German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently called support for Israel “a lasting historical responsibility”. Germany is the second largest arms supplier to Israel, and the government suppresses pro-Palestinian sentiment internally in the name of protecting Jews. Prominent Palestinians are banned from entering the country, and police violently attack demonstrations and tie people up in court. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis demonstrate with impunity and even receive protection from the police.
The domestic intelligence service has categorised Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East—an organisation of German Jews who support Palestinian rights—as a “foreign extremist organisation”, and the University of Jena recently banned its chairperson, Wieland Hoban, from speaking there.
During a visit to Germany in November, Janey Stone, co-author (with Donny Gluckstein) of The Radical Jewish Tradition (Interventions, 2024), caught up with Hoban to talk about how Germany’s support for Israel is presented as recompense for its past, challenging antisemitism amid the resurgence of the far right and the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany today.
We often hear about the role that “memory culture” plays in Germany. This is linked to Germany’s current policy toward Israel and is embedded in the concept known as Staatsräson. Can you explain this?
After the Second World War, Germany needed to rehabilitate itself after its military and moral defeat, so it could be a respectable international player again. The first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, decided to present relations with Israel as some sort of reconciliation. So Germany started military cooperation in 1955 and official relations in 1965.
The idea of memory culture became a central plank of German politics in the 1980s. After reunification in 1989, Germany sought a bigger role in Western imperialism and the transatlantic alliance. And so the moral justification became more urgent.
In 2008, Angela Merkel, the then chancellor, introduced the word Staatsräson [reason of state], meaning national interests. For Merkel and the German ruling class, national interest included selling weapons and having geopolitical access to the West Asian/Middle Eastern region, with the moral narrative providing a convenient packaging.
Merkel’s phrase, that Israel’s security is Germany’s reason of state, became part of the standard political vocabulary. Since then, we have seen the increasing Israelification of political discourse. The more brutal Israel’s crimes become, and the more Germany is implicated in them and as an ally in genocide, the more vehemently politicians have to try to justify that morally.
So the primary reason for Staatsräson is to compensate for guilt in relation to the Holocaust. Is there a larger picture in terms of Germany’s position in global imperialism?
Yes, they want to be part of the Western alliance, to have geopolitical access to the Middle Eastern region. The US discourse justifying support for Israel does mention antisemitism, but it’s not critical for them. But in Germany, the whole legitimacy of the relationship is dependent on the moral narrative. When German politicians demand acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, they’re implicitly demanding that you acknowledge Germany’s right to exist. Germany has so closely tied its post-Holocaust legitimacy to its support for Israel that without that, the whole self-conception of the German state project is under threat.
We hear the argument in Germany that antisemitism has been imported by immigrants and there is no native antisemitism here. Could you comment on that?
Germany has no need to import antisemitism. There is plenty of native antisemitism. In fact, supporting Zionism can be a good form of antisemitic praxis, of supporting a way to promote the departure of Jews from Germany.
But it’s become mainstream for people to use antisemitism as a weapon against migrants, especially Muslims and Arabs. As a Jewish group, we see it very much as one of our roles to counter the distortion, manipulation of antisemitism. We see the need to point out that the main source of antisemitism and also the most violence, has always been the far right.
The central problem is the conflation of supporting Israel with fighting antisemitism. And that is perpetuated by treating Israel as synonymous with Jews. For instance, when the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, talks about the Jewish flag, he means the Israeli flag. Or two recent articles in the magazine Der Spiegel, which had references to the Jewish embassy in Berlin.
There is a particularly dark side to this conflation. Israel stirs up anger and hatred in the world with its crimes. You have synagogues where people are praying for Israel and its genocidal army. Some people see this as being about Jews. It’s hard to say then, “Oh this is just a house of worship, it isn’t a legitimate demonstration target”. This is a result of the Jewish mainstream choosing to align itself with genocide.
In the same way that 9/11 stirred up a lot of Islamophobia among people who maybe were not particularly racist before, Israel’s actions do stir up antisemitism.
So what does this all mean for the pro-Palestinian movement in Germany?
It means that to support the rights of Palestinians and actually even to be Palestinian is a challenge to the German narrative and therefore German policies on the ground. Nazi Germany, because it carried out the Holocaust and because it triggered the mass flight of Jews from Europe, was actually ultimately responsible for the Nakba as well. Because if you hadn’t had these Jewish refugees, many of whom ended up in Palestine, the Jewish population would have been far smaller; they wouldn’t have been able to raise sufficient military power to expel the Palestinians and massacre them. And so, some people have referred to the Palestinians as the victims of the victims of the Germans.
The whole German redemption narrative, where Germany atones for its crimes against the Jews by supporting Israel, leaves no place for the Palestinians. Because if the foundation of Israel and the continued existence of Israel were not in effect a redemptive blessing, if they were actually something that involved terrible crimes that continue to this day, this interferes with the narrative.
So what do you do with the Palestinians? Their very existence is a problem for the narrative. So people use the charge of antisemitism. But now some are starting to break with this pro-Israel narrative. Of course, those who actually become active and demonstrate on the streets are a tiny proportion. But polls have shown that Israel is losing support in the population in Germany.
