity organisations, including the General Union of Palestinian Students.
After the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympians, the West Germans activated their racist “Alien Law” for the massive deportation of Palestinian workers and students from the country, based on "an outright lie" that they supported the Munich attack, which they did not.
Since 1990, reunified Germany’s enmity towards Palestinians has continued steadily. Ironically, Steinmeier’s remarks in support of Israeli settler-colonialism were made days after Germany finally acknowledged its colonial-era genocide in Namibia.
Given its illustrious support for settler-colonialism around the world, Germany’s longstanding backing of Israel and Zionist settler-colonialism - and for a proud killer of Arabs, such as Bennett - do not only derive from its professed guilt over the genocide perpetrated by the German people under the Nazi regime, but are also crucially informed by German colonial racism towards non-white colonised peoples worldwide, who, as far as Germany is concerned, were always dispensable in the interest of white settler-colonialism.