Germany’s recently promulgated amendment to its citizenship law has sparked discussion about its impact on antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the country. This has taken the form of several reports that applicants for German citizenship are now required to support Israel’s ‘right to exist’. At least this is how the Financial Times, Haaretz, Israel Hayom, the Middle East Monitor, the Palestine Chronicle and the Middle East Eye reported on the matter.

I was recently interviewed on Radio 786 about this and the following podcast is a brief overview of the article that follows.

To address the issues I spoke about in more detail and contribute to understanding the debate this article has three sections. First, it examines what the law actually says in respect of these issues, and the procedures for applying for citizenship through which applicants’ attitudes towards these issues are assessed. Then it examines the definitions of antisemitism likely to inform the assessment process. It concludes by considering the contestation within broader German society of the meaning of the terms ‘antisemitism’ and ‘anti-Zionism’, reflecting on the dominant and subordinate views.

The law — prescripts and procedures

Unlike what is reported across a range of mainstream media in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and Israel, the recently promulgated citizenship law does not require applicants for German citizenship to affirm their support for Israel’s right to exist. This is the view of Deutsche Welle (DW), a German, public, state-owned, international broadcaster, funded by the German Federal Budget.[1]

DW’s views are borne out by a close reading of the law[2] which requires applicants’ commitment to Germany’s liberal democratic order, its basic values in contradistinction to antisemitism and racism and last, but not least, its special responsibility for Nazi rule and the protection of Jewish life.[3] Applicants who fulfil the basic values of Germany’s political order and other requirements (related to their integration into the dominant German culture) can expect an accelerated naturalisation process, sometimes as quick as three years.

The application procedure includes a ‘naturalisation test’ in the form of multiple choice questions about German history, social norms, Basic Laws and also questions that test for antisemitism and their attitude towards the protection of Jewish life in Germany and also in the state of Israel.[4] Officials processing the applications for citizenship assess and decide whether the answers (or ‘confessions’) are valid. Rejected applicants can sue in an administrative court.

DW also explained an example of such a question as ‘which act relating to the state of Israel is prohibited in Germany?’, and that the correct answer is ‘the public call for annihilation of Israel’ and not ‘publicly criticizing Israel’s policies’. DW explained further that a confession questioning Israel’s right to exist would lead to asking whether this questioning stems from antisemitic attitudes. Thus, the meaning of the interpellation ‘antisemite’ is key in the bureaucratic process of deciding whether or not to grant citizenship at least on the confessions related to antisemitism as the motive for questioning Israel’s right to exist. DW further clarified that officials processing an application are guided as to this meaning by the definition of antisemitism developed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Resisting Israel and the charge of antisemitism

Antisemitism is a form of racism, of othering people interpellated as semites, a category that includes Palestinians and Jews. Historically antisemitism came to mean the othering of Jews, as different from ‘normal’ citizens (the nation), malevolent to their interests, unassimilable and degrading the national spirit and genes. It was articulated in the US in the early part of the 20th Century, as part of the discourse of Eugenics,[5] and institutionalised in Europe under the German occupations of World War Two, with deadly consequences[6] for people identified as Jews.

(In contrast, the citizenship law says nothing about protecting other social groups against whom Germany has perpetrated genocide, like the Hereros and Ovambos, during the colonisation of Namibia,[7] as well as — during World War Two — LGBTQ communities,[8] the Roma [500 000 killed][9] and Slavs [11 million]. [10] This reflects the exceptionalisation of the German genocide of the Jews).

The IHRA definition of antisemitism, ratified in 2015 between Israel and mainly Europe, the US, the UK, Canada and some Latin American states, provides examples of antisemitism, 64 per cent of which cover discourses about Israel.[11] The following are the key types of critical discourses that are examples of antisemitic speech:

· Israel treats another group (e.g. Palestinians, Arabs, Africans, etc) inhumanely.

