Germany and Israel: from historical responsibility to criminal complicity

“Zionismus über alles” (“Zionism above all”), a phrase attributed to media magnate and Axel Springer SE CEO Mathias Döpfner, revealed by a Die Zeit investigation based on leaked e-mails, illustrates the extent of Germany’s moral abduction in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The phrase eerily echoes “Deutschland über alles”, taken from the first stance of the German national anthem. Initially a call for the unification of the German-speaking states, this stance was hijacked under the Third Reich to embody the expansionist and criminal ambitions of Nazism. This parallel shows how little the German political and intellectual elites, with a few exceptions, seem to have learned from their own history. The height of cynicism lies in the instrumentalization of Erinnerungskultur – the culture of remembrance – to justify a crime that this memory was intended precisely to prevent. We analyze this situation by unravelling the mechanisms of inversion and projection at work and shedding light on their political and ideological motivations. We will also highlight, through a few examples, the rare attempts to resist this drift.

On October 12, 2023, a few days after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the start of Israel’s genocidal response in Gaza, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz addressed the Bundestag with these words: “There is only one place for Germany at this time, and that is by Israel’s side. This is what we mean when we say: Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson (raison d’état).” “Our own history, our responsibility deriving from the Holocaust, makes it our permanent duty to stand up for the existence and security of the State of Israel,” he added. This speech was inspired almost word for word by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2008 speech to the Knesset, which itself hijacked a principle formulated by Joschka Fischer two decades earlier. In an article published in the weekly Die Zeit in 1985 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe, Fischer wrote: “Only German responsibility for Auschwitz can be the essence of West German Staatsräson. Everything else comes afterwards.”

It is in the name of this Staatsräson that Germany has hijacked the belief that the Holocaust conferred on it a responsibility to humanity, to make it an exclusive responsibility to Israel.  In so doing, instead of preventing further genocides, Germany became a key player in the genocide in Gaza, providing military, political and diplomatic support to Israel while stifling any criticism of this war.

This complicity, now genocidal, has not always met with unanimous approval in Germany, and has aroused varying degrees of opposition. In the wake of Israel’s war against Lebanon in 2006, 25 German intellectuals and public figures published a manifesto in which they wrote: “The Middle East conflict, which has now been ongoing for almost six decades and has repeatedly turned bloody, undeniably has a German and, to some extent, a European genesis—European in the sense that the German concept of a ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ emerged from European antisemitism and nationalism. And the Palestinian population has not the slightest share in the outsourcing of part of Europe’s problems to the Middle East.” They added: “As Germans, Austrians, and Europeans, we bear not only a shared responsibility for the existence of Israel—which, given the course history has taken, must be safeguarded without compromise for all time—but also a shared responsibility for the living conditions and the self-determined future of the Palestinian people.”

Before this marginal stance in Germany, Edward Said had already, in 1999, formulated with implacable clarity the historical responsibility of Europe, and Germany in particular, in the dispossession of the Palestinians: “Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus, we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.”

Active complicity in crime, repression of whistle-blowers

German repression of Palestinians and their supporters does not date back to October 7. In 2020, around 400 academics and artists from several countries denounced political interference by German institutions and authorities aimed at silencing defenders of Palestinian rights. They cited four emblematic cases: in September 2019, Dortmund and Aachen cancelled awards to Kamila Shamsie and Walid Raad; in Munich, Nirit Sommerfeld was threatened with concert cancellation; in March 2020, Bochum was pressured to exclude Achille Mbembe from the Ruhrtriennale festival. All were accused of supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, wrongly equated with anti-Semitism. At the root of this McCarthyism was a resolution passed in the Bundestag in 2019, inspired by the extreme right.

Entering the Bundestag in 2017, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the first far-right formation to take its seat since the war, has adopted an opportunistic strategy: while denouncing the “cult of guilt” linked to German history and downplaying Nazism, its leaders have displayed unconditional support for Israel to mask their xenophobia and racism. In 2019, the AfD proposed banning the BDS movement in Germany, forcing other parties into line. A cross-party resolution passed in the Bundestag in May 2019 thus equated BDS with anti-Semitism by slandering it, falsely claiming that it “recall the most terrible phase of German history.” Widely passed despite its incompatibility with freedom of expression, it was subsequently declared unconstitutional by several courts.

