Opposing genocide is not complicated. So why does Germany back Israel unflinchingly?

Germany presents itself as a state reborn from catastrophe. Its Basic Law, drafted in the shadow of Nazism, begins with a sentence that was meant to ensure that the horrors of the past could never recur: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.”

It is the cornerstone of post-war German democracy, a declaration that dignity belongs to every person, without exception. Yet in practice, that promise has been selectively applied. When it comes to Israel's war on Palestinians, Germany has elevated another principle above human dignity: support for Israel as Staatsräson (reason of state/ raison d'etre), a doctrine that is treated as untouchable.

Olaf Scholz, when he was Chancellor told the Bundestag or German parliament in October 2023, “At the moment there is only one place for Germany, the place, side by side with Israel. This is what we mean when we say the security of Israel is Germany's Staatsräson.”

That doctrine now sits at odds with the very foundation on which the German republic was built. It also collides with the architecture of international justice.

On July 19. 2024, the International Court of Justice made clear that Israel's occupation of Palestinian land is unlawful and that withdrawal is obligatory. In September 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution noting, “Israel's policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in article II of the United Nations convention for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide.”

On September 16, a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

A year earlier, on November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a weapon of war and for crimes against humanity including murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.

Germany's answer to these findings has not been to uphold the international order it so often cites elsewhere, but to insist that the situation is “complicated”.

Asked directly about the International Criminal Court warrants, Friedrich Merz, who is now Chancellor of Germany, declared that he could not imagine arresting Netanyahu, adding that he would invite him for a visit instead.

“I have also promised him [Netanyahu] that we will find ways and means for him to visit Germany and also to be able to leave again without being arrested in Germany,” Merz said. “I think it is a completely absurd idea that an Israeli prime minister cannot visit the Federal Republic of Germany.”

The statement is a repudiation of the very institutions Germany claims to defend. For context, Germany is a signatory to the Rome Statute and as a member state bound to detain suspects facing International Criminal Court warrants should they enter its territory. Scholz, when he was Chancellor, had applauded the International Criminal Court's warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, declaring that “nobody is above the law”. When the same court indicted Israel's leadership, the commitment dissolved. Annalena Baerbock, who was foreign minister at the time, said Germany was “examining” how to respond to the court's decision.

Germany has chosen selective justice. What is applied to Russia is suspended for Israel.

The word “complicated” has become a shield. It is used to obscure rather than illuminate, to defer judgment rather than confront it. German politicians, intellectuals and media voices invoke “complexity” whenever the subject of Palestinian suffering is raised. The civilian dead are acknowledged in passing, but always with a balancing clause, always tethered to a defence of Israel's “security”.

By this rhetorical manoeuvre, clarity is muddied: the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians children and civilians, the displacement of two million people, the destruction of an entire nation are cast not as atrocities with legal and moral clarity but as unfortunate episodes in a tangled history.

But genocide is not complicated. International law is abundantly clear when it comes to the deliberate destruction of a people. The Genocide Convention of 1948, drafted in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, prohibits such acts unequivocally. The International has reiterated that prohibition. Genocide scholars across the world have warned in unison that Israel's assault fits the pattern. In every other context, Germany is quick to invoke these institutions and precedents. In this context, it looks away.

The roots of this contradiction lie in Germany's unresolved relationship with its past. Post-war Germany carries a profound and undeniable guilt for the crimes of the Holocaust. But rather than confront antisemitism as an enduring European pathology, Germany has displaced its guilt. The violence once directed at Jews has been transferred onto Muslims, Arabs, and immigrant communities.

German public discourse routinely casts Muslims as the bearers of antisemitism, erasing the centuries of European persecution that culminated in the Holocaust. The result is a convenient narrative: Germany's so-called memory culture honours its history by defending Israel unconditionally, while projecting its unresolved bigotry onto racialised minorities at home.

This narrative is not just historically false but is politically destructive. Antisemitism did not emerge from Palestine, Asia or Africa. It was forged and nurtured in Europe: from expulsions in England and Spain, through pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, to the industrialised murder carried out by Nazi Germany.

To suggest that antisemitism is an imported problem is to deny European responsibility. And to conflate solidarity with Palestinians with antisemitism and equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is to rob Palestinians of their humanity while trivialising the very concept of antisemitism itself.

It also contradicts Germany's own policy statement on antisemitism and anti-Zionism that states, “….Anti-Zionism refers to an ideological and political position which claims to oppose, not Jews but rather the State of Israel and Israelis.”

Germany insists that it has learned from history. But what lesson has truly been absorbed? If the lesson is that historical guilt and Staatsräson requires absolute support for Israel, even when Israel engages in mass displacement, state-sponsored settler violence and mass killing, then the lesson has been dangerously misinterpreted. If the lesson is that dignity must be protected for all, then Germany's practice belies its founding law.

The contradiction is most acute when one sets Article 1 of the Germany's Basic Law against present-day policy. Human dignity, the text declares, is inviolable. And yet Germany has criminalised demonstrations for Palestinian rights. Berlin Police has normalised violently assaulting the protesters. It has banned cultural events, silenced artists, and smeared critics of Israeli policy as antisemites. The inviolability of human dignity has become negotiable – conditional on one's ethnicity, religion, and political position.

Germany's complicity is not merely rhetorical. It is the second-largest supplier of weapons to Israel after the United States. It shields Israel diplomatically from sanctions at the European Union and the United Nations, and it suppresses dissent domestically. This is not the behaviour of a state that has absorbed the lessons of its past. It is the behaviour of a state that has substituted one moral failure for another, choosing loyalty to Staatsräson over loyalty to human dignity.

There is a tendency in German political culture to equate moral clarity with extremism. To oppose genocide, one is told, is to simplify a complicated conflict, to deny Israel's right to exist. But this is sophistry. The deliberate killing of civilians, the destruction of homes, schools, and hospitals, the forced starvation of a population – these acts do not become morally ambiguous because the perpetrators are allied with Germany. They do not become complicated because Germany feels guilty.

Opposing genocide is not complicated after all. What is complicated is living with the consequences of silence, and manufacturing justifications for silence, complicity, and self-deception. Germany has a choice: it can continue to treat Staatsräson as a sacred shield or it can return to the principle that founded its democracy – that human dignity is inviolable, for all.

The test of that principle is now, in Palestine.

Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate.

Source: Scroll
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