The Turning Point, Germany’s Rearmament and Israel

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 a new official finding in the very months this piece was written. Submarines bought from Germany’s ThyssenKrupp shipyard have for years shaken Israel’s own domestic politics, in a case known as Case 3000, the submarine affair. The submarines themselves are the largest and most expensive vessels built in Germany since the Second World War, and according to open-source analysis, though never officially confirmed under Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, they’re believed to carry nuclear-tipped Popeye Turbo cruise missiles launchable from four large torpedo tubes, giving Israel a sea-based second-strike capability. So the relationship born out of Germany’s postwar reparations debt has become, seventy years later, by the consensus of open strategic analysis, the physical carrier of Israel’s ultimate deterrent.

This case is itself a matter of a doxa breaking too, though not in Germany this time, inside Israel’s own security establishment. Israel’s defense procurement system long rested on an unquestioned assumption, that major arms deals had to pass through the Defense Ministry, the General Staff, and the relevant professional bodies, that political leadership couldn’t simply skip that process. The state commission report published on January 25, 2026, shows that this doxa was breached too, much like Germany’s, except the breach was never declared openly, it eroded quietly, decision by decision. According to the report, Netanyahu pushed for a sixth Dolphin submarine based on “unfounded assumptions,” avoided discussing its economic consequences, and tried to unilaterally expand the fleet while excluding the security establishment from the decision, with the cabinet itself functioning as little more than a rubber stamp. The same pattern showed up in 2015, when Germany’s sale of two Dolphin submarines to Egypt was approved without ever consulting then-Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon or even informing then-Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, a decision Israel’s own security establishment only learned of when Chancellor Merkel mentioned it to President Rivlin. The shares Netanyahu bought in 2007 from a ThyssenKrupp supplier, never disclosed, sold to his cousin at a steep profit in 2010, are part of the same case, Case 3000, even though prosecutors never charged him directly. This historic arms relationship with Germany thus becomes a site where two separate doxas break at once, in Germany the doxa of avoiding military power itself, in Israel the doxa of defense decisions passing through institutional process, both quietly eroding within the same decade, around the same class of submarine.

Germany raised its defense budget past $100 billion, with another $10 billion expected in 2026, aiming to become Europe’s strongest conventional military power. It signed two separate Arrow missile defense deals with Israel, the first, signed in 2023 for roughly $3.5 billion, was at the time the largest export contract in the history of Israel’s defense industry, the second, worth $3.1 billion, cleared the Bundestag in December 2025. Combined, the two total $6.5 billion, now the single largest defense export deal in Israel’s history. Because the US largely funded Arrow’s development, any sale of the system to a European country still requires Washington’s approval, meaning each of these deals stays indirectly tied to the first layer I wrote about a few weeks ago, Israel’s dependency on the US. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Germany alone accounted for 33 percent of Israel’s military arms imports between 2020 and 2024. Israel’s 2025 defense exports passed $19 billion, a record, a significant share of it with Germany. Israeli defense officials, in their own words, now see Germany as a counterweight to what they call anti-Israel initiatives led by France and Spain.

Bourdieu’s concept of doxa is worth returning to here, because the same mechanism is operating at two different scales. As I wrote last week, attachment to Israel within the American Jewish community turned into a doxa after 1967, an unquestioned assumption. In Germany, the opposite kind of doxa existed, not an unquestioned attachment to military power but an unquestioned avoidance of it. Zeitenwende broke that second doxa. But when a doxa breaks, the vacuum it leaves doesn’t fill itself immediately, it gets renegotiated, and Israel finds itself in the middle of that renegotiation, both as a solution and as a point of contention.

That renegotiation showed up in its starkest form in June 2026 at the Eurosatory exhibition in Paris. French authorities allowed Israeli companies to participate, but under limits, air defense and anti-ballistic missile systems could be displayed while offensive weapons, missiles, rockets, and armed unmanned platforms were banned. Israel was barred from setting up an official national pavilion, and government representatives weren’t permitted to attend in an official capacity. This was a more calibrated restriction than the 2024 Eurosatory, when French authorities tried to exclude Israelis entirely before court rulings partially reversed it. The same week, at Germany’s ILA exhibition in Berlin, the picture was the exact opposite, fifteen Israeli defense companies displayed systems tested in combat, as part of Germany’s record-breaking defense export numbers.

So on the same continent, in the same month, Israel’s relationship to the defense industry runs in two opposite directions at once. Germany embraces it, partly out of its own strategic need, partly through a particular way of reckoning with its own history. France keeps it at a distance, partly in reaction to its stance on Gaza policy. Israel’s defense industry isn’t facing a single Europe, it’s facing several Europes that disagree with each other.

The Rafael-Volkswagen deal also shows a concrete reason this wider picture is moving so fast. Germany’s automotive sector makes up roughly 5 percent of the country’s economic output, but it’s sliding into a structural crisis, driven by weak electric vehicle demand, intensifying Chinese competition, and rising production costs. The Osnabrück plant became a symbol of that crisis, expected to close in 2027. So Germany’s rearmament wave arrived at the exact moment a collapsing industrial sector was looking for a new way out. Rafael’s proposal to manufacture there became the point where two separate crises, Germany’s security doctrine crisis and its auto sector’s economic crisis, met inside the same factory.

Zeitenwende itself, as scholars have pointed out, isn’t as clean a break as it looks. Some researchers argue that German military restraint was never as stable a cultural core as assumed, that the more fundamental shift actually happened in the 1990s and 2000s, when Germany began participating in multinational operations. So the 2022 turning point wasn’t an overnight miracle, it was the most visible, most dramatic moment of a thirty-year process. But the visibility itself matters, because a speech declaring a doxa collapsed creates a social reality independent of the collapse itself, rearmament is now discussed differently, budgeted differently, partnered differently.

Israel’s place in this picture is both a beneficiary’s and a squeezed one. Inside Germany’s new doctrine, it’s valuable as a supplier tested in war. But woven into that same doctrine are its own shareholder chains, as seen in the VW case, and France’s own political calculations sit at the same table. Germany’s reckoning with its own past opened a door for Israel’s defense industry, but other actors Israel doesn’t control are waiting behind that door too.