News spreads fast in Berlin – as do the consequences. Last Friday afternoon Walter, a British-Jewish friend, was approached on a Berlin bus by a German man in his early thirties.
Had he heard, the man asked Walter, that Germany would no longer sell weapons to Israel?
It was a slight oversimplification: an hour earlier chancellor Friedrich Merz had announced that his government would no longer supply Israel with arms that could be used in Gaza.
Walter told his fellow passenger that, yes, he had heard the news. And that’s when it all kicked off.
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“Are you a Zionist?” the man demanded to know. Walter – grey beard, wearing a cap and a yellow ribbon in solidarity with the October 7th hostages – said “yes, of course”, but kept his head down, hoping the man would go away.
The man didn’t go away, shouting: “You’re a child-murderer!” He then grabbed Walter’s cap from his head, jumped off the bus and threw it on the side of the road as he walked off.
Days later, in his kitchen, Walter is still processing what happened – and why.
“He was happy, so gleeful to have found someone upon whom he could spill his rage,” said Walter. “He had obviously seen I was Jewish, but didn’t ask that. Instead, he asked if I had heard about Merz, making me wonder if Merz has opened the floodgates.”
Almost two years on, the Hamas-led October 7th 2023 attacks – which saw 1,200 Israelis killed and more than 250 others taken hostage, followed by an Israeli military campaign estimated to have killed more than 60,000 in Gaza, according to local health authorities - continue to trigger shock waves in Germany, land of the Holocaust.
Merz’s decision last Friday has caused a fresh shock wave although, or perhaps because, it was largely symbolic. No major weapons exports to Israel were looming. Instead, Merz said the decision was a response to Israel’s failure to end the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza and its plans for a full takeover of the enclave.
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The latter, the chancellor said, “contributes to the intensification of social conflicts in Germany and Europe which we must avoid”.
Pro-Palestinian campaigners in Germany see the main source of social conflict here in people like chancellor Merz supporting Israel regardless of the Government/ IDF strategy in Gaza, resulting in demonstration bans and violent police crackdowns on German demonstrators.
Until a week ago, Merz’s ruling centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and the pro-Israeli Springer media group, disagreed energetically with this stance. The problem was not Israel, they argued, but the latent, violent anti-Semitism – often masquerading as anti-Zionism – they saw among the country’s main critics: Germany’s Palestinian and Arab communities and leftist/ anti-colonialist campaigners.
To shore up their position, they took implicit German historical obligations – to defend Israel’s security and its continued existence – and added an explicit label: Staatsräson, or reason of state.
With Germany’s previously unconditional support of Israel now conditional, previous critics of the Staaträson term – and its logic – have now co-opted both.
“If you stand for Israel’s security and continued existence, you cannot be for Israel’s conquest of Gaza,” said Prof Moshe Zimmermann, an Israeli historian, on German public television.
In the week since the Merz pivot, curious things are happening – even to the pro-Israeli Bild. Previously the tabloid printed no pictures from inside Gaza – except those it denounced as Hamas propaganda.
This week it juxtaposed an image of the ruins of Gaza with 1945 Dresden – a comparison many readers supported.
The shift didn’t begin in the last week. Last May, a theatre in the western city of Celle staged a play drawing parallels between residents of postwar displaced people’s camps – including Holocaust survivors – and Palestinians in modern-day camps in Lebanon and Jordan.
When Celle rabbi Max Feldhake expressed concerns about such comparisons during a public discussion, he says an older German man stood up to say that “what Israel is doing is worse than the Nazis”.
As exculpatory arguments go it’s not new, but Feldhake says it is enjoying a post-October 7th renaissance.
“I get the sense that large parts of the German population are now delighted, saying: ‘Finally we get to tell off damn Jews’,” said Feldhake, over coffee in Berlin.
He is worried about the unintended consequences of the Merz shift that could, for instance, see the October 7th protest slogan: “Free Palestine from German guilt” merge with the thinking behind another postwar slogan: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz”.
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Back in his kitchen, Walter views his bus attacker – white, German – as part of a new norm, where old and new resentments collide to spark a surge in anti-Jewish violence.
“It’s not new, it’s just that the non-Jews hadn’t noticed it yet,” he said. “Attacks like this make about as much sense as all the Irish in 80s England being blamed for the IRA attacks there.”
