Germany’s moral reckoning in Lebanon

Germany has long spoken of Israel not merely as a partner, but as a matter of Staatsräson — a reason of state, a moral obligation etched into the national conscience after the Holocaust. Angela Merkel declared in 2008 that Israel’s security was ‘never negotiable’. Annalena Baerbock echoed that sentiment after October 2023 with the stark phrase: ‘In these days we are all Israelis’. Yet history, when turned into doctrine without moral balance, can become not remembrance but blindness.  The question confronting Berlin today is no longer whether Germany should support Israel’s security. It is whether that support has become detached from the very universal principles Germany claims to defend. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in Lebanon and Gaza. […]