Last October, Germany’s ambassador to Tunisia, Peter Prügel, sparked controversy while speaking at the opening of a new secondary school in the suburbs of Tunis. After Tunisia’s education minister expressed solidarity with Gaza during the event, Prügel described Israelis as victims of “Palestinian terror,” a reference to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.
The education minister angrily objected, asserting that the ambassador’s words ran contrary to Tunisia’s position on the Israel-Hamas war, and Prügel left the event in a hurry. Online, some Tunisians soon claimed that Prügel had justified Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza. The embassy insisted that Prügel had expressed sympathy for all victims, but said that “we could not ignore that this escalation was caused by Hamas’s barbaric terror attack on Israel.”
Days later, demonstrators gathered outside the German Embassy to demand Prügel’s resignation. Protests against Israel’s war in Gaza had already targeted the U.S. and French embassies in Tunis, but this was the first time they had turned their ire toward Germany. German tabloid Bild described criticism of Prügel as a “hate attack” and reminded its readers that the new school, partly funded by Germany’s development bank, was only opened thanks to the country’s generosity.
For decades, Germany has sought to reconcile a perceived historic responsibility to Israel with a cordial relationship toward the Arab world. Berlin developed a major soft-power footprint and was long seen as an honest broker in trade and economic relations. Organizations financed largely by the German government—such as the Goethe Institute, development agency GIZ, and foundations linked to the country’s main political parties—are major funders of various programs across the Middle East.
Since Oct. 7, this balancing act has faltered. Across the Middle East, there is growing support for Palestinian resistance—and condemnation of what many Arabs consider a genocidal war by Israel. Germany, shocked by the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, initially backed Israel’s assault in Gaza largely without qualification, though some officials have taken a more critical position in recent weeks.
Still, Berlin continues to assert itself as one of Israel’s closest political and military allies, even as—after more than seven months of Israeli bombardment—more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and the enclave is experiencing widespread famine. Germany’s uncompromising reaction to the war has rapidly tarnished its reputation across the Middle East.
Protesters carrying flags and signs pass on a path alongside a a vandalized election banner for the German Social Democratic Party. Paint has been used to cross out the eyes on photos of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Katarina Barley, which stand against a red background. Stickers with messages of protest are also stuck all over the banner.
Protesters march past a vandalized campaign banner of the German Social Democratic Party, which shows an image of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Parliament candidate Katarina Barley covered with the graffitied word “Warmongers,” seen in Berlin on May 1.Omer Messinger / Getty Images
Germany’s image is suffering across the Arab world. A 2020 survey by the Arab Center Washington DC found that a slight majority of the Arab public had positive views of German foreign policy. This January, by contrast, a poll of residents of 16 Arab countries published by the Doha Institute showed that 75 percent of respondents had a negative opinion of the country’s stance on the Israel-Hamas war.
Morocco-based sociologist Amro Ali, who studies the relationship between Germany and the Arab world, described this as a 180-degree turn in public opinion.
Positive impressions of Germany had long dominated in the Middle East: The country was associated with fast cars, high-tech products, and friendly tourists. The German government refused to take part in the Iraq War and welcomed more than 1 million Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016. Berlin, home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora, has become a hub for Arab culture and intellectual life. Germany also lacks the direct colonial legacy in the Middle East that still feeds regional distrust of powers such as France and the United Kingdom.
Five days after Oct. 7, in a speech that established Germany’s tone toward the nascent Israel-Hamas war, Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Bundestag that “(in) this moment, there is only one place for Germany: the place by Israel’s side.” By November 2023, Germany had licensed a nearly tenfold increase in arms exports to Israel, becoming the second-biggest arms supplier to the country since the war’s start, after the United States.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stand behind podiums in front of EU and Israeli flags. Netanyahu’s arms are outstretched as he speaks into the microphone. Both men wear black suits and ties.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) speaks during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Jerusalem on March 17.Leo Correa / AFP via Getty Images
As public figures in Germany expressed solidarity with Israel, police cracked down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, violently dispersing them or banning them on grounds of antisemitism. Artists and intellectuals who are critical of Israel, including Jews and Arabs, have warned of a wave of silencing across German society; many have seen awards and funding revoked or events canceled. Among them are Palestinian author Adania Shibli, whose award ceremony was called off by the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and Lebanese-Egyptian anthropologist Ghassan Hage, who was fired in February by the prestigious Max Planck Institute, which said views that Hage had shared on social media were “incompatible” with its values.
