By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
1. Reflecting on German Obligations to Israel and to Palestinians, on the Occasion of the Death of Jürgen Habermas
For Jürgen Habermas, the Holocaust has always been a central topic. His thought on this subject has long been of great interest to me. His death is a suitable occasion to articulate some thoughts of my own about German responsibilities toward Israel and toward the Palestinian people—thoughts that are suitably developed in a Habermasian framework though I also go beyond what Habermas himself did with this framework.
Habermas, as I argued in my general assessment of his work, is the philosopher of the Federal Republic of Germany. How to think of the Holocaust is one central philosophical-constitutional challenge for the Federal Republic (also see here). So it would have behooved Habermas to address this challenge—and there is no better way of honoring his legacy than to reflect on that very challenge on the occasion of his death.
My main point here is this: The same historical reasons that ground a special German responsibility for the security and flourishing of Israel—and of course they very much do that—ipso facto ground broader duties at the level of humanity that can be understood within the framework of values of the German Basic Law. They also ground a special German responsibility for the security and flourishing of the Palestinian people.
Let me explain what leads me to this view, and why the Habermasian framework is the right way to address it. The question of what a responsible German attitude toward Israel should be at this stage of history has long been on my mind. I first encountered this challenge in my childhood, in Germany, where learning about National Socialism and the Holocaust was essential to the curriculum.
Making sense of how people with whom I share language, culture, and ancestry could commit such atrocities has become a major concern of my adult life as well. I have visited Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and many other pertinent places. I keep up with historical and political literature on Israel/Palestine. I take an active interest in understanding how different stakeholders see the situation—among many other things.
As a student, I lived for a year in Israel, to write my master’s thesis in mathematics under the supervision of Robert Aumann. Aumann is a distinguished mathematician who has since received the Nobel Prize in Economics and is also a well‑known representative of right‑leaning views in Israeli politics. The story of his life—one Jewish life across the 20th and into the 21st century—has been a great source of inspiration for me. Also, working with him on mathematical problems has been an intellectual highlight of my life.
The same historical reasons that ground a special German responsibility for the security and flourishing of Israel...ipso facto ground...a special German responsibility for the security and flourishing of the Palestinian people.
My stay in Israel had nothing to do with history but everything to do with Israel’s distinctive intellectual culture—in this case, indeed, in mathematics. To this day, Israel is the country where—other than the two countries where I am a citizen (Germany and the U.S.)—I have spent most time. But it was also during my stays there that I visited the occupied territories.
The Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, in appropriate ways as part of its comprehensive events schedule, has paid sustained attention to Israel/Palestine. We just rolled out a new series called “From Pain to Hope? Israel/Palestine in 2026.” (Also see here and here and here.) We are doing this because for many people this is the world’s most visible human rights conflict—but I am also personally invested in it, having spent time in the Middle East on many more occasions since my first time there.
The obligations I ascribe to Germans vis-à-vis Palestinians are not simply generic human-rights duties Germany owes to everyone. Nor are they symmetrical with the obligations to Jews and to Israel, which are primary and arise directly from the Holocaust. Rather, they are derivative special obligations that emerge from the historically specific way in which Germany and Europe discharged those primary duties.
By supporting the establishment and subsequent policies of a Jewish state in a territory already inhabited by Palestinians, and by continuing to back that state materially, diplomatically, and morally, Germany has helped shape the conditions of Palestinian dispossession and vulnerability.
A state that grounds its legitimacy in universalizable norms cannot coherently say that the burdens produced by its special responsibility to Jews may simply fall on those who happened to live in the territory where the Jewish homeland was established—a land Jews had long regarded as their ancestral home. To avoid offloading the costs of its own past to others, Germany bears not only general human-rights duties to Palestinians, but also particular duties of non-complicity, protection, and repair toward them.
At this stage, I find these broader implications of the German responsibility toward Israel insufficiently reflected in German politics, and painfully so. But generational changes seem to be in the process of changing German attitudes in this direction.
I believe Habermas’s framework for thinking about all this is basically sound. But I also use it to articulate responsibilities toward Palestinians in ways he decidedly and deliberately did not do—which was a matter of some controversy (also see here). Among philosophers such a critical expansion of a framework is a way of paying respect—and is at the same time open to contestation from within the Habermasian framework. Systematic critical assessment of this framework is not my concern here. (Also see my earlier commentary on the situation in Israel/Palestine in the context of a possible demise of universalism.)
To ask about German responsibilities toward Israel and Palestinians of course simply is, inescapably, to ask a Habermasian question: How can a democratic political community relate to its own catastrophic past without either repressing guilt or drowning present judgment in sacralized memory?
Habermas’s intervention in the so‑called Historikerstreit (dispute among historians) of the 1980s remains the clearest formulation of this problem: the Holocaust is historically and normatively central for German self‑understanding; any attempt to “normalize” it by folding it quietly into a general history of twentieth‑century brutality is politically and morally dangerous.
I agree with Habermas on this point. The Holocaust must remain at the center of German historical consciousness and of a specifically German “constitutional patriotism.” That stance implies a special relationship to Jews around the world—and to Israel in particular.
Fidelity to that insight, however, does not require indifference to other genocides, nor does it absolve Germans of strong, simultaneously binding obligations to Palestinians. Quite the contrary. It is precisely a Habermasian understanding of the past that should sharpen our sense of what we owe to Palestinians today.
