Inflated claims in foreign policy can lead to some very bad judgment in practice

Germany and Israel edition

Natan Sznaider, a Tel Aviv sociologist, author, and an associate of the Bonner Zentrum für Versöhnungsforschung (Bonn Center for Reconciliation Research) has published an essay in Der Spiegel that nominally tires to help Germans understand how Israeli Jews view their own situation.¹

But it also essentially makes the pitch that, look, you Germans can’t really understand our situation. But you shouldn’t criticize Israel or its government but support us in conflicts anyway.

Since it makes an analytical pitch about the different national perspectives, it’s interesting to see how he approaches it. The title is striking, “Only despair can save us.”

The columnists don’t necessarily get to write their own headlines. But this one is taken from the wording of Sznaider’s piece, “The price for Israel will be high, but nothing but despair can save us.”

“Despair!” seems like an unorthodox rallying call for a country’s self defense. It recalls the sign at the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

But it fits with the message of you-Germans-just-can’t-understand-us. He frames it with the notion that Germans experienced a long post-Second World War period of peace and prosperity in which they were able to live by “universal” values of democracy, civil equality, and the rule of law. But he explains that for Israel and Jews, no such condition holds:

For we Jews and especially for Israelis there has been and is no postwar time. The time after the Shoah [Holocaust] is never “afterwards,” it is always in the Now. If one does not understand and recognize that and gives in to the illusion of simple humanity, then the consequences can be precarious, that is our experience. Insisting on this non-universal attitude to the world is a difficult imposition in a society of equal rights to freedom and speaking, which is based on the assumption that all people are equal.

Most Israelis will, can, and must live with these contradictions. That also explains Israel’s determination to defend themselves and to ensure that such an attack [as that of October 7] never occurs again. Even if the moral and political price for that is very high. But this price is the political responsibility of the Israelis, who have to live with the consequences of their actions. It is a political responsibility that neither the political nor the cultural elite in Germany carries despite whether they are currently “pro”- or “anti”-Israel. [my emphasis]

This is a strange framing in several ways.

Israel’s defense as a “reason of state” for Germany

First, the German government has taken the remarkable position that Israel’s security is a "reason of state" for Germany:

When it comes to Israel, which the Zionist movement founded as the Jewish state just three years after Germany's systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust, the German state sees a "special responsibility." Its commitment to Israel is more than just a policy goal; it is a fundamental part of present-day Germany's very existence.

That makes Israel's security and existence Germany's "Staatsräson" (reason of state). Former Chancellor Angela Merkel used the term when addressing the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in 2008. Her successor, Olaf Scholz, has repeated it several times since Hamas' terrorist attacks on Saturday, October 7 killed some 1,300 Israelis, the overwhelming majority of whom are civilians.

"At this moment, there is only one place for Germany. That is the side of Israel," Scholz said in an address to the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, on Thursday. "That's what we mean when we say, 'Israel's security is German 'reason of state.'"² [my emphasis]

Reason of state generally refers to actions that must be taken to preserve the safety of a nation-state. It is a concept from European medieval political philosophy:

It claimed practical usefulness in virtue of its grounding in experience and history, contrasting itself with “mirrors of princes,” which were supposedly ignorant of the realities of politics. More narrowly, reason of state meant a “Machiavellian” disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations when the “interests of the state” or “necessity” required it. Particularly contentious were the justifiability of dishonesty, duplicity, breach of faith and even treaty obligations, violence against opponents and competitors, illegal taxation, disregard of the claims of traditional institutions and officeholders, and the practice of religious toleration.³ [my emphasis]

In short, “reason of state” normally refers to things nation-state do for self-preservation including things that are out of the ordinary, or even not legally authorized, out of necessity. For German leaders to declare the security of Israel to be a German “reason of state” is part of Germany’s official understanding of itself as a state that thoroughly rejects the Holocaust and Hitlerism.

Beyond that general purpose, it is also an at least rhetorical declaration of his commitment to close relations to Israel and also a gesture to its support of the strongly pro-Israel position of Germany’s NATO ally, the United States.

But will German leaders actually treat the security of Israel as identical to the security of Germany and the continued existence of the German state - which would be the obvious meaning of “reason of state” in that context? I would venture to say that nobody actually believes that, at least nobody running a government.

And if Germany did take such a position seriously, it would mean that it would have to have view of its duty to defend Israel equivalent to that of Israel itself. Sznaider would presumably agree that such a common definition of that duty does not exist, because the framing of his essay is that Germany assumes “universal” values while Israelis operate on very particular values emerging from the historical experience of Jews and the State of Israel.

Still, that German leaders declare preservation of the State of Israel as a “reason of state” for Germany itself is surely an indication that those leaders are attempting to stand in solidarity with Israel’s own “particular” understanding of its security.

