A Kill List in Berlin. Iran’s Ambassador Remains.

A man allegedly walked through Berlin last spring, systematically scouting a kosher supermarket and a Jewish food merchant. He was allegedly mapping access to Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and helping procure a weapon to execute Volker Beck, a prominent German politician.

German federal prosecutors have now charged 54-year-old Danish citizen Ali S. and Afghan national Tawab M. with preparing murders and arson attacks on German soil. Investigators believe they were operating on behalf of the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The detail that should have triggered emergency sessions in the Bundestag is how Germany found out. The initial warning did not come from German domestic intelligence, but from the Mossad, with Volker Beck stating plainly that without Israeli intelligence, he would presumably be dead. A public figure who spent decades championing German-Israeli relations was placed under the highest level of police protection for six weeks because Israel had to warn Berlin about an Iranian kill team allegedly operating in its own capital.

I am looking at this as someone who grew up in Germany and knows exactly what this country tells itself about its history. We print “Never Again” in textbooks and repeat it every January at Holocaust memorial ceremonies. The Federal Republic has built its modern political identity around this phrase. Successive chancellors have elevated Israel’s security to Staatsräson, declaring the Jewish state’s survival a core German national interest.

If that is true, the government needs to act like it.

An Iranian operative was allegedly mapping Jewish targets in Berlin, yet the Iranian ambassador remains in his post, the embassy is open, and trade continues through various channels. The current CDU-led administration, which has been in power for just over a year, has issued strong statements but taken no action that inflicts real pain on Tehran. The Iranian regime simply dismissed the charges as fabrications meant to distract from Israeli military operations.

That’s impunity. That’s what it looks like when a regime knows nothing is coming.

The Iranian regime has targeted Jews and Israelis globally since 1979, from the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people to decades of backing proxy groups. Now the targets are in Berlin. In December 2023, a German court convicted a German-Iranian man for an attempted arson attack on a synagogue in Bochum, a plot also traced back to Iranian state agencies. The pattern is escalating and moving closer.

The targets in Berlin were chosen purely because they were Jewish or visibly aligned with Jewish life. This is the oldest form of targeting in European history, directed by a theocratic regime committed to Israel’s destruction. There is no diplomatic nuance that changes what a man with a target list of Jewish names means.

Beck has outlined exactly what must happen. He demands the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador, a rigorously enforced ban on IRGC activities, and the freezing of Iranian assets in German banks. Germany must abandon the illusion that it can maintain a polite diplomatic track with Tehran while simultaneously protecting German Jews.

Monuments and remorse do not protect living people. A commemorative speech on the anniversary of Kristallnacht offers zero security to a Jewish community leader facing an Iranian assassination plot. Germany owes Israel a clear, public thank you for stopping these murders. The regime’s security apparatus wants Jews dead. The government must abandon the diplomatic fiction that Tehran is a difficult partner capable of reform and start acting on what the indictment already makes plain.

Jews in Berlin deserve a government that protects their lives with the same conviction it brings to memorial speeches. Right now, the speeches are doing all the work.

Operatives with target lists are checking off names.