Could not my argument be used to question and perhaps even dilute the uniqueness of Germany’s moral relationship with Israel? The response to that concern must be that the German moral relationship and the uniqueness of its relationship with Israel—which of course is grounded in the Holocaust in ways that I fully endorse—should always have been seen in a larger regional context. This regional context becomes especially important now that Israel is such a formidable regional power, certainly far beyond what was the case when Habermas first engaged in the Historikerstreit.
Moreover, the Federal Republic of Germany has increasingly become a migration society. Today, many German citizens have roots far from Europe and families who had no part in National Socialism. Any account of German responsibility in 2026 must therefore speak both to those whose family histories reach back through 1933–45 (like my own, touched on a bit here) and to those who have joined this political community more recently. It must explain not only why the Holocaust matters, but what it means to carry forward its lessons in a plural, post‑war, post‑migrant Germany.
In that sense of course our contemporary questions are somewhat different from the questions that motivated Habermas’s original intervention in the Historikerstreit.
Much of what I have to say carries over to the global context: the obligations I describe are not only German. And what I have to say is very much informed by the American context in which I operate. But in light of the Holocaust these matters do pose special issues for Germans.
In any event, the immediate occasion for writing is the death of the Federal Republic of Germany’s most distinguished philosopher on March 14, 2026.
2. Habermas, the Historikerstreit, and the Question of Uniqueness
Habermas’s basic criticism of Ernst Nolte and other conservative historians in the Historikerstreit can be distilled into two claims.
First, he insisted that the Holocaust occupies a unique place in German history and identity. This was directed against attempts to tell a “normalizing” story of the 20th century, where Nazi crimes appear as just one—albeit particularly severe—episode in a general history of ideological mass murder.
Habermas did not deny that comparison is legitimate. His objection was to a certain kind of comparison: one that treats Auschwitz primarily as a “reaction” to Bolshevik violence—and then moves on, abandoning the moral insight the Federal Republic was supposed to draw from its past.
Second, Habermas argued that a democratic Germany can only build a defensible political identity if it chooses a verfassungspatriotisch (constitutionally patriotic) path: identifying not with national greatness or a sanitized past, but with the liberal democratic principles of its Basic Law. Memory of Auschwitz is not to be “processed” and filed away. That memory is to become a durable background against which Germans measure the legitimacy of institutions and policies.
To place this in a broader frame, it helps to distinguish three things:
Guilt is backward‑looking and individual: it attaches to those who planned, ordered, or actively facilitated Nazi crimes.
Responsibility, in the sense that matters here, is forward‑looking and collective: it concerns what we, as members of a political community, must now do in light of those crimes and their ongoing consequences.
Uniqueness claims assert something about the Holocaust as an event: that in some sense it is without parallel.
Talk about the uniqueness of the Holocaust has proceeded in at least three ways:
Empirical Distinctiveness: The Holocaust combined an explicitly exterminatory intent with industrialized killing and a continent‑wide bureaucracy, under a racial ideology that left no room for conversion or submission as a way out. In that combination it is historically specific.
Moral Ranking: Uniqueness sometimes slides into the claim that the Holocaust is the absolute worst crime in history, to which comparison with any other atrocity is almost insulting.
Symbolic Centrality: In Germany and much of Europe, the Holocaust has become the central moral reference point for thinking about genocide, racism, and state violence.
It is reasonable, and arguably morally required, for Germans to affirm the Holocaust’s historical specificity and its central symbolic place in their memory culture. It reveals, with terrifying clarity, what modern bureaucratic states can do when racism, nationalism, and technocratic rationality combine.
But if uniqueness is taken to put the Holocaust beyond all comparison, the result is often morally and politically pernicious. It can encourage a ranking of suffering, as if Armenians, Roma, Cambodians, Tutsi, or others have endured something categorically “less.” It can also be used to shield contemporary policies from critique: if the Holocaust is utterly unique, then whatever is done “because of the Holocaust” is treated as beyond normal moral evaluation.
A more defensible stance—one that fits Habermas’s position, draws on the plausible elements of all three views above, and that I call Moral Distinctiveness—is this:
For Germans, the Holocaust should be normatively central. It grounds a special responsibility toward Jews and Jewish life that no other nation bears in the same way. At the same time, the norms it reveals—the equal moral worth of persons, the wrongness of dehumanization, the dangers of unchecked state power—are universal in scope. They bind what may be done to anyone, including Palestinians. One can honor the Holocaust’s centrality without turning it into a monopoly on moral significance that leaves other victims outside the circle.
The point of resisting “normalization” is not to monopolize victimhood—it is to ensure that the specific link between German state power and the attempt to annihilate European Jewry is never forgotten, excused, or bracketed. That, for Habermas, is the precondition of an honest democratic patriotism.
Moral Distinctiveness has a number of implications that I spell out here. Palestinians enter this discussion not merely in the generic sense that “universal norms apply to all.” Moral Distinctiveness generates a particular obligation to the security and flourishing of Israel, as a place where Jews and Jewish life can be safe.
But the modern state of Israel arose in a territory where—over centuries, and before large‑scale Jewish settlement from the late 19th century onward—others had lived and built their own connections to the land. To the extent that measures to build a secure and flourishing Israel have negatively affected those people (the Palestinians), Moral Distinctiveness also generates particular obligations toward them. Let me now develop that implication into a formal argument.
