Germany slows arms exports to Israel — without admitting it

The German government appears to have quietly stopped, or at least paused, arms exports to Israel since the start of 2024, while officially denying any change of policy — and insisting that arms exports would continue in the near future.

Government figures revealed in an official answer to a parliamentary question from September 10 showed that while approvals of arms exports to Israel rose immediately after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, they then dropped at the turn of the year.

The parliamentary answers, issued by the German Economy Ministry, which is responsible for approving arms export licenses, stated that there have been no exports of "weapons of war" from January to June 2024. Meanwhile, export licenses for weapons components or technology — which fall under a different category — have continued this year, though at a significantly reduced scale.

To take one example from the parliamentary answer, the Economy Ministry said that just over €3 million ($3.35 million) worth of military parts and technology were approved in October 2023, while in July 2024, only around €35,000 worth of military equipment was sent.

Despite this, the Economy Ministry is adamant that these numbers do not indicate that the government has changed its stance. "There is no ban on the export of arms to Israel, nor will there be," a ministry spokesperson told DW in a statement.

Germany's main tabloid Bild reported on Sunday (13.10.) that Vice-Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had refused to give the go-ahead for the delivery of new weapons to Israel demanding that the Israeli government first give a written confirmation that they would "not be used for genocide." This written confirmation has since reportedly been given.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz reiterated this stance in a speech to parliament on October 10, when he announced that the government had taken decisions that "guarantee, that there will be further deliveries soon." He did not provide any details on what kinds of weapons would be exported or when.

All arms export applications, the ministry spokesperson added, are assessed on their individual merits: "In doing so, the Federal Government takes into account compliance with international humanitarian law. This case-by-case approach always takes into account the current situation, including the attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah as well as the course of the operation in Gaza."

Multiple court cases

Nevertheless, the numbers appear to represent a significant change in German military support for Israel: Germany has been Israel's second biggest supplier of arms for at least two decades. Statistics gathered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and presented in a report published by the investigative group Forensic Architecture (FA) in April, show that in 2023, Germany was responsible for 47% of Israel's total imports of conventional arms, following the US at 53%. FA also calculated that, of the €3.3 billion worth of the export licenses granted by Germany between 2003 and 2023, 53% were for war weapons. The rest was for other military equipment. Germany approved €326.5 million worth of arms exports to Israel in 2023 alone.

The German government has had to defend its military support for Israel in both domestic and international courts several times over the past year — often downplaying its arms exports as it does so.

In April, when Nicaragua brought an urgent case against Germany at the International Court of Justice under the UN's Genocide Convention, Germany's representatives told the ICJ that "98% of licenses granted after October 7 do not concern war weapons, but other military equipment." This could include engines for tanks, rather than whole tanks; the Merkava tank series used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), for instance, has for decades used German-made engines and transmissions. 

In fact, the government said in its plea to the ICJ, it had granted only four export licenses for "war weapons" in the past year: Three orders of ammunition (including one for 500,000 rounds) as well as propellant charges that it claimed were only suited for training purposes. The fourth order, the government admitted, was for "3,000 portable anti-tank weapons" — a license that had been granted "in the immediate context of Hamas massacres." These anti-tank weapons, known as Matadors, are essentially hand-held rocket-launchers, and several videos have surfaced in recent months showing Israeli soldiers firing these weapons at buildings in Gaza.

Not that the other 98% of exports — mainly components and training ammunition — is necessarily any less deadly: "To deliver 500,000 rounds of ammunition – supposedly only 'for training purposes' – seems to me to be a very suspicious statement," said Jürgen Grässlin, spokesperson for the German anti-arms trade campaign group Aktion Aufschrei – Stoppt den Waffenhandel. "The number is extremely high and raises doubts as to whether this ammunition is only to be used for training over however many years."

The government downplayed its arms exports to Israel in domestic court cases too. Earlier this year, five unnamed Palestinians living in Gaza brought a lawsuit to a Berlin court intended to force Germany to stop arms exports to Israel. The case, which was supported by the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and three Palestinian human rights organizations, was dismissed by the court in June — partly for legal jurisdictional reasons, but also on the grounds that it was simply too late: Germany, the government had said, was no longer sending weapons to Israel anyway.

Sönke Hilbrans, senior legal advisor at ECCHR, was less than satisfied with the court's reasoning: "The courts have not checked this information," he said. "Instead, those affected are asked to prove the opposite, which no one outside the federal government could do." Indeed, there is presently no public information about what new weapons export licenses Germany is or is not approving.

Mixed messages

The result is that the government's actions and statements appear contradictory. As Max Mutschler, senior researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC), put it: "The information from the German government is extremely opaque when it comes to arms exports. Now anyone can interpret things how he or she likes — those who say the government has imposed a stop can point to the war weapons figures, while those who say deliveries are ongoing can point to the other deliveries and the government statements. It's really bad information policy."

Many observers believe the government may indeed have become more careful about approving new licenses, both because of the many reports of alleged war crimes being carried out by the IDF and the court cases. Sources with knowledge of the latter told DW on condition of anonymity that indeed concerns about the situation in Gaza and the possible legal threats for Germany had given the government pause.

"But there is another interpretation," said Mutschler. "A lot of weapons exports were approved in 2023, after October 7 and well into December. It could well be that everything that was on the table then, and which Israel ordered quickly following October 7, was rubberstamped very quickly, so that in the first half of 2024 there weren't that many export licenses left to approve." Mutschler believes it was probably a combination of both these factors — the old licenses were approved quickly towards the end of 2023, and then Germany became more reluctant to approve new ones for fear of legal issues.

Either way, the German government's fundamental support for Israel doesn't appear to have changed. Andreas Krieg, a German associate professor of defense studies at King's College London, believes that the German government remains probably the most pro-Israeli state in the world, and that "they are still very much trying to do this, they're still standing with Israel, they still want to export." But at the same time, he suspects that the government is sitting on license approvals while it waits for legal advice: "I think it's not a political decision, I think it's a purely legal decision at this point," he told DW.

But the bigger concern, according to Krieg, is the lack of political or widespread public pressure on the German government to be more transparent about its military support for Israel. "The media landscape in Germany, and the public discourse, is almost exclusively on the side of Israel, and there are very few if any voices condemning what Israel is doing in Gaza," he said. "So I think the German government has a lot more leeway than, say, the British government here. In this context, the Germans don't have to be very transparent in what they're doing."

This article was initially published on September 27, 2024, and updated on October 13 to reflect latest developments.

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