December 8, 2023 - 7:00am
“The Shoah fills us Germans with shame,” Angela Merkel told Israel’s parliament in 2008, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. To her, this meant that Germany has a special responsibility for Jews and Israel. “Threats to you are threats to us,” she told the Knesset. Her successor Olaf Scholz repeated her words in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on 7 October: “Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson (reason of state) and we will act accordingly.”
But what it means for Israel’s fate to be so tightly bound to Germany’s has never been properly defined. “If you take it seriously,” Carlo Marsala, a prominent German political expert, said to the media, “it takes the question morally and politically to a constitutional level.”
Now one of Germany’s 16 states is doing exactly that. Saxony-Anhalt has made it a requirement for people who want to acquire German citizenship to confirm in writing “that they recognise Israel’s right to exist and condemn any efforts directed against the existence of the State of Israel”. It’s calling on the other 15 states to follow, arguing that Israel’s existence as German Staatsräson means that one can’t be German without sharing this belief.
Even if one agrees that Israel has the right to exist and defend itself — which I do — it is unlikely that making citizenship applicants sign a statement to that effect will produce the desired results. By comparison, in the process of becoming a British citizen I was asked whether I had ever committed an act of genocide. Other war crimes, perhaps? It’s unlikely that anybody ever replies “yes” to those questions even if they are guilty of mass atrocities, just as people will sign the required statement in Saxony-Anhalt regardless of their views.
The government also finds it difficult to convince those who already have citizenship of its stance on Israel. A recent survey showed that while the majority of Germans agree their country has a special relationship with Israel, two-thirds felt that this did not mean that Germany had a particular responsibility for its fate.
Experts say this isn’t necessarily down to anti-Israel sentiment but that a lot of it is crisis fatigue. Renate Köcher, CEO of the Allensbach-Institut which conducted the survey, observed “a notable tendency among the public not to want to be dragged into the conflict”, and added that this was also the case in previous wars.
Ultimately, the idea that Germany has a special responsibility for Israel is difficult to uphold with words alone. I was fortunate to attend a school exchange project as a teenager, and it was hard not to feel the weight of history as I walked through Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, with my Israeli exchange student. She suddenly broke down in tears and told me the horrific story of how her grandfather had survived the Holocaust, a crime my great grandparents’ generation had enabled. Suddenly history seemed very real, and I have never forgotten what that felt like.
But few Germans have such personal encounters with Israel. To them, the idea that the state’s fate is intrinsically tied to Germany’s is academic, a theoretical concept that has little relevance as they themselves struggle from one domestic crisis to the next.
If Germany is serious about making the security of its Jewish communities and Israel a “reason of state”, it needs to define what that means exactly and then make a strong case to the public. The relevance of history in the German-Israeli relationship isn’t something that can be conjured up by legislation or rhetoric.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.
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SubscribeThe point of the question about genocide etc is that if the applicant lies and that is later discovered the citizenship can be revoked easily.
It is the lie which is the important event.
That’s getting rather close to “thoughtcrime” territory though in my opinion, deporting people for having a different view of the Middle East to the officially sanctioned one
Exactly what I thought
Why stop there? Numerous other ethnic groups and the disabled were sent to the chambers during the holocaust so are they going to include all of them in this new pledge?
Young Germans aren’t responsible for the crimes committed by those before they were born
I agree, but this principle seems to be fading, if not outright forgotten. Slavery, colonisation and now the horrors of WW2 are the responsibility of those living today if our current political class and academia are to be believed.
Many people (myself included) complain about notions such as white privilege and historical guilt, so I’m not now going to make exceptions by blaming Germans for crimes almost a century ago
Can’t trust the Germans tho Billy. Confident Young Germans, forgetful of their history, might try to take over the world again
I have no idea what individual guilt of German native born citizens has to do with this. In any case younger generations of Germans are far more rejecting of the Nazi past than the immediate obviously inevitably tainted post war one.
The modern German state is the legal successor of one that was responsible, and can decide on its citizenship criteria. The Jewish would be genocide stands out as the attempted destruction of an entire people. Of course the Nazis also committed atrocities against Slaves and specific groups of German citizens.
It would have been helpful if Frau Hoyer had mentioned that the Saxony-Anhalt government is a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Free Democrats, and that the Interior Minister is a Christian Democrat (I’m not flaunting my knowledge here; I had to google it).
Speaking as woke liberal filth, I find this new requirement very silly. And I doubt it will go down well with those who vote for (or are inclined to vote for) the Alternative for Germany, which – Google again – is the second-largest party in the state parliament.
German citizens today are not responsible for the crimes of the past; they have no special responsibility towards Israel. Those seeking naturalized citizenship must accept the liberal democratic values of modern Germany. But the commitment “that they recognize Israel’s right to exist and condemn any efforts directed against the existence of the State of Israel” is a political one. Regardless, an application form checkbox will do nothing to change deep-rooted antisemitism. It’s delusional to think this is anything besides a token gesture.