3. The Offloading Argument: From German Duties to Israel to German Duties to Palestinians
The details matter, so I proceed carefully here, identifying the premises needed to support the conclusion that Germany has a duty to support Palestinian security and flourishing.
P1. Because of the Holocaust, Germans bear a special duty to help ensure that Jews can live in security and flourishing, including through support for a state capable of providing Jewish collective self-defense (namely, Israel).
P2. The realization of that state is historically entangled with Palestinian displacement, dispossession, and subjection through a specific and traceable causal chain: European antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust—for which Germany bears primary responsibility—generated the refugee crisis and the moral urgency that made Jewish statehood both politically necessary and internationally legitimate. While the specific decisions about location and terms were made by British, Zionist, and international actors, Palestinian harm was a foreseeable and structurally persistent consequence of that chain of events, one that Germany has further reinforced through continued material, diplomatic, and moral support for Israel.
P3. A special duty not to offload—distinct from generic humanitarian duties—arises when all of the following conditions jointly hold:
- An agent has a special duty to promote the security and flourishing of one group;
- Discharge of that duty causes or contributes to serious harm to another group;
- The harm is foreseeable, significant, and structurally persistent—not a merely incidental or transient side effect;
- The agent bears meaningful, non-remote moral responsibility for the causal chain producing that harm;
- The agent continues to actively support the arrangements that perpetuate the harm.
P4. All five conditions are satisfied in the German-Palestinian case:
- from P1;
- as established in P2;
- Palestinian dispossession has been foreseeable since the earliest large-scale Zionist settlement debates, affects millions of people, and is structurally ongoing through occupation, statelessness, and blockade;
- Germany bears the primary responsibility for the Holocaust, which created the conditions making Jewish statehood both urgent and internationally legitimate, and Germany has continued to support the political and military arrangements that produce Palestinian vulnerability;
- Germany actively provides material support, diplomatic backing, and moral legitimation to Israel to this day.
P5. An agent that meets conditions (i)–(v) cannot coherently claim the moral authority of special obligation to the first group while treating costs imposed on the second group as morally routine. The very logic that generates the special duty to the first group applies with analogous force to the second. A passive historical cause might owe only non-interference; but an agent who actively and continuously sustains harm-producing arrangements cannot discharge its responsibility by merely refraining from adding new harms—it must actively work to undo what its ongoing involvement perpetuates. To avoid offloading therefore requires actively supporting the security and flourishing of those who bear the costs.
C. Therefore, the very reasons that ground a special German duty to support Israel's security also ground a special German duty—not a merely generic humanitarian one—to support Palestinian security and flourishing as well.
This is not an optional “addition” to German responsibilities: it follows from taking Habermas’s universalism and German history seriously.
To avoid offloading the costs of its own past to others, Germany bears not only general human-rights duties to Palestinians, but also particular duties of non-complicity, protection, and repair toward them.
Habermas himself, to be clear, did not take his own framework into this direction. His concern was to provide a philosophical grounding of German obligations toward Israel. My addition to his thinking is that, as one thinks through this framework, more expansive obligations toward the Palestinian people appear than he himself wanted to articulate.
To be sure, it is consistent with what I have argued here that Germany’s specific obligations to Israel are stronger than those to the Palestinian people, in at least three respects.
First, they are more direct: the Holocaust was executed on German soil, creating an unmediated causal and moral link between German state power and the near-annihilation of European Jewry that has no parallel in Germany’s relationship to Palestinian suffering.
Second, they are of longer standing and more institutionally entrenched: Germany’s commitment to Israel’s existence is embedded in its foreign policy, its legal frameworks, and its memory culture in ways that obligations to Palestinians are not. And of course, the state of Israel did not come into existence because of the Holocaust—Jewish migration with the intention of founding a state had been in progress for decades. That point somewhat complicates the matter of specifically German obligations toward Palestinians. (For instance, one could not argue here that Germany should just have ceded part of its own territory to the founding of a new state—the choice of location had long been made.)
Third, they are less mediated: the duty to support Jewish security and flourishing follows directly from the Holocaust, whereas the duty to Palestinians is derivative—real and binding, but one step further removed in the chain of moral reasoning.
But notice that this derivative status does not reduce these obligations to generic human-rights duties: what makes them special is precisely the offloading argument developed above. Germany cannot discharge a primary duty to one people in ways that structurally burden another, and then treat its responsibilities to that other people as not different from its responsibilities to humanity at large.
In any event, two things are also quite clear. The first is the basic moral point that German support for Israel ought not to translate into actions that would condemn the Palestinian people to a level below basic human decency. The second is the observation that there will never be peace in the Middle East, and thus Israel will never be both safe and prosperous, unless the Palestinian people too are offered stable conditions that enable security and flourishing.
On both grounds, German obligations toward Israel imply obligations toward the Palestinian people, obligations to their security and flourishing—obligations that have remained widely unrecognized so far. What these obligations concretely amount to will also depend on Palestinian agency, including the role of Hamas, the internal divisions of Palestinian politics, and the ways in which Palestinian decisions have shaped the conflict. But this is a matter that I cannot further pursue here.
