Why does Germany support Israel?

Without western weapons, Israel would have been unable to carry out its genocide against the Palestinians or to carry on its provocations against Iran. Foremost among those arming the Israeli state is, of course, the United States. But the second largest supplier of weapons is Germany.

[Originally published at derkommunist.de]

Among other things, Germany supplies Israel with nuclear-capable submarines, tank engines and ammunition. Since 7 October 2023, the Federal Republic has increased these deliveries tenfold.

German politicians, bourgeois journalists and other representatives of the German ruling class justify Germany’s support for the Zionist regime with reference to Germany’s historic ‘guilt’ and ‘responsibility’ for the mass murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust in the 1940s.

Anyone who dares to criticise or protest against Germany’s support for the atrocities of Israeli imperialism is quickly branded an ‘antisemite’ who hasn’t learned the lessons of history. With this justification, heavy state repression against pro-Palestine activists has been meted out since day one. Protests and meetings have been broken up using severe police brutality. Artists, journalists and academics criticising Israel are under threat of being fired or losing funding, and freedom of speech is under attack through intimidatory lawsuits.

Already in 2022, former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) explained:

“The mass murder of the Jews originated in Germany. It was planned and carried out by Germans. This gives every German government the perpetual responsibility for the security of the State of Israel and the protection of Jewish life. We will never forget the suffering and victims of millions.”

And former German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) left no doubts as to what is meant by ‘Israeli security’:

“When Hamas terrorists barricade themselves behind people, behind schools, we find ourselves in very difficult situations. But we won’t shy away from it. That’s why I made it clear at the United Nations: civilian areas could then also lose their protected status because terrorists abuse it. Germany stands by this; for us, this means Israel's security.”

Dissent against this policy is portrayed as antisemitism. Using the history of the Holocaust and the lessons ‘we’ learned from it, last year a ‘resolution against antisemitism’ was passed in the German parliament on the anniversary of Kristallnacht under the title, ‘Never again is now’.

It called for heavy repression against supporters of Palestinian liberation, including the proscription of the BDS movement, and recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state as a prerequisite for public funding. In the context of the resolution, German government officials have said that claiming Israel is an apartheid state constitutes antisemitism.

Most recently, a woman in Berlin was ordered to pay a €1,500 penalty by a German court. Her crime: protesting Germany’s support for the genocide being committed by Israel, by standing in front of parliament with a sign saying: “Have we learned nothing from the Holocaust?”

The judges found her guilty of belittling the atrocities of the Holocaust by drawing a comparison between it and the Israeli genocide in Gaza – nevermind the fact that Israeli and German politicians constantly compare or insinuate a parallel between the Holocaust and the events of 7 October 2023! The notion of the singular and unique character of the Holocaust is only treated as sacred when it suits the interests of western imperialism.

Even some in the Palestine movement seem to have bought into this narrative. They assert that Germany’s support for Israel stems from a mistaken understanding of German responsibility and feelings of guilt. They have therefore put forward the very confused slogan: “Free Palestine from German guilt”.

But, of course, all this is wrong! This whole narrative is a huge ideological smoke screen employed by the German ruling class that has nothing to do with reality! German support for Israel is not about ‘historical responsibility’, but about tangible imperialist interests. This becomes particularly clear when one looks at the origins of this support.

West Germany and the USA

German capitalism started and lost the Second World War. In the aftermath, German imperialism was laid low. The terrible crimes of the Holocaust, through which German corporations amassed great wealth, came to the attention of the world.

But in the wake of the war, rather than weakening its competitor to the fullest extent possible, US imperialism rebuilt West Germany economically and politically as a frontline state in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.

Only on this basis was Germany able to become a relevant industrial nation again. Much of its debt was written off, it received cheap loans in the Marshall Plan, Germany was allowed to become a sovereign state again, and old Nazis were even allowed to escape disgrace and to remain in office because they were good anti-communists. In return, the Americans expected Germany to be at their disposal as an imperialist henchman.

