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.