4. What Follows from Moral Distinctiveness for a German Attitude toward Israel?
Moral Distinctiveness is not merely an abstract philosophical position—it has direct practical implications. It generates, on the one hand, a special German stance toward Israel that cannot be reduced to generic concerns for human rights anywhere; and on the other hand, for precisely the same reasons, a special stance toward the Palestinian people. I take up each in turn now.
Against this backdrop, what does it mean for Germany to have responsibility for Israel?
To begin with, it means the existence of a Jewish state—a polity in which Jews are collective agents of their own security—cannot be morally neutral for Germans. In the wake of a genocide planned and carried out from German soil, the fact that there is a state capable of guaranteeing Jewish self‑defense has special significance. And this would have to be a state that is secure and flourishing.
To that extent, the oft‑invoked formula that Israel’s security is part of Germany’s “reason of state” captures a genuine Habermasian insight: a Germany that refused to care about Israel’s continued existence (as a secure and flourishing country) would be a Germany that had failed to integrate Auschwitz into its self‑understanding.
But here Habermas’s other commitments also matter. A “constitutional patriotism” grounded in the Basic Law and human rights does not support the sacralization of any particular state’s policies, including Israel’s. Habermas has always linked the lesson of the Holocaust to a universalistic conception of law and rights. The horrors of 1933–45 revealed something about the capacity of modern states to turn legal and administrative apparatuses into instruments of radical exclusion and extermination. The appropriate lesson is not “never again against us alone” (as in, our group must never again be the victim) but “never again by a state that claims to speak in our name.”
The Basic Law internalizes that lesson in the form of justiciable rights and institutional checks. To treat Israel as exempt from similar standards would be to betray the very universalism that gives the German confrontation with its past its moral content.
A Habermasian stance toward Israel, then, does indeed have two sides: On the one hand, it recognizes a special historical and symbolic obligation: Germans cannot regard Israel’s existence as just one contingent fact among others. They owe Jews in Israel a particular concern that grows out of their own history of persecution and extermination. On the other hand, that concern must be articulated in the language of law, rights, and democratic legitimacy, not in the language of unconditional ethnic solidarity.
Accordingly, what Germans owe Israel is not a blank check to any government in power in Jerusalem. Instead, what Germans owe is a combination of support for Israel’s right to exist and to defend its population against real threats; and insistence that such self‑defense be conducted under the discipline of international humanitarian law and human rights, as Germans themselves claim to be bound.
This is the line Habermas held in the Historikerstreit: taking one’s own crimes with absolute seriousness without abandoning aspirations to a universalistic political morality.
5. Responsibilities Toward Palestinians
Once we see things in these terms, obligations to Palestinians do not compete with obligations to Israel (at least not in terms of philosophical foundations though they of course well do so politically and otherwise practically)—they flow from the same source.
If the central Habermasian lesson from the Holocaust is that the legal and administrative power of the state must be constrained by norms that protect the equal worth of all persons subject to it, then that lesson applies also—and perhaps especially—to those living under occupation, blockade, or domination without full political rights.
Responsibilities to Palestinians in fact arise in several ways.
First, there are causal and complicity‑based responsibilities. Palestinians are directly affected by a state that Germany supports materially, diplomatically, and morally. When German weapons, training, and political backing are involved, Germany is not a neutral bystander. It becomes indirectly complicit in how that power is used and shares responsibility for foreseeable harms to civilians who live under occupation, blockade, or repeated large‑scale military operations.
Second, responsibilities shaped by memory culture itself. The way Germany institutionalizes Holocaust remembrance has structural consequences for Palestinians. If “Never Again” is effectively interpreted as “Never again for us, even if it means grave and enduring harm for others,” or if it becomes a tool for branding robust advocacy for Palestinian rights as suspect or antisemitic by default, then Palestinians are implicitly placed outside the moral community that German memory culture claims to serve. Their suffering becomes narratively secondary and normatively marginal.
That exclusion is itself a form of injustice for which Germans bear responsibility. I am often astonished how hard it is to articulate this point in German debates.
Third, there are responsibilities drawing on historical entanglements. Palestinian displacement and statelessness are historically entangled with European and German histories: with European antisemitism, the emergence of Zionism, colonial partitions, post‑war refugee policies, arms transfers, and Cold War alignments. To insist Germans have no special responsibilities here is, at best, selective memory. Taking history seriously means acknowledging that the European “Jewish question” was not resolved but, in part, externalized—and that those who live with the consequences are not only Israelis but also Palestinians.
A Habermasian account would insist that those affected by the exercise of coercive power should be able, in principle, to regard themselves as participants in the justification of the norms that govern them. In the domestic context this leads to the discourse theory of law and democracy: rights and democratic procedures are “co‑original” because only citizens whose basic freedoms are protected can regard themselves as co‑authors of the law.
In the Israeli/Palestinian context, this logic has implications for German responsibility:
Germans should be wary of any arrangement—de facto annexation, indefinite occupation without political rights, systematic two‑tier citizenship—in which Palestinians are structurally excluded from any plausible role as co‑authors of norms that rule their lives. To support—materially, diplomatically, or morally—a permanent regime of domination that denies millions of Palestinians meaningful political participation would be hard to reconcile with the universalistic lessons Germany claims to draw from its past.
