Nothing can stop Germany’s moral panic over antisemitism
Germans are incapable of seeing Jews as anything other than victim… A presumption of innocence is extended even to the most violent actions of the Israeli state…. in recent years, this passive attitude toward Israeli violence has added a new element: an aggressive and exclusionary effort to silence anyone who sees things differently. Naturally, this aggression is also aimed at Jews. Thus the circle of madness is completed: Germany, and its Staatsräson, must be protected from everyone who disagrees, even if they happen to be Jews themselves.
By Eva Menasse
In April 2025, the Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm was invited to give the keynote address at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. A scholar of Kant and Spinoza, Boehm advocates what he calls “radical universalism”; in his 2020 book Haifa Republic, he argues for a single, binational state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.
Boehm is not an antizionist, but his invitation drew the unwelcome attention of Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador in Berlin. Prosor has no use for his compatriots who preach reason, understanding and peace, especially in Germany. The embassy began to put pressure on the Buchenwald Memorial and the state government of Thuringia, where the memorial is located. Prosor did not shy away from defamatory language, calling Boehm a “mouthpiece for left-wing antisemitism” and his invitation a “flagrant insult to the memory of the victims.”
“Under the guise of science, Boehm is attempting to dilute the commemoration of the Holocaust with his discourse on universal values,” the Embassy announced, “thereby robbing it of its historical and moral significance.”
In Thuringia, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) is now the strongest party, though it is not a member of the government (as three other parties govern in coalition to keep AfD out of power). The director of the memorial, historian Jens-Christian Wagner, who has been confronted with a sharp increase in right-wing attacks, historical revisionism and swastika graffiti, made some efforts to defend his speaker against these slanders, but ultimately caved when the Israeli embassy urged elderly Holocaust survivors to boycott the event.
It would be hard to surpass the absurd spectacle of a Jewish philosopher being blocked from speaking at a German Holocaust memorial because he intended to say that the lessons of “never again” should be applied universally. And yet such perverse distortions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’ have become ubiquitous: there are hundreds of such cases.
Sometimes these absurdities will catch the world’s attention, as happened this February when the Berlin film festival was once again convulsed by panic over Palestine. There had been much international bewilderment two years earlier when the Israeli and Palestinian directors of No Other Land, a shocking account of Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank, collected the festival’s award for best documentary.
Most of the German media treated the award ceremony as a scandal: when Claudia Roth, then Green Party minister of culture, was criticised for clapping, she claimed with a straight face that she had only been applauding the film’s Israeli co-director, not his Palestinian partner.
This year the farce began at the opening press conference: the live feed was cut off as a journalist asked the jury members about Gaza. Wim Wenders, the chair, proclaimed in response that film-makers must stay out of politics. His reply triggered further controversy when Arundhati Roy withdrew from her planned appearance, accusing Wenders of “shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity”.
But in Germany, and especially in its press, what is scandalous is not shutting down conversations, but allowing them to be heard. By the time the festival was over, an aggressive campaign by some media outlets – not only on the right – had nearly succeeded in getting its director, Tricia Tuttle, sacked from her post for the crime of allowing too much free speech.
The new German culture minister, conservative Wolfram Weimer, described one award speech, by the Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah Alkhatib, as an act of “political destruction” and declared that, at the Berlinale, “the Pali activist scene showed its ugly face with its hatred of Israel”. (Another influential commentator demanded that Alkhatib, who is a refugee in Germany, should be deported.) Only an intervention from hundreds of actors and directors kept Weimer from removing Tuttle, who instead agreed to a new “code of conduct” that will govern future speeches, ensuring that this controversy will recur again next year.
More than two years on from the shock of October 7, after the destruction of Gaza has led scholars, human rights organisations, and international courts to accuse Israel of genocide; after Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu launched a deranged war on Iran; and with the IDF busy flattening southern Lebanon – events in Germany are still being cancelled. The organisers of conferences and cultural events continue to fret about whether they can take place.
You might be surprised to learn that one recent controversy involved the Year of Jewish Culture in Saxony 2026, the theme of which is “Tacheles” – Yiddish for “straight talk”. One of the organisers, the German-Israeli singer and activist Nirit Sommerfeld, planned a series of public conversations with Jewish guests, including voices critical of Israel, such as myself. After a defamatory letter by a local conservative, pro-Israel Jewish group, the state government withdrew its funding for the event.
Sommerfeld has been raising funds privately to keep Tacheles going. But here again we see the typical absurdities: to protect the Jews, we must not tolerate a diversity of Jewish opinions. State institutions will reliably side with the most conservative and pro-Israel Jewish voices, in deference to the dogma of Staatsräson.
