Habermas After Gaza
Mourning Germany’s Most Famous Philosopher
Amelia Horgan
On Saturday, March 14, Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, died at 96. Already, many obituaries have been written for him. Some of these have mentioned Habermas’s statement in defense of Israel’s assault on Gaza. This is typically in passing. Those who tend otherwise to support, or at least admire, his revisions to critical theory, characterize it as an unfortunate incident, one of “many bad political calls,” “a failure of judgement.” Those who admire his work less view it as, for instance, symptomatic of theoretical tendences that “should be seen as the culmination of Habermas’s intellectual project.” Here, I give that statement the attention it deserves—the attention that, three years after the start of the genocide and in a world changed by Gaza, it demands.
Habermas, on November 13, 2023, put his name to a statement, “Principles of Solidarity,” describing Israel’s attack on Gaza as “justified in principle.” The signatories—Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther, and Habermas—claimed that “standards of judgement slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s action.” They do not state exactly how Israel’s attack was justified, or on what principles. There is, of course, no existing legal basis for the attack: an occupier has no right under international law to “self-defense” against the people being occupied (by contrast, thereis a right to armed resistance against occupation). The statement implies that the attribution of genocidal intent is not only unwarranted but unacceptable. According to Habermas and his co-signatories, this attribution risks promoting antisemitism and challenges Israel’s “right to exist,” which deserves special protection in Germany. The statement gives license to Israeli aggression, downplays Germany’s collaboration in the assault on Gaza, and takes both matters to be of significance first and foremost for Germany, further minimizing the horrors already committed, weeks into the genocide.
The statement was criticized at the time, including in two open letters. No public recantation of the statement was made even as the political landscape shifted such that the Western apologetics for Israel’s actions were no longer as tenable, including shifts in public positions from the governments of Britain, France, and Canada.
When Habermas’s statement is mentioned in obituaries, it is typically right at the end, in a paragraph that is awkward or forlorn. Whether the statement is taken as an aberration, or as a continuation of a long-standing failure to get it right, it ends up reaffirming what the obituary writer already thinks about Habermas. If an author sees Habermas as having taken critical theory in the wrong direction, the Israel statement is proof and culmination. Where Habermas is celebrated, the statement, sometimes bundled with his concerns about German rearmament after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is seen as proof of a committed life, even if he might have sometimes gotten it wrong.
Such reflections, which take stock of a thinker’s life and career as a whole, are perfectly legitimate in themselves. Since they will no doubt continue elsewhere, what if, rather than trying to reintegrate (back into Habermas’s thought or biography) or exculpate the statement, we take it on its own, as a political intervention in a concrete time and place? Rather than putting the statement into the context of Habermas’s intellectual biography, let us put it into the political context of the situation in Gaza, in Germany, and internationally, as it looked in 2023.
Returning to the immediate moment of that statement clarifies why it was, and is, contemptible. By mid-November 2023, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, backed militarily by the US, Germany, Britain, and other European allies, had already killed more than 10,000 Palestinians. Days into the assault, then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
It was on October 17, 2023, that Israel bombed a hospital for the first time in the genocide—al-Ahli Hospital, in Gaza City, which, incidentally, is now over 80% destroyed. This was a clear violation of international law and the opening salvo of a set of tactics that would come to shape the genocide: the destruction of the preconditions of life, including the targeting of healthcare workers and healthcare infrastructure.
On November 7, 2023, a group of children held a press conference outside of al-Shifa hospital, also in Gaza City, demanding an end to the assault on Gaza: “Since 7 October, we’ve faced extermination, killing, bombing over our heads—all of this in front of the world.” Over 4,000 Palestinian children had already been killed at the time of their press conference. Al-Shifa Hospital would, in the spring of 2024, be the site of a two-week siege, the second to which it was subjected; the first was just days after the children’s conference. At the end of the 2024 siege, mass graves, with bodies of those murdered with IV drips still attached to them, would be found.
The statement gives license to Israeli aggression, downplays Germany’s collaboration in the assault on Gaza, and takes both matters to be of significance first and foremost for Germany, further minimizing the horrors already committed, weeks into the genocide.
What had happened by November 2023 was already indefensible. The genocidal trajectory was clear. In December 2023, South Africa put a legal case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide, based on the evidence of the previous months. An interim ruling, in January 2024, ordered the prevention of genocide and found that Palestinians have the right to be protected from genocide. This did not stop the genocide. Nor did it stop a persistent, fanatical, genocidal denialism among the German elite, accompanied by attempts to crack down on any solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians. Habermas did not publicly change his position.
By November 2023, then, the brazenness of Israel’s breaking of law and convention and the mass scale of death were already very clear. This was made possible, politically and militarily, through support from Israel’s allies. The genocide, when looked at internationally, is marked by two key dynamics: first, the extent to which information about what was happening was broadcast to the entire world; and second, the genocide’s international basis, how actively allied countries were involved in arming or otherwise supporting Israel’s activities. The fact and nature of the collaboration were not hidden but carried out in plain sight.
Germany has been a significant military supporter of Israel. From 2020-24, it supplied 30% of Israel’s arms. After the US, it is Israel’s second largest military supporter. The amount of authorized military exports from Germany to Israel rose after October 2023: a ten-fold increase on the preceding year, from €32 million to €326.5 million. In 2023, only €38.5 million had been authorized by the autumn. The rest came after the genocide was underway. The federal government set up a mechanism for expediting military supplies and the supply of arms continued throughout the genocide. For a short period between August and November 2025, new export licenses were paused, but Germany remained a major military supporter of Israel.
