On February 27, 2022, three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood before the Bundestag and used a single word, Zeitenwende, turning point. What he announced that day wasn’t just a budget increase. Germany’s constitution, the Grundgesetz, was amended, a special fund of 100 billion euros was established for the Bundeswehr. On June 3, 2022, the Bundestag put it to a vote, 567 in favor, 96 against, 20 abstentions, only thirteen Green and Social Democrat lawmakers voting no. Because it required a constitutional amendment, a two-thirds majority in both chambers was necessary, and it was reached. For eighty years, the military had sat inside a restraint that was almost never questioned in Germany, a doxa built in the shadow of the Second World War, an assumption never up for debate. In a single day, that doxa formally ended.

Where this shift intersects with Israel isn’t only the Rafael-Volkswagen talks, it’s the latest link in a much older and much deeper relationship. Military cooperation between Germany and Israel began secretly in 1955, nine years before the two countries established formal diplomatic relations, right on the heels of the 1952 Luxembourg Reparations Agreement, known in German as Wiedergutmachung. That agreement itself was met with deep anger in Israel at the time, Menachem Begin called it, from the Knesset floor, a “revolting abomination” and “blood money,” riots broke out in the streets of Jerusalem that the army had to suppress, and the vote passed by a narrow margin, 60 to 51. Diplomatic relations were only formally established in 1965, under Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard. So the arms relationship came before the diplomacy, and grew out of reparations.

Netanyahu himself voiced the weight of that history last month in Jerusalem, after meeting with Chancellor Friedrich Merz. He said Germany no longer only defends Israel, that the Jewish state, eighty years after the Holocaust, now works for the defense of Germany, calling it a historical change. But the relationship hasn’t moved in a straight line. In August 2025, Germany imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel over concerns about its military conduct in Gaza, then lifted it that November. Asked about the episode, Merz said the decision had been directed at a particular situation, and that nothing had changed, before or after, in Germany’s basic approach to Israel’s security.

This same German-Israeli defense axis has a much darker story too, one that predates Rafael by years and resurfaced with........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)