Germany has earned a global reputation for confronting its past. Through education, memorials, and strict laws against fascist symbols and Holocaust denial, it has long been seen as a model for how a nation can reckon with historical crimes. But memory can become more than a lesson, it can become a performance. And when that performance turns selective, morality collapses under the weight of contradiction.

The German’s classification of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as a confirmed right-wing extremist movement is a defensible and principled action. The AfD traffics in xenophobia, nationalism, and racial anxiety. Its rhetoric, aimed at immigrants and the liberal democratic order, recalls the early days of a Germany many swore would never return. The state’s vigilance is not only legal, it is a moral stance rooted in the trauma of history.

But that same moral clarity vanishes when applied beyond Germany’s borders.

While it may exclude the AfD from any chance of governing, Germany continues to embrace Israel’s ruling coalition, a government that includes ultra-nationalist, theocratic, and openly racist parties. Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party governs alongside Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit, factions whose rhetoric and policy proposals, such as population transfers, annexation of occupied land, and systemic discrimination, would never be tolerated within Germany’s own democratic framework.

This contradiction is not a subtle one. Germany is, in effect, saying that fascism in Europe must be preemptively crushed, while fascism in the Middle East can be armed, legitimized, and quietly defended. All under the shadow of a Holocaust that took place in Europe, not in Gaza or the West Bank.

It’s a contradiction the United States is equally guilty of, though in a different register. The Trump regime, and indeed most of Washington, continues to support Israel’s government while offering lukewarm concerns over its hard-right turn. Yet unlike Germany, the U.S. does not claim a moral high ground based on historical reckoning. American foreign policy is defined by strategic interest, not collective memory. That makes it hypocritical, but at least consistently so.

Germany’s memory politics are unique because they are supposed to be rooted in morality. But morality, if wielded selectively, becomes just another political tool. When Germany sends arms to the very kinds of parties it would never allow on its own parliament floor, its moral authority collapses.

If “Never Again” means anything, it must mean never again for anyone, not just within the geographic bounds of the German state. If Germany can’t apply its values consistently, then it must stop pretending those values are universal.

History is not a shield you hide behind while funding its repetition elsewhere. It’s a warning. And Germany, in its foreign policy, is beginning to forget it.