German Universalism and Israeli/Jewish Particularism

Sznaider’s argument about the different world outlooks of Germans and Israelis certainly seems like a rhetorically overblown way to say that Germany has no right to criticize Israel’s policies because Germans simply cannot understand Israel’s way of seeing the world. But it also seems to be a way of arguing that Israel and the Israeli people don’t have to and should not take account of criticisms of its policies, even from allies.

Every writing out of Israel in the direction of Germany is doubly and triply burdened by the shadows of the past, by the dead. On one side [Germany’s], there are words of brotherhood and solidarity. On the other side [Israel’s], we recognize that that many intellectuals in particular want to argue in a general and factually balanced way, speaking from an almost rootless point of view. That may sound moral and unselfish, but it has absolutely no resonance in Israel. The existence of the State of Israel is a radical departure from this selfless negation of one's own place. [my emphasis]

There are a couple of genuinely clever pieces of literary irony here. Describing the German outlook as “rootless” is an ironic reversal of the old antisemitic description of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.” And to describe Germany’s viewpoint as a “selfless negation of one's own place” could also be taken as a dig at German leaders’ claim that ensuring the survival of Israel is a German “reason of state.”

This is how trying to talk about concrete foreign policy issues in terms of grand generalizations like Universalism and Negation of Place often winds up generating much more heat than light. And to mix metaphors here, Sznaider’s argument drifts off into the clouds here:

For us as Israelis it is not easy as Jews to return into the German public and to negotiate over sympathy and solidarity. Because this negotiation can only take place from particular standpoints. The selfless universalism which most Germans and Europeans have built up in the past decades, can exist for Israelis after 1945 only as an ideal image, not as real life.

He seems in that first sentence to equate Israelis with Jews. But even though 74% of the current Israeli population are Jews, the others are not. This is why the “apartheid” issue around Israel won’t go away. Israel specifically defines itself as a Jewish state, something that has always been part of the Zionist vision since Theodore Herzl’s time.

In the concluding portion of the column, Sznaider basically accuses the Germans in general of not having any sympathy for the victims of the October 7 attacks. And he makes the comment quoted above that Jews have no choice but to view the world as though the Holocaust “is never ‘afterwards,’ it is always in the Now.”

The column stays on a fairly high level of generalization and does not get into the specifics of the news over antisemitic incidents in Germany in the wake of October 7 and the current war. Or into the arguments over whether “from the river to the sea” should be banned from usage in public demonstrations. In fact, his entire pitch seems to assume that the German public is receptive to an argument that is saying or at least obviously implying: we’re fighting a war against the Holocaust in Gaza right now, and you Germans have no legitimate grounds to criticize what we do in that war.

But Sznaider does seem to be claiming that Israel can’t negotiate anything with Hamas and shouldn’t even try: “One can only have a dialogue with people who share a world. For those who don’t want to share a world, one can have no dialogue.” But since it’s in the middle of a paragraph complaining vaguely about “universalists” who suggest there’s anything remotely colonial about anything to do with Israel, maybe he means Germans.

My main thoughts on the case Sznaider makes:

1. Israel is not facing the Holocaust in their current conflict with Gaza. Even if we assume that Hamas has a literal goal of killing all Jews in Israel, Hamas is not the German Wehrmacht. And Israel is far and away the strongest military power in its region.

2. Whether one gives the broad concepts capital letters or not, Universalism and Particularism are not useful frameworks for understanding Israel’s current relations to its allies and opponents.

3. International law is binding on all countries and all military combatants: Israel, Germany, Hamas, the US. It does have universal application (without a capital “U”) because it is the common legal framework humanity has been able to develop over the last couple of centuries to make wars less frequent and make the ones that occur less murderous for noncombatants.

4. Claiming Israel as somehow having custody over the Holocaust and is entitled to use it to justify any action Israel takes in the world, even the commisison of war crimes, deprives such instrumental use of the Holocaust of their emotional appeal to foreign publics over time.

5. Threat inflation makes for bad foreign policy. And Israeli officials equating the current war to the Holocaust and the Second World War are classic examples of threat inflation. The real threat is real enough.

6. No country that I know of is denying Israel’s “right to defend itself,” a phrase heard often from American and Israeli politicians and polemicists. That right of self-defense is also part of this whole international law thing.

7. What “nothing but despair can save us“ is supposed to mean isn’t clear. But it doesn’t seem like the kind of approach in foreign policy that lends itself to realistic assessments of threats, risks and possibilities. Whether he means Israel acting out of despair or Israel acting to inflict despair on the residents of Gaza.

1. Sznalder, Natan (2023): Nur die Verzweiflung kann uns retten. Der Spiegel 48 26.11.2023, 120. My translations from German.

2. Glucroft, William Noah (2023): Germany's unique relationship with Israel. Deutsche Welle 10/15/2023. <https://www.dw.com/en/israel-and-germanys-reason-of-state-its-complicated/a-67094861> (Accessed: 2023-01-12).

3. Höpfl, Harro (2011): Reason of State. In: Lagerlund, H. (ed): Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9729-4_433> (Accessed: 2023-01-12).