Merkel's reason of state

Angela Merkel dedicates just 15 pages of her new memoir, "Freedom", to Israel, but her contribution to Germany’s relationship with the country could be summed up with one word. 

Staatsräson (reason of state) is a term used most famously by Merkel in her 2008 speech to the Israeli Knesset. In that address she made a historic commitment, declaring that the security of Israel is "part of my nation's Staatsräson". Since then, the term has taken on a quasi-legal weight, often invoked as if an alliance with Israel were part of Germany’s constitution. 

Merkel points out that she used the arguments from her Knesset speech "almost verbatim" half a year earlier at the UN General Assembly, and "barely anyone registered them", proving to her that "communication largely depends on who says what, when and where." In the Knesset, her "words had a different, incomparably powerful effect."

Staatsräson, she says, was simply "part of her political vocabulary", as well as that of the CDU. Chancellor Helmut Kohl used Staatsräson in the ‘80s about Germany’s commitment to the transatlantic alliance and European unity.  

As a citizen of the GDR, Merkel had grown up with a different version of German history from that of her West German counterparts. Many East German leaders were persecuted by the Nazis for their communist affiliations, and it was this persecution that became the focus of the country’s memory culture. As Merkel’s biographer Jacqueline Boysen tells Qantara: "There were many things that Merkel didn’t learn about in the GDR, where the process of dealing with history (Aufarbeitung) was more focused on the persecution of communists than of Jews."

"Kohl became Merkel’s political teacher", Boysen says. "She was always curious and learned very quickly that she had to be careful in certain questions, to learn from others, particularly Kohl", who emphasised Germany’s “responsibility to the state of Israel."

"Sometimes politicians just use words because they sound big and important, which Staatsräson certainly does, but its meaning remains obscure," Daniel Marwecki, author of "Israel & Germany: Whitewashing and Statehood" tells Qantara. "In a way it is smart politics: you reassure people and hope for the best in the realisation."

Deliberately ambiguous

Staatsräson is "part of neither the German constitution nor the law", as the Bundestag’s technical advisory service points out, but is "rather understood as a guiding political principle." 

The term itself carries a notably pre-democratic connotation, often used by Italian Renaissance political theorists like Niccolò Machiavelli. Originally something spoken into being by monarchical leaders, "In democratic states, the Staatsräson no longer plays a role," says Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education.  

It’s unclear what role this pre-democratic idea can play in a constitutional republic. Minimising its significance, Merkel points out that her declaration was not "a mutual defence policy" like NATO’s Article 5, but does demonstrate "a closer connection to Israel than many other states in the world."

"It’s a cop-out," Marwecki says. "Germany can’t make an Article 5 commitment to Israel but can only hint at it. There’s a clear implication but it’s never completely spelled out."

The foreign policy consequences are, however, real. Beyond underlining Germany’s readiness to supply Israel with weapons, Merkel points to the Staatsräson as the reason for Germany’s engagement in negotiations to prevent Iran’s nuclear development, as well as its decision to abstain from votes to recognise Palestine as a state. She doesn’t explain exactly how recognition of Palestinian statehood would contradict Israel’s security. In fact, Palestine is barely mentioned in the chapter.  

Merkel emphasises her support for the two-state solution in "Freedom". She did the same in the Knesset speech, although she somewhat softened the demand by saying that Israel "did not need unsolicited advice from outsiders."

A year after the speech, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power. The longstanding prime minister paid "lip service to the two-state solution but did nothing to facilitate it. Rather, by continuing settlement construction, he undermined it," Merkel writes. Disputes over settlements became "irreconcilable", though she remained convinced that they would not "lead to a fundamental questioning of relations between our two countries."

Visiting Israel

"Freedom" reveals Merkel’s distinctly romantic view of Israel, which was only the second foreign country she visited as a parliamentarian. She writes of her "goosebumps" after sensing "the physical presence of Adenauer and Ben Gurion... two men who managed to change things with courage, intelligence, and wisdom."

Merkel praises Israel's "outstanding reputation in research and science." As a physicist in the GDR, Merkel was not even able to receive post from Israel until after German reunification, so she remembers going to extra lengths to print Israeli research.

She admires the country’s success in "converting deserts into fertile farmland" and hopes that through technology-sharing initiatives, African companies could "honour Israel’s innovative power" and gain a better impression of the country, which she thinks is overly "determined by their conflict with Palestine."

Merkel writes that Israel and Germany are "uniquely connected by our remembrance of the Shoah." This remembrance clearly weighs heavily on her, with the normally stoic leader getting "well and truly choked up" while visiting Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial. "What indescribable suffering Germany brought upon the Jewish people, Europe and the world," she writes. "If Germany continues to recognise its enduring responsibility that arises from the moral catastrophe in its history, we can envision and plan a good, humane future."

The view Merkel presents of the history and future of German-Israeli relations is a simplification. She waxes lyrical about the first leaders of the German Federal Republic Adenauer and Ben Gurion meeting in New York 15 years after the Holocaust. But she doesn’t mention the political crisis in Israel that followed Ben Gurion’s first attempt to accept German reparations, which many Israelis (including Likud founder Menachem Begin) called "blood money."

The only democracy in the Middle East?

Merkel's Israel remains a romantic, flattened Israel of the German imagination: a country with good intentions and a strong civil society but certain roadblocks, principally the illegal settlements and implicitly bad leadership. That the Israeli population votes for governments that back illegal settlements, hardly figures, and neither do Palestinians.  

Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, home to millions of Palestinians who have no part in Israeli democracy, doesn't stop Israel from being "the only democratic state in the Middle East", a claim laboured without much justification in Merkel's book, and Western discourse generally. 

Merkel clearly takes antisemitism personally and interprets support of Palestine through this lens. She deplores that after the 7 October Hamas attacks, "instead of receiving solidarity, throughout the world, Israel, and Jews across the world, soon suffered antisemitism in the form of a torrent of hate speech."

"As legitimate as the wish for a viable (emphasis added) Palestinian state is and always has been", Merkel writes, using a formulation that is often used to block demands for Palestinian statehood, "those who use these wishes and criticism at demonstrations as a smokescreen to give free rein to their hatred toward the state of Israel and Jews abuse constitutional rights to freedom of expression."

Merkel has not engaged with those who do not share her romantic view of "innovative" Israel, formed by the weight of history or love of scientific research. "Her speech in the Knesset talks about Israel as a success story but never mentions the displacement of the Palestinians in it," says Marwecki. "You have to deny the existence of the other side and its narrative to pretend that everything is reconcilable: one is predicated on the other."

For Merkel, the foundation of Israel is the happy ending to the Holocaust, a neat moral lesson binding the German and Jewish states together in a political quantum entanglement. But for Palestinians, this happy ending was the beginning of a nightmare of ethnic cleansing, occupation and what the International Court of Justice describes as apartheid.