The Palestine Question in German Public Discourse

German attitudes toward the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism are largely determined by the experience of persecution of European Jews by the German Nazis, which culminated in the Holocaust . After World War II , German elites sought to reintegrate the Federal Republic of Germany into the US -led Western alliance, despite the manifold personal and structural continuities between the new republic and the Third Reich . A key pillar of this effort was the Luxembourg Agreements of 1952 , by which the Federal Republic offered sizeable material aid to Israel as “reparations” for the Holocaust. By engaging in this quid pro quo that facilitated their international acceptance, German elites boosted Zionism ’s assertion of being the natural and indeed only possible Jewish response to anti-Semitism. This reinforced the equating of Judaism, Israel, and Zionism in German public discourse, despite the crucial differences between the three terms.

Although contested throughout the seven decades of the Federal Republic’s existence, this erroneous conflation still holds strong, and in recent years it has become even more pervasive. In 2019, the German Bundestag approved a resolution equating the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement with anti-Semitism, and it urged German public institutions to disassociate themselves from BDS supporters. The resolution has led to the cancellation of appearances and the stripping of awards to numerous international scholars and artists, such as British author Kamila Shamsie and Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe . Palestinian Germans, as well as Jewish persons critical of Zionism and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, have been targeted by German public officials and mainstream media as “anti-Semites” or “self-hating Jews.” The current situation needs to be examined within the context of the historical evolution of public perceptions of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

German Perceptions of the Palestine Question during the 1949-1967 Period

German public discourse on the question of Palestine has been shaped by modern German history. Until the early 1960s, West Germany adopted three approaches toward the Nazi past. Conservatives typically refused any discussion of Nazi crimes, as such discussions inherently stood in conflict with a positive national identity. Social democrats and liberals were willing to discuss Nazi crimes, but they maintained that the Federal Republic represented a significant rupture with fascism and had to be defended against all “extremes.” Only the radical left explored the many continuities between the Nazi regime and the Federal Republic. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), on the other hand, defined itself entirely in explicit opposition to the Third Reich.

A key role in shaping West German public perceptions of Israel was played by the influential German Evangelical (mainstream Protestant) Church. The church had a long history of entanglement with the Prussian state, Imperial Germany, and later the Third Reich. Protestant theologians argued that the survival of Jews despite the Holocaust and their national reconstitution in the state of Israel were proof that the establishment of the state was God’s will. Germans could thus atone for National Socialism’s crimes by offering support to the self-proclaimed Jewish state. The Evangelical Church’s volunteer corps “Atonement Action ”, usually active in countries directly victimized by the Nazi regime, sent young volunteers to Israel as means of post–Holocaust reconciliation, even though West Germany and Israel did not maintain diplomatic relations. Another factor enabling identification of Israel with Judaism was the postwar dominance of the “collective guilt” thesis (Kollektivschuldthese) in German public life. According to this, all Germans as a collective were to blame (as opposed to only bearing collective responsibility) for the horrors of the Nazi regime. This viewpoint facilitated the staffing of the higher echelons of West German politics, state bureaucracy, and industry with individuals whose biographies were tainted with active involvement with the Third Reich. For instance, Hans Globke , key advisor to first federal chancellor Konrad Adenauer , was a co-author of the infamous Nuremberg Race Laws .

The public debate around the Luxembourg Agreements of 1952 exemplified German attitudes to Israel. Adenauer justified the agreement in (anti-Semitic) terms of appeasing American Jews who allegedly influenced US policy toward Germany. Many fellow Christian Democrats refused to vote for the agreement, interpreting it as an admission of guilt for the Holocaust. The agreement could only be ratified with the votes of the Social Democratic opposition, which maintained extensive links to the Labor Zionist Movement and the Histadrut Zionist trade union federation.

Despite this tendency of identifying Israel as the sole legitimate successor to the victims of the Holocaust, diplomatic relations between Bonn and Tel Aviv were not established. Opposition to such relations was particularly strong among the foreign policy establishment, which feared the recognition of the GDR by the Arab states. West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine maintained that the Federal Republic was the only legitimate German state, and threatened states in the Global South that recognized the GDR with the severing of relations and a halting of development aid. Officially, the absence of relations was justified with the need to uphold the traditional “German-Arab friendship.”

Up until the mid-1960s, perceptions of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were almost completely dominated by the identification of the former with “the Jews.” “Israel” was either rejected on anti-Semitic grounds or seen as the embodiment of progress and even democratic socialism by the liberal and left-wing side of the political spectrum, with the latter campaigning vigorously for the establishment of diplomatic relations. Being overshadowed by the Arab states, particularly Nasserist Egypt , Palestinians did not appear as visible actors but rather as passive objects of refugee resettlement policies in the region. 

