In my city, the only Zionists are Iranians

Germany’s parliament is moving to jail people for denying Israel’s right to exist. It cannot enforce the laws it already has, and the people paying for that are Iranians.

A man walked past an Iranian opposition rally in central Stuttgart, turned toward it, and threw a Hitler salute. He was laughing. I photographed him. A few metres away the group that turns up at every one of these rallies with Palestinian symbols was laughing too. No officer moved. He walked on.

The salute is a criminal offence in Germany under Section 86a of the criminal code, up to three years. Nothing happened, because the people it was aimed at were Iranians.

In July the Bundesrat advanced a bill expanding Section 130 of the same criminal code to cover public denial of Israel’s right to exist, with penalties up to five years. It is now with the Bundestag. Israel’s ambassador in Berlin called it a bright red line. Israelis reading about it are cheering.

They should not be. Germany’s answer to a state apparatus that does not function is another statute. There is a German term for the problem and I did not invent it: Vollzugsdefizit. Enforcement deficit. The norms exist. They are not applied.

Look at how Section 130 actually works before you celebrate its expansion. In practice the provision is read to require that the group being incited against lives in Germany. Prosecutors close files on precisely that ground. Elisa Hoven, professor of criminal law at Leipzig, has documented it, and it has been submitted to the Bundestag in writing. So abuse aimed at Israel falls outside the paragraph almost by construction. And abuse aimed at Iranians holding an Israeli flag falls outside it twice over: they are not Jews, and they are not the domestic group the paragraph is read to protect. Hoven’s own conclusion is that if Germany wants to give the state of Israel criminal protection, Section 130 is the wrong place for it, and the chapter on offences against foreign states is the right one. The bill puts it in Section 130 anyway. Expert witnesses have already told the Bundestag it may not survive Article 5 of the constitution.

So a law that may be unconstitutional, filed in the wrong chapter, will be enforced by the same municipal officials, the same patrol officers and the same prosecutors who are not enforcing what is already on the books.

I can give you numbers, since Germany likes numbers. When I stand at one of these rallies wearing a kippah, I collect roughly ten aggressive shouts in ninety minutes. Across the whole crowd, an hour and a half produces incidents in the dozens. None of them appear anywhere. RIAS, the federal reporting network, documented 8,725 antisemitic incidents in 2025; police registered 6,548 offences, a record. Both figures are floors, and one rally in one provincial city would move them if anybody were counting.

If you doubt this, run the experiment yourself. Put on a kippah and walk a central street in any large German city for a week. When a group of teenagers closes around you, or you are shoved to the ground, pay attention to what your attacker does not say. He will not use the word Jew. He knows exactly which words are prosecutable. He will shout about Israel, about Gaza, about what you people do over there. Then file a report and watch it fail to be recorded as antisemitism.

The machinery is not always slow. On 8 June 2024 at 17:55, Stuttgart police issued me a Platzverweis under Section 30 of the Baden-Württemberg police act, barring me from the marked zone until ten that night. The form has a line for the reason. An officer filled it in by hand: Zeigen der Flagge von Israel. Showing the flag of Israel. I still have the document. That decision took minutes.

German police are toothless toward antisemites, which necessarily means they are also toothless toward a Jew who has been handling this since he was six and spent years in an army. Here is why I side with the only open pro Israel group visible in my city and its not the Jewish community. Most Jews in Western Europe with historical memory and ordinary judgment should leave, and I say that without any pleasure. Nobody here holds weekly demonstrations about Sudan, and nobody held them about Syria. When everything in a city converges on one country, it is not policy that is being talked about.

I also walk with a large dog, and it works. In most schools of Islamic law the dog is najis, ritually unclean, and where that ruling carries authority you can see what follows from it: Khamenei ruled in 2017 that keeping dogs for anything but herding, hunting or guarding is reprehensible, and last June Iranian prosecutors extended a dog-walking ban to more than twenty cities. When I used to run in Israel and a pack of strays came at me, I bent toward the ground as though reaching for a stone and they scattered instantly. They had learned that from someone. In Hebron I watched a dog lynched. So the dog is my friend and we are each others security arrangement. Among young Iranians, keeping one has become an act of rebellion for the same reasons.

The people on the square have no arrangement at all, and most of them are not Jews.

Every week I stand at Iranian opposition rallies here. Lion-and-sun flags, and beside them Israeli flags, carried voluntarily by people who are not Jewish and have no registered community behind them and no security budget, no state budget at all. Across the square the same crowd assembles with Palestinian symbols and no registration of any kind. Every few minutes somebody shouts Fuck Israel. Passers-by walk up to Iranians and hold them personally responsible for what Israel is accused of doing, which tells you what the word Israel is being used for. One woman in a hijab took an Iranian woman by the hair and put her on the ground. A man had his nose broken. Afghans and other bearded men constantly work the crowd photographing every face they can reach, and nobody stop them.

At the rally before last, three men attacked a woman holding a placard. A police van with three tactical officers was parked a few metres away, which is unusual. They were not looking. I have watched officers at these events stare into their phones for the length of an entire demonstration. Someone had to go and fetch them. They came, walked the three men aside, spoke to them, and released them. When there is only an ordinary patrol, or nobody visible at all, it gets darker.

When the Jewish community club here goes out, its members do not merely leave Israeli symbols at home. They take off their kippot or cover them with caps, and they move with people whose job is to cover them. At the last rally I spoke with and photographed an American Jew of Iranian origin, religious, a tourist. He had taken his kippah off. He was filming the Iranians, who had taken nothing off, out of amazement “to show his friends in America”.

None of this is only about migration, and I want to be exact, because the wrong conclusion is the popular one. The gap between the German government’s pro-Israel rhetoric and the street’s actual position was there before the last decade of arrivals. When I put on an Israeli shirt to walk to a demonstration, the disapproving looks I collect on the way are not coming from any one community. The police are not failing because of who serves in them. They are drawn from that same street, and they are a product of the society rather than of the chancellor’s speeches.

That is also why closing the borders will not fix it, and why the AfD can keep selling the idea that it will. What drove that party’s rise was knife attacks, not antisemitism, and what it produced is no solution to antisemitism: in November 2023 two RTL reporters went undercover on a hike with the AfD’s youth wing in Saxony and recorded participants discussing ghettos for Jews and labour camps for people of foreign origin. That is what grows when a state legislates instead of enforcing.

Two things follow for Israel, and neither is being done at the necessary scale.

First, the Iranian diaspora is not a courtesy file. A narrow intelligence relationship, whatever its quality, cannot produce what is needed inside Iran, because Iranians inside Iran cannot bring that regime down alone no matter how badly they want to. Only a broad movement can, and a movement is built through the diaspora: through the people currently standing unguarded in European squares holding your flag while nobody counts what is done to them.

Second, Europe has no Jewish future. The state that exists because a Zionist movement decided Jews needed one should be making it substantially easier, by whatever mechanism it prefers, for European Jews to come home. Both of these are overdue, and the second one has a clock on it. I’d like to underline that providing security for Israeli and Jewish objects never was the main idea of the Zionist movement, but creating a Jewish state while Europe has been a threat to them. We need to ask ourselves if Europe and the West generally stay or may become a threat to the State of Israel in a foreseeable future.

And if Germany wants a red line, it already has several. It has Section 86a, and it has a photograph of a man throwing a Hitler salute at Iranians on a shopping street while nobody moved. Enforce that one first.