“Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas terrorism,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared today. However, in response to Israel’s planned expansion of military operations, his government will now suspend all exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip. This marks a significant shift in German foreign policy — one driven more by domestic political pressures than by changes in geopolitical strategy.

Due to its Nazi past, Germany has a special relationship with Israel, shaped by moral responsibility for the Holocaust from which successive postwar governments have concluded that “Israel’s security is Germany’s reason of state.” What that means in practice has never been defined, but arms deliveries have long been seen as a means of shoring up Israel’s self-defence.

Between Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and May 2025, Germany approved arms exports to its ally worth €485 million. Prior to the war, German weapons amounted to 30% of Israel’s major arms imports between 2020 and 2023. So Merz’s announcement marks a significant turning point in German foreign policy, and it’s all the more surprising that it comes from a chancellor of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, a party that is strongly rooted in West Germany’s staunch support of Israel.

Merz says this change of course is a response to Israel’s plan to take control of Gaza City and to the “ongoing suffering of the civilian population in the Gaza Strip”, both of which “appear, in the view of the federal government, to be less and less concerned with achieving the aims” of freeing the hostages and removing the threat of Hamas. Yet, it’s likely that this pivot was driven by domestic concerns rather than a genuine change of heart.

A few weeks ago, Merz was still expressing gratitude for the “dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us”. But he was also the first German postwar chancellor to sharply criticise the country. In May, he stated he could not understand what the Israeli army was doing in Gaza and that the human suffering there “can no longer be justified by citing the fight against Hamas terrorism”.

Finally, the Chancellor has put words into action because internal pressure has been ramping up. Merz’s centre-left coalition partners in the SPD have been pushing for an arms embargo for some time. When he announced it on Friday, the immediate response of his Vice Chancellor from the SPD, Lars Klingbeil, was supportive. It is a show of unity that will be welcomed by the Chancellor.

Merz’s ruling coalition holds a narrow 12-seat majority. From the start, it was severely strained. In fact, it took him two attempts to win the necessary parliamentary vote to become chancellor — a process that is usually a formality. Since then, the uneasy alliance has come under further pressure over fundamental issues such as plans to reform Germany’s expensive benefits system and tackling illegal immigration. Most recently, the election of a high court judge failed because there was no majority in parliament for one of the proposed candidates.

Merz’s predecessor, Olaf Scholz, failed to hold his dysfunctional coalition together, which bolstered the rise of the Right-wing AfD. German centrists like Merz feel they have only one more chance to deliver tangible outcomes for voters before the country becomes ungovernable. Giving in to the Left-wingers in his coalition on Israel may feel like a comparatively low-cost compromise, strengthening goodwill in a political climate where this is increasingly hard to come by.

Merz will hope that stopping arms exports to Israel doesn’t do him political damage domestically. Yes, there is significant grumbling about this from within his own party, with the leader of its youth wing posting on X that “Israel is now doing our dirty work without German weapons.” But surveys indicate that the majority of Germans support a more critical stance. In a recent poll, two-thirds said that Israel had gone too far in its military response to 7 October. Over three-quarters said it was right for Merz to criticise Israel, and about the same proportion want arms exports to either stop fully or partially.

Merz’s pivot on German-Israeli relations may represent a fundamental shift in the country’s foreign policy outlook, but it is one that reflects deep-seated changes within Germany itself.

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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and writer. She is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.

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