Germany struggles with complexities of its relationship with Israel as war and suffering continue

Locals noticed the holes in the street early on Monday and began calling the town hall in Zeitz, a quiet eastern German town near Leipzig.
Someone could trip over the holes, one caller said. Then came another call – and another.
Mayor Kathrin Weber realised quickly that, overnight, someone had ripped up and stolen 10 so-called “stumbling stones”, square brass plaques embedded in the pavements in front of the former homes of local Zeitz residents murdered in the Nazi death camps.
“I was shocked when we got the news,” said Weber, above all at the timing: exactly a year after the Hamas attack on Israel: ”It’s impossible to understand such an attack as anything but politically motivated and an attack on our democracy.”
The incident rattled Germany further as it struggles – even more than its European neighbours – with the emotional and complex post-October 7th reality.
In the country of the Holocaust, which has professed Israel’s security to be its “Staatsräson” or reason of state, pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps have spent the last year facing off daily. In the middle: an insecure silent majority.
Such divisions run through Germany’s three-way “traffic-light coalition”, too.
Social Democrat chancellor Olaf Scholz remains staunchly supportive of Israel. In a statement calling for a ceasefire this week, he mentioned Gaza only as the location of remaining Israeli hostages and did not refer to Lebanon at all.
In a separate video message, Scholz said a ceasefire would ensure “the civilian population in the Gaza Strip is better protected”, but made no mention of Israel’s military strategy there. His stance has prompted blowback from political allies as well as observers from an Israel-critical perspective.
“The issue of humanitarian aid, 40,000 dead in Gaza and the situation in Lebanon seem to be of absolutely no interest to Olaf Scholz,” said Daniel Gerlach, editor of the German-Arab magazine Zenith on Germany’s most-watched political talkshow on Sunday. “Apart from Israel’s legitimate security interests, this conflict doesn’t seem to exist for [Scholz].”
Sitting alongside Gerlach on Sunday was Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Green foreign minister. After 11 trips to Israel and the region in the last 12 months, the evolution in her thinking has been pronounced.
Visiting her last January in Berlin, Tánaiste Micheál Martin suggested Germany’s early post-October 7th position was “still constrained by the historical prism” of the Holocaust.
Since then Baerbock has condemned Israeli settler violence, and clashed with Binyamin Netanyahu when he disputed mass starvation in Gaza.
On Sunday evening she went even farther, arguing that Germany’s historical responsibility for Israel’s security was not “about the security of the Israeli government or a prime minister, but about the state, the people and future generations”.
Her ministry is Europe’s largest donor to Gaza, providing an additional €290 million in humanitarian funding in the last year, including 315 tonnes of aid airdropped into the region. Co-ordinating the aid – and discreet diplomacy efforts – is her special regional envoy Deike Potzel, Germany’s former ambassador to Ireland.
A year on, however, many Jews in Germany are fearful for their safety as friends and neighbours cut contact and strangers blame them for Israel’s actions.
A survey of 105 Jewish religious communities published this week showed 42 per cent had experienced anti-Semitic attacks – verbal abuse, physical attacks and graffiti – while 82 per cent of respondents said they were more concerned than ever at being openly identified as being Jewish.
Jewish students have faced exclusion and attacks at university, Israeli restaurant-owners report dramatic drops in trade – even cancelled leases.
“Before October 7th I went on the street as a rabbi with the kippa,” said Maximilian Feldhake, a US-born rabbi now based in Celle, to Der Spiegel magazine. “I don’t do that any more. I always wear my baseball cap. You no longer know from which corner an attack could come.”
As well as additional funding for security of Jewish institutions, politicians have struggled with the thorny – and complex – issue of how and when criticism of Israel tips over into anti-Semitism.
At state and federal level, several German ministers are mulling measures to cut – or bar – arts and research funding from anyone perceived to be anti-Semitic.
This has opened a legal can of worms alongside another legal conundrum: an ongoing series of “from the river to the sea” court-cases. Germany has criminalised it as a slogan of support for the outlawed Hamas organisation.
Many of these legal disputes have their origins on German city streets. Demonstrators at weekly pro-Palestinian marches in Berlin report massive, and violent, crackdowns by police who, in turn, point to radical and violent elements hijacking the marches.
Leading politicians here demanded a travel ban for Swedish activist Greta Thunberg this week after she attended a Berlin rally and, on Twitter/X wrote afterwards: “Germany shares responsibility for this genocide” in Gaza.
Last April in The Hague, German lawyers convinced the UN International Court of Justice – in emergency preliminary proceedings, at least, – to dismiss a case brought by Nicaragua that German arms supplies were “facilitating genocide” in Gaza.
Official figures show Germany has supplied an estimated €1 billion in military equipment and arms to Israel in the last decades. But no longer: in May, for instance, Germany supplied Israel with arms worth just €187.
Opposition politicians point to other data from the last year, showing Germany has exported to Israel equipment worth €3.74 million for the manufacture of arms.
“The German government … is approving production components to keep the war machine running,” said Sevim Dagdelen, foreign policy spokeswoman for the left-wing BSW parliamentary grouping.
On Thursday, Germany’s military support for Israel was the subject of heated exchanges in the Bundestag. When opposition conservatives accused the government of abandoning Israel by throttling arms deliveries, Scholz intervened to say “we have and will deliver weapons”.
“We have taken decisions in the government that will ensure further deliveries in the future,” he added.
Such deliveries to Israel are backed by just 19 per cent of Germans, according to a poll in August, while 68 per cent are opposed to arms deliveries.
A second poll before the anniversary highlighted public concerns over media bias in coverage since the October 7th attacks.
Just 38 per cent of respondents felt German media coverage of the conflict is balanced, according to the poll for public television. Some 31 per cent felt it was too in favour of Israel while just 5 per cent said coverage was too in favour of the Palestinians.
The centre-left Süddeutsche Zeitung daily, a rare critical voice, wondered aloud this week if, after flying Israeli flags at half-mast to mourn the October 7th attack, Berlin “might do the same for the victims in the Gaza Strip and do justice to the complexity of the conflict”.
By contrast, the Bild tabloid has been the most supportive of Israel. It has ignored the situation in Gaza and, 165 times in the last year, castigated protesters against Israel and critics as “Jew-haters”.