Oil and anti-communism

During the Second World War, the USA had replaced Great Britain as the strongest world power. It began to enforce its own interests everywhere, including in the Middle East. US imperialism had three main strategic goals in the region: first, to gain control of the vast oil reserves in the Middle East; second, to prevent the Middle East from slipping into the Soviet sphere of influence; third, to oust the weakened European colonial powers from the region in order to snatch the territories in their sphere of influence for themselves.

The founding of the state of Israel helped the USA to assert its influence at the expense of the old European colonial powers / Image: public domain

The Middle East has the largest oil reserves in the world. After the Second World War, oil began to replace coal as the most important source of energy for industry. In addition, synthetic rubber, which was obtained from oil, became increasingly important as a material in industry. The US was less concerned with simply meeting its own oil needs and more concerned with using its control over oil production in the Middle East to expand its strategic control over the entire world economy.

In Europe, the Soviet Red Army had defeated fascism. After the war, revolutionary and pre-revolutionary situations arose in many countries, for example in Italy and Greece. The revolutionary wave also shook the colonies, because the old European colonial powers Great Britain and France had emerged weakened from the war, and their power over their colonies was slipping through their fingers.

In 1945, France-occupied Algeria was rocked by mass protests. In 1947, the British colony of India gained independence. In 1949, the Chinese Revolution triumphed, thereby depriving imperialism of the ability to exploit one-fifth of the world's population. The masses, striving for independence and colonial liberation, looked to the Soviet Union. The former colonial countries were in danger of drifting into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, including in the Middle East. The USA wanted to prevent this. It was doggedly trying to contain the influence of the USSR.

The founding of the state of Israel helped the USA to assert its influence at the expense of the old European colonial powers. After the First World War, Great Britain had taken control of historic Palestine and, in line with the typically imperialist modus operandi of ‘divide and rule’, promised the land to both the Palestinians and the Zionists.

Their plan was predicated on neither side prevailing. But in the Nakba that is exactly what happened, when 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled in 1948 in the course of the founding of the state of Israel. The US sought to support Israel in order to weaken the position of British imperialism and at the same time get a foot in the door in the Middle East.

The USA wanted to develop Israel into a permanent strategic and military base from which it could control the entire region. To do this, Israel needed weapons, money and economic aid. But the US had to tread carefully in its support for Israel. It was increasingly drawing the reactionary Arab monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Jordan into its own sphere of influence as Britain declined. But these regimes were under massive pressure from their own masses to oppose Zionism, and overt US support for Israel could jeopardise these efforts. The USA found West Germany to be a pliant middleman in its support for Israel.

‘Reparations’

Under massive US pressure, West Germany signed a DM 3.5 billion ‘reparation agreement’ with Israel in 1952. The western Allies made the agreement a condition for West Germany's state sovereignty and lobbied Chancellor Adenauer to accept the agreement.

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) tried to keep the extent of its support for Israel a secret throughout the Cold War / Image: public domain

The West German politicians grumbled and complained about the size of the sum, but had to swallow it whether they liked it or not. Their main problem was not the amount of money, but concern that the agreement would worsen German relations with the Arab states, many of which were even threatening to recognise and support the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) if West Germany continued to support Israel.

Hence, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) tried to keep the extent of its support for Israel a secret throughout the Cold War. However, the particular interests of the German bourgeoisie were of little importance to the USA. It was better for the FRG to embarrass itself in the region than for the USA to have to do so.

Despite the name, this agreement was not really about compensating victims of the Holocaust. Non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust received nothing at all, and even the Jewish victims themselves saw little or none of this money. Instead, it subsidised the development of Israeli industry and the Israeli state. This aid was crucial for the country's continued existence. Incidentally, it also provided a small economic boost for German industry, as two-thirds of the ‘reparations’ were paid to Israel in the form of German industrial goods.

