There is plenty for Tánaiste Simon Harris to discuss on Friday in Berlin with his new German foreign minister colleague, Johann Wadephul. After a chilly meeting of Irish and German foreign ministers last year, no joint press conference is planned this time around.
Berlin and Dublin, traditionally close partners on EU and foreign policy, have found themselves far apart following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7th 2023, which claimed at least 1,200 lives.
In his January 2024 visit, then-tánaiste Micheál Martin suggested Berlin’s view of the Gaza conflict was constrained “by the historical prism of the Holocaust”, though “evolving”. Germany’s position has evolved quite a bit further since then, with growing public outrage here over Israel’s Gaza blockade, settler violence in the West Bank and a Palestinian death toll nearing 60,000. A more critical tone towards Israel from the new German government, however, has yet to be matched in any significant policy shift.
The current Israel-Hamas conflict, for many Irish people living in Germany, resembles what John le Carré once called a “looking glass war”. In their daily lives here and during visits back to Ireland, the German-Irish negotiate two separate minefields with one common denominator: dissent from the majority opinion – or attempts at differentiation in the public debate – are often denounced.
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The most visible sign of tension surrounds two Irish citizens who face expulsion from Germany in connection with their alleged role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including a violent confrontation at a Berlin university.
Their precise role in what happened there has yet to be established and, in an emergency injunction, a Berlin court has halted expulsion proceedings until after trial, likely in the autumn. That didn’t stop Berlin’s governing mayor Kai Wegner prejudging them, in a national newspaper, as “anti-Semitic criminals”.
Many Irish people here who join Gaza solidarity marches, as they would if they were in Ireland, report harassment in their workplace and police violence.
Some face charges they view as spurious and – after 18 months and counting – the charges have neither come to trial nor been dropped. That keeps them flagged in police databases, making every re-entry to Germany a stressful business of arbitrary delays and border police questions. For them, this is official Germany’s intentional chilling effect for holding the “wrong” views on Gaza. (A similar chilling effect, critics of Israel’s Gaza war say, follows German efforts since November 2023 to outlaw every public utterance of “from the river to the sea” as an illegal slogan supporting the proscribed Hamas group. In May a Berlin court dismissed one such prosecution as a politicised endeavour lacking evidence and any legal standing.)
The colonial framing of the Gaza conflict, as popularised by Kneecap, gets an airing in Germany, particularly in universities, but others reject it as ill fit for the complexities of the conflict
All of this is attracting outside attention. Last month the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights body, sent a two-page letter of concern to the Berlin federal government. Police violence, limits to freedom of assembly and “the blanket classification of criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism”, the letter warned, do a disservice to democracy and may even endanger it”.
While German officials dismiss such concerns, campaigners are already collating information about the crackdown they see. And writer Maxim Biller has even devised a diagnosis for the motivation: Morbus Israel, Germany’s Israel disorder. “At the core of [this] neo-German Orient neurosis is, very loosely: Germans’ disappointed love for their former victims,” he argued in a column for Die Zeit weekly. His polemical text was later removed from the Zeit website following protests over his description of the “strategically correct but inhumane hunger blockade of Gaza”.
[ An Irishman in Berlin: ‘For Germans, everything is forbidden unless it allowed’Opens in new window ]
As the conflict drags on, though, some Irish in Germany wonder – quietly and cautiously – if Ireland has a disorder of its own. Earlier in the conflict, before everything was eclipsed by the real and justified horror over children being starved – or shot dead by Israel soldiers – one Irish acquaintance asked: where was the Irish protest over Hamas contempt for – and human rights violations of – its own people?
Given the unprecedented degradation in Gaza, such questions may seem like cynical what-aboutery. Yet another middle-aged Irish acquaintance, living in Germany as long as the Belfast Agreement, wondered aloud recently how Irish people, who resented the IRA killing people on their behalf, feel about Hamas doing the same for Palestinians?
The colonial framing of the Gaza conflict, as popularised by Kneecap, gets an airing in Germany, particularly in universities, but others reject it as ill fit for the complexities of the conflict.
After a strange start, Germany’s debate has shifted radically in recent months. The popular Bild tabloid still ignores the reality in Gaza and denounces Palestinian solidarity marchers as “Jew haters”, but other outlets offer a broader and more challenging range of views.
[ Israeli foreign minister finds shifting moods as he visits BerlinOpens in new window ]
On Wednesday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung daily printed a harrowing 5,000-word report on the starve-or-be-shot reality in Gaza. A day later, it ran a full-page essay by French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, asking “Is anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism?”
With large Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian communities, Germany’s Israel-Gaza-Hamas debate is messy, emotional, confused and conflicted. A diverse range of voices compete to be heard, airing grievances which not all share but are nonetheless real. Two conflicts are playing out, as Berlin arms one side and tries to feed the other. Attempting to meet two non-negotiable postwar obligations – to Israel and human dignity – has created a domestic conflict of conscience with an equally unpredictable outcome.
By comparison, many Irish living in Germany perceive Ireland’s debate as Irish people telling other Irish people, at no personal cost and from a safe distance, how terrible things are for the Palestinians.
A recent public television poll here asked who respondents feel is responsible for the plight of the civilian population in Gaza. Some 69 per cent said the Israeli government was fully or partly to blame while 71 per cent said the same of Hamas. How would a similar poll look in Ireland?
Ireland and Germany hold competing views on the conflict, yet both have considerable credibility among Palestinians and Israelis respectively. How can our two countries leverage that good will for a better future in the Middle East? That is a debate worth having.