The Palestinian Revolution Reaches Germany, 1967-1990

This situation would change dramatically, especially after the 1967 War . In the context of the Cold War , West Germany and Israel aligned more closely, establishing official relations in 1965. Following the defeat of pan-Arabism in 1967, the mainstream Bild tabloid even positively compared Israeli general Moshe Dayan to German World War II field marshal Erwin Rommel . For West German conservatives, Israel was now a convenient projection screen, an embodiment of the military prowess and nationalism, which they themselves as Germans could no longer glorify due to the experience of World War II.  

This development stood in contrast to the internal upheaval gripping West Germany in the context of the student movement of the late 1960s. The radical left Socialist German Student Association (SDS) became the main vehicle of extraparliamentary opposition. Students began taking up issues, such as the struggle against colonialism. Already in the early 1960s, the pro-Zionist orientation of the West German left was put into question by the movement in support of the Algerian liberation struggle, which was supported by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and opposed by France ’s main ally in the Middle East , Israel. As West German conservatism fully embraced Israel, left-wing support for Israel stood on shaky grounds. As the mass movement against the US war in Vietnam gained momentum, students increasingly drew parallels with the fate of the Palestinians, proclaiming their solidarity with the Fatah -led PLO , seen as the Middle Eastern expression of global armed anticolonial struggle. From that moment onwards, solidarity with the Palestinian struggle was firmly situated on the left side of the West German political spectrum, ranging from the armed guerrillas of the Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells (which received training and support from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine ) to the mainstream Young Socialists affiliated with the Social Democratic Party  (SPD).

This solidarity could not come about without the active agency of Palestinians themselves. Like other foreign students, Palestinians disseminated information on their struggle in their homeland to German students, while forming numerous solidarity committees on the local level, thus contributing to the overall radicalization of the student movement of the late 1960s, which drew inspiration from struggles in the Global South. Following the massacre of Israeli athletes by the Black September group during the 1972 Munich Olympics , Palestinians formed civil society alliances with left-wing groups, churches, and other actors in the face of collective punishment and deportations meted out against the entire Palestinian community. For decades, Palestinians in Germany have actively sought to redefine the discourse around the conflict. They have not only done so as participants in their struggle to liberate their homeland, but also as members of an increasingly multicultural German society containing a plurality of lived experiences.

Renegotiations of the Nazi Past on Perceptions of Palestine

Support for the Palestinians in West Germany was inevitably caught up in the processes of reevaluation of the Nazi past that became more central in public discourse from the late 1970s onward. Discussion of the these debates in their complexity goes beyond the scope of this essay. However, some overlapping events account for the gradual disintegration of the Palestinian solidarity movement. First, its main bearer, the Marxist radical left, found itself in sharp decline in the late 1970s, eclipsed by the “new social movements,” such as the anti-nuclear and environmental movements, and their political expression, the emerging and far less radical Green Party . Second, processes of the renegotiation of Jewish American identity and their expressions in popular culture began reaching West Germany. Specifically, the airing of the US miniseries Holocaust initiated a wide-ranging discussion about the question of ordinary Germans’ guilt during the Judeocide. Third, the paradigm of anti-imperialist armed struggle, upon which solidarity with the Palestinians was based, was in profound crisis by the early 1980s. This was exemplified by the eviction of the PLO from Beirut , the Iran-Iraq War , China ’s implicit alliance with the US against the Soviet Union , and the repression of the Iranian left by the Khomeini regime.

Fourth, a reinvigorated West German conservatism sought to rehabilitate German nationalism and an assertive foreign policy, as well as to roll back the social gains of the 1960s student movement. Chancellor Helmut Kohl ’s speech in front of the Knesset in 1984, in which he spoke of the “grace of late birth” (Gnade der späten Geburt), was an expression this new assertiveness. Kohl sought to make clear that due to his young age, he and other members of the establishment could not be held accountable for Nazi crimes. For many Israelis, the attempt to “normalize” West German foreign policy—to disassociate it from any moral imperatives related to World War II—led to fears of diminishing West German commitments to Israel. The attempts of German conservatives at “normalization” culminated in the so-called “historians’ quarrel” (Historikerstreit) in the mid-1980s, a publicized exchange of polemics by historians in the West German press. The opening salvo was launched by the conservative historian Ernst Nolte , who sought to portray the Holocaust as a “preemptive” move against Bolshevik “class genocide.” His main opponent, the liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas , on the other hand, correctly castigated Nolte for relativizing the Holocaust, but insisted on both the singularity and the incomparability of the Nazi genocide against the German Jews. While the question of continuities with the Nazi era was previously confined to intellectual and activist milieus, the debate signified the growing salience of the Holocaust in public life and the related question of the implications of the recent past for German national identity.

