by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
The German government’s official policy is that it makes efforts to fight antisemitism and is friendly toward Israel. At the same time, it actively promotes antisemitism and anti-Israelism.
President of Israel Reuven Rivlin and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, March 9, 2018.
Photo by Mark Neyman for GPO via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,101, March 3, 2019
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The
German government’s official policy is that it makes efforts to fight
antisemitism and is friendly toward Israel. At the same time, it
actively promotes antisemitism and anti-Israelism. It allows massive
migration of antisemites from Muslim countries, supports discriminatory
anti-Israel motions at the UN General Assembly, generously finances the
antisemitism-supporting UNRWA, and congratulates the genocide-promoting
regime of Iran.
The German government’s official policy is that it
makes efforts to fight antisemitism. One example is its provision of
security services for Jewish institutions. Another is the appointment of
a national antisemitism commissioner. It is also official policy that
Berlin is friendly toward Israel. One illustration of this is that
German ministers visit Israel from time to time to discuss possibilities
for collaboration.
Alongside these measures, German policy also promotes antisemitism and anti-Israelism, both directly and indirectly.
Since 2015, the German government has welcomed,
without any selection, many immigrants from Muslim countries. Hundreds
of thousands of these immigrants are antisemites. A study in Bavaria
found that more than 50% of Iraqi, Syrian, and Afghan immigrants agreed
with the statement “Jews have too much influence in the world.” Among
Germans this figure is between 15% and 25%. One might argue that a
nation whose grandparents’ generation murdered 6 million Jews should not
open its doors to an influx of new antisemites. Doing so cannot be
reasonably justified through humanitarian arguments.
A major example of Germany’s ongoing participation
in incitement against Israel is its voting record at the UN General
Assembly. The German daily, Bild, reported that in recent years
the General Assembly has accepted more than 500 resolutions against
Israel – and not a single one against the Palestinian terror group,
Hamas.
Bild gave examples from the period
2014-2017. In 2014, of all resolutions directed against a specific
country, 87% were against Israel. In 2016, the number was 77%. In 2017,
78%. At the UN Human Rights Council, more than half the resolutions
were against Israel. Bild pointed out that Germany regularly
sides with Israel’s enemies. In November 2018, of 21 General Assembly
resolutions against Israel, 16 were supported by Germany and on four it
abstained.
In the previous government, the leader of the
socialist party, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, was a frequent
anti-Israel inciter. Gabriel accused Israel of apartheid and did not
apologize for months. While speaking in Tel Aviv in January 2018, he
said he was a friend to Israel, adding that his country had a special
commitment to Israel’s security. These assertions ring hollow, as
Gabriel was responsible for a huge number of German votes against Israel
in the UN that undermined its security.
In the current government, Foreign Minister Heiko
Maas, also a socialist, has often said that Auschwitz inspired him to go
into politics. Yet his ministry continues to support the demonization
of Israel at the UN. The 16 German votes against Israel in November 2018
took place during Maas’s time in office.
Under Maas there has also been increased German
support for UNRWA after the US pull-out. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate
Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, summarized the issue and Maas’s
role in it thus:
Following the US’s move to pull support from the group that brainwashes kids on the many “virtues” of martyrdom, German Secretary of State Heiko Maas announced a “substantial” increase in funds from his country to UNRWA. With 100 million euros in aid money, Germany remains one of UNRWA’s largest benefactors. Yes, support for the Palestinians’ quest for a better future is right and important. But Hamas and Palestinian Authority curricula funded by UNRWA amount to textbook child abuse. Nobody I met with in Berlin could assure me that the German money did not directly benefit Hamas.
Furthermore, in February, under Maas’s leadership,
the German Foreign Ministry sent representatives to the Islamic
Republic of Iran’s embassy in Berlin on the occasion of the celebration
of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. This was despite the fact that Iran frequently calls for the destruction of Israel.
The German celebration of the Islamic Revolution
did not stop there. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also a
socialist, “congratulated the Iranian Government cordially on the
occasion of the 40th anniversary of the revolution, also in the name of my fellow country citizens.” The daily Tagesspiegel wondered
whether one had to remind Steinmeier that Iran is a sponsor of
international terrorism, threatens Israel with destruction, denies the
Holocaust, oppresses women, executes homosexuals, and punishes religious
conversions with death. It concluded: “The moral compass that should
guide the words of a President of the German republic has in this case
greatly failed.” The German congratulation of the Iranian government is
even more striking in view of the fact that when Donald Trump was
elected US president in November 2016, Steinmeier, then foreign
minister, made a point of stating that he was not offering him
congratulations.
The liberal party (FDP), which is in opposition,
recently asked the German government to change its policies at the UN.
One of the party’s parliamentarians, Frank Muller-Rosentritt, pointed
out that in one year, 21 resolutions against Israel were decided while
there was only one against Syria. He said this “disproportion shows that
the enemies of Israel instrumentalize the UN to delegitimize the Jewish
State.”
Direct and indirect assistance to antisemites and
anti-Israelis takes place not only at the national level, but also at
the level of the federal states. Establishing statistics on antisemitic
crimes is their responsibility. The national antisemitism commissioner,
Felix Klein, has said that published statistics on this subject are
misleading and that he intends to tackle this distortion. The many
crimes against Jews in which the perpetrators cannot be identified are
registered as having been caused by extreme right-wingers, which is
often untrue.
Klein has stressed that the necessary change can
be achieved only by convincing the interior ministers of the federal
states to modify the way these statistics are compiled. According to
Klein, physical attacks on Jews by Muslims are far more numerous than
what is recorded. Jewish representatives, too, have often drawn
attention to the many antisemitic incidents caused by Muslims, which are
poorly reflected in the statistics. If the states do not accurately
report among whom to search for perpetrators, they are in effect
assisting the antisemites.
The approval of schoolbooks is another
responsibility of federal state governments. A recent study by two
German professors, Samuel Salzborn and Alexander Kurth, investigated
antisemitism in German schools. Partly on the basis of an earlier study,
they found that with respect to textbooks, Israel is often presented as
entirely negative and Palestinians as entirely positive in the fields
of geography, history, and politics. They note that Israel is mentioned
solely in the context of the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s
military actions and reactions to Palestinian terrorism are often
presented as just as problematic as the terrorism itself.
These are but a few examples among many more. In
view of Germany’s horrible past and problematic present, an in-depth
study should be conducted on how German national and state governments
directly and indirectly promote antisemitism and anti-Israelism.
This article is an extended version of an article which was published in Algemeiner on February 19, 2019.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is a Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center and a former chairman of the Steering Committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He specializes in Israeli–Western European relations, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism, and is the author of The War of a Million Cuts.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/germany-antisemitism-israel/
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