Germany’s antisemitism schtick has outlived its usefulness

The weaponisation of antisemitism against Palestine solidarity and peace activism has reached new lows in Germany, the largest illiberal democracy in the European Union by population size. By increasingly targeting anti-Zionist Jews who oppose the country’s complicity in “Israel’s” genocidal war against Gaza, the German state is displaying the same anti-Jewish bigotry it is claiming to fight.

The unintended confession the German state is making is that the motivation behind its messianic fight against Jew-hatred is less a concern for the religious sentiments of Jews, but rather the imperial designs that continue to safeguard the existence of “Israel” as a Euro-Western settler colony built in the Middle East on the ideological basis of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians.

Scamming people into believing that criticising “Israel” constitutes an act of antisemitism continues to provide a much-needed psychological coping mechanism for Germans: it enables the descendants of genocidaires who murdered six million European Jews in a white supremacist orgy of death and destruction to feel they are successfully atoning for the irredeemable sins of their ancestors, however performative and utilitarian their motives.

It doesn’t matter to Germans that they are knowingly misappropriating antisemitism to provide moral cover for “Israel’s” systematic human rights abuses against Indigenous Palestinians as long as they feel they have the support of their fellow Jewish compatriots, and the weaponisation of antisemitism only affects those adversely who were considered as undesirables within German society in the first place: Arabs and Muslims. It is to these communities that Germany routinely outsources blame for a racist ideology born and bred in Europe throughout centuries, accusing them of a cultural predisposition towards hating Jews.

But what to do when “Israel’s” decades of settler colonial crimes climax into a full-blown genocide and a growing number of German Jews become wary of Germany’s weaponisation of their faith against Palestinians and their allies? What happens when they order Germany to cease and desist from abusing Judaism as a camouflage for “Israel’s” ongoing final solution to the Palestinian question? How to justify Germany’s fight against Jew-hatred when it increasingly targets Jews?

That is exactly what is occurring in the country right now. After almost seven months into “Israel’s” genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza and the accompanying McCarthyite repression of Palestine solidarity in Germany, a nation which continues to defend the Apartheid regime’s campaign of mass extermination, Germany’s antisemitism schtick has outlived its usefulness as a tool of redemption. The mass swindle blew up in the faces of its perpetrators the moment Jews standing in solidarity with Palestine became a target in the alleged fight against anti-Jewish bigotry.

In the weeks leading up to the Palestine Congress in Berlin, disbanded by the police after not even two hours and ultimately banned, German bank Berliner Sparkasse froze the account of co-organiser Jüdische Stimme, confiscating their funds under spurious administrative grounds. Since then, the bank has terminated at least one other bank account of a private individual who had transferred a donation to Jüdische Stimme.

Udi Raz, a Berlin-based Israeli activist and doctoral candidate involved with Jüdische Stimme, who often wears a watermelon yarmulke as a sartorial sign of Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian cause, has been arrested repeatedly, a fate shared by many other Jewish comrades in Germany who have been standing up for Gaza since October 7.

Dror Dayan, an Israeli filmmaker who was planned to speak at the Palestine Congress, and whose brilliant statement denouncing Germany at an emergency press conference the morning after police violently closed down the gathering I highly recommend watching in full, is facing a criminal investigation for using “symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations.” The symbol in question: the slogan “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free”, the much-maligned call for liberation which a recent resolution passed by the US House of Representatives has branded as antisemitic.

At the now (violently) evicted Occupy Against Occupation protest camp in front of the German parliament, police prohibited Jewish participants from speaking Hebrew, a racist (and unlawful) measure that makes a mockery of Germany’s self-image as a multicultural country that adheres to the rule of law. The use of Arabic and Gaelic was also banned at the encampment.

On the academic front of Germany’s increasingly anti-Jewish blitzkrieg against Palestine solidarity, Jewish-American philosopher Nancy Fraser (not to be confused with Germany’s anti-Palestinian interior minister Nancy Faeser who praised the unlawful police crackdown on the Palestine Congress, which was co-organised by Jews as a blow to “Islamist propaganda”) is the latest Jewish person of prominence to be cancelled by Germany’s genocidal establishment when the University of Cologne rescinded a job offer over a letter she had signed expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

In a sense, the German state’s war on antisemitism has become yet another expression of its virulent anti-Palestinian racism. And as Palestinians are hated in Germany, in part because they are predominantly Muslim, targeting anti-Zionist Jews in the name of fighting antisemitism also has an Islamophobic rationale behind it.

Antisemitism remains a serious issue in Germany, but it is nowhere near a problem as Islamophobia is in a country where the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes more than doubled in 2023 compared to the previous year, and Muslims outnumber Jews 60 to 1. Yet Germany continues to overstate the threat of antisemitism and obfuscate its origins, egged on by pro-Zionist lobby groups such as the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (which is behind the revisionist redefinition of antisemitism that enables the weaponisation of Jew-hatred in the first place), while at the same time neglecting to counter anti-Muslim bigotry.

Needless to say, the state-sponsored persecution of Jews in Germany in the name of combating antisemitism has punched holes in the nation’s own mendacious narrative of antisemitism being something that is imported from the Arab and Muslim world by way of immigrants and refugees, as opposed to the centuries-old European ideology that culminated in the German-led extermination of Europe’s Jews and the ongoing expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland as penance.

The jig is up, dear Germany.