In his 1953 Bundestag speech, former concentration camp inmate and KPD Member of Parliament Kurt Müller from Frankfurt summed up the situation:

“The death and murder of six million Jews is a single indictment of a terrible system of inhumanity and barbarism. Many heartfelt words have been spoken about this here. But we object to people appearing here who, at the time when it was necessary to prevent these crimes, either stood aside or supported them. Ladies and gentlemen, I also say today with the same clarity that this agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of Israel does not serve to make reparation for the boundless and bestial crimes of Hitlerite barbarism against the persecuted Jews. [...] So, in the name of reparation, Israel's industrialists receive from West Germany everything they need to develop their basic industries. The facts prove that this agreement has nothing to do with reparation. [...] In plain German, this means that the individual persecutees in Israel will not receive a single penny of the three billion DM, while the industrialists, on the other hand, are doing a roaring trade. [...]

“For it is they who are behind the agreement and who have brought it about, not for reasons of humanity and philanthropy. There are very real reasons for this policy. It is the American imperialists who are creating a strong strategic and military base in the Middle East, on the one hand against the British, but on the other hand also against the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa. With the help of industrial equipment from West Germany, the Americans also want to expand the State of Israel, which is in their hands, into an operational and military base for their aggressive policy. [...]

“Ladies and gentlemen, the winners from this agreement are not only the industrial masters in Israel and the Americans, but also the industrial masters in West Germany, for whom it ensures sales and huge profits for several years to come. Is it not an outright, disgusting mockery of those persecuted on racial grounds that those who are jointly responsible for the mass murder, who made huge profits under Hitler and from his massacres of the Jews, today, under the disguise of such ‘reparations’ are once again seeking to make huge profits, while the victims of racial persecution, like everyone else in the federal territory, have to wait years for adequate reparations and pensions? Is it not a bloody mockery that here in the Bundestag people are advocating such ‘reparations’ who, like Mr Pferdmenges, for example, once helped to finance the SS, to whose special account the murder of millions of Jews, or a military economy leader, Dr Frowein, about whom the following is written in a document dated 31 May 1940: ‘Mr Frowein has learned that Jewish women can be provided to us in any desired number. They would have to be guaranteed work on the night shift or, if possible, housed in barracks or in the worst possible housing. Mr Frowein suggests 500 Jewish women.’ We Communists reject [the agreement]. We demand that the means be finally provided here in the federal territory so that the claims to which all those persecuted by the Nazi regime are entitled as reparation are satisfied.”

The German capitalist class supported the agreement mainly because they had to bow to US imperialism. While they did so, they naturally tried to rake in as much profit as possible. And the fact that they now had a project to launder their bad reputation without having to give up the wealth they had accumulated during the Holocaust was, of course, also a nice additional upshot. Meanwhile, the Americans achieved their goal of raising Israel to the status of a regional power without having to take public responsibility for it.

The Six-Day War

But economic aid urgently needed to be followed by military aid. Between 1957 and 1967, West Germany was by far Israel's largest supplier of weapons. In the 1960s, the FRG secretly supplied American tanks and other heavy equipment. And it did so even when German politicians would have preferred to avoid it in order not to jeopardise diplomatic relations with the Arab states. But, as with the 1952 ‘reparations agreement’, they had to comply. And by doing so they abetted US imperialism further in allowing them to focus solely on the incipient Vietnam War.

In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel carved its new position of dominance in stone by inflicting a crushing defeat on the Arab states / Image: Government Press Office Israel, Wikimedia Commons

This allowed Israel, over time, to grow into the strongest regional imperialist power in the Middle East. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel carved its new position of dominance in stone by inflicting a crushing defeat on the Arab states – thanks in part to German tanks. Now, the US could finally support Israel directly and openly without having to fear any real resistance from the Arab states. It was only in the wake of that defeat of the Arab states that the US came into the open as Israel's most important arms supplier.

When Israel cemented its position as an imperialist regional power in the Six-Day War of 1967, both the liberal and right-wing German media celebrated the Israeli victory, by positively comparing the Israeli offensive to that of… the Wehrmacht under Rommel in North Africa! “VICTORY! Dayan – Israel's Rommel”, thundered Bild. Israeli soldiers “rolled like Rommel,” exclaimed Der Spiegel.

