PATRICK LAWRENCE: Germany Learns From the IDF   

The Israelis are to teach Germans how to use artificial intelligence based on the I.D.F.’s experience in Gaza, where, among other things, it used A.I. to identify targets, guide drones, and conduct remote assassinations.  

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

A year ago this month — St. Valentine’s Day 2025, actually —Foreign Policy ran a piece with an arresting thesis. “Germany’s Pro–Israel Policy Must End” was the headline atop Ilyas Saliba’s essay.

How bitter it is to reread this commentary, given the Bundeswehr and the Israel Defense Forces have just signed a military cooperation agreement that is not a millimeter short of stomach-turning.

The German army, to put it simply, will now learn from the I.D.F. how to do what the I.D.F. has done in Gaza these past two years and some.    

Yes, readers, it has come to this. And in its limitless inhumanity I take the Federal Republic to be emblematic of all the Western post-democracies, a point to which I will shortly return. 

“The recently negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, which put an end to more than 15 months of war in the Gaza Strip,” Saliba’s commentary begins, “is an opportune moment for Germany to recalibrate its Israel policy.”

Wrong from the start, of course: There was no ceasefire two Februarys ago, not on the Israeli side—and the Zionist army has not observed one since, I’ll add instantly. 

But I credit Saliba, and by extension his editors at Foreign Policy, for publishing a creditable criticism of Germany’s relations with “the Jewish state” at a time it was a not-done to question the Western powers’ support for the Zionist regime’s campaign of terror in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Here is Saliba’s argument in gist:

“Berlin has long cited a ‘special historical responsibility’ toward Israel and its right to self-defense. Germany sends the country a steady stream of arms and is its second-largest weapons supplier after the United States.

Germany’s pro-Israel policy is rooted in a commendable desire to atone for historical atrocities. But it also threatens to make Germany complicit in new ones.

Now, amid the wreckage in Gaza… Germany must confront an uncomfortable reality: Its weapons have aided Israel in committing grave breaches of international law. If Berlin is to stay true to its word that it is an advocate for human rights and the rules-based order, it must halt all offensive arms exports to Israel going forward.”

To give this piece some chronological context, it was not until the spring of last year, after Israel blockaded Gaza with the intent to starve its residents, that corporate media, mostly on the European side of the Atlantic, went anywhere near this kind of thinking. 

Saliba is a fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, which is funded by the German and Canadian governments and various multilateral organizations (the Red Cross, the World Food Programme, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees).

It advocates the usual list of right-sounding principles — democracy, human rights, humanitarian assistance and so on — and I do not honestly know what kind of benign or malign business it gets up to.

But Saliba, in a piece written just one year ago, presses upon us the bitterest of truths: Germany has no intention, and never has, ever of coming to a reckoning of its complicity in the genocide the world has witnessed since the events of October 2023.

No, all such expectations now prove pitifully misplaced. There has been but one change in Germany’s “pro–Israel policy” since Saliba wrote: The Federal Republic wants to learn all the “techniques,” the how-did-they-do-it of the I.D.F.’s sadistic brutalities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. 

This is Germany, this is the West. 

My mind returns to that moment last June, when Friedrich Merz looked into the camera at Z.D.F., Germany’s public broadcaster, and declared, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.”

The German chancellor was commenting on the Israeli bombing operation against Iran, but we cannot take this remark to go only for Iranians any more than the Zionists’ dirty work stops at the Islamic Republic’s frontiers.

The Agreements

Nothing makes this clearer than the cooperation agreement — two, in fact — senior German officials recently signed with the Israelis.

These were reported last week by German Foreign Policy, a website run by non-corporate journalists and scholars who report daily on “Germany’s renewed attempts to regain great power status in the economic, military and political arena,” as the website puts it. 

The site’s report on the new bilateral agreements appeared Wednesday under the salient headline, “Learning from the Gaza War.” It is here, for the time being only in German. (I am indebted to Christian Müller of Global Bridge for a translation.) 

