Anti-Antisemitism Is Fuelling an Authoritarian Climate in Germany

Much has been written about the events of 7 October 2023, including about what they brought to light, such as the broad lack of empathy for the victims of the Hamas attack on the part of certain sections of the campist Left. They interpreted the reactionary, anti-Israeli, and misogynist outburst of extreme violence as a “military operation” of the “Palestinian resistance” (Klasse gegen Klasse, among others), in short a “day to be proud of” (Palästina spricht). An anti-Zionist worldview,[1] with antisemitic leanings and in some cases explicitly antisemitic expressions, is rearing its ugly head and is on the rise in parts of the pro-Palestinian and anti-war protests around the world.

“Conflict over the Conflict”

And yet, the friend-enemy binary is not only to be found among the campist troops of Israel’s opponents. On the contrary, the second-order Middle East conflict, what Kenneth Stern calls the “conflict over the conflict”, quickly reached a new level after 7 October in the debate around anti-Semitism.

In a downright “moral panic”, there was soon a tendency, mirroring the above, to suspect antisemitism behind every expression of (pro-)Palestinian perspectives and demands and of compassion for the Palestinian victims of Israel’s war in Gaza (which quickly ceased to be a legitimate response and turned into a war crime with genocidal tendencies), and ultimately, to impute an antisemitic motivation to every form of activism against the war in Gaza.

The Hamas sympathizers distributing sweets in Berlin-Neukölln after the massacre set the stage for the possibility of interpreting virtually everything (pro-)Palestinian as dangerous — a form of anti-Palestinian racism that is not necessarily intentional, but nevertheless is effectively such. This was most obvious in the general decrees issued by the police in some cities banning all Palestine-related gatherings for extended periods of time, or in the police anticipating violence at such gatherings due to the “typical emotionalism” of the participants.[2]

Trench Warfare Logic

This constellation is not new. Identitarian proclamations, the obligation to profess loyalty and absolute partisanship, that is, “radical identification”, have long characterized the discursive field surrounding Israel/Palestine/Jews/antisemitism etc. At the same time, this discourse has also always been characterized by a reductionism that, following a binary trench warfare logic, does not distinguish between the various dimensions of the conflict (cultural, economic, political, moral, and so forth).

One side sees it as a mere (asymmetrical) conflict of interests; the other interprets it through the lens of antisemitism. The first reductionism refuses to address antisemitism (especially within its own ranks) by pointing to the “facts on the ground”. The second reductionism, indeed also the most astonishing in its theoretical idealism and sociological narrow-mindedness, considers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be essentially about antisemitism, assuming that it would not even exist without one side’s antisemitism (as articulated with shocking frankness by Lars Rensmann and Karin Stögner in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 12 June 2024).

What is alarming about this constellation of authoritarian anti-antisemitism is how extremely low the threshold is set for what societal debates are expected to be tolerated before the authorities resort to repressive measures.

This, albeit in exaggerated form, is the ideological foundation for instrumentalizing the critique of antisemitism as a mere accusation of antisemitism. Such a perspective can be used to delegitimize any not entirely tame criticism of Israel, Zionism, the decades-long occupation, settler violence, or the current war. The debate then becomes more about the appropriateness of the terms used to describe what is going on (apartheid, genocide, etc.) than about the actual situation.

As scholars such as Hannah Tzuberi and Patricia Piberger have repeatedly pointed out, in the German media and political arena, criticism of Israel’s human rights record or other actions is not measured in terms of its factual accuracy or political aptness, but, as it were, is first made to pass the antisemitism test before it can be considered at all. This is also evident in the legal nihilism widespread among German politicians as regards statements critical of Israel in international judicial proceedings and UN resolutions. In this perspective, Israel does not appear as an actual nation state that is an object in the real world, but it plays out in the “imagined space of the past”and in the German project of “becoming good again”[3] by way of the struggle “against antisemitism and for the protection of Jewish life.”

Authoritarian Anti-Antisemitism

What is new about the current constellation is the scope and depth of this misguided anti-antisemitism and, in particular, the degree to which it has become bureaucratized — and hence the degree to which the debate over the Middle East conflict has become the object of juridification and securitization. This means that the space of what is considered to be debatable in public is increasingly being governed by (quasi-)law, monitored by law enforcement agencies and treated as a problem of social order rather than a political problem. Only obliquely is this about fighting actual antisemitism, and involves other aims as well. Above all, it is a trend that is attaching to other illiberal tendencies, embedding itself in and reinforcing an authoritarian turn, even if not always intentionally. That is why I call it authoritarian anti-antisemitism.

Authoritarian anti-antisemitism draws on at least two distinct sources. One is a political position that combines genuine concern for Jewish people and a honed awareness of antisemitism with fallacious universalizations of the “lessons of history”. It sees itself as articulating an anti-fascist lesson from the Holocaust, but consistently locates the fascism of the present in (pro-)Palestinian discourse (I do have not enough space here to show how this evolved historically). Ultimately, this position, metaphorically speaking, is at best only able to make out differences of degree between the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and the boycott of Israel as an occupying power. It is a position that can be found on the “antideutsch” Left, in left-wing solidarity with Israel and the left-wing critique of ideology, as well as in socially liberal civil society.

The normative foundations of the Federal Republic of Germany are being watered down in the name of a ‘lesson from history’.

The second source is a right-wing discourse that the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has propagated for years and which overlaps with the discourse of a significant portion of the “liberal” and conservative mainstream. Here, an instrumentalization of the “Christian-Jewish legacy”, or even of “the West”, combines with anti-Muslim and anti-leftist resentment disguised as “anti-extremist” to form a national-interest position that extends back to the efforts to “make amends” during the Adenauer era and is instrumental in the national exoneration from the Holocaust.

