Since October 7, 2023, relations between Germany and Israel have come under renewed scrutiny. Alongside the United States, Germany has been one of Israel’s strongest supporters since its founding in 1948. Last year, that support led to Germany being accused of complicity in genocide before the International Court of Justice.
Although Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity in Gaza were recently criticized by Chancellor Merz—who stated, “It is not acceptable what they are doing anymore”—the unique friendship between Germany and Israel remains unwavering. This relationship is the foundation of German Middle East policy: the uncompromising defense of Israel’s “right to exist” (das Existenzrecht Israels) as a matter of national raison d’état (Staatsräson).
This principle is shared across the parliamentary spectrum and underpins both the current and previous governments’ policies. Chancellor Scholz repeated it during his visit to Israel on October 18, 2023. Israel’s “right to exist” is defended tooth and nail by the Anti-Deutsch—a significant force within the extra-parliamentary left—as well as by government officials tasked with combatting antisemitism (Antisemitismusbeauftragter). To question this “right” is to end all polite discussion. Amen. It has become the civil religion of Holocaust remembrance in Germany, and Israel’s right to exist is an unquestioned article of faith in that catechism.
However, the “right of a state to exist” is not codified in international law. It is a pseudo-legal concept, better suited to Ernest Renan’s apologia for the nation (“the nation, that moral consciousness created by men of sound mind, is legitimate, it has a right to exist”). Outside of nationalist prose, state formation, like marriage, is largely a matter of will and opportunity. In Israel’s case, its founding stemmed from UN Resolution 181. States do not possess a legal right to exist; their creation results from political claims. Even if German defenders of this concept cite various legal articles, states are formed and dissolved without any legal framework that ensures their existence. The long list of former sovereign states, such as the DDR or the Weimar Republic, bears this out. Israel’s supposed “right to exist” is unique because of its exceptional status as a result of the Holocaust.
In truth, the phrase “the existence of a state” is a metaphor—one that merges biology and politics. States do not “exist” in the living, breathing sense. They are constructs with real-world consequences, but speaking of their existence is rhetorical. A state does not cry when it is struck—not even Israel. It is people, actual human beings, who exist and are protected under international law. States may collapse, as with the Third Reich, or undergo historic defeats, but these are metaphors. Personifying a state, as if it were a sad-face emoji, is meant to elicit emotional identification. My poor little State!
In a recent communiqué, the party Die Linke (The Left) criticized a map of Palestine posted on Twitter as an unacceptable attack aimed at the “annihilation” (Auslöschung) of Israel. This reflects a purely symbolic realm of wordplay—while in reality, Gaza is being physically destroyed. Israel is not under existential threat, despite repeated claims to the contrary. Rather, since its founding, it is Israel that has threatened the physical existence of the Palestinian people. Unlike the supposed “right to exist” of a state, the rights of the people of Gaza are explicitly protected in international law, most fundamentally, the right to life.
The concept of Existenzrecht, a mix of flowery metaphor and fictional right, serves to justify Israel’s crimes: a state that claims to defend its “right to exist” by attacking unarmed civilians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. Existenzrecht recalls another metaphor once used by a different German government. The biopolitical idea of Lebensraum (“living space”) was instrumental in justifying territorial conquest and ethnic cleansing. The German state’s demand for Lebensraum was invoked during both World Wars, notably by Hitler in the second, to legitimize expansionist violence. Similarly, the Existenzrecht metaphor is now used to excuse Israel’s occupation and war crimes in the name of an exclusively Jewish state. Germany’s version of the two-state solution.
The German government has made the defense of Zionist Lebensraum its raison d’état. But raison d’état is not a legal term—because a state’s highest values are set out in its constitution, and Israel does not appear there. Staatsräson exists in a parallel moral universe. Since Machiavelli, the concept has been defined as a moral justification for the state to do whatever is necessary for its survival. A license to kill. Like the state of exception, raison d’état represents a self-declared suspension of legality, justified by force majeure. It permits the commission of “lesser evils” (crimes) in pursuit of a higher good; for example, in the fight against terrorism. The Italian government invoked the concept during the Aldo Moro case, as documented by Leonardo Sciascia. In the German case, the higher good is unwavering support for Israel.
Clearly, there is no need to invoke raison d’état unless one must justify the commission of a crime. Supporting Gaza requires no Staatsräson, but financing a state that commits war crimes does. Inviting politicians wanted by the International Criminal Court violates Germany’s obligations under international law. To invoke Staatsräson is, in effect, an admission of guilt.
Chancellor Merz admits as much when he describes Israel’s attack on Iran as Germany’s Drecksarbeit (“dirty work”)—a phrase that conjures both an implicit admission of criminality under international law and the disturbing image of Jews performing demeaning labor on behalf of Germans. The German state not only provides moral and financial support to a regime committing heinous crimes against humanity; it also openly admits to operating outside the bounds of legality (Staatsräson), justifying this through its defense of a supposed higher good: Israel’s Existenzrecht. This justification is presented as the moral lesson Germany has drawn from its own history.
Rather than warning against its own hubris and acting as a moral conscience, Germany has allowed the memory of the Holocaust to be used in the service of justifying another genocide. The complicity of the entire parliamentary spectrum, from die Linke to the AfD, reveals the failure of German remembrance culture and casts serious doubt on the completeness of Germany’s denazification.