Germany's admirable bond with Israel is becoming a straitjacket

With Gaza bombarded, with thousands dead and its infrastructure largely in ruins, is it ever acceptable for a German to criticise Israel? Almost the entire German political establishment and most of those in public life apparently think not.

- John Kampfner

Since 7 October, the day Hamas fighters inflicted carnage on a music festival and on kibbutzim inside Israel, all the main parties - the three making up the government, plus the Conservative CDU opposition and even the far-right AfD - have spoken with one voice, in solidarity with Israel. It is not lost on Germans that more Jews were killed on that one day than on any single day since the defeat of the Third Reich.

"I thought that after the Holocaust, after the extermination of 6 million Jews, we might have learned from history," wrote Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the company that owns the tabloid Bild, and one of the most influential people in the land. In a comment piece for Bild last month, entitled Not again!, Döpfner wrote that two Jewish members of his staff had gone abroad because they didn't feel safe, while another, with a Jewish wife, had expressed his desire to take his child out of nursery school. Döpfner criticised the UN secretary general, António Guterres, and Greta Thunberg's Fridays for Future movement. When it comes to support for Israel, he contended, "there is no 'yes but".

Last week, the German vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, one of the Greens' most senior figures, accused leftist protesters of turning on Israel as part of a "great resistance narrative". Habeck called on the police to clamp down hard, including deporting those without residence permits found guilty in the courts.