What about the German left?
One problem on the left is the so-called anti-Deutsch movement, which originally came from the radical left. They argue that, to oppose historical German fascism, you have to support American imperialism and because antisemitism was a central element of Nazism, then we have to support Israel.
The largest left-wing party is The Left (Die Linke). As well as elements of anti-Deutsch, there are reformist sections that want to avoid conflict with the staatsraison. There are also open Zionists. On the other hand, there are real anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists, and an increasing presence of pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist elements in a younger generation of members.
Die Linke saw huge growth at the last election, primarily a reaction to the growth of the far right. Many new members have a strong view on Palestine and are now in conflict with the reformist and Zionist elements in the party.
So that brings us to the question of the role within the Palestinian support movement of anti-Zionist Jews in general and Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East [Jüdische Stimme, or JS]. How was JS established and how do you see its role in Germany?
JS was founded in 2003. Initially, it was a small group of Israeli and German Jews who argued that not all Jews support Israel, and that supporting Jews and fighting antisemitism in Germany should not mean supporting the policies of Israel. The existence of Jews critical of Israel and using the “not in our name” message caused a lot of hostility in the Jewish mainstream. And because we started off pretty small, people found it easy to dismiss us as just some cranks, fake Jews, self-haters, traitors or unrepresentative. These accusations are familiar to all of us who move in Jewish anti-Zionist circles.
But in the same way that the Palestinians are a problem for the German redemption narrative, critical Jews are also a problem. Because if this supposedly self-redeeming policy is not accepted by all Jews, then they’re not going to forgive you. This makes us troublesome, the same way that the Palestinians are troublesome for not accepting their own dispossession and slaughter.
The other thing, of course, that has always been important for JS is to build alliances and relationships with Palestinian groups. And also to use whatever leverage or privilege we might have, as Jews, to assist in getting more exposure for Palestinians themselves.
German police frequently attack Jewish participants and others in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, pretty violently. On the other hand, you see actual Nazis holding their demonstrations and being protected by the police in the name of freedom of speech. Why does this happen?
Of course, the police always have less sympathy for the left than they do for Nazis. But yes, it’s the Palestine movement that is particularly targeted. And it’s not confined to violence—the police harass us in other ways. You get accused of doing something illegal or maybe that you said some slogan or that you held some sign, you need to be taken out of the demonstration now. We need to take your details, and maybe you’re going to get a letter from the police.
There’s also legal persecution and harassment. There are something like 10,000 court cases currently. I’ve had a few such letters myself, although I’ve been lucky and the accusations haven’t stuck. But the situation is, when you oppose Israel as a Jew in Germany, to the pro-Israel mainstream, you basically renounce your status as a Jew. One consequence of this is that non-Jewish Zionists are perceived as the actual Jewish representatives. The distortion of Jewish identity through Zionism has gone so far that you don’t even have to be Jewish to be Jewish.
There’s been significant growth of the far right in Germany. One of the most important developments has been the Alternative for Germany (Alternative fűr Deutschland, AfD), which has had significant electoral success. Why has this happened, and what threat do they represent?
The AfD has grown a lot because they bring together right-wing conservatives and neo-Nazis. This sets them apart from previous far-right parties. The AfD started out virtually as a single-issue party based on euroscepticism. When a lot of refugees came from Syria and Iraq, Merkel’s policy of welcoming them was seen as a betrayal by many on the right wing of her conservative party [the Christian Democratic Union, CDU], so they migrated to the AfD. Since then, the party has moved further to the right and become more overtly racist.
This consistent rightward shift in the AfD has been accompanied by increasing support in the population, which has put pressure on the conservatives electorally. It is likely that the CDU will eventually have to enter a coalition with them.
What do you think is the way forward for the pro-Palestinian movement and the left in general in Germany?
We have to try to reach people who are not already in our activist circles, which is not easy. However, in Berlin, there was a demonstration of about 70,000 in June, and then 100,000 in September, the biggest Palestine demonstration ever in Germany. One important route would be through the trade unions. The weapons are leaving the docks in Hamburg, and we have seen how the dock workers in Italy or Greece have really intervened in arms deliveries.
And so do you think also, as a socialist, you would link up the struggles around Palestine with local issues of concern to so many ordinary people, like the fact that Germany’s now introducing conscription, there’s a major housing crisis, at least in Berlin, and the cuts that are planned for very soon in social welfare payments?
Absolutely. There is a whole range of other issues that affect ordinary people, and antisemitism and Islamophobia have always been used as ways of distracting people from those issues. The whole issue of Israel is being used as a way to promote racism.
This is why I mention the imperialist context, including the intensification of militarisation and the insane budgets. A law limiting state debt has been dropped to fund a military budget of €500 billion, supposedly in order to defend against Russia. Israel buys arms components such as tank engine technology that only Germany manufactures. On the other hand, the German military buys drones and missile defence systems from Israel.
All of this goes together with increasing austerity and reductions in social welfare spending. So we need to explain to our audience that the Palestine issue is not something far away that has nothing to do with them, but that it’s something that concerns all of us, both at the moral and the material level.