Ever since Angela Merkel announced in a 2008 speech to the Knesset that “Germany’s special historical responsibility for Israel’s security” was a non-negotiable feature of contemporary German statecraft, the country’s once-admired memory culture has gone seriously haywire. A wave of rejections, cancellations and speech restrictions has swept the country. The space for public debate has almost vanished. Some pro-Palestine demonstrations have been banned – and where they have been allowed to take place, they have often been met with excessive police violence.
While I was writing this article, the city of Stuttgart pulled €15,000 of funding from a symposium on the crackdown on free expression in German public spaces. The irony was perfect: part of the discussion was going to be about how threats of such withdrawals of funding have been used to silence debate across Germany.
What all these stories have in common is something that is stubbornly denied in German discourse: everything is viewed backwards through the narrow prism of historical German guilt. In Germany, the reality of Israel and Gaza, and even the ongoing wars in Iran and Lebanon, is less significant than German guilt, and the subsequent pride in memory culture, which is regarded as a kind of vaccination that will prevent Germans from ever again feeling such guilt.
The American-German philosopher Susan Neiman, who in 2019 published an admiring account of Germany’s “working through the past”, but has since become a prominent critic of memory culture’s repressive force, has written many times that Germans are incapable of seeing Jews as anything other than victims, and therefore feel obliged to protect them forever and at all costs. A presumption of innocence is extended even to the most violent actions of the Israeli state.
But in recent years, this passive attitude toward Israeli violence has added a new element: an aggressive and exclusionary effort to silence anyone who sees things differently. Naturally, this aggression is also aimed at Jews. Thus the circle of madness is completed: Germany, and its Staatsräson, must be protected from everyone who disagrees, even if they happen to be Jews themselves.
2.
Just three days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, while Israel was beginning its campaign of retribution in Gaza, the journalist Carsten Otte posed a sinister question in the left-wing Berlin daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung: “Can you award a prize to a novel that depicts Israel as a murder machine?”
The novel in question was Minor Detail, by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. The LiBeratur prize, which it was due to receive at the Frankfurt Book Fair, was not particularly well known, even though its jury, which had selected Shibli months earlier, had been striving since 1988 to draw more attention to authors from the Global South.
But Otte, and others, managed to make the prize famous and destroy it at the same time: the award ceremony for Shibli was “suspended”, leading to international protests, but it was never rescheduled. The following year, in 2024, the prize was “put on hold”. Today, the awarding institution no longer exists.
It is worth rereading the first paragraph of Otte’s article. “The terrorists of Hamas were still murdering their way through Israel when their terrible deeds were already being celebrated in the Berlin district of Neukölln,” he wrote. “The conflict in the Middle East has long since spilled over into Germany, not only in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of immigrants, but also inside the local cultural scene. Instead of baklava for passers-by who rejoice at the death of Israeli civilians, prizes are awarded, to the applause of perhaps well-meaning donors, to works that portray the state of Israel as a murder machine.”
These “celebrations” by Palestinians, during which “sweets were distributed” on the streets of Berlin, have been cited countless times in newspaper articles, commentaries, television debates, and social media posts since October 7. They stand for the alleged inhumanity of immigrant Muslims as garish proof of the idea of “importierter Antisemitismus” (“imported antisemitism”) – now a staple of politicians’ speeches – in a country that has not historically suffered a shortage of homegrown anti-Jewish sentiment.
According to Berlin police, some 60 people had congregated in Neukölln, and one of them had a tray of baklava. The Palestinian organisation Samidoun, which supports prisoners in Israeli detention, had posted the only picture of this gathering on Instagram. Thanks to the outrage with which it was shared, the post immediately went viral. Less than four weeks later, Samidoun was banned as a terrorist organisation. But this post cemented the image of frivolous and murderous Palestinians in the heart of Germany – a country that is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe and to more than 5 million Muslims altogether. If they had really wanted to set Berlin on fire after 7 October, it would hardly have escaped notice.
But Otte accurately captured the zeitgeist, not least because he named another main suspect: the German cultural scene, which hands out prizes instead of baklava to “haters of Israel”. Like the “celebration with sweets”, this claim has been repeated so often in editorials and politicians’ speeches that it is no longer called into question.
There is a simple explanation for this psychological projection, which is based on fear, defensiveness and guilt: if antisemitism still exists in this decontaminated country, which claims to have learned so well from its past, then it must not come from the German establishment, nor even from the usual suspects on the far right.
One of the paradoxes of memory culture is that it seems to require greater and greater efforts to police and repress a rising tide of antisemitism – which memory culture is supposed to have already eliminated. Since 2018, Germany has appointed “antisemitism commissioners” at the federal, state and local level. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that they are taking over public discourse to the extent that internationally recognised German Holocaust historians and highly qualified experts on antisemitism and the Middle East are being sidelined, as their views are less suited to a certain political agenda.
