Germany will no longer block the sale of Eurofighter jets to Saudi Arabia and will also deliver other high-tech armaments like the IRIS-T guided missiles. That is despite concerns from within the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s ruling coalition and his own party.
Germany started blocking weapons deliveries to Saudi Arabia in 2018 after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi made global headlines and highlighted the country’s human rights violations. But now, as per a German government press spokesperson, Scholz shares the opinion of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who has praised Saudi Arabia’s “constructive” position concerning Israel during the current Israel-Hamas conflict.
“The Saudi Arabian air force also employed Eurofighters to shoot down Houthi missiles that were bound for Israel,” government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in Berlin this week.
The Gulf nation’s “constructive” attitude clearly means more to the German politicians than previous concerns about Saudi Arabia’s role in the war in Yemen, which has resulted in what is often described as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, as well as the various human rights violations that first sparked the ban.
The Germans are not alone in this kind of “realpolitik.” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also found kind words for Saudi Arabia following his visit to Riyadh earlier this week. Blinken said he and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had discussed potential normalisation of relations with Israel and that the Saudis still had a clear interest in progressing this.
Blinken’s view seems more positive than that expressed by most Middle East analysts, who perceive a growing distance between Saudi Arabia and Israel, after the militant Hamas group attacked Israel on October 7. Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States, Germany and other countries. During the attack, over 1,100 people were killed and over 200 taken hostage.
Part of the motive for the Hamas attack was the fact that several countries in the Middle East were normalising their relationships with Israel, bypassing any solution to the problem of Palestinian statehood along the way. The Hamas attack brought attention back to that.
During the Doha Forum, held in Qatar at the beginning of December, many attendees also seemed to think that the Saudi-Israeli normalisation process was on hold. Saudi Arabia could not continue with the process given the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza since Israel started bombing the enclave. The normalisation process was never formally ended but realistically, it was on ice. Despite all of the Saudi criticism of Israel one thing remains clear, said Philipp Dienstbier, director of the Regional Program Gulf States for Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation: Saudi Arabia’s underlying foreign policy objectives have not changed drastically since the beginning of the Gaza conflict.
The Saudis were previously working on a better relationship with Israel at the Americans’ request because the Saudis want to continue to enjoy a good relationship with the US. Saudi Arabia continues to make efforts to secure its own borders and the military installations that the Saudis used while fighting in Yemen continue to operate.
“Of course, these could be contributing to the Kingdom’s ability to prevent Houthi attacks,” Dienstbier said. And if one looks at it that way, it is also quite possible that Saudi Arabia is actually protecting itself as opposed to actively helping to protect Israel.