In a ruling on June 11, 2020, the European Court of Human Rights affirmed the right of BDS activists to call for a boycott of Israeli products. On January 20, 2022, Germany’s Federal Administrative Court ruled that the city of Munich could not refuse a hall to an association wishing to debate restrictions on the BDS movement, thus confirming the latter’s lawfulness and the legitimacy of the boycott as criticism of the Israeli government. This decision follows those of the Higher Administrative Court of Lower Saxony (Lüneburg) on March 28, 2019, which overturned the refusal of the municipality of Oldenburg to authorize an event linked to Israeli Apartheid Week, and the Administrative Court of Cologne on September 13, 2019, which ruled that the exclusion of an association from a cultural festival in Bonn due to its support for the BDS movement was illegal.

Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocidal response in Gaza, Germany has stepped up its repression of Palestinians and their supporters, while strengthening its support for Tel Aviv on almost every front, including military and legal. On October 12, it authorized the use of two Heron TP combat drones against the population of Gaza. Arms exports to Israel then exploded: 326 million euros in 2023, ten times more than in 2022, and 161 million in 2024. The German government has also “firmly and explicitly” rejected the accusation of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), calling it “totally unfounded”. In an order issued on January 26, 2024, the ICJ indicated that there was a plausible risk of genocide committed by Israel against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, and ordered five provisional measures against the State of Israel. In February 2025, Chancellor Scholz said in an interview, in a manner both astounding and revolting, about genocide in Gaza and the ICJ: “I am not engaging in this debate because my legal assessment is that it would be an incorrect judgment. There is no point in dealing with it at all […] The accusation of genocide is absurd.”

The Namibian president found Germany’s position shocking, deploring its failure to learn the lessons of its history. Between 1904 and 1908, Germany massacred at least 70,000 Herero and Nama in Namibia, a crime that many historians consider to be the first genocide of the 20th century.

Alongside their ostentatious support for the Israeli government in the midst of genocide, Germany’s leaders have imposed a leaden blanket on Germany’s Palestinians and their supporters. Germany has long repressed pro-Palestinian voices, but the trend intensified sharply after October 7. Demonstrations were banned, police violence and arrests increased, including against Jewish activists. Freedom of expression was also under threat: slogans such as “From the river to the sea” and “Free Palestine” were criminalized, and student protesters suffered repression and smear campaigns.

Even more staggering, renowned intellectuals and academics from a variety of disciplines, expressing themselves peacefully, some of them Jews themselves, have been bullied, silenced or even dismissed. In April 2024, Germany expelled Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British-Palestinian surgeon and rector of Glasgow University, to prevent him from testifying about Israeli atrocities in Gaza, where he had spent several months treating the war-wounded after the Israeli assault. A few weeks later, he was refused entry to France. The French authorities told him that Germany had imposed a one-year visa ban on him, valid throughout the Schengen area.

In February 2024, Professor Ghassan Hage was dismissed by the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for criticizing Israel on social networks. Artist Laurie Anderson was forced to resign from Essen’s Folkwang University of the Arts because of her support for a “Letter against Apartheid” initiated by Palestinian artists in 2021. Last April, the University of Cologne cancelled a visiting professorship awarded to American philosopher Nancy Fraser after she condemned the massacres committed in Gaza by the Israeli army. The Federal Minister of Education, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, attempted to cut off the funding of over 1,000 professors who had signed an open letter denouncing police violence against students mobilized against the war in Gaza. On January 29, 2025, a resolution adopted by a broad parliamentary coalition, ranging from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to the extreme right (AfD), stepped up the repression of critics of Israel and supporters of the BDS movement in schools and universities.

After winning two prizes at the Berlinale Film Festival for their film No Other Land, which documents the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Masafer Yatta, Israeli director and journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian journalist and activist Basel Adra were the target of a violent campaign of attacks. Their prize-giving speech, in which Adra urged Germany to end its support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Abraham denounced the apartheid that separates them as Israelis and Palestinians, sparked an outcry in Germany.  Media and politicians accused them of anti-Semitism, while the German Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth, who was filmed applauding the winners, made it clear that her applause was directed solely “at the Israeli Jewish journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham”.