Germans have responsibilities to Palestinians as rights bearers, not only as objects of humanitarian concern. It is not enough to support reconstruction in Gaza or to fund refugee services while treating the underlying political structure—absence of Palestinian self‑determination, realities of occupation and settlement—as an unfortunate but morally secondary backdrop. The same insistence on law‑bound state power and equal respect that structures Germany’s constitutional order should inform its expectations of a state it supports in Israel/Palestine.
We can distinguish, more explicitly, the kinds of duties that arise here:
Negative duties: not to contribute—through arms, diplomatic cover, or silence—to structures that systematically deny Palestinians basic rights or political participation.
Positive duties: to use diplomatic influence, economic tools, and international fora to help ensure that Palestinians’ security, freedom of movement, and basic livelihood are protected.
Duties of repair: to acknowledge and, as much as possible, mitigate the ways in which European and German policies have contributed to Palestinian dispossession or statelessness.
Responsibility to Palestinians, then, involves at least three concrete commitments: to acknowledge their suffering and their rights as fully real, not derivative of someone else’s narrative; to resist tendencies to see them primarily as a security problem rather than as rights‑bearing human beings; and to ensure that German policies do not treat Palestinian life as less worth grieving for or less worthy of protection than Jewish or Israeli life. (See again my earlier commentary.)
On the long-term prudential front, German foreign policy should always be guided by the basic insight that there will never be peace in the Middle East unless the Palestinian people can live decent lives. German historical responsibility generates an obligation to help make sure that happens. (To be clear: I take it that long-term prudential considerations reinforce the points about moral obligations, which would have priority in cases of doubt.)
In that sense, one can fully affirm Habermas’s warning against normalizing the Holocaust and still say: other genocides have occurred, other mass atrocities are real, and the structures of domination under which Palestinians live engage precisely the concerns about state power, dehumanization, and exclusion that German memory culture was meant to sensitize us to.
6. New Germans, Old Responsibilities
These matters now arise in a Germany that has changed demographically. Many German citizens have come to Germany after 1945 or are children or grandchildren of those who did. Their families may have endured other histories of injustice—colonialism, civil war, dictatorship, migration. They are not descendants of these particular perpetrators; many are themselves targets of racism and exclusion in contemporary Europe.
What responsibility for Israel and for Palestinians can we reasonably ascribe to them?
Here the distinction between guilt and responsibility helps. Newer Germans are not personally guilty of Nazi crimes. Nor are they symbolically tied to them by ancestry. But they are citizens in a polity that has taken on certain obligations: to Holocaust remembrance, to the security of Jewish life, to the existence of Israel, and, more generally, to human rights. To become a German citizen is, among other things, to enter an ongoing, shared project of memory and responsibility.
It is precisely a Habermasian understanding of the past that should sharpen our sense of what we owe to Palestinians today.
This does not demand emotional identification with German suffering or genealogical continuity with the perpetrators. But it does mean learning about the Holocaust and antisemitism; understanding why Jews in Germany and in Israel experience German actions and silences in certain ways; and accepting some share in the forward‑looking responsibilities the country has adopted.
At the same time, a serious German memory culture must allow the histories and traumas of immigrants and their descendants to appear, rather than treating them as irrelevant to “real” history. It must avoid turning the Holocaust into an instrument for disciplining immigrants politically, especially those with connections to the Middle East. It must show how the universal claims of “Never Again” apply to all victims of dehumanization and mass violence, not only to Jews then and now.
For newer Germans, responsibility for Israel and Palestinians is therefore not about inherited guilt—it is about navigating the ethical commitments of the polity they have joined, and about insisting that these commitments be applied coherently and inclusively.
Other questions too arise in this context about the German role in world history, including questions about the German role in European colonialism that predate the time when Germany acquired its own colonies. (See my podcast from December 2024 with Tiffany Florvil, author of Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement.) But these are complexities we need not explore here.
7. Uniqueness of the Holocaust, Other Genocides, and the Scope of “Never Again”
What does Moral Distinctiveness mean for other genocides? This question takes us back to the universal part of the obligations arising from the Holocaust.
Habermas never denied that there have been other genocides. His quarrel in the Historikerstreit was with the use of comparison as a way of relativizing German responsibilities, not with comparison as such. One can and should acknowledge that the Armenian genocide, the Porajmos (Romani for something like devouring) against the Roma and Sinti, the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, and other atrocities are genocides in a robust sense of the term, without abandoning the claim that, for Germans, Auschwitz has a unique constitutional status.
In practical terms, that means two things.
First, Germans should support the investigation, recognition, and commemoration of other genocides, including those for which European powers (Germany among them) bear colonial or post‑colonial responsibility. A memory culture that recognizes only one set of victims has already betrayed its universalistic aspiration.
Second, and crucially, Germans should resist the temptation to use the Holocaust’s uniqueness as a shield against criticism of present policy. It is entirely coherent to say, “Because of what happened to Jews here, we bear a special responsibility to Jews and to Israel,” and, in the same breath, “Because of what we learned about how states can go wrong, we also bear responsibilities to others who now live under domination and systematic exclusion, including Palestinians.”
The right response to the risk of relativization is not to declare the Holocaust incomparable in every respect, but to insist that its central moral and political lessons are general in scope. To universalize is not to trivialize. Instead, it is to take the insight seriously enough that one allows it to constrain one’s conduct beyond the original case.
