[rad-green] Germany's pro-Israel Left Has a New Target in the Crosshairs: Jews

*https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-germany-s-pro-israel-left-has-a-new-target-in-the-crosshairs-jews-1.8438634
<https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-germany-s-pro-israel-left-has-a-new-target-in-the-crosshairs-jews-1.8438634>Haaretz
         Jan 23, 2020*





*Germany's pro-Israel Left Has a New Target in the Crosshairs: JewsIdeas
and opinions that can be voiced freely in Israeli academia will spark a big
backlash in Berlin, led by the Antideutsche movementBy Ofri Ilany*

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[image: A pro-Israel rally in Berlin, in 2014.]
*A pro-Israel rally in Berlin, in 2014. Markus Schreiber / AP*

I met Thomas, an ardent young German, more than a decade ago at a
radical-left demonstration in Berlin protesting the commemorative
celebrations of the anniversary of Germany’s reunification. Because the
official event was packed and rife with security that year, I preferred to
go to the protest rally, which also sounded more interesting. It was billed
as an anti-nationalist demonstration warning against the dangers of
patriotic discourse about “national unity.” But when I got there, I was
surprised to see that many of the protesters were waving Israeli flags.
Thomas was one of them. He ran through the street draped in the
blue-and-white flag. The presence of the Israeli flag puzzled me – after
all, for decades the German state he was demonstrating against had been one
of Israel’s biggest supporters. Thomas explained: “I am anti-nationalist
and I hate every flag, other than the Israeli flag, because Israel is the
answer to fascism.” He then joined the other demonstrators in roaring,
“Grandpa, Grandma, stop whining – you’re criminals, not victims.”

That was my introduction to the political phenomenon known as Antideutsche
– anti-Germans. It started in the late 1980s as an exotic offshoot of the
Maoist left, whose members denied the very legitimacy of a German nation
after Nazism, under the slogan, “Germany, never again.” But for the past
two decades, Antideutsche has had one primary focus: an unrestrained attack
on anyone who is critical, even a bit, of Israeli policy. According to
their amazingly simplistic approach, anti-Semitism is the source of all
evil, Israel is the answer to anti-Semitism, and thus constitutes absolute
good. Hence, at demonstrations and in Facebook posts of this left-wing
group, there have even been calls to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza – that is,
calls for genocide.

The absurdity doesn’t end there. Even a call for regulation of Germany’s
financial markets constitutes anti-Semitism in the eyes of the
Antideutsche, because they believe it hints at a conspiracy of “Jewish
bankers” and “international Zionism.” Intellectuals in this group also
assail women’s meditation gatherings, where participants hold hands and
connect with the Great Mother, defining them as pagan rites aimed against
Jewish monotheism.

The Hebrew-language Wikipedia terms the Antideutsche an “anti-nationalist
communist movement.” But it’s hard to define them as communists, much less
anti-nationalists. Antideutsche people don’t come only from the left; many
come from the neoliberal economic right and some are even willing to stand
with the extreme-right AfD party, because it supports Israel.

All this sounds like a description of a bizarre ideological cult. Indeed,
the Antideutsche number a few thousand activists at most. But in the
current global political climate, the marginal becomes central and the
central, marginal. As a result, in recent years, the worldview espoused by
these people has become a phenomenon that transcends the anecdotal. It
wields considerable influence in civil society and on the editorial boards
of the most important newspapers in Germany, and now also in Austria and
Switzerland. More particularly, it has become increasingly evident in
Berlin, where there is an especially large concentration of Antideutsche.
Thomas, the enthusiastic demonstrator, has since become an academic and an
editor of an influential cultural column in a German paper.

Antideutsche sympathizers are now the driving force behind journalistic and
social-media attacks on institutions in Berlin, notably those dealing with
Jewish history and even anti-Semitism research. Thus, the Jewish Museum
Berlin became the object of a particularly ugly offensive. The
institution’s director, Peter Schaefer, a Jewish studies scholar, was
vilified by pro-Israel activists to the point where he was compelled to
resign last June. In the wake of the museum’s sharing on Twitter of a story
that implied support for the BDS movement, it was claimed that Schaefer
personally supports BDS and is therefore anti-Semitic.

Subsequently, the denunciations focused on another senior official of the
institution, Yasemin Shooman, who was accused of having dared to compare
anti-Semitic attacks to attacks on Muslim migrants. For his part, Thomas
Thiel, a senior editor at the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
wrote an opinion piece alleging that Shooman had turned the museum, which
features exhibitions focusing on Jewish history and the Holocaust, into an
active center of “political Islam.”

In fact, intellectual and academic discourse in Germany today is
consistently skewed toward the Israeli right. When the subject is Israel,
the most distinguished media and academic platforms publish items that look
like they could have been culled from the Israeli right-wing site Mida.
Even the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, one of the most important
institutions of its kind in Germany, has been caught up in a public storm
and accused of anti-Semitism.

The Antideutsche want everything having to do with anti-Semitism to be
subjected to their uniform and dogmatic line. Paradoxically, ideas and
opinions that can be voiced in Israeli academia with no special problem,
foment a huge ruckus in Berlin. Incensed Germans, some of them descendants
of Nazis, don’t hesitate to attack Jewish and Israeli left-wingers.
Scholars who have devoted their lives to Jewish studies tread carefully for
fear they will say something that is not consistent with this absurd
conception of reality.

‘Iran Day’

It looks like no one is able to stop the madness of the Antideutsche, who
are reminiscent of pro-Israel evangelicals or extreme-right groups. Things
have reached a pass where, even if the Israeli government were to decide to
expel all the Palestinians, or to annex Lebanon – its staunch defenders in
the German media might well bar publication of any criticism of the move.

In fact, Israel’s German defenders aren’t truly interested in Israel: The
Jewish state appears to be the center of their world, but their knowledge
of Israeli politics and society is usually very limited. What does interest
them is cultivating their own self-righteousness, which reaches shocking
proportions. Because the Nazi past and the Holocaust constitute the
foundation of postwar German identity, they are intent on projecting their
selfhood onto the whole world.

The atmosphere now pervading Berlin, once the capital of the Third Reich,
is particularly instructive when pondering the state of discourse about
anti-Semitism 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. The conflation of
criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism is growing ever tighter. Any other
viewpoint is rejected aggressively. The gathering of world leaders this
week in Jerusalem to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz embodies this
conception of reality, which subordinates history and morality to the
present-day interests of the Israeli government. Thus Holocaust Day becomes
“Iran Day.” According to the new version of the Holocaust, Hitler was
merely the precursor of Ali Khamenei, and Benjamin Netanyahu is the
contemporary personification of Anne Frank.

But Israel is not the whole story. Underlying the new German ideology is
apparently a single imperative, which originated with the philosopher
Theodor Adorno: the obligation to do everything to prevent Auschwitz from
recurring. It sounds good, but at the present time, that necessity is
revealed to be a poor compass – those who subscribe to it will stumble
along the way. If your entire worldview revolves around the effort not to
repeat one crime – even if it is the most horrific crime in history – you
are liable to arrive at absurd conclusions.

It turns out that under the banner of the struggle against anti-Semitism,
it’s possible to justify murderous actions, violate freedom of expression,
besmirch Jews, and above all make a mockery of reason.

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