Yuval Abraham said that the characterization of the award ceremony as “anti-Semitic” by German officials had triggered death threats and physical intimidation against his family, forcing him to postpone his return to Israel. “To stand on German soil as the son of Holocaust survivors and call for a ceasefire, only to be branded an anti-Semite, is not only outrageous: it literally puts Jewish lives at risk,” he denounced. “I don’t know what Germany is trying to do with us,” he added. “If this is how it intends to deal with its guilt over the Shoah, then it’s totally draining the meaning out of it.”

Inversion and projection

Amos Goldberg and Alon Confino explain that the conflation between harsh criticism of Israel and Zionism with anti-Semitism stems from a campaign waged by Israel and its allies worldwide over several decades to silence opposition to the state’s violent policies, such as occupation, apartheid and domination of the Palestinians. This strategy is not only cynical and hypocritical, it also undermines the fight against real anti-Semitism, enabling Israel and its supporters to divert attention from its own crimes by projecting them onto the Palestinians and their allies, whom they then designate as anti-Semites.

This mechanism of inversion and projection is embodied in the definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which serves as the basis for the so-called “fight against anti-Semitism”. Israel and its allies actively promote it throughout the world.

In 2016, the IHRA adopted an “working definition of anti-Semitism” that has provoked fierce controversy, although it has been adopted by a dozen countries, including Germany, and several organizations. The definition offers a neutral but summary description of anti-Semitism as “hatred of Jews”, accompanied by eleven examples intended to illustrate it. However, seven of these examples focus exclusively on Israel, equating criticism of Israel or opposition to one version or another of Zionism with anti-Semitism. Kenneth Stern, the main author of this definition, said: “I drafted the definition of anti-Semitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it”.

Goldberg and Confino show how the mechanism of inversion and projection is at work in this definition, drawing on one of the examples of anti-Semitic acts it proposes, namely “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination.” While Israel prevents Palestinian self-determination through its policies of colonization, annexation and the 2018 Basic Law, which states that “The actualization of the right of national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people”, the IHRA definition inverts this reality and projects it onto Palestinians, calling this situation anti-Semitism.

The same mechanism of inversion and projection underlies the German Staatsräson, leading it to support Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, while repressing victims and their supporters under the accusation of anti-Semitism. This can be seen, for example, in the text and spirit of the 2019 anti-BDS law, as well as in several recent events.

Israeli filmmaker and pro-Palestinian activist Dror Dayan was recently summoned to appear before a Berlin court for “using distinctive signs of unconstitutional and terrorist organizations”, a charge punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment. The prosecution stems from a post on X, where Dayan had taken up the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and denounced its Nazification by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, writing: “We will not allow history to be rewritten. Palestine Solidarity will not become the scapegoat of the Nazis grandchildren. Your crimes, not ours.”

What undoubtedly particularly motivated the prosecution was the second part of his message, in which he denounced the historical revisionism of the German government, which now equates the slogan “From the river to the sea” with the swastika. “This cynical relativization serves to invert the roles of perpetrator and victim and to trivialize Germany’s blood-soaked history,” Dayan told Jüdische Welt. He added: “The Palestinians, who have had to live under the most brutal occupation or in exile for nearly 80 years, are being equated with the Gestapo—the same Gestapo that deported my great-uncle to Buchenwald as a Jewish communist.”

The trial, originally scheduled for January 27, 2025, was adjourned. Ironically, Dayan commented, “There is no better day to bring a Jew before a German court than January 27, the day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.”

The phenomena of role reversal, the projection of the Western anti-Semitic legacy onto others – including the descendants of the victims of anti-Semitism and the “victims of the victims” – and the accompanying rewriting of history are not unique to German society. They can be found in many Western societies, notably France. What distinguishes Germany is both the intensity of these dynamics and their interweaving with Erinnerungskultur – the  culture of remembrance.

Erinnerungskultur or memory erasure?

In April 1961, a few hours before the opening of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem for his central role, as a senior Nazi official and SS lieutenant-colonel, in planning the extermination of six million European Jews, Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, told his fellow citizens that he hoped this biggest Nazi trial since Nuremberg would “bring the full truth to light . . . and that justice will be done”. He added: “In the German national body, in the moral life of the German people, there is no longer any National Socialism, no National Socialist feeling. We have become a constitutional state.”

This statement was as much wishful thinking as a blatant lie – and no one knew this better than Konrad Adenauer himself. His chief of staff and close confidant between 1953 and 1963, Hans Globke, had, in fact, been a high-ranking official in the Interior Ministry under the Nazi regime, playing a central role in implementing its anti-Semitic policies.

