Berlin’s sovereignty has been deeply compromised, and no talk of ‘collective guilt’ or ‘reason of state’ can explain this away
Jürgen Mackert is Professor of Sociology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He was a temporary Professor for the Structure of modern societies at the University of Erfurt, Germany and a visiting professor for Political Sociology at Humboldt University Berlin. His latest books include On Social Closure. Theorizing Exclusion, Exploitation, and Elimination (Oxford University Press 2024). Siedlerkolonialismus. Grundlagentexte und aktuelle Analysen (edited with Ilan Pappe; Nomos 2024).
Cross-posted from Middle East Eye
Photo: Screen grab Instagram
It couldn’t go fast enough for Germany.
Just one month after the announcement of a “ceasefire” in Gaza, with the whole world aware that its sole purpose was to enable Israel to continue its genocide, Germany once again spread a veil of silence over the process, launching a “normalisation offensive”.
Last November, after having met his Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar in Tel Aviv, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul declared that his “confidence in the peace process as a whole has grown” and that “the situation has stabilised noticeably”.
A few days later, 160 “young leaders” from Germany were not above accepting an invitation from Israel to soak up Zionist propaganda.
And in early December, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a wanted war criminal, thus paying homage to a murderous regime that he continues to call a democracy, while assuring Berlin’s continued unconditional support for Israel’s crimes against humanity.
German police followed suit, eager to “learn from Israel” – apparently fascinated by the weapons tested on Palestinians in Gaza, which they would soon have at their disposal.
And then 2026 began, with German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt travelling to Israel to sign a pact on “the development of a joint ‘Cyber Dome’ system, an artificial intelligence and cyber innovation centre, drone defence cooperation, and improved civilian warning systems”. Israel, Dobrindt said, was “a premium partner”.
All this “normalisation” – the veiling of genocide by the German government, young German “leaders” and the police wishing to “learn” from war criminals and a minister making pacts with them as “premium partners” – allows for little other conclusion than that the Zionist police and surveillance regime has become a role model for Germany.
Collective guilt narrative
Indeed, Germany’s transformation is already underway. After Berlin police prohibited Palestinians and their supporters from gathering in remembrance of the Nakba under dubious justifications, the courts – both the administrative court and the high administrative court – legally confirmed this massive infringement of civil rights.
Alongside the brutal actions of Berlin’s militarised riot police against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, strongly reminiscent of those carried out by Israeli security forces against Palestinians, this should deeply concern everyone living in Germany.
After Nazi rule, nothing was more important for West Germany than “normalising” relations with the newly formed state of Israel, which had just committed crimes against humanity in the Nakba.
In a 1966 interview, former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, an enthusiastic supporter of Zionist settlement in Palestine who paid reparations to Israel, said: “We had done so much injustice to the Jews, committed such crimes against them that somehow these had to be expiated or repaired, if we were at all to regain our international standing … Furthermore, the power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated.”
Author Daniel Marwecki pointed out that this “illustrates the way in which the objective of German rehabilitation was closely intertwined with a central idea of modern antisemitism: that of Jewish power” – and Adenauer’s fear, as historian Tom Segev has shown, was exploited by the Zionists in these negotiations.
Marwecki also shows how the reparations had nothing to do with forgiveness on the part of Israel or German atonement. Instead, one has to conclude, Germany allowed its sovereignty to be compromised to facilitate its return to the international stage as quickly as possible, while instilling a collective sense of guilt in its own citizens, ensuring they would accept Germany’s future subservience to Israel.
When these politics of collective guilt became implausible for subsequent generations who had done nothing to feel guilty about, former Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2008 trotted out the narrative that Israel’s security was “part of Germany’s reason of state”.
Proclaimed as if by an absolutist monarch and repeated like a mantra by Germany’s loyal public and liberal media, any democratic debate on this subject was to be nipped in the bud – which is why today, any dissenting opinion on Germany’s support for Israel’s genocide can easily be criminalised.
International law discarded
Interestingly, other parts of the alleged reason of state, that might also from the experiences of Nazi rule, are never mentioned: defending the dignity of every individual, complying with international law, obeying the decisions of global courts, defending human rights by all means, and treating those who commit genocide as nothing less than war criminals.
Nothing remains of such maxims today, as the Scholz and Merz administrations have willingly disregarded them in order to support the genocide being carried out by the regime whose “security” is so dear to Germany.
Not only has this enabled the destruction of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of Palestinians, but Germany has also significantly contributed to the destruction of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and international law, which all stand in the way of neoliberal imperialism.
As nothing remains from these high maxims but the alleged obligation to protect Israel’s security, Germany is doing the “dirty work” for the Zionist regime by “normalising” a state that commits genocide in Gaza, ethnically cleanses the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, that systematically neglects Palestinian citizens of Israel and now introduces the death penalty for Palestinians only, intending to execute them not for what they allegedly have done but for what they are.
Berlin is further protecting a racist ideology that feeds the fascist delusions of the vast majority of Jewish Israelis, who welcome the extermination of the Palestinian people. It is also normalising a “moral” army of war criminals, sadistic torturers and rapists reduced to their lowest instincts.
Finally, Berlin normalises paramilitary militias and fascist hordes of Zionist settlers terrorising Palestinians in the West Bank and causing a second Nakba.
While Germany behaves as if all this were “normal”, Israel has become radicalised within a specifically settler-colonial dynamic; first, as Patrick Wolfe has made clear: “Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.”
World-leading genocide experts as well as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian territories, leave no doubt that Israel today is such a genocidal regime.
Second, French-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi points out that “every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom” – and this seed has undoubtedly taken root in Israel, as Holocaust survivors also explain.
Over time, the normalisation of Germany’s relations with Israel has developed into a normalisation of all Zionist crimes, no matter how repugnant. No talk of “collective guilt” or “reason of state” can explain this away; it is a product of deeply compromised sovereignty.
The veil of silence that Germany has cast over Israel’s atrocities for decades has become a blood-soaked shroud.
Pretending that everything is “normal” as Israel continues its daily slaughter and dehumanisation of Palestinians comes at a high price: the “normalisers” lose their own humanity.
As the old saying goes: If you dance with the devil, you don’t change the devil. The devil changes you.
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