8. Antisemitism, Criticism of Israel, and the Politics of Blacklisting
Sections 8 and 9 move from philosophical discussion to more distinctly political applications. To begin with, debates about responsibility are inseparable from debates about antisemitism and its boundaries. In Germany, as elsewhere, two definitions have become particularly salient: the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism and the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.
The IHRA definition, widely adopted by European governments as well as by the U.S. government, offers a broad working definition with a list of examples, several of which concern Israel—for example, applying double standards to Israel by requiring of it a behavior not expected of any other democratic nation, or denying the Jewish people their right to self‑determination by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
This approach has strengths. It recognizes that contemporary antisemitism frequently travels through coded speech about Israel and “global Jewry,” and it has practical value for training officials and educators.
The risks of using this definition lie in its use, which on balance have made it troubling especially for human rights organizations. In practice it is sometimes, in fact too often, interpreted as implying that sharp criticism of Israeli policies, of Zionism, or of the foundational structures of the Israeli state is antisemitic by definition. In Germany in particular, but also in the United States, this has contributed to a chilling effect on Palestinian advocacy, academic work, and cultural expression; institutions have treated a non‑binding working definition as if it were quasi‑binding law.
The Jerusalem Declaration (JDA), drafted by scholars of antisemitism and Jewish studies, aims to clarify matters conceptually. It defines antisemitism as discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish). JDA then offers concrete examples of antisemitic speech, including about Israel, alongside examples of speech that, however controversial, is not antisemitic—such as support for various constitutional arrangements between river and sea, or opposition to Zionism as a political ideology.
The JDA’s strength is that it protects space for robust political critique, including anti‑Zionist positions, while still condemning antisemitic stereotypes and calls for discrimination or expulsion. Its critics worry that it underestimates how easily antisemitic motifs can slip into ostensibly political critique.
A responsible German approach should ideally not treat IHRA and the JDA as rival banners to be waved against each other. It should use the IHRA text where it genuinely exposes antisemitic patterns, and the Jerusalem Declaration where it reminds institutions that criticism of Israeli policy and solidarity with Palestinians are not in themselves antisemitic and must not be suppressed under that label. But if a choice must be made, politically or pragmatically, my sense is that JDA is far more sensible (in light of the difficulties in applying the IHRA account without stifling criticism of Israel).
The stakes of these definitional battles become visible when one looks at initiatives such as Project Esther in the United States and Canary Mission. Project Esther presents itself as a national strategy to combat antisemitism. In practice, however, it tends to collapse much pro‑Palestinian activism, especially on campuses, into a supposed “support network” for terrorism. It proposes using security language, visa policy, funding cuts, and purges of curricula to dismantle this alleged network, while focusing overwhelmingly on left‑wing and student activism and giving comparatively little attention to right‑wing or Christian nationalist antisemitism.
Canary Mission is an anonymously run website that compiles dossiers on students, academics, and activists whom it labels as antisemites or “terror supporters.” It collects social‑media posts, petitions, photos, and quotations, often out of context, and publishes them in searchable form with the explicit aim of damaging the subjects’ future employment and reputations. In doing so, it frequently conflates pro‑Palestinian or anti‑Zionist speech with antisemitism, without clear and publicly accountable standards, without a right of reply, and without any mechanism for recognizing change or error.
But in any event, Project Esther and Canary Mission are examples of a broader blacklist mentality. This mentality is also reflected, for instance, in Trump’s Executive Order 13899 that directed federal agencies to use civil‑rights law to treat some opposition to Israel, especially challenges to its status as a “Jewish nation‑state,” as potential antisemitic discrimination, or in the fact that the Trump government’s attacks against Harvard have been driven by accusations of campus antisemitism and featured from the beginning something like an “Antisemitism watchlist” that included all three of Harvard’s human rights centers.
In these cases, “antisemitism” is deployed not as a concept for understanding and combating hatred of Jews, but as a political weapon for stigmatizing and intimidating critics of Israeli policy and suppressing Palestine advocacy.
From the standpoint of German responsibility, such approaches are deeply troubling (as obviously they also are from an American standpoint, see my earlier Crimson piece and also this and this.)
They cheapen the concept of antisemitism by stretching it to cover wide swathes of dissent. They undermine academic freedom and democratic debate, especially for students and scholars with Palestinian or Arab backgrounds. And they obscure the continuing danger of right‑wing and white‑supremacist antisemitism, which historically has been responsible for the worst crimes against Jews and remains a grave threat. (On this, also see here.)
In these cases, “antisemitism” is deployed not as a concept for understanding and combating hatred of Jews, but as a political weapon for stigmatizing and intimidating critics of Israeli policy and suppressing Palestine advocacy.
If Germans are serious about their responsibility to combat antisemitism, to support Israel’s existence, and simultaneously to take Palestinian rights seriously, they should resist importing blacklist models like Canary Mission or Project Esther’s style of securitized crackdown. They should insist that definitions of antisemitism and the policies built upon them distinguish, case by case, between hatred of Jews as Jews, or calls for their exclusion, and critical engagement with Israeli state power and Zionist ideology.
They should combat antisemitism wherever it appears, including on the far right and in Christian nationalist milieus, rather than focusing almost exclusively on campus leftists and Muslim youth (all of whom seem to understand the difference between hatred against Jews and criticisms of Israel on balance fairly well, see again here). And they should ensure that tools meant to protect Jews do not become instruments of new injustices against anyone.
