Germany opens the door to recognizing Palestinian statehood
Ahead of a two-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories, Wadephul said his government won't deviate from its goal of a two-state solution, adding that "for Germany, the recognition of a Palestinian state is rather the end of the process. But such a process must begin now.'
As other European governments are hardening their position on Israel with respect to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, Germany, too, is under growing pressure despite its traditionally close alliance with the Jewish state. There's been a groundswell within Europe and beyond, urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address the crisis.
After a meeting of Germany's security cabinet on Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz called on Israel to immediately alleviate the "catastrophic' humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Merz added that his government was considering potential further steps should the situation not improve, although he didn't elaborate on what they were.
While both French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer have said this month that their governments could recognize a Palestinian state, Merz made clear that recognition of Palestinian sovereignty can only be among the last steps toward a comprehensive agreement.
Wadephul's two-day trip to Israel and the West Bank will play a central role in a possible reevaluation of Germany's Middle East policy, Merz made clear. Germany's top diplomat will talk to his Israeli counterpart Gideon Saar later on Thursday and meet with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah on Friday.
Wadephul may also meet Netanyahu, a German official said under the condition of anonymity.
"Germany is convinced that a negotiated two-state solution remains the only sustainable solution to the conflict,' Wadephul said before his departure. But after the Knesset voted for an annexation of the West Bank, Germany is increasingly concerned that this would also mean the end of the two-state solution.
Wadephul's report may influence the decision whether Germany agrees to sanctions against Israel, which might include curbs on weapon deliveries.
Separately, the European Union is debating whether it should suspend all or parts or its association agreement with Israel — which governs their trade relations — over the humanitarian situation. Countries including Sweden, Spain and Ireland have called for its suspension.
The EU is Israel's largest trading partner, with the two exchanging $47 billion of goods last year, according to the International Monetary Fund. A change in trade policy would have a palpable impact on the Jewish state's economy, which is already under strain because of the war.
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Israeli military intelligence goes back to basics with focus on spies, not tech
Humiliated by the Hamas attack that devastated Israel 22 months ago, the country's military intelligence agency is undergoing a reckoning. The service is making profound changes, including reviving an Arabic-language recruitment program for high school students and training all troops in Arabic and Islam. The plan is to rely less on technology and instead build a cadre of spies and analysts with a broad knowledge of dialects — Yemeni, Iraqi, Gazan — as well as a firm grasp of radical Islamic doctrines and discourse. Every part of Israel's security establishment has been engaged in a process of painful self-examination since Oct. 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas operatives entered Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others — and setting off a brutal war in which an estimated 60,000 people have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, with many more going hungry. 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"If more Israelis could read Hamas newspapers and listen to their radio,' said Michael Milshtein, who heads Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University's Dayan Center, "they'd understand Hamas was not deterred and was seeking jihad.' The renewed focus on language and religious training represents what the intelligence officer calls "a deep cultural shift' in an organization where even top officers rely on translations. The aim, the person said, is to create an internal culture "that lives and breathes how our enemy thinks.' Yet Milshtein and others say that for this to succeed, it will require significant, society-wide changes. Although Arabic is offered in public schools, most Israelis study English instead. Silicon Valley looms large for ambitious young people, who learn little about countries only a few hours away. The challenge lies in convincing Israelis to focus more on the region — its cultures, languages and threats — and less on global opportunities. Israel grew comfortable and rich seeing itself as part of the West, the thinking goes, when it needs to survive in the Middle East. That hasn't always been the case. In the first decades of its existence, Israel had a large population of Jews who'd emigrated from Arabic-speaking countries. The nation was poor and surrounded by hostile neighbors with sizable armies, so survival was on everyone's mind. Many of these emigres put their skills to use in the intelligence service, including Eli Cohen, who famously reached the highest echelons of the Syrian government before he was caught and executed in the 1960s. (He was recently played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the Netflix hit "The Spy.") Today, Egypt and Jordan have peace treaties with Israel, and Lebanon and Syria are weak states with little capacity to challenge Israeli might. The supply of native Arabic speakers has dwindled. Israelis whose grandparents came from Iraq, Syria and Yemen don't speak Arabic, and Israel's 2 million Arab citizens aren't required to serve in the military. Some Arabic-speaking Druze do go into intelligence, but they make up less than 2% of the population. As part of the intelligence changes, the service is reviving a program it shut down six years ago which encourages high school students to study Arabic, and plans to broaden its training in dialects. The officer mentioned that eavesdroppers were having trouble making out what Yemeni Houthis were saying because many were chewing khat, a narcotic shrub consumed in the afternoon. So older Yemeni Israelis are being recruited to help. It's also channeling resources into a once-sidelined unit whose function is to challenge mainstream intelligence conclusions by promoting unconventional thinking. The unit's work is colloquially known by an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud — ipcha mistabra — or "the reverse may be reasonable.' More broadly, the service is moving away from technology and toward a deeper reliance on human intelligence — such as planting undercover agents in the field and building up the interrogations unit. This breaks with a shift over the past decade toward working with data from satellite imagery and drones, and goes hand-in-hand with another change that was made after Oct. 7. While the country's borders used to be monitored by sensor-equipped fences and barriers, the military is now deploying more boots on the ground. These new approaches will not only require more people, said Ofer Guterman, a former officer in military intelligence currently at the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, but people who are "more alert to different arenas.' Prior to the Hamas attack, he said, "there was a national perception that the big threats were behind us, except an Iranian nuclear weapon.' Now that that has been proven false, he believes that Israel needs "to rebuild our intelligence culture.' To explain what this might look like, he distinguishes between uncovering a secret and solving a mystery. At exposing a secret — where is a certain leader hiding? — Israel has been excellent, as shown by its wiping out of the Hezbollah leadership in Lebanon last fall. At unraveling a mystery — what is that leader planning? — it has lost its way. Acquiring the kind of knowledge needed for this requires deep commitment to humanistic studies — literature, history and culture. And he worries that Israeli students have developed a contempt for the rich cultures of their neighbors. That too, he says, has to change. At the same time, not everyone is persuaded that the planned changes are the right ones. Dan Meridor, a former strategic affairs minister under Netanyahu who wrote a landmark study of Israel's security needs two decades ago, says the wrong conclusions are being drawn from the Hamas attack. "The failure of Oct. 7 wasn't a lack of knowledge of the verses in the Koran and Arabic dialect,' he says. Rather, he believes that Israel is viewing its neighbors only through the lens of hostility. "It's not more intelligence that we need,' he added, "it's more dialogue and negotiation.'