Felix Klein, the German government’s longstanding antisemitism commissioner, infamously said that “Israelis who lean more to the left politically” should “show some sensitivity to Germany’s historical responsibility”. Antisemitism commissioners, together with their mostly online coterie, will proceed in a familiar pattern: complaints are filed over one or two participants at a conference or an arts festival having signed a pro-Palestinian petition or made statements on social media; in the event that no such incriminating evidence is present, a new charge is brought, that the events in question are “too one-sided”.
*
In the summer of 2023, two Jewish thinkers – the American scholar Michael Rothberg, who holds a chair in Holocaust Studies at UCLA, and the South African artist Candice Breitz – organised a conference in Berlin dedicated to the policing of speech in German cultural institutions, titled “We Still Need to Talk”. This was a reference to the controversy over “We Need to Talk!”, a public forum about German blind spots over racism that had been scheduled as part of the major global art exhibition Documenta 15 in Kassel a year earlier, but was cancelled at the last minute.
However, Rothberg and Breitz were informed by their institutional partner, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, that after October 7, it was “not the right time” for such discussions – and so “We Still Need to Talk” met the same fate as its namesake. In response, Breitz held a rally in Berlin with other Jewish and Israeli artists, which she dubbed “We Still Still Still Still Need to Talk”.
After this, a planned exhibition of Breitz’s video work at the Saarland Museum was cancelled, on the basis that the Jewish artist had not taken a clear enough stand against Hamas.
In all these incidents, the press plays a significant role. Both the tabloids and the ‘quality broadsheets’ have been the most reliable enforcers of an unbending orthodoxy that punishes critics of Israel as well as sceptics of memory culture. The German media landscape is ideologically diverse, but on this subject there is no division between the papers of the left and the right.
Over the past five years, there has been a dramatic convergence between the hard-right Islamophobic Axel Springer papers, Die Welt and Bild, the more respectable conservative papers like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and liberal outlets like Die Zeit, Die Tageszeitung and Der Spiegel.
One reason for this alliance is the little-known phenomenon of the ‘Antideutsche’, a movement whose emergence split the German left around the time of reunification. Its proponents were leftists who opposed both the revival of German nationalism and strands of antisemitism on the old-school anti-imperialist left. But all that remains of their stance today is blind allegiance to Israel; the Antideutsche, nearly all of them boomers and Gen Xers, are represented in most German newsrooms, particularly on the liberal left. More recently, a gaggle of online media outlets like the popular cultural journalism platform Perlentaucher – whose editors are largely of the Antideutsche persuasion – have also acted as aggressive cheerleaders in a number of wildly inflated antisemitism scandals.
In a few short years, what had been a vague tendency to underreport Islamophobia while casting a suspicion of antisemitism over all immigrants has now calcified into an aggressive bunker mentality. Even opinions that deviate only partially from this consensus have disappeared from major media outlets. A whole host of formerly well-respected authors and commentators are no longer published anywhere in the mainstream media; some have moved to newer online outlets founded specifically for this reason, including The Diasporist and The Berlin Review – but their opinions are now invisible to the average German reader.
Among the large German newspapers, there is now a troubling uniformity. Instead of taking a political stance, they take refuge in gently mocking profiles of figures such as Weimer, the culture minister and a self-styled hunter of antisemites, who, within just a few months of taking office, had turned himself into the bête noire of Germany’s entire cultural scene.
Even before 2023, critical reporting on issues such as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was hard to find in the German press. These days, it isn’t just Israeli policy that has to be defended, but the perceived success of German memory culture as well. The more that each comes under increasing scrutiny, the harder the stonewalling gets. Israel has become the central issue of an angrily contested German identity politics.
Late last year, when the organisers of another conference on German memory culture wisely sought a venue outside the country – in Zurich – they were still pilloried in the German (and Swiss-German) press. The theme of this gathering, playfully named “Der Grosse Kanton: Rise and Fall of the Federal Republic of Germany”, was that the pluralistic culture of postwar Germany had been “subordinated to a Staatsräson, which is increasingly at odds with its post-fascist consensus and opening massive rifts in German society.”
The broadsheets, perhaps seeing themselves described here, poured predictable scorn over the assembled lefties, mocking us for posing as exiled dissidents in neutral Zurich. The Swiss-German daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung dismissed the discussions as “left-wing conspiracy theories” and asked why Swiss institutions had hosted such a dubious undertaking. Back in Germany, the formerly liberal weekly Die Zeit accused the organisers of betraying the sensible centre: “One day, when the question is asked why the left could not stop the advance of the populist right, the answer will be: they were preoccupied with enemies far to the left of the AfD.”
This is how the German establishment remains blind to its own failures. Only a few weeks earlier, the same weekly paper posed a question on its cover about the rise of the far right: “Are the leftists themselves to blame?”
3.