Historian Gunnar Take, of Munich’s Institute of Contemporary History, discovered that of more than 50 senior officials in Adenauer’s chancellery who were of service age during the Third Reich, only three were demonstrably anti-Nazi.

Globke was instrumental in implementing the Nuremberg racial laws and drafting the Slovak “Jewish Code”. Author of an influential legal commentary in 1936, he tightened discrimination, stipulating that sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans were a crime, even outside Germany. He also banned German women under 45 from working in Jewish homes, citing the “pernicious racial sexual threat” posed by Jews. In 1938, Globke, now Ministerialrat (ministerial advisor), headed a unit on racial law and required Jews to add “Israel” or “Sara” to their first names to identify them more easily. During the war, he supervised the application of racial policies in the occupied territories. In 1941, he co-authored an ordinance depriving Jews in conquered countries of their legal status and facilitating the confiscation of their property, considered one of the most important legal foundations of the Holocaust. He has also been identified as the likely author of a report by the Reich Interior Ministry in France, which complained of the “infiltration of coloured blood into Europe” and called for the “elimination” of these “detrimental influences” on the gene pool. 

After the Second World War, Globke became a senior civil servant, diplomat and spymaster. Under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he became Chief of Staff in the Federal Chancellery after the October 1953 elections. A true “éminence grise” and the chancellor’s closest confidant, he oversaw recruitment policy, government operations, as well as the creation and supervision of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the foreign intelligence service, and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. He also played a key role in the leadership of the CDU party (Germany’s Christian Democratic Union).

This position enabled him to ensure that his name was removed from the Eichmann trial in 1961-1962. With CIA support, all mention of him was erased from the serial publication of Eichmann’s memoirs in an American magazine. Government documents obtained by German journalist Gaby Weber reveal that Robert Servatius, Eichmann’s lawyer, had been an informant for West German intelligence services for five years. He passed on to them his client’s state of mind and redacted his final speech of compromising names, including Globke. Weber also established that Germany had known about Eichmann’s hiding place since 1945 without taking any action.

However, an investigation by The Times of London in 2021 revealed Hans Globke’s central role in the development of Israel’s nuclear program.

According to the Times, months before the trial, Globke and Adenauer began negotiating a secret agreement to lend Israel 2 billion Deutschmarks, or around 4.8 billion euros today, for a “development project” in the Negev desert. Documents revealed by Weber suggest that this was in fact the construction of the Dimona atomic research facility and heavy water reactor, the cradle of Israel’s nuclear program. The agreement was codenamed Aktion Geschäftsfreund, “Operation Business Friend”.

A memorandum from the German Foreign Office at the time describes a meeting between Adenauer’s Defense Minister, Franz-Josef Strauss, and David Ben Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister: “Ben Gurion addressed the production of atomic weapons. In the conversation Ben Gurion explained that the chancellor had promised him Germany would take part in the development of the Negev desert.” However, the Germans seem to have suspended negotiations during the Eichmann trial in order for the Israelis to ensure his silence. “In no event can we make any undertakings before the conclusion of the Eichmann trial,” says a Foreign Office document. Globke and Adenauer both retired in October of that year.

The “Operation Business Friend” loan was finally granted. In 1965, after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries, this loan was converted into official development aid. Decades later, in 2015, Hans Rühle, a nuclear proliferation expert and former senior German Defense Ministry and NATO official, confirmed to the conservative pro-Israeli newspaper Die Welt that this money had been used to finance Israel’s nuclear program. The technology used came from France, as part of the secret 1956 Sèvres agreement between Israel, France and the UK, which established cooperation for the construction of the Dimona nuclear reactor.

Gerhard von Preuschen, head of the German delegation at the Adolf Eichmann trial, concludes his final report with an astonishingly racist eulogy of “the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth. This youth exhibits almost none of the features which one used to regard as Jewish. Of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces, the offspring of the German Jewish immigrants represent a new type of the Jew that was unknown until now.” In his eyes, the Jewish state had become “Aryan”.