At the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, every single one of the stipulations the statement’s authors lay out for the attack that they see as justified in principle—proportionality, the prevention of civilian casualties, and the waging of a war with the prospect of future peace—had already been violated.
In the debate that followed the statement, much was made of Germany’s and Germans’ reactiveness to the possibility of a resurgent antisemitism. Germany’s history, the suggestion is, affords Germans both a special ability and special responsibility to identify and prevent antisemitism. Having reckoned with its past, it is able to carry out its duties, which are taken to be closely related to supporting Israel.
Aside from the strong reasons to question whether support for Israel is the appropriate means of carrying out this responsibility, including because it conflates Israel and Jewishness, and not least because it involves supporting a settler colonial project, do we have to be quite so credulous about Germany’s redemption arc, and the extent to which well-handled guilt and responsibility are the sole or primary drivers of the nation’s collaboration in the present genocide? Since the end of WWII, there have been several factors that could drive support for Israel from West Germany and, after reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany: shifting the international reputation of a disgraced, defeated, and disempowered state, and deflecting attention from the continuity of the West German elite with Nazi Germany; deepening alliances with a former enemy and new global power broker, the US; Cold War rivalries; straightforward business interests; and new and old imperialisms. After the Cold War ended, Germany has proved a helpful ally in US empire; it was the third largest military contributor in the multilateral US-led military engagement in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014, and supported, through US bases like Ramstein in south Germany, the CIA’s program of “extraordinary rendition”. Rather than evidence of national-cultural virtuousness learned through prior evil, or even understandable vice issuing from good intentions, German support for Israel is driven by a host of other, grubbier considerations.
Germany’s closeness to Israel continued throughout the genocide. In addition to the supply of weapons, Germany supported Israel against the ICJ case brought by South Africa. In mid- March, Germany relinquished its backing, because continuing support ran the risk of jeopardizing a separate case that it faces—brought by Nicaragua—for German political, military and financial assistance in the genocide. Attempts to silence dissent and outlaw protest were not unique to Germany, but the fervor with which they were carried out, the breadth of the repression, and the extent to which the establishment—the media, parts of the academy—enthusiastically took part in the crackdown were arguably singular.
Germany moved to ban the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Protests across Germany were marked by police violence and government interference in attempts to criticize it: the Federal Minister of Education, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, considered cutting funding for academics who had spoken out against police violence against student protestors.
Rather than positioning the statement of November 2023 in the context of the contested history of critical theory, or Habermas’s intellectual biography, we can view it as forming part of the response by the German establishment to a nascent genocide that same establishment was already supporting; seen this way, it looks less aberrant. When everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, the song is most likely to be the same.
Readers might find it unfair to consider this statement beyond the context of the rest of Habermas’s thought, but putting it back into the context of November 2023 does what the statement does not: it recognizes that Palestinians in Gaza are at the center of events, that they are the victims of a genocide, and that their demand from the rest of the world is justice.
Without being prescriptive about the mode of reckoning, we can say that, so far, there has not been much of a reckoning at all.
Perhaps some readers remain uneasy. Perhaps a statement, late in life, should not be used to damn its issuer, no matter its contents. There surely must be limits to this, however. Lines can be drawn. In its omission of condemnation for the already disproportionate bombardment of Gaza and for likely violations of international law, its complacency about what might be to come, and in its focus on what this means within Germany rather than on the extent of Germany’s involvement in the bombardment, the statement did and should inspire horror.
Habermas is certainly not the first philosopher to have what is euphemistically referred to as a “complex legacy.” In fact, his early career was marked by a public intervention, one of many he would make on a wide range of political issues, about the legacy of Heidegger. Habermas, in his 1953 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger,” criticized the unamended publication of Heidegger’s 1935 lectures, including, therefore, the remarks about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Habermas writes that he is not concerned with Heidegger “the philosopher, but with the political influence that emanated from him,” about what the lectures do in a particular context, the effects they could have on students. Habermas the statement-maker can be addressed alongside Habermas the philosopher.
Habermas’s statement should leave us uneasy. It, and the way it has been approached in Habermas’s memorialization, should provoke a series of questions, especially for academics in countries complicit in the genocide. It is not something to be glossed over or ignored. These questions should be addressed with the seriousness they deserve because of the significance of this statement, of what it meant and means after Gaza. Seriousness does not mean these questions must be posed and answered in the standard academic mode—lengthy discussions, obsessive attention to detail—although that is, no doubt, to come. Without being prescriptive about the mode of reckoning, we can say that, so far, there has not been much of a reckoning at all. What must be seriously reckoned with, rather than turned to in passing, is the legacy of silence and complicity that has dominated much of the Western establishment, including particularly the German elite, during the genocide.
After the death of a thinker, it is not unusual for there to be an outpouring of adoration. Adoration tends to cloud judgment. When the fog of praise disperses, then, perhaps Habermas might be understood in his intellectual context. Does his statement, for instance, mean the rest of his ideas are connected to genocide denialism? To imperialism? If so, how should they be approached? What, if anything, can be taken from Habermas after this statement? Where does this leave the tradition of critical theory, especially the Frankfurt School? What kinds of environments—institutions and cultures—can produce a statement like this and then ignore or downplay it?
Habermas’s statement of 2023, made over the corpses of thousands of Palestinians, when warning bells of violations of international law were already sounded, and children already pleading to the world via livestream to let them live, can be understood plainly enough—as an expression of solidarity with the perpetrators of a genocide above its victims.
The world has been changed by the genocide. Habermas’s statement was a refusal to look at the world for what it was, or was becoming. If it is taboo to speak ill of the dead, here I have tried only to speak of the dead who are, in the public mourning of Germany’s most famous public philosopher, ignored.