9. Some Comments on Specific Issues and Vocabulary
A Habermasian commitment to discursive democracy does not stop at institutional design—it also governs the terms in which public debate is conducted. How we use contested words and symbols is not merely a semantic question: it shapes who is heard, whose grievances are legible, and whose suffering can be named.
For Germans who take their responsibilities seriously, a Habermasian approach therefore recommends case‑by‑case interpretation, attention to context—and a presumption in favor of discursive openness rather than premature moral closure. Let me go through some pertinent questions that arise here.
Should Germans Support or Reject Zionism?
At its core, Zionism is about creating a polity where Jews are safe and can exercise collective self‑determination. That is unquestionably positive, especially in light of the history of persecution and extermination in Europe. Since that polity has been created in a location where others, too, have lived for a very long time, the Palestinian people too need a polity where they are safe in that very area.
From a German standpoint, it is reasonable and morally required to affirm the legitimacy of Jewish self‑determination and the existence of a Jewish homeland, while also insisting that this cannot justify permanent domination, dispossession, or rightlessness for Palestinians.
Whether the just political form is best pursued in one, two, or three states is a separate matter on which I do not comment here. What matters is whether any concrete political project respects the equal moral status and basic rights of everyone subject to its power.
Is It Per Se Antisemitic or Otherwise Illegitimate to Talk about Occupied Territories or Apartheid?
The UN and most states continue to think of both Gaza and the West Bank as occupied territories because since 1967 Israel has maintained extensive control over borders, airspace, and many economic and political possibilities there. “Occupation” here is a legal and political term, not a slur. Its use does not presuppose that Israeli security forces have been constantly present everywhere on the ground throughout.
“Apartheid” is also a term of international law. Contemporary usage roughly designates three elements: (1) an intent to maintain domination by one group over another; (2) systematic oppression; and (3) inhumane acts or acts of cruelty in service of that domination. International human‑rights organizations (also see here) and Israeli human‑rights organizations (as well as the UN and Palestinian civil society) have argued that this term is appropriate in any event for the occupied territories.
Obviously, one may disagree with the application of “apartheid” to Israel/Palestine on factual or analytical grounds. But there is nothing per se antisemitic or otherwise illegitimate about debating the matter or taking a stance on it. From a German perspective, the question should be: in specific cases, are such terms being used in a reason‑giving, evidence‑based way, or as mere demonizing rhetoric?
What to Make of the Term “Genocide” in the Context of Israel’s Military Activities in Gaza?
The notion of genocide is vexingly complicated, both jurisprudentially and empirically, because it requires, among other things, an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. Dramatic losses of civilian life, however appalling, do not by themselves settle this question of genocidal intent.
The International Court of Justice has seen enough plausibility in the claim that it has allowed proceedings to go forward and has issued provisional measures. Moreover, over time more and more experts have seen this charge as well-grounded.
From a Habermasian perspective, two things follow. First, using the term “genocide” in this context is a legitimate matter of political and legal argument and cannot be ruled out of bounds a priori. Second, the term should be used carefully and with an awareness of its gravity: inflating it into a mere synonym for “large‑scale killing” risks undermining its ability to name specific patterns of state violence elsewhere, including those historically perpetrated by European powers.
We should also be highly mindful of the symbolic and emotional weight that terms like “occupation,” “apartheid,” and especially “genocide” carry in Jewish communities, particularly when juxtaposed with Holocaust memory (and thus the kind of memory that I myself had the honor to explore with a Holocaust survivor in early 2025 on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz). That is why careful, non‑sloganistic debate is necessary. Cordoning off these terms in advance, however, is incompatible with honest discourse.
What Can We Do with References to Indigeneity in This Context?
We sometimes hear that Jews are the indigenous occupants of the territory. We also hear that the Jews arrived in the 19th century to colonize the indigenous Palestinian population.
There is truth to both perspectives, but use of this terminology is importantly different from usage elsewhere, such that it might just be better to avoid this kind of talk altogether and focus on the pertinent issues in other ways. Jews first inhabited the territory in Biblical times and were then expelled by the Romans in the Second Century CE—though it seems Jews have continued to be present, one way or another. And they certainly never ceased to see the territory as their homeland.
But by the time large-scale Jewish migration started, in the late 19th century, other people had lived there for centuries. From their point of view, the arrival of increasingly large groups of Jews was very much like colonization elsewhere.
Typical cases of colonization of indigenous territories are the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. White people took those territories without any prior connection to the territory whatsoever, and they took it from the population that had inhabited the lands for a long time before. Israel/Palestine is importantly different from these scenarios.
What is clear is that both Jews and Palestinians can make ancestral claims of sorts to this territory. But what is also clear is that they have now both lived there for many decades. The deeper difficulty is that historical claims of this kind can only resolve present conflicts if both sides accept auxiliary assumptions required to give those claims decisive weight—and in this case, neither side’s foundational assumptions command sufficient acceptance from the other to settle anything.
What matters morally and politically is the present reality: two peoples, both with deep connections to the land, both requiring security and flourishing, and both entitled to political arrangements that protect their equal worth as persons. That is the terrain on which a Habermasian approach insists we must work.