The Max Planck Society and the legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society

The Max Planck Society (MPS) is a perfect example of how a scientific institution can, over the course of its history, reverse the responsibility for its past and project it onto others. Heir to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which collaborated closely with the Nazi regime, the MPS has not learned the lessons of its past, as demonstrated by its stance on the war in Gaza. Instead of critically examining its history, it has aligned itself with the German Staatsräson, displaying unconditional support for Israel in defiance of international law and its own code of conduct.

Patrick Cramer, President of the SMP, said during his visit to Israel in November 2023: “Just like the State of Israel, the Max Planck Society was founded 75 years ago. However, its inception represented an entirely different kind of new beginning. Researchers in our predecessor organization, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, had been complicit in Nazi crimes. This legacy remains a heavy burden and an enduring obligation for us.” He added: “Our own history provided an additional reason why I was so deeply moved by our visit to Yad Vashem today. We laid a memorial wreath for the Jewish members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society who were murdered: Fritz Epstein and Fritz Duschinsky, and Marie Wreschner, who committed suicide. We also commemorated the more than one hundred people in our predecessor organization who were forced to flee Germany, including world-famous scientists like Lise Meitner and Albert Einstein.”

A few weeks later, after an article in the right-wing German newspaper Welt am Sonntag accused Ghassan Hage, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, of “hatred of Israel”, and wrongly labelled him a “BDS activist”, MPS issued a brief statement announcing the termination of its “working relationship” with him. In a subsequent article, Hage returned to the circumstances of his dismissal, denouncing a hasty decision by MPS, taken under media pressure and without consulting him, and criticizing the instrumentalization of the accusation of anti-Semitism to stifle criticism of Israel.

Following his dismissal, the global academic community, including Israeli researchers, the German Society for Social and Cultural Anthropology, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, the European Association of Social Anthropologists, the American Anthropological Association, the Council for Humanities, Arts and Sciences and the Australian Anthropological Society, mobilized in support of Hage, calling on the MPS to reverse its decision. Their requests went unheeded.

The MPS president lamented in his aforementioned statement: “Israeli students are at war, just as many young academics and members of your universities and institutes. Many of you, dear colleagues, are also affected as parents.” What distressed him, however, were not the war crimes committed by these soldiers, nor the hospitals and schools they bombed, nor the universities they blew up. Instead, what distressed him was that these young soldier-scientists could not continue their research during the war. That’s why he declared: “We are committed to supporting Israeli science through these difficult times. We wish to provide researchers who had to leave Israel with the opportunity to continue their projects at one of our institutes, remaining under the supervision by their Israeli mentors, and then returning to Israel and continuing their work here. To strengthen our cooperation, we will also soon open an office in Israel. Now is the time! We have reserved special funds for these measures. In addition, project funding within the Minerva Foundation will be increased by the German government.” He did not utter a single word in support of Palestinian academics and students, victims of Israeli war crimes, and granted not a single euro to the universities in Gaza, devastated by the Israeli army, nor to those in the West Bank, stricken by Israel’s occupation policy. These decisions and statements have caused deep unease within the Max Planck Society, and have been strongly condemned in an open letter signed by several of its employees.

In March 2024, Cramer welcomed on his official X account an article by Barak Medina and Anna Peters entitled “Terror militärisch bekämpfen?” (Fighting terrorism by military means?), published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), calling it “Important international law assessment”. The article seeks to exonerate the Israeli army of its responsibility for violations of international law in Gaza, claiming for example that the destruction of all hospitals in Gaza could be legitimate, as Hamas allegedly used them for military purposes.

Barak Medina is a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was Dean of the Faculty of Law (2009-2012) and Rector (2017-2022). He is also Academic Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights. Anne Peters is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, a professor at several universities and a member of various European legal institutions. She chairs the academic committees of the Minerva Foundation and the Max Planck Society and was a member of the German legal team at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, defending Germany against Nicaragua’s accusation of complicity in Israel’s destruction of Gaza. Chancellor Scholz’s recent staggering and outrageous statement – that “the accusation of genocide [in Gaza] is absurd” – seems directly influenced by positions like those of Medina and Peters.