Germany’s penchant for moral panic has astonished outside observers since 2023, but it began years earlier. In May 2019 the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and denying anyone associated with it the right to appear at venues supported by public funding. This was ostensibly a non-binding resolution: it was designed to be a symbolic statement, because its authors knew that the text would violate the German constitution if it were written into law.
The idea originated with the AfD, which proposed an outright ban of the BDS movement. The other Bundestag factions must have been shocked to be outflanked by the far right on the issue of ‘protecting Jews’, so they hastily put together their own motion and passed it without much further thought.
But with an unconstitutional resolution disguised as a “declaration of intent” by the Bundestag, it was possible to permanently label the BDS movement as antisemitic – and to create an atmosphere in which people who have done nothing more than sign a petition or express sympathy for the boycott of Israeli products are widely presumed to be guilty of something more nefarious. Almost overnight, the BDS campaign, which had not been widely known in Germany, was blown up into a national emergency, on par with a severe terrorist threat.
The fact that the anti-BDS resolution was not written into law did not prevent state-funded cultural institutions from being forced to comply with its strictures. In Germany, critics of this repressive reading of memory culture are now treated as effectively antisemitic – suggesting that the real Staatsräson is not just the protection of Israel, but of German moral purity.
A year after the BDS resolution was passed, representatives of more than 30 major state-funded cultural and scientific institutions raised concerns about its impact, signing a declaration that criticised the way “accusations of antisemitism are being misused to push aside important voices and to distort critical positions”. They faced a fierce backlash: German media outlets condemned the institutions that signed the initiative, including Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Federal Cultural Foundation, the Humboldt Forum and the Centre for Research on Antisemitism. The well-known curators and renowned scholars that head these organisations were defamed as secret antisemites and “enemies of Israel”. The name of their initiative, “Weltoffenheit”, which means “openness to the world”, has since become a derogatory term in the press.
Susan Neiman described the events triggered by the anti-BDS resolution as the emergence of “a philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens to throttle the country’s rich cultural life”. Since then, she wrote, “German historical reckoning has gone haywire – as the determination to root out antisemitism has shifted from vigilance to hysteria.”
This hysteria has had a devastating effect, because German cultural institutions depend far more on public funding than their Anglosphere counterparts. In the German funding model, the state acts as a kind of blind benefactor, providing funds that are distributed by a diverse array of cultural institutions, prize juries and curators. One tenet of this system was the idea that – unlike with private sponsors, who have economic and political interests – a wide distribution of state funds would minimise political influence in the cultural sphere.
But this is exactly what the resolution was intended to change. Since then, the media and politicians have repeatedly demanded that institutions must not be involved in subsidising ‘antisemitic’ art. But nobody has asked whether any of these institutions were actually funding antisemitic art to begin with.
*
The panic and repression aimed at imaginary enemies of Israel in the cultural sphere has been notably lacking when it comes to Germany’s ancestral forms of antisemitism.
Consider the so-called “Leaflet Affair” (“Flugblattaffäre”), which erupted in August 2023, when the world was a marginally happier place. Shortly before state elections in Bavaria, Hubert Aiwanger, the leader of a small right-wing populist party whose seats were necessary for the conservatives to retain a coalition, was reported to have written and distributed a neo-Nazi leaflet as a teenager. This was a crisis for the powerful Bavarian CSU leader, Markus Söder, and his aspirations to be the next conservative chancellor candidate. Aiwanger’s teachers and classmates testified to his far-right views, and insisted that he did not deny writing the leaflet at the time.
It contained “jokes” about Auschwitz and chimneys, mocking the victims of the Holocaust. Two days after the news broke, Aiwanger’s older brother suddenly claimed that he had actually written the pamphlet. And then Söder, the CSU leader, drew a line under the affair with a crass instrumentalising of German Jews: he announced that he had consulted Charlotte Knobloch, an elderly Holocaust survivor and highly venerated president of the Bavarian Jewish Community. Knobloch, he said, had expressed “understanding” for his decision to keep Aiwanger in office.
In today’s Germany, a senior politician can face no sanction for his teenage neo-Nazism because his party is needed for a conservative coalition. And then, a few months later, a Russian-American Jewish intellectual, M. Gessen, set to be awarded a prize named after Hannah Arendt, finds themselves under attack for making “unacceptable” comparisons between Jewish ghettos and Gaza in The New Yorker, with both the city of Bremen and the Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation withdrawing in panic from the award ceremony.
There is a pattern: far-right extremist ideas, or even crimes, are trivialised or regarded as inevitable, like natural disasters. Maybe they also seem less interesting because they are so boringly familiar. By contrast, the left and Muslim migrants are the target of constant, loud and powerful criticism, shading into repression. The heated debates of recent years, even in official statements by the Bundestag, focus almost exclusively on so-called antisemitic incidents in the German cultural scene.
