Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding by Daniel Marwecki

Abstract

Reviewed by: Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding by Daniel Marwecki Roni Stauber Daniel Marwecki. Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 254 pp. Daniel Marwecki, a political scientist and currently a lecturer in international relations at the University of Hong Kong, based the book reviewed here on his PhD dissertation, which he wrote at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. It aims to analyze seven decades of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, or, more precisely, four decades of Israel's diplomatic ties with West Germany, and, from 1990 on, Israel's diplomatic relations with a unified Germany. The book consists of four parts, arranged chronologically: the 1952 reparations agreement; the years 1956–1967, characterized by growing military cooperation; the period between the 1967 war and the First Lebanon War, characterized by the German effort to "normalize" Germany's relations with Israel; and the years from the unification until today, in which Germany has demonstrated a new commitment to Israel's security needs. The main argument of the book is summarized in its subtitle: Marwecki argues that the mutual relations were based on a quid pro quo that lacked any moral considerations, which he defines as an "exchange between whitewashing and statebuilding." Germany provided extraordinary economic support and military aid to Israel, which the country sorely needed, particularly in its formative years. In exchange, Israel granted Germany rehabilitation, which [End Page 218] helped Germany distance itself from its immediate Nazi past and further its full integration with the West. To his analysis of the complex German-Israeli relationship, Marwecki added a third party, the Palestinians. He claims that the German approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been based on the European Union's perception that "while the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East has been an end for itself, a Palestinian state has not." The book emphasizes the ambiguity of the EU policy, and it is unclear to the reader what distinguishes Germany's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the policy of other major European countries, which is problematic, given the extraordinary German-Israeli mutual relations and their traumatic history. Marwecki presents his arguments forcefully and clearly, and the book reads well. Nevertheless, it seems overly ambitious and almost impossible to provide an in-depth study of seventy years of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany in an account of 250 pages. Moreover, less than half of the study discusses almost five decades. Thus, we get only a brief glimpse into many complex diplomatic situations. As noted above, the book is divided chronologically and thematically into four parts. From a methodological point of view, however, these four parts can be divided into two: the first two chapters, covering the early 1950s until 1967, are based on primary sources—documents from the archives of the German Foreign Office, cabinet protocols, and the Bundestag debates; the following two parts of the book, covering later periods, provide an analysis based primarily on scholarly studies and journalist accounts. Three conceptual and methodological problems arise from the book's whitewashing and statebuilding thesis. First, the thesis does not characterize the relations during most of the decades addressed in the book. As a result of the gradual improvement in its economy, its growing manufacture of weapons, and, more than anything, its strategic alliance with the United States, Israel found that "the German support lost its crucial nature," to quote the author himself. Simultaneously, West Germany's need for rehabilitation from Israel was already waning at the end of the 1960s. The quid pro quo thesis has become even less relevant in recent decades because of Germany's growing willingness to come to terms with the Nazi past. Second, Marwecki's thesis should be challenged in its characterization of Konrad Adenauer's motivation in his approach to Israel. Studies about Adenauer's "policy for dealing with the past" (Vergangenheitspolitik) have emphasized Adenauer's efforts to shape the myth of a clear distinction between Nazis and Germans. As Marwecki rightly claims, the policy was designed to whitewash German society's moral responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime, particularly the persecution and eventually the...