Merkel Says Israel’s Right to Exist Is Germany’s Reason of State

Former German chancellor Angela Merkel said she had told the Israeli Knesset in 2008 that, for her, Israel’s right to exist belonged to Germany’s raison d’état.

She spoke to “Kaffee und Fluchen,” a podcast by the student initiative Studopolis, published on Nov. 13.

“Criticism is not forbidden at all, but one must always keep in mind how I can help ensure that the State of Israel continues to exist and, preferably, can also live in peace,” she said.

Criticism and the 2008 Line

Merkel said the formula was sometimes misread as a ban on criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. She said she had often done so, and that there were “certainly also reasons” to do so now “in dealing with the Gaza Strip.”

The 2008 Knesset speech is usually cited for saying that Germany’s responsibility for Israel’s security was part of its raison d’état and “never open to negotiation.” On Friday she framed that commitment around Israel’s right to exist.

Die Linke and Berlin Talks

Asked about a coalition with Die Linke in Berlin amid accusations of antisemitism, Merkel pointed to the Christian Democratic Union’s incompatibility rule against the Left party. “I think the CDU is right” to have that resolution, she said. “So I would not do that.”

Taking Israel’s right to exist seriously, she said, meant rejecting “certain one-sided statements.” “Die Linke in Berlin has a particular problem in this regard.”

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has said that a clear line on antisemitism must be a condition in coalition talks.

Hamas, Iran and Gaza

Merkel said Israel’s right to exist was “not theoretically endangered” by Iran, Hamas “and others,” but faced a “practical threat.” She called the Oct. 7, 2023, attack “a Hamas assault on Israel,” and said that after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas had pursued a policy “aimed only at the destruction of Israel.”

If a bunker sat beneath every kindergarten and hospital, with Hamas “knowing that I can only destroy its position if I also attack what is above it,” she said, an Israeli prime minister’s task became “at least somewhat more complicated.”

She also said the “disproportionality” of what civilians in Gaza had to endure should be named, “especially when it came to food supplies and other things.” What surprised her, she said, was that “very, very few people from the Gaza Strip” had been heard “critically confronting Hamas.”

Attention to Other Conflicts

Merkel compared public discussion of Israel with coverage of Yemen, “where millions of children are starving,” and of Sudan, saying there was “a certain disproportionality in having virtually no discussion about other places.”

A recent poll found half of Germans considered her suited to be federal president.