German chancellor Friedrich Merz has changed Berlin’s stance towards Israel since the October 7th Hamas-led attacks, insisting Germany’s sense of historical responsibility for Israel applies to the state and not its government.
Mr Merz told the Sunday edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper that Israel’s security “was and would remain” an important part of German foreign policy.
However, it was up to each German government “to reassess, in light of the situation in the Middle East, how we can best live up to this responsibility”.
This is often summarised in the term “Staatsräson” or reason of state, first used in this context in 2007/2008 by former chancellor Angela Merkel to make explicit postwar Germany’s implicit sense of responsibility for Israel’s continued security and survival.
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Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in 2023, Staatsräson has re-entered daily political debate, though its ambiguous meaning and contested consequences have created tensions that Merz acknowledged on Sunday.
“I have always had my difficulties with this term because it has never been spelt out in all its consequences,” he said. Exactly a year ago, as opposition leader, Merz denounced the Scholz administration for halting all arms exports as a betrayal of German Staatsräson obligations to Israel, “in this, its most precarious hour”.
On the election trail earlier this year, Merz promised he would, as chancellor, invite Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the chancellery in defiance of an international arrest warrant on him for suspected genocide.
Since taking office in May, however, the deteriorating situation in Gaza saw the new chancellor bury that invitation and begin a discreet policy pivot. Mr Merz criticised ongoing IDF military policy in Gaza and its human cost and imposed a limited arms export freeze to Israel, attracting considerable criticism from Middle East hawks even in his own party.
The final tipping point came last month when the head of Germany’s official Jewish community urged Berlin not to make its support for the state of Israel dependent on the decisions of Israeli politicians.
Prof Josef Schuster, head of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany, said in a speech marking the 75th anniversary of his organisation, that not even he understood – or supported – all decisions of the Netanyahu government.
With Mr Merz in the front row, Schuster said support for the Israeli state – and Jews in Germany – did not oblige blanket support for the Israeli government.
“There’s a good reason why it is called reason of state and not reason of government,” said Mr Schuster to applause, adding: “Germany has to stand for the security of Israel, regardless of which government it is.”
The Schuster speech was motivated by a growing fear that the Staatsräson link was generating a growing backlash against Jews in Germany. A first indication of the latest policy shift came with German foreign minister Johann Wadephul’s Bundestag address to mark the second anniversary of the October 7th attacks.
After criticising the Netanyahu government’s foreign policy as “unwise”, he told MPs Germany’s Holocaust past created a “responsibility for the security of Jews in our country and the existence and security of the state of Israel – regardless of the respective government’s policies”.
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Berlin’s policy on Israel-Gaza has, in the past two years, attracted huge criticism at international level, from German opposition parties and even inside Berlin government ministries.
A common line of criticism was that Berlin had, in its post-October 7th shock, let the country – and the term Staatsräson – become beholden to the Netanyahu government’s most extreme members.
“Merz has seen this term is so limitless that he has seen it brings more difficulty than clarity,” said Peter Lintl, Middle East analyst at the SWP think tank. “It’s also a Merkel term and he has a tense relationship with her, so he is now distancing himself.”
