Amit Segal@AmitSegal
Israel had a problem, and Germany had a solution. Israel needs more manufacturing capacity for Iron Dome components. Volkswagen, having failed to establish itself as a leader in electric vehicles and bleeding market share to Chinese imports, has capacity to spare. So the two problems found each other: Volkswagen’s management board green-lit converting a production line to defense manufacturing under a deal with Israel’s Rafael, saving thousands of German jobs in the process. A win-win.
Until the Qataris intervened and sank the deal.
Why do the Qataris have a say in what German factories build? Because, according to Bild, the Qatari sovereign wealth fund holds 10.4 percent of Volkswagen’s shares and 17 percent of its voting rights—and it vetoed the deal for one reason: the company slated to manufacture at the plant is Israeli. Qatar spent years funding Israel’s enemies and is now spending its equity blocking Israel from intercepting the missiles it paid for.
Volkswagen confirmed that its Qatari shareholders vetoed the cooperation at the Osnabrück plant but said it would keep seeking partnerships to save the site. Good luck to the 2,300 workers employed there—all facing layoffs by the end of 2027.
The Qataris had help, of course. Peace activists and opposition parties had criticized the conversion from the start, insisting Volkswagen manufacture only for the civilian market—never mind that everyone in Germany has understood for over a year that tens of thousands of jobs are gone without exactly this kind of reform. The protests intensified once the partner turned out to be Israeli, with radical left-wing activists, backed by the Left Party, declaring it “a deal that the German public cannot accept” given Netanyahu’s military activity across the Middle East.
And this is not just about Volkswagen. According to Bild, the $4.2 billion deal for German shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd to acquire Israel’s Zim is also apparently collapsing—and here too, senior Israeli sources point to Gulf money inside the German corporation: the Qatari sovereign wealth fund holds 12.3 percent of Hapag-Lloyd, the Saudi fund another 10.2 percent.
Nor is the creeping problem exclusive to Germany. As FDD’s Natalie Ecanow has documented, the state of 330,000 citizens, half the size of New Jersey, has invested some 400 billion dollars in the United States—roughly 1.2 million dollars per Qatari citizen. From defense and energy to basic infrastructure and manufacturing, the Qatari octopus has slipped its tentacles into countless sectors of the U.S. economy. As the Volkswagen case demonstrates, these investments can pay more than one kind of dividend.