While Cramer chose to blindly support Israeli policy, figures such as Albert Einstein demonstrated a radically different moral conscience. In an open letter published in The New York Times in December 1948, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt denounced the rise of the Tnuat Haherut (later Likud) party, which they compared to the Fascist and Nazi parties: “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” 

In particular, they mentioned the Deir Yassin massacre: “On April 9, terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants (240 men, women, and children) and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”

The MPS press release on Ghassan Hage’s dismissal states that “the freedoms enshrined in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany for 75 years are invaluable to the Max Planck Society. However, these freedoms come with great responsibility. Researchers abuse their civil liberties when they undermine the credibility of science with publicly disseminated statements, thereby damaging the reputation and trust in the institutions that uphold it. The fundamental right to freedom of opinion is constrained by the mutual duties of consideration and loyalty in the employment relationship.” To be consistent, the Max Planck/Kaiser Wilhelm Society should therefore remove Albert Einstein’s name from its archives once again, for his letter to the NYT in 1948.

“Philosemitic Maccarthysm”

The term was coined by philosopher Susan Neiman, director of Germany’s Einstein Forum, who offers several illustrations, including this one from Munich: In November 2022, two Jewish university students charged that the play Birds by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad was antisemitic. “Rejecting the director’s offer to host another performance at which the alleged antisemitism could be discussed, the students threatened to demand that the city withdraw the Metropol Theater’s funding if the play wasn’t canceled. It was duly canceled, and a debate began.”

Birds tells the story of two students in love, one a descendant of Holocaust survivors and the other of Moroccan origin. RIAS, the anti-Semitism watchdog, accused the play of depicting Jews with negative characteristics, presenting them as neurotic and racist. It also criticized the play for showing a Holocaust survivor making a joke about his survival. According to RIAS, the fact that the Jewish student is a geneticist is anti-Semitic, as “the combination of genetics, Jews, and Germany makes one think of Nazi euthanasia and the Shoah.” Moreover, a remark by his father that he wouldn’t like to be a Palestinian reminded RIAS of a statement by Hermann Goering after Kristallnacht, when he said, “I wouldn’t like to be a Jew in Germany today.” After a lengthy debate, the theater decided to cut a few passages before re-running the play, but Mouawad insisted that it be presented in its entirety, resulting in its cancellation. Curiously, Birds had already been successfully performed in 14 German cities before the controversy, and the Schauspiel Stuttgart decided in 2020 to award Mouawad its first European Drama Prize.

On November 9, 2022, an event entitled “Holocaust, Nakba und deutsche Erinnerungskultur” (Holocaust, Nakba and German memorial culture) was to be held in Tel Aviv. Organized by the Goethe Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, it was to bring together German journalist Charlotte Wiedemann and Israeli academics Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir, all authors of books on the subject.

In Understanding the Pain of Others, Charlotte Wiedemann argues for an inclusive culture of remembrance, based on solidarity rather than competition between victims. Doing justice to the victims of colonial crimes and their descendants does not call into question the singularity of the Holocaust. For their part, Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir, in the collective work The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, explore the possibility of a common language to address the memories of two linked but distinct events: the genocide of European Jewry and the displacement of Palestinians. Their concept of empathic destabilization challenges the mutual denial of suffering and opens the way to an egalitarian binationalism.

Under pressure from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the Israeli Ambassador to Germany, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (German-Israeli Society), the event was cancelled. The choice of November 9, the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938, was denounced as a provocation. According to Haaretz, the Israeli Foreign Minister declared himself “shocked and disgusted by the crude cheapening of the Holocaust and the cynical, manipulative intent to create a linkage [between the Holocaust and the Nakba] whose sole purpose is to smear Israel.” The organizers immediately offered to postpone the meeting until November 13, but the controversy did not abate. This time, the Israeli government demanded outright cancellation. Faced with threats from the far-right student group Im Tirtzu, the Goethe Institute cancelled the event.

Finally, the debate took place on February 2, 2023 at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, on the initiative of its director, Susan Neiman. Opening the discussion, she ironically thanked the censors, pointing out that “censoring a subject only makes it more attractive”.

A few months later, Susan Neiman, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, historian and director of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin, and journalist Emily Dische-Becker organized the conference Hijacking Memory. The Holocaust and the New Right. The conference analyzed how nationalist and xenophobic forces have hijacked the memory of the Holocaust, originally dedicated to the defense of human rights. This phenomenon, first visible in the United States under Trump’s first term, has since spread to several countries, including Germany.

