In the dim halls where statesmen polish their thunder but pretend it shines as policy, the current pageant unfurls with the measured cruelty of a Greek chorus: reason draped in red tape, compassion folded into a ledger, and the old certainties of right and wrong bending beneath the weight of expedience. From the vantage of Benjamin Netanyahu, Germany’s move to suspend arms exports to Israel—a pause meant to pause blood in Gaza—smells to him not of mercy but of betrayal. He speaks of disappointment, of a reward to terror, and he insists that Israel’s aim is not conquest but the liberation of Palestinian land from Hamas, that sovereign dawn of peace which forever eludes the map's bare margins.
Germany, for its part, speaks in the language of humanitarian concern and of the sacred routes of aid, announcing a halt to arms exports that could be used in Gaza for the time being, a gesture meant to keep the lifelines open to the besieged and the aid convoys, to reassure the UN and the wounded who live in the shadow of conflict. Chancellor Merz, with a prudence that pretends to be moral clarity, urges Israel not to cross the line toward annexation of parts of the West Bank, while the fog remains whether the plan contemplates any full grasp of Gaza itself. The theatre thickens, the actors changing costumes, the plot lingering in unresolved ambiguity.
On stage in Jerusalem, the cabinet speaks of an expansion of the war by taking Gaza City, a strategic move that is framed by five principles meant to end the conflict: disarm Hamas, return all hostages, demilitarize Gaza, ensure Israeli security control of the coastal stretch, and establish a civilian administration independent of both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. It is a blueprint that promises order through control, a paradox that the ancient theatres would have understood as tragedy wearing modern boots. Yet the chorus from the United Nations and Palestinian voices rings with alarm: a dangerous escalation, a call for an urgent Security Council gathering, a reminder that the container of peace remains fragile, if not broken.
In Berlin and beyond, the numbers whisper of the old arithmetic of power: roughly 485.1 million euros worth of arms and military equipment approved for Israel between October 7, 2023, and May 13, 2025, a statistic that clatters like coins in a moral machine, insisting that the currency of security is minted in fear as much as in defense.
And so we stand at the edge of the theatre where Nietzsche would hear the bells toll for the will to power, where Greek tragedy—human beings doomed by their own designs to enact ruin in the name of salvation—unfolds anew. The West, venerable and waning, offers its modern rite: sanctions and euphemisms, humanitarian passkeys, and the spectacle of a state’s conscience weighed against the ledger of arms. If we are to believe the recent lines written by power, the plot to end a war becomes, paradoxically, a new chapter in the long decline of a culture that once knew how to cradle virtue and catastrophe with equal reverence. We watch, and the lament returns—not simply for Gaza or for Israel, but for a civilization that, in its craving for order, risk-asses and trades away the very possibility of a just peace, as if peace were merely another commodity to be bought, measured, and sold.