Symbols and Slogans
A further feature of debates about Israel/Palestine is that words, phrases, and symbols are used differently by different participants. This is certainly true of terms such as Zionism, occupation, apartheid, indigeneity, and genocide that we already discussed. But it is also true of expressions such as “from the river to the sea,” graphic symbols like red triangles (see here for a recent example in Germany where such triangles were central to protests against a Palestinian artist), pieces of clothing like the keffiyeh, or the respective flags of either Israel or Palestine.
For some, these are calls for liberation, independence, self-assertion, or equality; for the respective others, they are heard as calls for expulsion or elimination, or as calls for continued oppression and cruelty.
Here, too, careful attention to detail is needed. But one should approach these matters with the understanding that both sides must be given room to articulate grief, to name past wrongdoing (even where contested) without automatically being accused of fostering violence or aiding and abetting terrorism, or to assert their right to security, well-being, and collective self-determination in some political shape or form.
A blanket criminalization of slogans, without attention to how they are used and interpreted in specific contexts, sits uneasily with a commitment to discursive democracy.
This does not mean that any usage is acceptable. A slogan explicitly paired with calls for killing civilians or expelling populations obviously crosses a line. But the appropriate response is to criticize, and where necessary legally address, those concrete incitements—not to foreclose entire vocabularies whenever they appear in certain spaces.
One‑sided References and Commemorations
Finally, after decades of trauma in this conflict, it will have to be acceptable on occasion to focus on Palestinian victims without always, in the same breath, rehearsing the responsibility of Hamas; just as it must be acceptable to focus on Israeli victims without simultaneously recounting the major injustices Palestinians have suffered.
It must be permissible to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians “by itself,” even to the extent that this also raises accusations against Israel. Such acknowledgement should not automatically be regarded as antisemitic, or as endorsements of terrorism—it should be understood, in the first instance, as pro‑Palestinian.
Symmetrically, acknowledging the suffering of Israeli Jews “by itself” is not anti‑Palestinian. A mature memory culture allows for asymmetrical moments of mourning and recognition, within an overall framework that insists on the full humanity of all parties.
What is not acceptable, from a Habermasian and German perspective, is to use one group’s suffering as a reason to deny the other group a voice in the public justification of the norms that govern their lives. These groups themselves might be in the midst of dealing with too much grief to be able to attend to these matters. But on the whole, as a polity, Germany should be able to create space for Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, other Arabs, sympathizers of Palestinians and other groups to articulate their concerns.
That such a tolerant attitude might also give rise to abuse goes without saying. Again, it is judgment in context that is required, without predetermination or blanket advance condemnation.
10. Concluding Thoughts: Double Fidelity under New Conditions
Taken together, a Habermasian account yields a demanding but coherent attitude for Germans in 2026 and beyond.
It begins by affirming the central place of the Holocaust in German self‑understanding and rejecting efforts, old or new, to normalize or relativize it away. It accepts that this generates specific obligations to support the existence and security of Israel and to combat antisemitism vigilantly.
At the same time, it insists that the norms internalized in the Basic Law—human rights, rule of law, respect for the equal moral status of all persons under state power—are universal in scope. They apply to Palestinians under Israeli control, to victims of other genocides, and to those silenced or blacklisted in the name of fighting antisemitism. It refuses to let the memory of Auschwitz be instrumentalized in support of a politics that denies other people a voice or treats their suffering as narratively and normatively secondary.
To Palestinians, Germans also have more specific obligations. In fact, to the extent that Germany has obligations to help safeguard the security and well‑being of Israel, it also has obligations to do the same for Palestinians. After all, the basis for this obligation toward Israel is the Holocaust. To the extent that the Holocaust grounds obligations to safeguard a particular territory as a place of safety for Jews, those who have been displaced or structurally marginalized also need to have their security and well‑being protected.
Without acknowledging such duties, Germans would place burdens of their own obligations onto the Palestinians. That these obligations are derivative and somewhat less comprehensive than those to Israel does not make them merely generic—they remain genuinely special, rooted in the same singular history that grounds Germany’s responsibilities to Israel in the first place.
And again, there will never be peace in the region unless the Palestinian people, too, can live in a polity where their security and well‑being are protected. To that end it also matters that around the world Palestinians and their allies have political spaces in which their concerns can be articulated without immediate association with terrorism or illegitimacy.
Such a set of attitudes does not resolve all disputes. It does not tell Germans how to weigh arms exports, UN votes, or the recognition of Palestinian statehood. But it provides a framework: support Israel’s right to exist and defend itself; oppose antisemitism without equivocation; and at the same time refuse both the relativization of the Holocaust and the monopolization of its lessons.
Its universalistic meaning is that no one, anywhere, should be permanently reduced to an object of state power without a say—including those who live in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in refugee camps; including Jews in Germany who face renewed hatred; and others who suffer under different regimes of exclusion.
In addition, it grounds specific obligations toward Palestinians that follow directly from the history that makes German responsibilities to Israel distinctive.
To agree with Habermas here is to accept that Germans cannot, and should not, become “normal” in the sense that some participants in the Historikerstreit desired. Their past has marked them with a particular kind of responsibility. The real question for 2026 and beyond is whether they are willing to let that responsibility reach as far as the universalistic principles they profess would demand—and also to acknowledge the specific obligations to Palestinians that are implied.
Design: Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Images: Created using generative AI