There are harsher and bloodier tales to tell about Germany today. In the summer of 2019, Walter Lübcke, the regional governor of Kassel, in the north of Hesse, was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. For years, the far-right scene had been harassing Lübcke, a devout Christian, because he advocated for refugees. Four months later, on Yom Kippur, an armed right-wing extremist tried to break into the synagogue in Halle, near Leipzig. Impeded by the heavy door, he instead shot and killed two people at a nearby Turkish snack bar. Just a few months later, in February 2020, another far-right gunman killed nine people of Kurdish and Turkish background in Hanau, near Frankfurt.
There are regular scandals over right-wing extremists in the police and the armed forces: in private chat groups, police officers have been caught sharing pictures of Nazi salutes, Christmas baubles with SS runes, and a picture of a black child crouching in a toilet bowl with the caption “The first refugees are leaving the country.” Even when put on punitive leave, such police officers will usually return to duty, arguing that the far-right fun was merely part of their private lives.
This relaxed attitude stands in stark contrast to the scandals surrounding writers like Adania Shibli and M. Gessen, or the endless arguments about whether protesters chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are calling for the elimination of Israel. (The slogan is routinely prosecuted by the Berlin police and prosecutor’s office, and dozens of court cases are pending on this issue.) German politicians rush to demonise awards speeches at the Berlinale and Israeli philosophers speaking at Holocaust memorials, while they forgive their allies’ jokes about Auschwitz; they pass new laws to combat what they consider antisemitism, which will be enforced by police officers who send one another Nazi memes.
4.
In the days of horror after October 7, the first idea that occurred to Germany’s politicians was to pass another Bundestag resolution, to “protect Jewish life in Germany”. The day of commemoration of the first major Nazi pogrom, on 9 November 1938, was deemed an appropriate date to announce the resolution. Here is a perfect example of German symbolic politics, which is both helpless and punitive: Israel is under attack from Hamas, so German officials, lawyers and antisemitism commissioners rush to pass a resolution designed to protect Jews in Germany.
The October 7 attacks were a deeply traumatic moment for Israel, but also for many Jews around the world. The country that was supposed to be a safe haven after the Holocaust had proven to be much less secure than promised. The reason is not surprising. When a nation permanently occupies land claimed by another people, and then brutally oppresses them, the security of the oppressors will remain fragile.
But in the first few months after October 7, it was impossible to say this in Germany. In the first few days, the taboo was quickly turned into a formula: you must not say ‘but’. Prominent German Jews and high-ranking politicians repeatedly declared that they “do not want to hear any buts”; that the Hamas attack should be condemned “without any buts”. When this phrase first appeared, I had not heard any “but”s at all. And yet the obsessive insistence on forbidding “but” makes its absence more obvious.
There was another reason for this strange formula. In the days following October 7, there was a rush to make accusatory comparisons between the Hamas attack on Israel and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Back then, the charge went, ‘everyone’ had shown solidarity with those being attacked – so why not now?
For Germans, the allegation of failing to stand with Israel is so unbearable that it triggers immediate action. This is why many public buildings that were already being illuminated with the blue and yellow of the Ukraine flag had the blue and white of Israel added – in order to say “We Germans stand firmly alongside Ukraine and Israel”, a declaration that has been repeated mindlessly by German politicians ever since.
In this pathetic simplification, the Palestinians automatically end up on the other side, right next to Putin, just as the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli found herself paired with Hamas. These crude binaries depend on silencing “but” – because “but” is a word that makes distinctions, and requires comparisons. The German culture of remembrance, in its current form, absolutely rejects comparison – which is seen to undermine the singularity of the Holocaust as a historical event – unless threats to Israel are being compared to the darkest events in German history.
Resistance to another “declaration of intent” by the Bundestag was quick to arise, owing in part to lingering anger about the anti-BDS resolution, but it became even louder when the first drafts were leaked: they suggested that antisemitism should be combated by imparting knowledge “about Israel and its history” (but not about the Palestinians and the Nakba!). The two-state solution went unmentioned in the paper drafted by the ruling parties. Instead, the anti-BDS resolution was to be reinforced and incorporated into immigration rules.
There were protests from many different quarters: lawyers, cultural organisations, civil society groups, Muslim and progressive Jewish associations, human rights campaigns including Pro Peace and Amnesty International. But the resolution passed with a large majority. It was a joint motion by the three governing parties, along with the largest opposition party at the time, the CDU/CSU, with the title “Never again is now – protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”.
