The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced recently that Germany would be suspending weapons exports to Israel for use in the Gaza Strip “until further notice”.
This decision is far from a clean break, but it is the sharpest policy turn Berlin has made since the war began. It’s a warning wrapped in diplomacy — licences suspended “until further notice” — and, yet, for a country that has treated military support for Israel as almost sacrosanct, it’s a moment that feels historic.
The decision comes after Israel’s security cabinet approved plans to take over Gaza City, explaining that it was necessary to defeat Hamas and free the remaining hostages — a decision that has received vocal criticism from the families of hostages who say it further endangers their loved ones. It also comes amidst rapidly changing public opinion in Germany, particularly since disturbing images of widespread starvation and shootings at aid stations have been widely circulated on social media.
Up until now, German leaders had been unwavering. Since October 7, 2023 they’ve spoken with the confidence of a country convinced its position was fixed in stone: Israel’s security was not just important, it was part of Germany’s Staatsräson — its ‘reason of state’. The phrase has been repeated like liturgy since Angela Merkel delivered her speech to the Knesset in 2008 in which she said that the “historical responsibility” to provide political and material support to Israel is the fundamental reason for the state of modern Germany existing today and is a matter not only of reparations for the crimes of the Holocaust but also a necessity for building a Germany based on humanitarian universalism.
Although not a law, Staatsräson is a policy so ingrained in German politics that it may as well be a constitutional commitment. It elevated support for Israel above the everyday push and pull of foreign policy. It was repeated by the foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, and the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in the last coalition government and has been repeated by Merz in this one. But the near total destruction of Gaza has tested Staatsräson in ways nothing else has.
The shift in policy comes after weeks of photographs and videos from Gaza: skeletal children limp in their mothers’ arms; the glass-eyed pallor of famine; the skin stretched on bones. The pictures are everywhere — especially on social media — and their power is in their unmistakable familiarity. For many Germans, these are not just images from a faraway war. They are reminders of the black-and-white photographs taken during the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The comparison is fraught, and newspaper editors are careful about invoking it, although many are getting bolder in the assertion. While Staatsräson may not be a law, it is illegal to ‘relativise’ the Holocaust — essentially compare any other act of genocide to the exceptional atrocities of the Second World War and there have been numerous cases where artists, speakers, writers and others have either had their funding cancelled and awards revoked or have been fined for doing so.
But increasingly there is little need to spell it out; it’s clear to anyone who sees a picture of a starving child dying in its mother’s arms. In a country where Holocaust education is the backbone of public morality, people make the connection themselves.
The result is a shift not just in policy but in the public mood. Polls now show that a majority of Germans want more pressure to be put on Israel, a stark reversal from the first months of the war. The new suspension of Gaza-bound arms sales is the government trying to walk a knife edge: keep the alliance with Israel intact while also saying, in policy if not in rhetoric, that this war has limits. When Merkel elevated Staatsräson from a moral principle to a guiding doctrine, the point was precisely that it would not bend to circumstance. It was that rare foreign-policy position treated as an identity statement. But doctrines do bend under pressure, and this one has been quietly reshaped by the last 10 months: first in language — more frequent reminders that Berlin’s commitment is to Israel’s security, not to its every military decision — and now in the mechanics of arms licensing.
The suspension is narrow. It does not affect weapons deemed irrelevant to Gaza operations and Berlin has stressed that the commitment to Israel’s defence against external threats stands. But the symbolic weight is outsized. For the first
time in this war, Germany has drawn a visible red line in its relationship with Israel.
If this feels unprecedented, it isn’t — not entirely. In 1973, as the Yom Kippur War raged, the then chancellor, Willy Brandt, refused to supply arms to Israel. It wasn’t born of indifference; Brandt was the architect of Ostpolitik, the policy of reconciliation with eastern Europe, and had staked his career on moral gestures like kneeling at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial. But the oil crisis was beginning, and West Germany — deeply dependent on Arab oil — feared economic collapse if it openly armed Israel. Brandt even protested when the United States of America used the German port of Bremerhaven to move weapons without warning. Back then, the calculation was geopolitical and economic. Today, it’s moral and humanitarian. But the instrument is the same: limit military support to Israel without severing the relationship. Ultimately, the foil of Staatsräson is about Germany’s interests, not Israel’s, and certainly not for the goal of global humanitarianism.
But the post-Merkel Germany of 2025 is different from Brandt’s Bonn. Support for Israel has been long institutionalised — taught in schools since reunification in the 90s, baked into foreign-policy consensus — and remarkably insulated from public opinion. What’s broken that insulation now is the imagery of starvation. Even with caveats, fact-checking, and disputes over the origins of certain photographs, the underlying reality has been confirmed by aid agencies and the United Nations: a hunger crisis of extraordinary scale. You cannot watch those images, day after day, without feeling the tension between Staatsräson and the humanitarian obligations Germany also claims as part of its identity.
There’s a legal dimension too. For months, Berlin argued that its exports to Israel complied with both German law and international humanitarian law. That argument becomes harder to defend as the humanitarian situation worsens. A narrow suspension — targeted at exports likely to be used in Gaza — gives Germany a defensible legal position while preserving other forms of military cooperation.
But this isn’t just about law. It’s about memory politics. Germany’s identity as a post-Holocaust State has been built on a two-part promise: never again for Jews, never again for anyone. In moments of crisis, those promises can clash. This week’s decision is what that clash looks like in policy form.
This will not be the end of the argument. Some in Berlin will push for a broader embargo; others will call any limit a betrayal. The coalition government will have to decide whether humanitarian thresholds — malnutrition rates, aid blockages — will become triggers for future suspensions and it will have to manage the fallout in Israel where the move will be read not as a legal fine-tuning but as a political statement. For now, the Merz government has chosen the middle path: signal to Israel that Germany’s support is not unconditional without dismantling the special relationship. Whether that’s sustainable depends on what happens next in Gaza, and on whether the public’s patience has already run out.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C.