One thing I have never understood, is why, following WW2, the Jewish state was established in Palestine, rather than in Europe. Surely it would have been fitting, following their defeat in the war, if Germany has been forced to ceded some of it’s territory in order for culturally European Jews to have a homeland there. Sure, there would have been practical issues to overcome, not least the mass deportation of Germans, but that happened anyway, when ethnic Germans were expelled in their millions from other central European states.I might seem cruel to evict Germans from their homeland, but no less cruel than evicting Palestinian arabs, who, unlike the Germans, bore no responsibilities for the horrors of the Holocaust.
Israel was the historic home of the Jewish people. They were exiled more than once, but the Romans scattered Jews all over the place, which made it much harder to return. The area became (much later) part of the Ottoman Empire, which at its final demise after WW1 left a hotchpotch of peoples inhabiting the region, including Muslims, Jews and Christians. Although it became known as the Palestinian Mandate, administered by Britain, there were no such people as ‘Palestinians’.
When Europe’s Jews were all but exterminated many survivors wanted to live elsewhere and the Zionist movement encouraged them to join the existing Jewish population in the Mandate. Hence the eventual founding of modern Israel.
This is a very potted story and therefore missing all sorts of details and nuances, but I hope it explains the reasons accurately.
It is pretty accurate except for one (pretty important) lie. I expect you know which phrase I am talking about. Does the existence of Palestinians in Palestine pre-1948 make you uncomfortale to the extent you feel the need to downplay their (our) existence?
No one is denying the existence of people who live(d) in the area known as Palestine in the early 20thC. But as “A People” they have never existed, in the sense of the Arabs, the Russians, the French. Where is the Palestinian language, art, political history, infrastructure, of the last 3,000 years?
Mark Twain’s observations (among that of others) about the Holy Land just prior to the huge influx of Jews to the area (about 1881) record a land undeveloped and wasted and nearly devoid of people.
I think those people in Gaza and the West Bank (as well as others stuck in refugee camps around the region) would disagree with you that there is no such people as Palestinians. The British Mandate of Palestine predates Israel after all
After the Holocaust (and Europe’s long history of antisemitism) the Jews simply didn’t feel that they would ever be safe in Europe.
That. And the fact that the European powers found it easier to give away someone else’s land, rather than their own.
This is what always bothered me. It was somehow easier for the allies to displace brown people in a far-away land, than fellow white Europeans, even if the latter were responsible for the most terrible of atrocities.
Even now, as we can see, Germany is supporting the right of the Jews to a homeland – somewhere else. That’s really big of them.
So they went to the middle east instead. How is that working out for them now?
It was called a ‘world war’ for a reason, not just a European scrap. There were close links between the Third Reich and Arab leaders, such as the Grand Mufti Husseini, one of the founders of the Palestinian ‘cause’. Just as we see people today shouting that ‘Hitler knew how to deal with these people’, so it was in the 30s, 40s & onward in the Middle East. Check out _Israelophobia_ by Jake Wallis Simons for an overview.
If you don’t have time for a whole book, this gives you a potted history: https://youtu.be/peXAqwS2yqc?si=3_hGoWqbmspft7hB
Many of those Jewish people who were fortunate to survive the Holocaust, didn’t trust – with good reason – the Germans or indeed any of the other European countries where non Jewish citizens willingly and actively collaborated with the Nazis to implement the ‘Final Solution’. There was a pogrom in Poland as late as 1946, long after Germany had been defeated but when the horrors of the Holocaust were still vivid memories.
As for Palestine, it has never been a sovereign state. Since the beginning of recorded history, it has always been just another province in some empire or other. And many Palestinians willingly left their land in 1948 because they foolishly believed the absurd promises of Arab league leaders to drive the Jews into the sea. Since then they have been stupid enough to prop up a corrupt regime in the West Bank, stupid enough to throw in their lot with Hamas in Gaza and stupid enough to fail to make peace with Israel when a more moderate regime was in place. Those that remain in Gaza and other refugee camps could have emigrated overseas as some Palestinians did, but they preferred to be paraded before the world media as helpless victims.
The children of Israel can have a home in no other land than in the land promised to Israel. Curiously enough, we have no wish at ALL for a land in any other place.
What other political beliefs will Saxony-Anhalt require as proof of German-ness? Must would-be Bundesbuerger also profess a certain belief about climate change? What about their position on the Ukraine War? Keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio below 60%?
Ultimately, does German citizenship require adherence to State dogma, and if so, what does that say about the state of its democracy?
Yes, in my view they do.
“The majority of Germans agree their country has a special relationship with Israel, two-thirds felt that this did not mean that Germany had a particular responsibility for its fate.”
An enitely appropriate position, and one that should, in fact, be the position of all persons in all countries not formally and militarily committed to Israel, such as the United States.
Germans are weird when it comes to Israel, the Palästinafrage, and the Jewish people in general (not just in Germany itself and Israel, but anywhere). Stranger, and most importantly, excessively obsessedabout the Jewish people, orders of magnitude more than we in the United States in fact, which unlike Germany (and every other European country currently losing their minds over the Middle East conflict, as a matter of fact) does have a significant and overall well-regarded Jeiwsh community, and where the rise in anti-Semitism, both disguised as anti-Zionism and not so disguised, would have actual tragic consequences.
My advice for the Europeans, including the British, is to to calm down, stay quiet, and follow the United States’s lead on this.