The one-sided partisanship of both of these ideological strands in favour of Israel and its policies seemingly remains unshaken by even the most openly fascist attitudes and practices on the part of the Israeli government. The fact that both agree on the identification of their Muslim or “woke”, post-colonial, (pro-)Palestinian opponents conceals the disagreements between these camps on other issues and allows for strategic alliances between them.

Policing the Academy

The trend towards authoritarian anti-antisemitism found its most obvious expression in the events surrounding the Gaza war protest camp at the Free University of Berlin in spring 2024. The camp was cleared by the police, using massive force and on the orders of the vice-chancellor, for no apparent reason and without any serious incidents having occurred — one of the most brutal police operations in recent decades, according to political scientist Hajo Funke.

Hundreds of academics criticized this in an open letter. Note that they did not express their solidarity with the demands of the camp initiators, but appealed to the right to protest and be safe from police violence, calling for universities to find a different way to deal with the conflict. In an act of excessively heightened ambiguity intolerance, the right-wing press pilloried the signatories as supporters of “Jew-hating demonstrations”, even publishing photos of what they called “Universitäter”.[4]

This was politically seconded and cheered on by the governing mayor of Berlin and all the way up to the federal government. The office of Education Minister Stark-Watzinger, who publicly declared she was “appalled” by the letter and called into doubt signatories’ adherence to the constitution, drew up lists of the signatories and — without any legal basis or jurisdiction — considered prosecuting them and withdrawing their funding. A high-ranking staff member in the education ministry, who in the course of the scandal was promoted to secretary, expressed his intentions clearly in internal chats: to pressure the undesirable voices into censoring themselves.

Intensified Securitization

The debate was accompanied by calls to intensify the securitization process. Well-known politicians spoke out in favour of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, investigating ever more areas of society (scholarship, cultural funding, etc.). A Berlin cultural centre had its funding withdrawn because it allowed an anti-Zionist Jewish association to use its space. A Palestine conference was prevented with the help of legal as well as illegal forms of harassment.

Police violence overshadowed many demonstrations, which were also subject to the absurdities of protest policing, such as the banning of certain languages (Irish, Arabic, Hebrew). Municipal offices of the interior and education authorities criminalized Palestinian symbols, the display of which led to seizures and arrests. A new parliamentary resolution blames primarily Muslims for antisemitism. It seeks to make the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism — highly questionable in both political and scholarly terms — into a general standard, reaffirms the substantively illegitimate BDS resolution passed by the Bundestag in 2019, and wants to ban the movement from operating in Germany. Finally, asylum and residency law, of all things, are identified as key levers in the fight against antisemitism.

What all this means in practical terms was recently made public: according to the new citizenship law, anyone who refers positively in any way to the (ambiguous) slogan “From the river to the sea” — for example, by “liking” it on social media — is to be excluded from the possibility of naturalization. In short, the normative foundations of the Federal Republic of Germany (immutable principles of the state and constitutional rights such as freedom of speech, artistic expression and assembly, academic freedom, and the right of asylum) are being watered down in the name of a “lesson from history”.

In the current situation, we can no longer naively criticize antisemitism without also addressing the false accusations and instrumentalizations of anti-antisemitism.

What is alarming about this constellation of authoritarian anti-antisemitism is not so much that combating antisemitism, of all things, is at its centre (although this too is tragic, and evidence that the German culture of remembrance and what is derived from it have always been less than effective in protecting Jews). No, what is most alarming is how extremely low the threshold is set in this context for what societal debates are expected to be tolerated before the authorities resort to repressive measures.

Here, too, the treatment of the BDS movement is symptomatic. While there is plenty to criticize about it, seeking to ban it on the basis of an equation with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses (as was already the case when the movement used public municipal spaces to address its concerns) seems downright grotesque. This is a low point in the inability and unwillingness to grasp and endure complexity and ambiguity. It is the German state’s blatant partisanship in a national(istic) conflict in which the same slogans (e.g. “From the river to the sea”) — which can be found on both sides, like maps lacking the symbolic representation of the other side, and which derive from the same dynamics of escalation and nationalist mobilization — are only charged with a portentous ideological surplus of meaning (“antisemitism!”) and massively sanctioned in the case of one of the sides. The responses range from denunciations and the withdrawal of funding to arrest.

The consequences are: people become intimidated and withdraw from public discourse; others exhibit signs of reactance (“You can go f*ck yourselves!”); the situation escalates; a culture of public debate disappears. This is buttressed by instruments of control and repression that are already menacing, but will be all the more vicious in the hands of a government led by the AfD.

Once again, none of this is to say that there is no antisemitism in this conflict, including Israel-related antisemitism, that needs to be combated. On the contrary: residential buildings have been tagged with Stars of David, there was an attempted arson attack on a Berlin synagogue, journalists have been targeted with “Jew-press” slurs — not to mention the genuine antisemitism of Hamas and their ilk. There can be no excuses or passivity in this respect.

Nevertheless, in the current situation, we can no longer naively criticize antisemitism without also addressing the false accusations and instrumentalizations of anti-antisemitism. This is currently one of the key ideological battlegrounds on which an authoritarian restructuring of German society is being advanced and simultaneously camouflaged as a good cause. Any Left that is critical of antisemitism and in solidarity with Israel that ignores this fact or overlooks what reactionary wagon it has hitched itself to has betrayed its own universalist claim to liberation at least as much as have the Hamas apologists. And in light of the mass murder in Gaza, the increasing violence against the population of the West Bank, and the war in Lebanon, this is certainly the bigger problem.

This article first appeared in LuXemburg. Translated by Millay Hyatt and Sam Langer for Gegensatz Translation Collective.