As Germany rearms, Holocaust-begotten ties with Israel take on increasing importance |
When Israel handed over its Arrow 3 long-range missile defense system to the German Air Force at Holzdorf Air Base south of Berlin earlier this month, the moment carried weight far beyond the deal’s hefty price tag.
For the first time, Israel was sending its most advanced ballistic missile interceptor system outside its own territory — and deploying it in the country that orchestrated the Holocaust. Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish state is now helping defend Germany, and by extension, much of Europe, against long-range missile threats from adversaries such as Russia and Iran.
“As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, I stand here deeply moved,” said Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram at the handover ceremony. “A ballistic missile defense system, developed by the finest Jewish minds in Israel’s aerospace industry, out of our existential necessity, will now help defend Germany.”
The agreement, worth a whopping $4.6 billion, was signed just over a week before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that would set into motion a series of events that would not only prove the Arrow 3’s effectiveness in wartime, but indelibly change Israel’s relationship with Europe.
Over two years later, the handover ceremony, held as the countries marked 60 years of bilateral ties, consummated the largest defense export deal in Israel’s history, a tangible expression of time’s ability to scab over even the deepest of wounds.
More than a milestone transaction, the defense agreement encapsulates the transformation of a relationship born of genocide and moral reckoning into one increasingly defined by strategic necessity. As Germany races to rebuild its military in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, its turn to Israeli technology to plug urgent gaps in its air defenses shows the increasing centrality of the Jewish state as a pillar of European security.
The foundation of ties between Israel and Germany rests on the memory of the Holocaust. In the immediate postwar years, the nature of the relationship was moral and financial rather than diplomatic or military, beginning with West Germany’s 1952 reparations agreement — an explicit acknowledgment of responsibility for Nazi crimes.
That moral commitment was codified in former chancellor Angela Merkel’s landmark 2008 speech to the Knesset, in which she declared Israel’s security part of Germany’s staatsräson, or reason for being.
“Without the memory of the Holocaust, there would be no special relationship between Germany and Israel,” said Shimon Stein, former Israeli ambassador to Germany and a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in a 2018 article. “This memory was the core of the original relationship.”
According to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, Germany’s “unique relationship with Israel… stems from Germany’s responsibility for the Shoah” and “is a cornerstone of German foreign policy.”
German Ambassador to Israel Steffen Seibert stressed that the relationship rests on two parallel foundations.
“Historical responsibility is one pillar of our relationship: the other is made up of the liberal democratic values that we share — the values of our Constitution and your Declaration of Independence,” he told The Times of Israel.
The relationship’s first........