· Israel weaponises the German genocide of the Jews in order to stifle its critics.

· Israel acts similarly to the Nazis.

· Israel causes a conflict of loyalty for Jewish citizens of other countries.

· Jews are collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.

In 2020 more than 200 international scholars endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). The JDA, in which 73 per cent of the examples of antisemitism have reference to Israel,[12] was intended as an improvement on the efficacy, and not as critique, of the IHRA. What is interesting about the JDA is that it excludes anti-Zionism from being a sign or code for antisemitism. Like the IHRA the JDA examples of antisemitic anti-Zionist speech provide guidelines for German bureaucrats assessing answers to the multiple-choice questionnaire test referred to earlier. Some of the key types of critical discourses that the JDA identifies as examples of antisemitic speech are:

· The state of Israel is the ultimate ‘evil’.

· Applying antisemitic tropes (like the child killing ‘blood libel’) to Israel (a current example of this would be publicising news of Gazan babies and children killed as a result of Israel’s bombardment).

· Requiring Jewish people to publicly condemn Zionism.

In effect a German official processing applications will assess the answer to questions testing for views on Jews and on Israel, by reference to the IHRA/JDA examples. Answers to these questions are statements of fact, and their significance is not immutably tied hostility towards Jews — in the first instance their significance lies in their truth or falsity. However, without reference to historical antisemitism as a specific form of racism the IHRA and JDA examples simply assume that uttering a specific phrase or sentence is hostile to Jews in effect even if not in intent.

Conclusion: Ideological contestation

Thus the key issue with respect to the discriminatory impact of the new citizenship law on freedom of speech is not that it requires fealty to Israel’s right to exist. Rather, it is in respect of enforcing rules governing how anti-Zionist discourse is expressed. The German state criminalises these examples of antisemitic speech signification through both repression (e.g. police action against Palestinian protestors and their allies) and as well as through imposing its own discourse norms in the name of fighting antisemitism. But German society is not monolithic and there are pockets of resistance to this imposition outside of the state apparatuses, and even within some of them.[13]

German ideological state apparatuses (ISAs)[14] have interpellated the identity of antisemitism, prepared and directed through the IHRA and the JDA. Indeed the German ISAs were involved in the early articulations of the IHRA, starting in 2004.[15] Since then calling Israel an apartheid state arguably crosses the line between legitimate criticism and antisemitic animus, because it challenges the legality of the Zionist regime of governance. The apartheid critique is attested to by eight reputable human rights and scholarly reports published between 2004 and 2022[16] as well as reported on (between 2002 and 2013) by 11 eminent people in the fields of statecraft, international law and journalism.[17] The reaction of the US, Israel and its supporters to one of the above reports — that published by the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia in 2017 — is a pertinent example of how the IHRA and JDA definitions and examples of antisemitism are used to cancel substantive criticism of fundamental aspects of Israel’s governance regime, hence of its ‘right to exist’. Notwithstanding Justice Goldstone’s[18] claims that Israel had no intention to implement an apartheid system, the authors of these reports have stood by their research and conclusions about the truth value of this description of the Israeli regime.

Within certain cultural and academic ISAs there have been voices of dissent against the practical political implications of the IHRA and JDA definitions. In addition, the German courts appeared to be relatively independent of this IHRA/JDA inversion of the meaning of antisemitism: in 2022 there were cases of favourable rulings for Palestinian and other critics of Israel, its policies, of Zionism as a racist ideology and Israel as an illegitimate apartheid state. Nevertheless, Germany’s political class with almost no exceptions stands firmly with Israel in repressing public protests against Israeli apartheid and that state’s current genocidal moment in Gaza.

Outside of the German state apparatuses local activist groupings, mostly with a critique of contemporary German capitalism as well as of the rise of the ethno-nationalist Alternative fuer Deutschland party, contest the equating of resistance to Israel with antisemitism. There is a relatively large Palestinian population living in Germany (said to number almost 100 000)[19] who make up a large portion of these protests, a small but vociferous grouping of anti-Zionist Jews[20] as well as other German citizens allied to the cause of Palestinian freedom, human rights and peace.