It is an irresponsible document – wholly partisan in its support for Israel, without a word about discrimination against other groups or the daily reality facing Germany’s many immigrants. Its vagueness opens the door to repression – for who defines the antisemitism that it targets? This text goes far beyond the first anti-BDS resolution, calling for “legal loopholes to be closed and repressive measures to be consistently exploited … particularly in criminal law and in residence, asylum and nationality law, in order to ensure the most effective possible fight against antisemitism.” The resolution cites the art exhibition Documenta 15 and the 2024 Berlinale as “major anti-Semitism scandals of recent years”, but there is no mention of the murders or attempted murders in Halle. For a German parliamentary document, this is madness.
*
Shortly before the second resolution was passed, the then foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock of the Green party, hosted a dinner with Germans from Jewish, Israeli and Palestinian backgrounds: academics, journalists and artists. I was one of the guests, and the discussion was calm and open, unlike the public debates that were taking place.
The focus was on the situation in Israel and Palestine, with Baerbock explaining German foreign policy strategy and the possibility to influence events. Towards the end of the dinner, the new anti-BDS resolution was briefly discussed; many of the guests suggested it would further intensify polarisation in Germany. One of the country’s best journalists said he could not remember a time when such a broad social coalition had tried to prevent the passage of a problematic bill – including so many respected institutions – and yet they were still hitting a brick wall.
This informal meeting was quickly turned into a scandal by the right-wing Springer press, which has long abused the accusation of antisemitism and “hostility towards Israel”. The Springer papers Bild and Welt dubbed it “the dinner with Israel’s enemies”, though they did not even know who had been invited to the “much-criticised dinner”. They were driven mad by the fact that the foreign ministry cited confidentiality and did not release the guest list, which the papers tried to compel by legal means. “If Baerbock really meets with such questionable people,” their lawyers argued, “it is in the public interest.”
For the dinner guests, those weeks felt like a witch hunt. In my case, colleagues were informally asked if they could confirm that I had been there. What would happen if you suddenly found yourself outed as an “enemy of Israel” by Bild? Soon, however, it became obvious which participants were really being targeted. The three youngest, the German-Palestinian journalist Alena Jabarine, the French author Emilia Roig, who is of Jewish-Algerian and Martinican background, and the musician Michael Barenboim, the son of world-famous Jewish-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, had posted a photo together on social media – with the knowledge and permission of the ministry, as one of the three assured me. In their post, without giving any details, they said that Baerbock had invited them to the foreign ministry, and that they had “presented [their] political arguments”.
From then on, the two non-white women were repeatedly accused, without evidence, of having “attracted attention with extremely anti-Israeli statements on the Hamas war”. Barenboim’s son, who had regularly and harshly criticised Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, was barely mentioned. But that was probably what ultimately stopped the feverish investigations: not enough “questionable individuals” had been invited, as the majority of the guests were actually Jewish. Springer, the media corporation whose employees must sign a written pledge to “support the right of existence of the State of Israel and oppose all forms of antisemitism”, had unleashed a witch hunt against Jews in order to damage a political opponent, the Green Party foreign minister. When the Scholz government collapsed at the same time as the “Never Again” resolution was passed and new elections were called, the “dinner with the enemies of Israel” disappeared from the newspapers.
But this forgotten episode was a perfect example of how the German mainstream press have not only failed to challenge false claims of antisemitism, but in fact normalised their deployment as a tool of political defamation. In the days of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, the grubby methods of the Springer press were still subject to critical reporting by other newspapers. Böll himself wrote about the way the country’s largest tabloid, Bild, would methodically destroy innocent citizens’ lives, most famously in his 1974 novel The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.
These days there is an embarrassed silence among my colleagues: any critical comment might expose them to the same kinds of accusations. In Germany, the mechanism of guilt by association has been applied to maximum effect. Whenever large cultural institutions warn of the impact of the anti-BDS resolution on the German cultural scene, they are routinely defamed as BDS supporters themselves, and no one will take a stand against it. After all, nobody wants to be seen to act in defence of possible enemies of Israel, even if well-known intellectuals who attended that dinner were obviously anything but terrorists.
When hundreds of German university professors protested against the brutal clearing of a pro-Palestine camp at the Freie Universität Berlin, Bild singled out 12 of the most prominent voices and published their pictures with the headline “Die Universitäter”, a terrible pun conflating universities (“Universitäten”) and perpetrators (“Täter”), claiming that the academics had signed “an open letter in favour of Jew hate demos”.
This relentless hounding of Israel’s critics is matched only by a failure of reporting on the ground. Last year, the German edition of the socialist magazine Jacobin analysed the headlines of nearly 5000 articles in major German news outlets between October 7 and the ceasefire that began in January 2025. Of the 4853 news stories examined, 2100, or more than 40%, were based on Israeli sources; only 244, or 5%, were from Palestinian sources. “For every headline citing Palestinian sources,” the analysis found, “Spiegel and Zeit published seven, and Tagesschau eight, from Israeli sources. Bild’s ratio was even higher, at one to eighteen. This means that in the first week of reporting alone, Israeli information made headlines in leading German media outlets more frequently than Palestinian information did in the first six months.”