These were the same unreconstructed antisemites that had infested the German ruling class for many years!

Never has any supposed ‘remorse’ led Germany to forge closer ties with Israel. German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU) made that clear in 1965 when he whispered into German television cameras that Germany had to get closer to Israel because “the power of the Jews, even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated”.

In fact, the first German ambassador to Israel was a former Wehrmacht officer on the Eastern Front and holder of the Knight's Cross, who rambled on about “world Jewry” and that “the Jews would unleash the dogs from Jerusalem to London to New York” if Germany did not support Israel.

If proof were needed that the German ruling class’ support for Israel never had anything to do with sympathy for the plight of the Jews, these admissions demonstrate that quite clearly.

The fact is that it was neither antisemitic delusions of geriatric CDU politicians nor ‘moral guilt’ that caused Germany to give its support to the Zionist state. Rather – as already shown – all along it was the tangible material interests of American and German imperialism that were at the root of the question.

Raison d'être

Since the end of the Six-Days War, German support for Israel has increased. Over the decades, German-Israeli cooperation at the intelligence and military level has become ever closer. With the fall of the Soviet Union (and the GDR), Germany was finally able to openly and proudly profess its support for Israel.

In the course of German reunification, the agreement between German and American imperialism was reaffirmed: the USA gave the FRG its consent to incorporate the GDR, and Germany strengthened its supremacy in Europe – much to the displeasure of France and Great Britain, who ultimately had to bow to the decision of the USA.

The newly united Germany was brought into NATO. Only 20 percent of the population of the whole of Germany favoured NATO membership, but where the fundamental interests of imperialism are at stake, democracy does not apply.

The German ruling class gained by this arrangement, as it meant the German and other European ruling classes could spend less on their own militaries, being militarily underwritten by US imperialism. But it came with the condition that the now united Germany would continue to support the interests of US imperialism, including in the Middle East.

After the Americans' second Iraq War in the early 2000s ruined that country, Iran was the only regional power left that was a thorn in the side of US imperialism / Image: public domain

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the USA rose to become the undisputed world power. They now finally intended to bring the Middle East under their complete control, asserting themselves in those countries in the region that had been in the Soviet sphere of influence. Germany provided a great deal of assistance in this. Although Germany did not take part in the American Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, it provided large financial subsidies to Israel, which was indirectly involved in the war.

But, again, the policy of Germany in the Middle East had and still has nothing to do with ‘morality’, ‘reparations’ or the ‘fight against antisemitism’, but only with the imperialist interests of the West. Indeed, until the late 1980s, the regime in Iraq, itself overtly hostile to Israel, had been a western ally against Iran and had therefore had been supplied with heavy weapons, including by Germany, weapons that it would also use in its murderous crimes against the Kurds.

After the Americans' second Iraq War in the early 2000s ruined that country, Iran was the only regional power left that was a thorn in the side of US imperialism. From the beginning of the 1990s until today, Germany delivered seven nuclear-capable submarines to Israel, which enable the Zionist state to maintain a nuclear second-strike capability against Iran. Incidentally, it is highly likely that the original Israeli nuclear weapons programme of the 1960s was co-financed by Germany.

Yet, at the same time as Germany was delivering nuclear-capable submarines to Israel, it was also stepping in to financially prop up the Palestinian Authority (PA) after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 under the guise of supporting Palestinian ‘self-determination’ – the EU with Germany at its core being its biggest financial backer. In fact, from the beginning, the PA has been a corrupt parody of self-determination, and has acted as little more than a deputy sheriff, a prison guard, of the Israeli regime itself.

As one academic, Daniel Marwecki, explains: “this results in the paradoxical circumstance that Germany is helping to finance Israel's occupation.” In fact, there is nothing paradoxical about this whatsoever, it is wholly in line with the German ruling class’ policy over decades.