In December 2023, Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen were due to receive the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, but the Heinrich Böll Foundation (affiliated to the German Green Party) and the city of Bremen withdrew their support after the publication, a few days before the ceremony, of an essay in the New Yorker in which Gessen compared Gaza, prior to October 7, to the Jewish ghettos under Nazi occupation. In particular, she wrote:

”For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyper densely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”

The award was first revoked before being discreetly given to them in a small room, in front of about fifty guests, under police protection.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation, which created the prize, claims to honor personalities “who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions.” Yet several intellectuals have pointed out that Hannah Arendt herself would not qualify for the prize today because of her criticism of Zionism. In 1955, she wrote to her husband Heinrich Blücher: “The galut-and-ghetto [Exile and ghetto] mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially, it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

French historian Vincent Lemire, author of the comic strip Histoire de Jérusalem (with Christophe Gaultier), was due to take part in a debate at the end of November 2024 at the Urania center, a cultural and educational association, to present the German version of his book. The event was cancelled at the last minute, officially for lack of a replacement following the withdrawal of a speaker.

This speaker, Volker Beck, former Green member of the Bundestag and president of the German-Israeli Society (Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft, DIG), justified his withdrawal in an e-mail to the publisher: “I am unfortunately obliged to cancel [my attendance at] the event due to the author’s current somewhat obsessive positioning”, denouncing Vincent Lemire’s supposed “goynormativity” – in other words, non-Jewish approach.

Beck would have liked to focus the discussion on the ICC arrest warrants against Benyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, while Lemire had criticized the French position granting them immunity. “The announced format doesn’t work in this context. I can’t start by talking about his comic strip and then quietly question its ‘goynormative’ character in certain places, as if nothing else existed,” Beck wrote. The organizers made it clear, however, that no changes to the content of the debate were envisaged.

Volker Beck and the DIG are at the forefront of this German McCarthyism, sanctioning any criticism of Israel and censoring pro-Palestinian discourse. The DIG, one of Germany’s leading Israel-supporting organizations, partly financed by the German Foreign Office, has provided many of its former officials with Antisemitismusbeauftragte (Commissioners for Antisemitism). These new inquisitor positions, created since 2018, are present in almost all public institutions, administrations, cultural bodies, organizations and universities. They include the Inquisitor for the State of Hesse, Uwe Becker, former President of the DIG, and the Inquisitor for Saxony, Thomas Feist, former Director of the DIG in Leipzig. The Federal Inquisitor, Felix Klein, made a name for himself in April 2020 by leading a cabal against the invitation to Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe to give the opening speech at the Ruhrtriennale.

Susan Neiman wrote of them, “None of the commissioners was raised as a Jew, though one converted soon after his appointment; most have little understanding of Jewish complexity or tradition. (The federal commissioner was photographed marching with one of the Christian Zionist groups whose mission is to ignite an apocalypse in the promised land that will either convert or obliterate the Jews. His participation was innocent; he simply saw an Israeli flag and assumed he should join.) To compensate for their unfamiliarity, the commissioners rely on two sources for information about Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians: the Israeli embassy and the Central Council for Jews in Germany, one of the more right-leaning Jewish organizations in the world. Even more importantly, they rely on what they’ve learned from Germany’s decades-long historical reckoning, which views all matters Jewish through the prism of German guilt.”

In 2020, together with Deidre Berger, Volker Beck co-founded the Tikvah Institute, which in a short space of time has become one of the main vehicles for anti-Palestinian repression and Israeli propaganda in German academic and cultural circles. The Institute’s legal opinions on liberticidal bills designed to absolve Israel of all criticism and project German anti-Semitism onto Palestinians and their supporters are pure caricature. One of the tastiest examples is the Federal Ministry of the Interior’s draft law on the naturalization test, which is supposed to assess “knowledge of the legal and social order as well as living conditions in Germany.” Tikvah is outraged by the following multiple-choice question: “111. Which action related to the State of Israel is prohibited in Germany?” The institute denounces legal ambiguities in the wording and proposed answers, which it deems can be exploited by candidates to circumvent the spirit of the law. It also asserts that the question can neither assess adherence to democratic values nor measure rejection of anti-Semitism.

These are just a few examples of the McCarthyism that is sweeping through German civil society, particularly the university, with the aim of establishing a silent terror. The aim is to stifle all criticism, as denounced by Pastor Martin Niemöller in his famous speech, to which a line should now be added:

“First, they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Palestinians, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Palestinian.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Report by the Association of Academics for the Respect of International Law in Palestine (AURDIP)