Germany: No Land for Jews (Still)
A Jewish journalist, who was charged with antisemitism over his support for Palestine, reflects on how Germany's unflinching support for Israel has fueled the suppression of Jews once again.
In early November 2025, I was dragged before a German criminal court, charged with antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The charge rested on a single sentence – “Jews were never victims” – written in English in an exchange with one of the many Zionist digital warriors that assail me online as a response to one of the oldest tropes of Zionist antisemitism: the depiction of Jews as eternal victims. The German state chose to read this statement not as an intervention in a debate about Jewish identity, but as a statement about Jewish history. With typical German solicitude and diligence, the Berlin prosecutor placed this Jewish journalist on trial so that he might demonstrate that he is a “good Jew.”
That a German prosecutor in 2025 should assume the authority to determine who qualifies as a legitimate Jew – as opposed to an antisemite – may seem like a rather exotic if not altogether grotesque exercise in historical reenactment but in all sorts of ways such episodes among others in which Jews today are targeted politically and ideologically is the logical consequence of the particular moral economy Germany constructed after 1945.
Out of admission of evil and the very protestant proclivity to self-mortification, what emerged in the postwar period was a national ethic shaped less by confrontation with the past than by exculpation through compensation. For the past 80 years, Germany figured that it could pay for its rabid antisemitism of olden with a new, fresh, and equally rabid philosemitism, but in a country largely emptied of Jews, the object of this love was rather evasive. So in the absence of living Jewish communities, Germany turned to Israel, and Israel and the Zionist project became repositories of redemptive blessings. Jerusalem – not the capital but its political operators – supplied what Germany required most: a certificate of moral rehabilitation, a means of affirming love for Jews without the inconvenience of Jewish plurality. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger’s unfortunate words about Europe. If you want to apologize to the Jews, you could just call Jerusalem.
But just like the antisemitism it sought to amend, German philosemitism relied on a figment of the German imagination. Where the Jew of the grandfather was despicable and degraded, the Jew of the grandchild was not merely virtuous; he was unreproachable. Both figures were imaginary. And both collapsed the moment real Jews returned to Germany in significant numbers. Real Jews disagree: as the old adage goes, two Jews, three opinions. So they argue, dissent, and refuse instruction, including about the meaning of Judaism, and the role of the state of Israel and the Zionist project in the articulation of its identity. Actual Jews were bound to disrupt the symmetry of German moral fantasies, and they did to brutal effect.
The Jew as Foreigner (Still)
To a large degree, Jews in Germany are still perceived as a foreign body, and this perception is not confined to the usual suspects in the margins of national politics. No case is perhaps more troubling than that of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who, in a campaign stop in the run-up to the national election early in 2025, referred to the Israeli flag as a “Jewish flag,” happily and unwittingly not only blurring the line between Judaism and the Israeli state but more importantly perpetuating an age-old idea that the Jew is not a German. Similarly, in well-tempered garden variety liberal media, one can hear the echo of the grandfather’s Jew, as when, last May, a Der Spiegel headline referred to the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, as the “Jewish embassy.” The new Jew in the German head might be adorable, but he is only a guest, and in due time, one can rest assured, he will return home to the warm embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu.
If this sense of foreignness has been omnipresent in German life, the genocide in Gaza did not merely accelerate the process of confronting the Germans with their ghosts but brought the philosemitic fantasy of the agreeable Jew to an end. Confronted with images of genocidal intent by Israeli leaders and then a mass infanticide, a programmed famine, and an endless catalogue of postcards from the depths of human misery in Gaza, Germany aligned itself unambiguously with Israel and its machinery of death while many Jews in Germany, particularly those shaped by diasporic experience and humanistic value, aligned instead with a Judaism grounded in universal ethics, historical memory, and political responsibility. And so it was that suddenly Germany was confronted with large numbers of Jews whose political imagination did not findagreeable at all, and to make things worse, it had given many of them permanent residency.
Over the past two years, such a rude awakening has fueled the return of an old German pastime, the suppression and prosecution of Jews for political, cultural, social, and, of course, identity deviance. Jews who diverge from the state’s preferred ideological, cultural, and political alignment have been silenced, censored, and, in many cases, prosecuted. The list is notably long, and if one has not been paying attention, one would be duly surprised by the scale of the persecution.