On social media, Ali noticed something he had never seen before: Young people across the Arab world were posting daily about Germany—and none of their impressions were positive. He links the changing perceptions of the country to a reorientation of global politics, in which Western support for Israel has become a source of unbearable hypocrisy for many in the global south.
“We really see some big shifts happening, and one of the key players that’s contributing to this is Germany,” Ali said.
This change in public opinion is unlikely to affect Germany’s political or economic relations with Arab states. Yet it has the potential to undercut Berlin’s soft power in the region.
Foreign Policy spoke with nine current and former staff of six German institutions that do work across five Middle Eastern countries. They said that Germany’s hard-line position on the Israel-Hamas war has jeopardized their work with local partners and communities—damaging trust and credibility that have taken years or decades to develop. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their careers.
A historic black-and-white image shows David Ben-Gurion and Konrad Adenauer seated and laughing as they speak to each other in an ornately decorated sitting area.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (left) and then-West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer meet in New York in 1960.Bettmann Archive/via Gety Images
The West German government first sought to build relations with Israel when it agreed to pay Holocaust reparations to the young state in 1952. Then-Chancellor Konrad Adenauer saw reparations as a means to restore Germany’s reputation and reintegrate itself with Western powers. The Arab League objected to Adenauer’s plan, arguing that Germany should not financially support a state that was at war with its Arab neighbors and had refused to take responsibility for the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.
The Arab League “stated that Germany should not solve its problem on the backs of Arabs or Palestinians,” said Daniel Marwecki, a historian of Germany’s relations with Israel and lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. “That has been the issue ever since.”
The two-state solution set out in the 1994 Oslo Accords offered Berlin a chance to clear the slate. Germany became a key supporter of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In 2023, Germany, directly and via the European Union, was the second-largest national donor in the Palestinian territories and to the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), behind only the United States in the latter ranking.
“The idea was: If you just throw money at the process, things are going to get resolved,” Marwecki said. “The U.S. will take the political leadership—we’re just going to follow checkbook diplomacy.”
In the 2000s, as the Oslo process failed, Germany drew closer to Israel on matters of security. Berlin’s foreign policy became increasingly tied up with domestic anxieties about antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment among Muslims in Germany, which some politicians said obstructed the country’s attempts to overcome its history. Longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel summed up Germany’s position during a speech to the Knesset in 2008, when she said that Israel’s security was Germany’s Staatsraison, or reason of state—a term repeated by Scholz and others after Oct 7.
When Merkel put the blame for the 2006 Lebanon War and 2008 Gaza War entirely on Hezbollah and Hamas respectively, there was still occasional opposition to the Israeli military’s operations expressed by officials within the German government; in 2008, a leading Social Democratic politician accused the then-chancellor of “taking the side of permanent Israeli bombardment.”
But Israel’s military conduct in wars in Gaza in 2014 and 2021 earned relatively little criticism from German politicians of any party. Although Germany continued to oppose the construction of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and expressed alarm at the anti-democratic tendencies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, these policy differences did not substantively alter the Germany-Israel relationship.
In the months after Oct. 7, German leaders fixated on the victims of Hamas’s attack, the fate of hostages in Gaza, rising antisemitism, and what they perceived to be Hamas’s existential threat to Israel’s security. The welfare of Palestinian civilians received notably less attention than in previous conflicts, even amid historic levels of death and destruction in Gaza.
Last October, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Hamas had taken the entirety of Gaza hostage and repeated Israel’s claims that the militant group was using civilians as human shields. Germany continued to reject calls for a cease-fire, which Scholz said would allow Hamas to rearm, and abstained from a December 2023 United Nations vote calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
As Palestinian deaths in Gaza climbed to more than 20,000 in January, German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck denied that Israel was targeting civilians; while some may object to the Israeli military’s “harsh measures,” he said, accusations of genocide against Israel were false. Germany labeled South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice as “political instrumentalization” and froze its funding for UNRWA after Israel alleged that some of its staff participated in the Oct. 7 attack. (Germany has since reinstated its UNRWA funding after an independent review found that Israel provided insufficient evidence for its claims.)
A protester in a bright red long coat stands out among the crowd as she is surrounded by police in black uniforms on a street in Berlin. The woman also wears a black-and-white keffiyeh scarf around her neck, and she is turning to say something to the officer closest to her.
