Germany and Israel
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Germany and Israel describes, in John Kiriakou's framing, a relationship in which German guilt over the Nazi period has hardened into automatic political support for the Israeli government. Kiriakou offers it as "my own humble opinion": the Germans are "knee-jerk pro-Israel because they're ashamed of their Nazi past," they are "unable to control themselves and going too far in the opposite direction," and the result is German support for Israeli policies "that in many ways mirror the policies of Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s."

The effect on critics

Kiriakou raised the point with Roger Waters, who has faced the sharpest pushback of his career in Germany. Waters said promoters and officials "try and cancel the shows and they use lawfare, warfare, anything they can," and that in Germany "no newspaper will ever speak to me", "I am verboten." He recalled a single exception, a slanted but genuine interview with a German journalist, as the only German press engagement he could name.

Waters attached to that account an image he says he also used in his memoir: the top floor of a Berlin hotel beside a copper-domed cathedral, where the cobbled square below his window holds a pane of glass set into the stones, the memorial marking where the Nazis burned a pile of books in 1933. He was uncertain of the month, offering September and then May.

The boycott was not confined to Germany. Waters said that on the South American leg of his 2023 touring he could not get a hotel room in Buenos Aires and had to borrow an apartment, flying out immediately after the second concert, in a city where he had previously played nine consecutive sold-out shows at the River Plate stadium to 65,000 people a night.

The Argentina slip

Drawing the historical parallel, Kiriakou asked how ironic it was "that Germany was the home to so many escaped Nazis after the Second World War", corrected himself to Argentina when Waters queried it, and Waters answered that he believes elements of the Israeli leadership are now looking at Patagonia as a destination for themselves.

"A pro genocide state again"

Visiting Germany in 2026, Kiriakou met the national security adviser to one of the left-wing parties and had what he describes as a conversation about national guilt. "The Germans still feel widespread national guilt for the Holocaust. But this guilt has so paralyzed them that they've bent over backwards to serve the Israelis to the point where today they are complicit in a genocide against the Palestinians. And so now Germany is a pro genocide state again."

His phrasing of the conclusion is sardonic, "congratulations you guys, you want to help the Israelis build the concentration camps because that's what's happening", and he notes the circularity of Germany now asking Israel for help with its own rearmament.

He raises German remilitarisation alongside Japanese as something he did not expect to see in his lifetime, and says he is "worried about the Germans especially."

See also

- Roger Waters
- John Kiriakou
- Antisemitism and anti-Zionism
- Israel-United States relations