Nan Goldin, a Jewish photographer and activist, faced de facto censorship and denunciation from German cultural authorities for her pro‑Palestinian statements; Candice Breitz, a Jewish artist, experienced deplatforming and cancellation of her exhibitions in Germany; Adam Broomberg, a Jewish artist, had his work removed from German institutions after expressing criticism of Israeli policy; Masha Gessen, a Jewish journalist and author who now goes by M. Gessen, saw public events canceled due to their political positions; Yuval Abraham, a Jewish filmmaker who co-directed the Oscar-winning documentary, ‘No Other Land,’ was accused of antisemitism by German officials; Deborah Feldman, a Jewish author, encountered restrictions on her public engagements; and the Jewish anti‑Zionist organization Jewish Voices for Peace had its bank accounts frozen, was labeled extremist by the German domestic intelligence agency, and faced state surveillance and pressure on its members, several of whom were arrested. And this is just a very partial list, to which one must add large numbers of anonymous Jews in places of work, social life, and cultural activities who are being threatened, silenced, and reproved for expressing opposition to Israel. I leave it to the readers to take stock of the fact that under current conditions, even figures now enshrined in Germany’s national canon would fail the test. Albert Einstein, who in 1938, in his American exile, said that he opposed a Jewish state, however minimal, would be disciplined, perhaps prosecuted, and even, once again, made to flee from Germany.
So indeed, through legal and administrative measures that conflate Judaism with Zionism, Germany has rendered political loyalty to Israel effectively compulsory. No measure illustrates this more clearly than the inclusion of questions about Israel in the German citizenship test, which makes loyalty to Israel a condition of full membership in the German state. And indeed it is this demand of loyalty which Germany sees as a “reason of state,” which means that I cannot in good conscience apply for the German citizenship I am entitled to.
Staatsräson
It was Angela Merkel who put on the table, if not on the books, the doctrine of Staatsräson. What this meant was that Germany’s political decisions regarding Israel would be guided above all by imperatives of national responsibility and moral obligation stemming, so they always say, from the Holocaust, prioritizing the security, legitimacy, and image of the state of Israel. This doctrine is often presented in terms of a so-called “special responsibility” that has been placed on Germany for its sins.
The moral rot of German ferocity, for anyone with even a modicum of historical understanding, was not predicated on the sins committed against a foreign Judaism but against a European Judaism that it treated as foreign. Any special responsibility that exists, if at all, is to redress the crimes committed against European and within it, German Judaism, and not against a Zionist ghetto on Palestinian land. It is only a few hundred meters from my desk that Jewish books were burnt, that synagogues were destroyed, that graves were demolished, and that the plan for the cultural and social erasure of the record of Judaism in Europe was planned. It is, in fact, from the very house from where I write that Jews were marched to Anhalter station to be taken to the slaughterhouses of Poland. So it is here that the crime must be redressed in the reconstruction of the Jewish diversity that was exterminated. And incidentally, this is not only a responsibility to Jews but a responsibility towards Europe, which has suffered the loss at the hands of Germany of vast swaths of its cultural, social, political, and religious life.
The special responsibility that I put on Germany and the Germans is to the so-called Jewish diaspora. What anti-Zionist Jews used to call Hereness (Doikkeit), the value and the hope of Jewish life right here and right now. And indeed this is the second treason of the Staatsräson. To be a good Jew in Germany today requires the renunciation of these cosmopolitan and humanist traditions in favor of allegiance to Zionism, even when that allegiance conflicts directly with our sense of Judaism itself, and in this regard, Germany is still no land for Jews.
I went to court to explain to the judge that I saw our rendezvous as the meeting of our two histories and legacies; charges were dropped, the prosecutor’s office was invited to cover my Palestinian lawyer’s costs, making the victory all the sweeter, yet I left with a deep sense of dismay. I realized I was allowed to walk away merely for being a Jew, while a young Palestinian or Syrian would have been crucified.
Martin Gak is an Argentine journalist based in Berlin since 2010, who spent a decade at Deutsche Welle as a religious affairs correspondent and senior producer for the political interview program ‘Conflict Zone.’ His reporting focuses on the Middle East and conflict zones, and his work has been published and broadcast across European and Latin American media.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
Check out more of Zeteo’s past coverage of the crackdown on pro-Palestine speech in Germany:
National Guilt Runs Deep
Germany's repentance for Hitler's atrocities has gone too far Now ironically what Germany is doing as a country is supporting the same genocidal behavior exhibited in the late 1930's and early 1940's Fear of reprisal by the global community has stifled their moral voice on the current disgusting immoral display by a theocratic fascist regime Sad time for Germany
Outstanding article providing valuable insight. I hadn’t understood really what Germany was getting at until it was framed in this way. Thanks!