For the past few months Germany has stood high in Arab opinions, not because of the quality of its products but because of its refusal to back the Bush administration in its belligerent stand toward Iraq. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s refusal to support any US-led invasion, even if endorsed by a UN motion, was seen as courageous, all the more so because it went against 40 years of German foreign policy.
The German government’s decision to now sell missiles to Israel and Schroeder’s justification that Germany has a "historic and moral duty" to do so undoes all that. It wipes out any admiration and raises questions as to whether the Iraq policy was anything more than a cheap electoral ploy.
The fact that the missiles in question are defensive rather than offensive and supposedly to help Israel withstand Scud missile attacks from Iraq makes no difference. It is not Israel that needs defending, it is the Palestinians. They are the ones who should be offered the means to protect themselves from daily attack. Israel is the aggressor. Under Ariel Sharon, it has embraced military force, terrorizing the Palestinians as never before. That is not merely an Arab view or a Muslim view; it is the view of most of the world; even Americans, even Germans agree. Thus, to offer the aggressor the means to defend itself at this particular juncture, when it is being so vicious, so vile to Palestinians who cannot defend themselves is repugnant. It is profoundly unjust, profoundly immoral.
Germans have an understandable guilt complex about the Jews because of the Holocaust, a guilt which the Israelis have exploited to the full. Arabs have understood that and not greatly challenged it, in part because it is recognized that the problem is something the Germans have to sort out for themselves, but even more so because it has not had any significant material bearing on the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis or between Israel and neighboring Arab states. It is the US that arms and sustains Israel, not Germany.
That is not to say that Arabs have not hoped that Germans might at last be able to put their past to rest and see for what they are, through unstained glasses, the gross injustices perpetrated by the Israelis on the Palestinians. Many in this part of the world imagined that moment to have arrived when Schroeder broke with the US over Iraq, although the accusations of anti-Semitism against Jurgen Mollemann, deputy leader of the centrist Free Democrats, over anti-Sharon remarks made by him and his forced resignation indicated that very little has in fact changed.
That is now proved with Schroeder’s sale. The additional fact that Israel already possesses Patriot missiles — as does Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Taiwan, Greece and, in the near future, Egypt — only makes matters worse. Clearly the Israelis are in a position to withstand attack from Iraqi Scuds. If not, the US would have already supplied them with extra Patriots. That means that this sale of six patriots is primarily diplomatic rather than practical — a deliberate gesture of support from Schroeder at a time when Germany is being pilloried in the Israeli and American press for being soft on Saddam. To please the Israelis (and the US with whom he is trying to rebuild bridges) the German chancellor is busy waving the Israeli flag and spouting forth about morality for all the world to see and hear. It is abhorrent.