All these overlapping events led to the weakening of support for the Palestinian struggle among civil society. The result of the parallel decline of both the PLO’s radicalism and the German radical left, combined with the assertiveness of German historical revisionism, was that Palestinian solidarity in West Germany was frequently accused of being willingly or unwillingly aligned with German neoconservatism. After all, through the prevailing conflation in society of Judaism and Israel, Habermas’s postulate of a fundamental singularity and incomparability of the Holocaust was translated into a widespread perception of the Israeli state as the “natural” outcome of German history, with the fate of Palestinians relegated to that of a “lesser” tragedy. Habermas’s widely perceived victory in the Historikerstreit signified a generational shift within West Germany’s political class, with deradicalized participants of the student movement of the 1960s increasingly entering the political stage. However, the lessons drawn by Habermas and others—that honoring the victims of German fascism necessitated a view of Israel as a “historical necessity” (historische Notwendigkeit) —were permeated by an inherent paradox: couched in the universalist language of liberal post-nationalism, these lessons nonetheless referred to specifically German rather than universal responsibilities. This paradox thus made them ideal as the hegemonic discourse of a reunified Germany seeking a positive national identity.   

Reunified Germany and Palestine

The official ideological rationale for West German support for Israel was based on two elements: redemption for Nazi crimes and Cold War anticommunism. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the Berlin Republic , the parameters of German-Israeli relations had to be renegotiated. Germany increasingly found itself confronted with the challenge of formulating a positive national identity seemingly at odds with the Nazi past. This was a novel development, as the division of Germany along ideological lines had previously made any positive reference to German nationhood appear anachronistic. Unconditional support for “Israel’s security” has been elevated in recent years to an entry ticket into legitimate political discourse, supported by the overwhelming majority of political forces.

To outside observers, German support for Israel is rooted in guilt for the Holocaust. However, a more accurate explanation needs to situate this support in the context of surging German nationalism and Islamophobia. In hegemonic discourse, “Israel” appears as a redemptive element that allows Germans to feel pride for their unprecedented “processing of history” (Geschichtsverarbeitung), while drawing clear lines of exclusion within German society between those able to feel guilt for the Holocaust (white Germans) and those deprived of this ability (the numerous descendants of immigrants, particularly from Muslim majority countries). The existence of Palestinians disrupts this script of Israel-centered national redemption, leading some to speak of the existence in Germany of a specific anti-Palestinian racism. Historian Dirk Moses has aptly summarized this condition in his 2021 article “The German Catechism,” arguing that current German national self-perceptions revolve around a series of fundamental principles. Among these are the interpretation of the Holocaust as fundamentally incomparable to other genocides (e.g., the Herero genocide perpetrated by German colonialists in Namibia in the early twentieth century); the existence of a special responsibility of Germans to Jews, the latter equated with the state of Israel; and the equivalence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. 

Developments such as the criminalization of BDS activism are not isolated to Germany; similar legislation has been implemented or proposed in the United States, France, and Great Britain . However, unconditional support for Israel is a key linchpin of current German nationalism, reinforced by diffuse anti-Muslim racism that has gripped Europe in the aftermath of the “war on terror” of the early 2000s, as well as the economic crisis. This profoundly affects Germany’s Palestinian community, the largest in Europe. For instance, in recent years, authorities have banned processions commemorating the Nakba as indicative of “anti-Semitism,” while Germany’s foreign broadcaster Deutsche Welle has fired members of this Arabic language news service based on their opinions on Israel. Such developments must additionally be situated in the context of ongoing economic crisis, political polarization, and the rise of the far right in German politics. Germany’s political, economic, and cultural elites are increasingly being perceived within global public opinion as particularly hostile to Palestinian liberation, given the entanglements between Zionism and contemporary German nationalism. Nonetheless, there is also a growing domestic challenge to this stance, emanating mostly from a coalition of radical left-wing actors, Palestinian and other migrant communities, and dissident Jews.

Conclusion

German perceptions of the conflict between Palestinians and Zionist settler colonialism have been greatly determined by the false conflation of Judaism, Israel, and Zionism in German public discourse, itself related to the crimes committed by the German Nazis against the European Jews. The motivations behind this conflation have been mostly unrelated to the actual conflict, being derived from domestic factors. While in the early 1950s, identifying Israel as the legitimate successor of Holocaust victims was related to the Federal Republic’s quest for international legitimacy, in the post-reunification period, unconditional support for Israel by Germany’s political class serves the articulation of a positive German nationalism, seemingly unrelated to the Nazi past. Such outlooks have radicalized in recent years, expressed in a series of legal and other measures against Palestine solidarity activism and/or individuals espousing dissenting views, and owing to processes of the crisis-related rise of the far right and Islamophobia. However, as the period between the late 1960s and early 1980s has demonstrated, German society should not be considered a monolith. The potential for Palestine solidarity has historically materialized in periods of rupture and contestation hegemonized by progressive political forces.