In mid–January Alexander Dobrindt, the Federal Republic’s interior minister, convened in Jerusalem with Bibi Netanyahu to sign an agreement covering collaborations in “gray areas,” meaning military-civilian technologies. Israel is now to assist Germany in the construction of a “cyber dome,” an automated system to protect against digital attacks.

More to the point, the Israelis are to teach Germans how to use artificial intelligence based on the I.D.F.’s experience in Gaza, where, among other things, it used A.I. to identify targets, guide drones, and conduct remote assassinations.  

In mid–February Christian Freuding, whose title is Bundeswehr army inspector, traveled to Israel to sign a more extensive agreement with Nadav Lotan, a major-general in the I.D.F. and Freuding’s counterpart. The Freuding–Lotan agreement is a lot more operational and, to my mind, a lot more terrifying. 

Under this accord the I.D.F. will train the Bundeswehr based on the Zionist army’s Gaza campaign, with an emphasis on ground operations and such things as house-to-house maneuvers. It calls for joint military exercises and instruction in administrative matters such as how to integrate large numbers of reservists into a fighting force.

Are we surprised to learn that before concluding their accord Lotan treated Freuding to a helicopter tour of Gaza and the Israeli settlements on its perimeter that were attacked on Oct. 7, 2023?

Not I.

Bonn and, post–Wall, Berlin have been working with the Israelis up and down the scale—militarily, diplomatically, politically, with generous aid assistance—since 1952, four years after the Jewish state’s founding.

Since the early years of our century Germany’s devotion—exactly the term—to the Israeli cause has been considered a Staatsräson, an inalterable priority of the state, roughly. 

For many years this was understood to be all about Germany’s wartime guilt or the sense of responsibility shared among Germans or a common desire to atone or some combination of these three.

“When German politicians today talk about Israel it is from a moral standpoint,” Daniel Marwecki, the author of Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and State Building (Hurst, 2020), said in an interview after his book came out. “All the leading German politicians think it is morally the right thing to do because of the German past.”

But as the years went by and the Zionist regime’s barbaric persecution of the Palestinians became grotesquely routine, what was presumed to be and presented to the world as moral became unambiguously immoral.

By the count of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, good old SIPRI, roughly a third of Israel’s arms imports came from Germany in the five years to 2023. That year German weapons exports increased tenfold, to $355 million, most of these shipped after Oct. 7. 

This is hourglass upside-down. Since the genocide in Gaza began three autumns ago, as I argued two years ago this week, we are treated to the nonsensical spectacle of the Federal Republic supporting Israel’s daily atrocities in the name of assuming responsibility for the daily atrocities for which Germany was responsible in the past. 

“For the first time, the I.D.F. Ground Forces and the German Army have signed a formal cooperation agreement,” a Zionist blogger named John Meister notes in The Times of Israel. “It’s a move that marks a new chapter in the strategic military partnership between Israel and Germany.”

Indeed, and the telling feature of this new chapter, or one of them, is that there is no longer any pretense of the Germans supporting the Israeli regime as a matter of post–Reich morality.

No, it is the other way around now — the Israelis, with their battle-tested military technologies and their similarly proven techniques for mass murder, coming to the aid of the Germans. 

This is about power now, nothing more: I see no other plausible conclusion to draw since german-foreign-policy.com made these German–Israeli accords public. Moral imperatives, a righteous defense of the Jewish state, combatting anti–Semitism: Neither Germany nor the other Western powers act in behalf of any of these causes, if ever they did. 

In his Foreign Policy piece a year ago Ilyas Saliba wrote of the anxiety then mounting among German officials about Israel’s war crimes and Germany’s complicity in them. But he immediately noted the hypocrisy rampant at the time.

“They have continued to voice public support for Israel,” Saliba wrote. “Berlin has not publicly acknowledged that the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct in Gaza has amounted to violations of international law, let alone war crimes—even though the German government fears that’s the case.

To draw on the I.D.F.’s expertise in the techniques of extermination and the instruments used to commit it is the icing on this cake of bad faith. But this is Germany, this is the West.  

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon.  Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored. 

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