Thus the interpellation of Jews and antisemites as well as the possible boundaries of critique of Israel and Zionism are contested in Germany. The hegemonic ideology is based on the IHRA/JDA guidelines on discovering antisemitism, the practical implication of which is that ‘Israel’ is a code for ‘Jew’. The claim that Israel is the ‘raison d’etat’[21] of the German state means that the security of the apartheid state of Israel is indistinguishable from the security of the federal state — and provincial states — of Germany. The amendment to the citizenship law gives practical effect to enforcing these key identities. Challenging this is the recognition of the complexities of the German government’s appropriation of the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ to persecute both Jews and Palestinians.[22] One of these complexities is the adoption by the German state itself of the identity of being Jewish, as explained in the following video clip.

Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 6 July 2024

[1] DW is controversial with Belarussian, Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan authorities for allegedly supporting regime change in these countries. But it is precisely its embeddedness in the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) of the German state that make its insider views interesting for understanding the practical political implications of the new law.

[2] Cf. page 21 of the earlier linked file (amended law).

[3] According to DW — and corroborated by other sources like The Times of Israel, ASB Zeitung, The Washington Post, the Jewish Telegraph Agency, the New Arab and WION (Indian news agency) — only the state of Sachsen-Anhalt requires acknowledgment of Israel’s ‘right to exist’ by applicants applying for citizenship of that state.

[4] Cf. earlier linked DW source.

[5] In the early 20th century antisemitism fused with the Eugenics pseudo-scientific movement in the US, which took Darwin’s evolution of species and created a civilizational teleogy that defined ‘Nordic’ races as the fittest for development of civilization, and Slavs, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and Southern Europeans as genetically inferior. Jonathan Spiro and Edwin Black show Eugenics as popular amongst certain US political and educated elites, influential in founding the National Parks. Eugenics had limited and uneven application in the US but in the Third Reich came to justify the extermination of ‘sub-humans’.

[6] An estimated 5,7 million Jews were killed in the German genocides during World War Two. Cf. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jewry. See Appendix B Statistics of Jewish Dead.

[7] See Daniel Goss, 2015 A Brutal Genocide in Colonial Africa Finally Gets its Deserved Recognition. See BBC, 2021 Germany officially recognises colonial-era Namibia genocide. Germany also announced financial aid of more than $1,34 billion, which many Namibian activists said was insufficient because it did not address access to land currently.

[8] See Marcel Furstenau, 2023 LGBTQ People: Germany’s long-forgotten victims of the Nazis.

[9] See Wiener Holocaust Library (exhibition), 2019–2020 Forgotten Victims: The Nazi Genocide of the Roma and Sinti.

[10] See Lennart Lens, 2019 The Forgotten Holocaust: the systematic genocide on the Slavic people by the Nazis during the Second World War, Bachelor thesis, Universiteit Leiden.

[11] I address the IHRA in more detail in my article ‘Jewish right not to be invested in Israel‘, sub-heading ‘Rejection of a Jewish state is antisemitic‘ and also again in my article ‘The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)‘.

[12] I address the JDA in more detail in my article ‘Jewish right not to be invested in Israel’, sub-heading ‘Rejection of a Jewish state is antisemitic’, and also again in my article ‘Contesting Zionist identity claims‘, sub-heading ‘Post-holocaust Jewish identity‘.

[13] See my article ‘Inverted antisemitism in Germany and the United Kingdom — the dialectic of racism in contemporary capitalism‘, sub-heading ‘German criticism of Israel — Where’s the red line?‘, for a description of the repressive enforcement of the hegemonic view of antisemitism and extra-state resistance to the imposition of this view.

