Netanyahu once tried to get Germany’s Merkel to fire her top adviser over pro-Palestinian demands, report reveals

10 July 2025, 11:48 pm

2 Edit

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (R) chats with her foreign policy adviser Christoph Heusgen before the opening session of the North Atlantic Council during the NATO Summit on May 20, 2012, at McCormick Place in Chicago. (Mandel Ngan/AFP)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to get Germany’s leader to fire a top adviser more than a decade ago, a new German report reveals.

The incident happened during negotiations for a submarine deal between the countries, a deal that has since become mired in a major corruption probe that has ensnared top Netanyahu advisers, but not the premier himself.

According to the Panorama TV magazine, during talks in 2010 and 2011 between Israel and German conglomerate Thyssenkrupp, then-German chancellor Angela Merkel’s top foreign policy adviser Christoph Heusgen demanded that any deal to supply the Jewish state with submarines be conditioned on Jerusalem halting all settlement construction in the West Bank and agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state — conditions that angered Netanyahu.

The report cites multiple sources, including Heusgen himself, former Israeli ambassadors to Germany Yacov Hadas-Handelsman and Yoram Ben-Zeev, and former senior Israeli Defense Ministry official Amos Gilad.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) with Israel’s Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, at the president’s guest house, in Washington, DC, February 14, 2017. (Avi Ohayon/ GPO/ File)

It says Netanyahu’s top confidant Ron Dermer — then a staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office and today the strategic affairs minister — approached Berlin’s then-ambassador to Israel, Harald Kindermann, and demanded that Merkel fire Heusgen. Dermer reportedly stressed at the time that he was acting on orders and not of his own initiative.

The pressure campaign reached new heights when Germany’s Bild tabloid published a story in December 2012 in which an unnamed Israeli government official was cited as blasting Merkel for leaving too much of the policy-making to Heusgen, who “only wants to talk about settlement policy.”

Panorama says it isn’t known who that official was, but the program implies it might have been Dermer, noting that in 2011, Dermer was given authority to act as a liaison to Germany’s Axel Springer Group, which publishes Bild.

Merkel didn’t heed the demand to sack Heusgen, who remained her adviser until 2017 when he became Berlin’s envoy to the UN.

But the report says Germany did end up dropping the demand for concessions to the Palestinians as conditions for the submarine deal, which was followed up by more deals for submarines and corvettes.