Why has the German press collectively failed? Is it foolishness, cowardice, or conviction? Everyone in the media has witnessed the way defamation has been wielded, particularly in the devastated cultural scene, where so many figures have been accused of hating Israel or trivialising antisemitism. But cowardice cannot explain the ideological rigidity of the senior ranks of German media companies. For the most part, these are people of conviction. They feel irrationally trapped by the curse of their grandparents’ generation, and they fear the past might suddenly return and make them guilty all over again – which, ironically, becomes more and more likely as they doggedly try to prevent it.
Their prevailing views are based on confused emotions and historically inadmissible comparisons – and they are no longer shared by the majority of their readers. For the past year, German public opinion on the Middle East has been at odds with Staatsräson, with a clear majority opposed to delivering weapons to Israel.
And yet, once a claim has been repeated often enough without challenge, it will come to be regarded as the truth. This includes the idea that anything that happens to Israel or diaspora Jews should be understood by reference to the Holocaust. In fact, this myopic tendency has only got worse since 7 October 2023, which is unvaryingly described as the day on which “the most Jews were murdered since the Holocaust”, as if to emphasise that the second of these events is a continuation of the first; similarly, any suggestion of boycotting goods produced in Israel is regarded as an extension of the Nazi campaign targeting Jewish businesses in Germany.
5.
There is no official censorship in the German media. The dynamics of “intellectual cowardice”, as famously described by George Orwell, operate in a more subtle way. By tacit agreement, a number of authors known for their critical stance on Israel are no longer published – while there is still room for all manner of tastelessness on the pro-Israeli side. Last summer, as famine threatened Gaza, a well-known German-Jewish columnist, Maxim Biller, wrote that the “hunger blockade of Gaza” was “strategically correct, but inhumane”.
When proper reporting on these issues does appear in smaller publications, the mainstream outlets ignore it completely. This was the case with Jacobin’s analysis of Gaza coverage, the stark results of which were not debated elsewhere. A similar fate has met the tireless reporting done by an Israeli investigative journalist in Berlin, Yossi Bartal, whose articles, written in German and English, are met with the same combination of deafening silence and deadening ignorance. When there’s absolutely no way of getting around his work, Bartal is smugly pigeonholed as “an author familiar from the post-colonial milieu” (Die Zeit). His latest long-form report, published by the liberal-left paper Die Tageszeitung, and in English by the online magazine The Diasporist, would likely have caused a major government scandal in other EU countries.
Bartal’s reports examined the “extraordinary influence” of the German branch of the highly active pro-Israeli lobbying group ELNET (European Leadership Network), which sees itself as a European sibling to America’s influential AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). According to Bartal’s most recent research, ELNET has taken at least 125 members of the Bundestag and 35 members of state parliaments on trips to Israel that include personal meetings with representatives of the government, military and industry.
The organisation’s chairman claims to have “recruited numerous leading figures from the central political camps in Germany” and, through his “continuous activity at the highest political levels,” contributed to “Germany adopting a decisive policy against the boycott movement against Israel.” Many of the trips involved politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU, whose MPs staunchly oppose any interruption in weapons deliveries to Israel. (These same MPs were furious with Friedrich Merz, the chancellor and CDU leader, when he temporarily called a halt on such deliveries last year.)
ELNET Germany is a high-profile network. Among its co-founders is Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who has served as both economics and energy minister and defence minister; he is in a relationship with the current economics and energy minister, Katharina Reiche. ELNET’s advisory council boasts Karin Prien, the current education and family minister. “No other organisation has organised even a fraction of the amount of foreign travel for German parliamentarians,” writes Bartal, and quotes the independent German watchdog Lobbycontrol: “You don’t get to see such a fully fledged network of prominent policymakers as these everyday.”
But, several weeks later, the media reaction to Bartal’s two comprehensive articles – and to another independent research by the online platform Abgeordnetenwatch (“Parliamentwatch”) – has been near-total indifference. No other German media outlet found it worth reporting that a whole host of politicians from both governing parties (as well as all other parties, with the exception of the AfD) have been guests of an Israeli lobbying group founded and represented by government ministers and ex-ministers. Perhaps this is what Staatsräson really stands for today.
If you were to ask all the politicians, journalists, and opinion leaders in Germany why they react with such hostility and aggression whenever they are challenged on their narrow worldview or their increasingly repressive policies – or if you were to point out how Jewish and Israeli artists and intellectuals are constantly falling prey to their Staatsräson politics, at least a few honest souls among them might reply, in despair, with another question: What else could be done against antisemitism? As we see daily across the German media, antisemitism is said to have risen “enormously”, “dramatically”, and “immeasurably”, and all those hardline policies are intended to combat this resolutely.