In a 2008 speech, Chancellor Angela Merkel notoriously told the Israeli parliament, that “Germany’s support for Israel's security is part of our national ethos, our raison d'être.” What the whole postwar history of Germany shows is that “Israeli security” means the enforcement of the interests of the western imperialism in the Middle East. And that very much is, indeed, part of capitalist Germany’s “raison d'être”.

Antisemitism and ‘historical guilt’

But it has really been since the 1980s and 90s that German support for Israel has been wrapped up and justified under a moralistic guise, using the notion of German guilt for the Holocaust. In 1999, Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer declared that Germany had to support NATO's intervention in former Yugoslavia, which was in violation of international law, not despite, but because of Auschwitz.

German imperialism was once again trying to extend itself eastward: in the 1940s, it did so with open genocidal intent; in the 1990s, it did so abusing the memory of that past horror, using the hypocritical lie that it was bombing Serbia in order to prevent a genocide.

The German liberal journalists and intellectuals went along with this new justification for the aims of German imperialism when it suited them. When it didn’t suit them, they dropped it entirely.

While German liberals otherwise repeatedly assert the ‘uniqueness’ (i.e. singularity) of the crimes of the Holocaust in order to derive from it a special German guilt and responsibility, this sacred moral principle no longer applies when it comes to justifying the interests of US imperialism by comparing others to Hitler.

The propaganda of those in power is having less and less effect on the population / Image: IDF Spokespersons Unit, Wikimedia Commons

Thus, the left-wing liberal German writer Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, for example, compared Saddam Hussein with Hitler in DER SPIEGEL in 1991 and explained that the thesis of the ‘singularity of the Holocaust’ did not apply here.

And, of course, nowadays you are portrayed as an antisemite if you in any way compare Israel’s atrocities in Gaza to those of the Nazis. And yet, at the same time, Israeli and western politicians constantly compare Hamas to the Nazis. German authorities absurdly claim, for example, that the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” is a call for the mass murder of Jewish Israelis and is therefore antisemitic. And in order to supposedly prevent such a thing, arms exports to Israel are ramped up, and so too is repression against pro-Palestine activists.

Fight German imperialism

It is obvious that the capitalists, politicians and their journalists in Germany and the USA, in their ‘culture of remembrance’, are unconcerned about the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, who to this day have still been insufficiently compensated. Rather, they are trying to exploit the honest feelings of the masses – compassion, a sense of justice and outrage at the bestial crimes of German fascism – to justify shameful imperialist interventions in which millions of innocent civilians have died miserably.

The latest of these victims are the tens of thousands of dead in Gaza and Lebanon. We will not accept lessons in morality from these ladies and gentlemen. The German working class is not to blame for the crimes of the Hitler regime. But these apologists for western imperialism are to blame for the victims of these interventions and for the desecration of the memory of the Nazi victims.

But the propaganda of those in power is having less and less effect on the population. In a survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation, only 27 percent of Germans believe that their country has a special obligation to Israel.

In another study in November 2023, just a few weeks after the Hamas attack, only 35 percent of Germans considered it to be Israel's right to invade the Gaza Strip militarily and take harsh action against Hamas (during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, it was only 21 percent). And only 8 percent were in favour of arms deliveries in the same survey!

In 2018, Green Party politician Katrin Göring-Eckardt said in the Bundestag: “Israel's existence is directly linked to the existence of our country as a free democracy and therefore our responsibility [...] Israel's right to exist is our own”.

In doing so, she unwittingly expressed a fundamental truth, albeit one that was turned on its head: German imperialism can only exist if it serves the USA as an imperialist assistant. Within this framework, the German bourgeoisie naturally tries to get the best possible deals for itself.

One of its first acts in this servile relationship was to support Israel in the 1950s and 60s, and this balance of power continues to determine the relationship between Germany, the USA and Israel to this day. This is not about remorse for the Holocaust. German support enables Israeli imperialism to oppress the Palestinians. If German imperialism is intimately linked with Israeli imperialism, as Göring-Eckardt admits, then the inverse is true: the fight for Palestinian freedom is also the fight against German imperialism.