A protester issurrounded by police during a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Berlin on May 18.Ralf Hirschberger/AFP via Getty Images
The government’s views are rarely shared by staff of German institutions with experience in the Middle East. They have long admitted in private what cannot be said publicly in Germany, sources told Foreign Policy: The two-state solution is dead, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank amounts to apartheid, and German foreign policy is unmoored from the realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The divide between German organizations’ headquarters and their outposts in the Middle East has only grown starker since Oct 7. Staff across institutions in several countries say that using terms such as “apartheid” and “genocide” in reference to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians—phrasing rejected and considered antisemitic by the German government—is common among immediate colleagues. They say their work has been impaired by Germany’s support for the war, their own organizations’ silence or support for Israel, and blowback related to the repression of pro-Palestinian voices in Germany.
Several weeks after the protests against Prügel in Tunis, a swastika was painted on the walls of the city’s local branch of the Goethe Institute, the German government’s flagship global cultural institution. The organization canceled a series of school visits and a film screening in the capital and made a planned public exhibition invite-only. It has also canceled events in Beirut and Ramallah due to security concerns. In March, the Egyptian artist Mohamed Abla returned an award from the institute to protest Germany’s support for Israel; the organization had faced backlash in 2022 for canceling a talk with Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd.
Three current and former staff members at GIZ told Foreign Policy that Germany’s complicity in the war has caused outrage within the development agency. GIZ has not taken a public stance on the conflict, even after one of its own Palestinian employees was put in administrative detention—without a trial or charges—by Israel in March. (This differs from GIZ’s strong position against Russia’s war in Ukraine.) At least two Palestinian nongovernmental organizations that GIZ worked with are now boycotting the agency, the sources said.
One described an “authoritarian” atmosphere that has led some staff to fear speaking out and others to quit. “You fund the bombing on one side, and you throw a little bit of aid to show you’re a humanitarian,” the source said of Germany’s actions.
To keep a low profile and protect their local staff and partners, many German organizations doing work in the Middle East have quietly canceled public events, postponed the publication of reports, or removed their logos from the projects they support. Several sources said they fear that the German media or government could accuse their organizations or their local partners of antisemitism if anyone affiliated with them supports the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement or criticizes Israel on social media.
The German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, which funds GIZ and the party foundations’ work abroad, has said partner organizations are subject to “close scrutiny” and checked for any statements that are antisemitic, deny Israel’s right to exist, or support BDS. The ministry and foreign office are currently implementing cuts of nearly 1.5 billion euros as Germany slashes its international aid and development budget.
Last December, Germany removed funding for a project to support victims of trafficking aided by the Centre for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance after its leader signed a letter condemning the war and supporting BDS. During a post-Oct. 7 review, Germany defunded three Palestinian human rights organizations that Israel had labeled as terrorist organizations in 2021. (These designations had been denounced by the United Nations.) The ministry told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in February that it regularly discussed this review with Israel.
The Israeli flag flies between the European Union and German flags in front of the Reichstag, a stone building with large columns in Berlin, beneath a cloudy gray sky.
The Israeli flag flies between the flags of the European Union and Germany outside the Reichstag in Berlin on April 9.Sean Gallup/Getty Images
Some regional partners have issued their own boycotts against Germany. The Lebanon-based Haven for Artists collective rejected a $35,000 grant from the socialist Left Party’s Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in January after a board member criticized Egypt for not admitting Palestinians fleeing Gaza, which the Lebanese group said amounted to support for ethnic cleansing.
“People within the (cultural) scene right now don’t want to be associated with the German foundations,” said a staffer at a German organization in Lebanon. The same source believes that more culture workers would join a boycott if they could afford to do so; many people who once saw Berlin as a hub of Arab culture, they added, have become disillusioned.
In recent weeks, Germany, like the United States, has taken a harsher tone toward Israel. Scholz and Baerbock have now repeatedly called for a more permanent cease-fire and an increase in the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza to alleviate the risk of famine. They have also warned Netanyahu to cease Israel’s planned full-scale invasion of Rafah. During a visit to Israel in mid-March, Scholz spoke not of Staatsraison, but of the suffering of Palestinians and the impossibility of fighting terrorism through military means alone.
Still, in a scene unthinkable just months ago, Germany’s chief representative in the Palestinian territories was chased out of Ramallah’s Birzeit University in late April. Videos show Palestinian students heckling him, kicking his car, and hurling stones as it sped away. Germany’s rhetoric and actions since Oct. 7 “destroyed the dream and an idea of Germany,” the staffer in Lebanon said.
As one of the biggest Western funders of civil society in the Arab world, Germany will continue to be a major influence in the region. Its less political work, such as supporting infrastructure programs and providing language classes, has largely been unaffected by the Israel-Hamas war.
But the government’s moral advantage on many issues—and Germany’s image as a liberal, welcoming society—may prove hard to rehabilitate.