[14] For more on the concept of ideological state apparatus see my article ‘Jewish right not to be invested in Israel‘, sub-heading ‘Interpellation and identity‘.

[15] I track the developmental process of the IHRA in my article ‘Assessing the antisemitism experts?‘, sub-heading ‘Extent of antisemitism in Germany‘.

[16] Cf. B’Tselem, Forbidden Roads: Israel’s discriminatory road regime in the West Bank, August 2004; Association for Civil Rights in Israel, The State of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories, 2008 Report page 17; Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), 2009 Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid? A Re-assessment of Israel’s Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) Under International Law, A report of the Middle East Project in the Democracy and Governance Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council, Cape Town; UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), 2017 Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid; B’Tselem report, This is apartheid — a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, 12 January 2021; Human Rights Watch (HRW) Report, A Threshold Crossed — Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution — 27 April 2021; Amnesty Report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians — A look into decades of oppression and domination — 1 February 2022; and, Al Haq Report, Israeli Apartheid: Tool of Zionist Settler Colonialism, 29 November 2022.

[17] Michael Ben Yair, The War’s Seventh Day, Haaretz, 2 March 2002; Meron Benvenisti, Founding a Binational State, Haaretz, 22 April 2004; Roee Nahmias, Israeli Terror is Worse, Ynetnews.com, 29 July 2005 (about Shulamit Aloni); Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, New York 2006; Shulamit Aloni, Indeed, There is Apartheid in Israel, ynet.co.il, 5 January 2006; Chris McGreal, Worlds Apart: Israel, Palestine and apartheid 6 February 2006, and, Brothers in Arms: Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria, 7 February 2006; Dinah A Spritzer, British Zionists drop Haaretz Columnist, Jewish Telegraph Agency, 8 August 2007; Ezra HaLevi, Haaretz Editor Refuses to Retract Israel Apartheid Statements, israelnationalnews.com, 5 September 2007; Haaretz, Where is the occupation, 7 October 2007; Haaretz, Our debt to Jimmy Carter, 15 April 2008; Yossi Sarid, Yes It is Apartheid, Haaretz, 24 April 2008; Amos Schocken, Citizenship Law Makes Israel an Apartheid State, Haaretz, 27 June 2008; John Dugard, Apartheid and Occupation under International Law, Hisham B Sharabi Memorial Lecture, 30 March 2009; Haaretz, The Price of Deception and Apartheid, 27 November 2013; and, Times of Israel, Meridor Compares Likud Policies to Apartheid, 19 November 2013.

[18] Justice Goldstone had headed a fact-finding mission into Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s 2008/09 attack on Gaza, which concluded that both Hamas and the Israel Defence Force committed war crimes. Under pressure from local Zionists in South Africa, Goldstone then published a retraction of these claims in respect of Israel.

[19] Cf. Unicomb, Matt 2022 Inside Berlin’s famous Palestinian neighbourhood — Palestinians have become deeply ingrained in German society, influencing food, politics and working to preserve their heritage.

[20] Juedische Stimme (Jewish Voices for Peace in the Middle East).

[21] Spoken by German chancellor Angela Merkel during her speech to the Israeli Knesset in 2008, cf. my article ‘Inverted antisemitism in Germany and the United Kingdom — the dialectic of racism in contemporary capitalism‘, sub-heading ‘German criticism of Israel — Where’s the red line?‘

[22] Cf. Oberman, Jason ‘Why I’m boycotting the word antisemitism — anti-Jewish racism in Germany’. Oberman refers to what I have in previous articles termed ‘inverted antisemitism’ because of Zionists inverting the historical meaning of antisemitism into anti-Zionism. Cf. also Friedman, Steve, ‘Good Jew, Bad Jew’, which describes the segmentation of Jewish people into two categories, with the ‘bad’ Jews characterised as antisemities for resisting the state of Israel. This is congruent with describing as ‘segmented antisemitism’, German states practices of ‘protecting Jewish life’.