But the facts of this rise are surprisingly hard to substantiate. For years, a tally of German antisemitic incidents has been collected and published annually by a private association funded by public money, the Research and Information Centre on Anti-Semitism (RIAS). The number of incidents recorded had already risen sharply before 7 October 2023. The reasons for this are likely found in that cesspool of human communication known as social media as well as the reporting paradox: as soon as social sensitivity to an issue increases and reporting centres are established, the number of cases begins to rise.
A recent report, commissioned by Diaspora Alliance and written by Israeli journalist and data analyst Itay Mashiach, also casts serious doubt on RIAS’s methods: “The organisation has, for example, categorised the anti-occupation demonstrations of retired peace activists, a theatre production on Jewish-Arab family relations, and even a speech about the lessons of the Holocaust (given by one of Israel’s most prominent historians) as anti-Semitic incidents.” The report goes on to state that “much of RIAS’s work focuses on delegitimising pro-Palestinian advocacy and vilifying markers of Palestinian identity. This report convincingly demonstrates that virtually any Palestinian public event in Germany is eligible for inclusion in RIAS’s statistics.”
For Germany, this is a painful subject. The country undoubtedly has problems with antisemitism, as well as a special historical responsibility for the protection of Jews and other minorities. This is precisely why the country should handle accusations of antisemitism responsibly, and in good faith. Yet today, the opposite is the case. In Germany, even police officers who get hurt at a pro-Palestinian demonstration are counted as victims of an antisemitic attack.
The big question is whether Germany is experiencing a more dramatic rise in antisemitism than neighbouring countries: Jewish schools and institutions require protection throughout Europe, and hate-based crimes – from graffiti to physical attacks – are on the rise everywhere. But hate incidents are by no means only happening to people perceived to be Jewish; anti-Muslim sentiment is increasing, too.
If every criticism of Israeli government policy, every film about the occupation, every debate featuring a Palestinian presence is counted as an antisemitic incident, it helps no one – certainly not Jews living in Germany. They are already being frightened by irresponsible actors like the Israeli ambassador and the alarmist, one-sided Jewish weekly Jüdische Allgemeine. At the same time, driven by convulsions of online hate, a murderous kind of antisemitism is spreading – in Sydney, Manchester, and most recently London. And while antisemitism is present in every society, the weaponisation of inflated charges of antisemitism for political gain has also played a part in bringing out the real thing.
Given Germany’s history, there is a bitter irony in the increasingly aggressive attacks by non-Jewish politicians and journalists on Jews who refuse to be ‘protected’ by Staatsräson. At the same time, these noisy debates divert attention away from the everyday racism directed against German Muslims, who are in turn suspected of antisemitism. I ask myself whether, in a different country, a minister of culture could use a racist phrase like “Pali activists” without sanction, the way Wolfram Weimer did.
As elsewhere, all of this is playing into the hands of repressive, right-wing, anti-immigrant political forces while obscuring the economic interests that lie behind them. After all, Germany is still delivering weapons to Israel – without any meaningful protests or public debate.
Until recently, the extreme right in Germany have been more than happy to present themselves as Israel’s most passionate defenders, as a pretext for their anti-Muslim xenophobia. But suddenly they seem to have discovered a lot of things to criticise. One of Germany’s most eminent far-right politicians, Björn Höcke of the AfD, recently posted a picture of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, celebrating with champagne in the Knesset after the vote to introduce the death penalty for Palestinians. Höcke, cynically relishing the opportunity to take a position almost beyond criticism, commented: “The religious fervour in a parliament of the ‘Western World’ shows that the world is moving towards a tragic tipping point. A state that makes imposing the death penalty contingent on citizenship or ethnic affiliation has stopped adhering to the rule of law.”
For the time being, the struggle for a more open, liberal Germany seems to be lost. Twenty-five years ago, as the daughter of a Jewish father persecuted by the Nazis, I came to this seemingly enlightened country full of hope. Nowadays, I catch myself thinking bitterly that Germany hasn’t learned much from its history. But then another, more level-headed voice reminds me: perhaps history teaches us that danger always appears where we least expect it.
Source: EQUATOR
++++++++++++
Germany trumpets its reckoning with its Nazi past – except when it’s inconvenient
Gabor Maté, Chris Hedges & Aaron Maté on Palestine: The Moral Issue of Our Time
Albert Einstein on Jews in Palestine (1932-49)
Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
Read Anne Boyer’s extraordinary New York Times resignation letter
Award ceremony suspended after writer compares Gaza to Nazi-era Jewish ghettos
Indiscriminate slaughter of innocents
A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance
We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza
Why is Germany supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
Israel’s Secret Plan of Ethnic Cleansing (w/ Jessica Buxbaum)
Trump’s new world order is being born – and Venezuela is just the start
After the truth-shower 