The Comfortable Failure
Why Germany Has Lost the Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Understands Nothing About Israel.
Let’s not fool ourselves: Germany has lost the fight against Jew-hatred. Not narrowly, not temporarily, not “despite all efforts.” It lost because it never seriously fought. In 2025, the RIAS reporting centers documented 8,725 antisemitic incidents nationwide, almost 24 a day. In 2022 the figure was 2,610, so the number has more than tripled. Anyone who still talks about “progress in prevention work” in the face of these numbers is lying. Anyone who keeps presenting action plans that change nothing is engaging in self-deception at the expense of the Jews in this country.
Germany loves its dead Jews. For them there are wreath-layings, commemorative ceremonies, Stolpersteine, the language of solemn dismay in every keynote speech. This country has a problem with living Jews the moment they make demands, the moment they have a state that shoots back, the moment their safety costs money, personnel and political trouble. Then come the weighing of interests, the qualifications, the references to the complexity of the situation. Germany’s culture of remembrance has degenerated into a ritual that serves one main purpose: it makes Germans feel better. It does not help Jews. A Jewish student in Berlin who no longer dares to enter a lecture hall gains nothing from a commemorative session in the Bundestag.
Every week, dozens of rallies take place in this country at which Jews are targeted. In 2025, RIAS counted 1,744 gatherings with antisemitic incidents, almost 34 a week. And the state? It watches. Police officers stand by while the destruction of Israel is demanded. Assembly authorities fear administrative courts more than the hatred on the streets. Prosecutors drop cases because they don’t know whether calling for a Palestine “from the river to the sea” is a crime or not, and every federal state decides differently. A constitutional state that, after three years, still doesn’t know whether calls for annihilation are legal is not a democracy capable of defending itself. It is a helpless one.
The universities are a total failure. University leaders who take a stand on every other issue instantly rediscover academic freedom, diversity of opinion and the bluntness of their authority over their own campuses when it comes to Jew-hatred. Lecture halls are occupied, Jewish students are threatened, and the administrations set up working groups. The cultural sector is no better. documenta 2022 exhibited antisemitic imagery, the 2024 Berlinale gave a stage to an audience that cheered incitement against Israel, and the consequences were laughable. A cultural establishment that lives on taxpayers’ money but does not feel responsible for the hatred within its own ranks does not deserve that money.
And then there is politics. The right talks about Muslim antisemitism and stays silent about its own, about fantasies of drawing a line under the past, about conspiracy myths, about the talk of a “cult of guilt.” The left talks about right-wing antisemitism and stays silent about its own, about the anti-imperialist obsession with Israel, about Jew-hatred from immigrant milieus, because it would rather abandon Jews than risk applause from the wrong side. Every camp fights exactly the antisemitism that serves it and covers for the one that hurts it. That is not a strategy, that is cowardice with a party card. To a Jew whose head is being smashed in, it doesn’t matter whether the attacker votes AfD or wears a keffiyeh.
The Staatsräson, Germany’s declared reason of state regarding Israel’s security? An empty word. For years it was carried through ceremonial halls like a monstrance, and when Israel actually needed support after October 7, the hesitation began, the conditions, the admonitions directed at Jerusalem, while Berlin remained suspiciously tight-lipped toward Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah. A reason of state that is only spoken aloud so that it never has to be honored is not a reason of state. It is a platitude.
We must also be honest about our own instruments. There are antisemitism commissioners at the federal, state and municipal levels. Most of them have no enforcement powers, no meaningful budgets, no access to school supervision, the judiciary or the police. They may warn, write reports and sit on panels. Politics has outsourced the problem to commissioners so that it doesn’t have to deal with it itself. It created an alibi and called it responsibility.
The same failure is on display when Germany looks at Israel. On Tuesday, Israel votes. On October 27, Israelis will elect a new Knesset, the first election since the Hamas massacre and the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and against Iran. And what will Germany do on election night? It will stare at Netanyahu as if he were Israel. For the German public, this country consists of one man and one war. That Israel is one of the loudest, most combative and most vibrant democracies in the world, where people argue more about their own government than in any German parliament, simply does not register in German newsrooms.
German ignorance can be pinned to names. Netanyahu’s most dangerous challenger is not some peace activist from Tel Aviv, but Gadi Eisenkot, former Chief of the General Staff of the army, who founded the Yashar party in September 2025. A man who lost a son in Gaza after October 7 and still sat in the war cabinet. His central promise is a state commission of inquiry into October 7. The second challenger is Naftali Bennett, former prime minister and former settler-movement official, who in April 2026 forged the “Together” alliance with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid. Anyone in Berlin who believes that Netanyahu will be followed by a government that works through German Middle East position papers has understood nothing, absolutely nothing, about Israel. This election is not a referendum on peace to German taste. It is a reckoning with the failure of October 7, with the relationship between religious and secular Israelis, with military service for the ultra-Orthodox, with the power of the judiciary. These are Israeli questions. Israelis don’t need German advice on them, least of all from a country that cannot protect its own Jews.
The polls show a country in deadlock. According to a Walla poll after Benny Gantz’s Blue and White withdrew from the race, Yashar stood at 23 seats and Likud at 19; Netanyahu’s bloc was at 48, the opposition at 54, neither with a majority. The Israeli press cannot even agree on who is ahead: Channel 14 and i24NEWS show Likud clearly in front, most other polls show Eisenkot leading. And then there is a detail that should leave every German “apartheid” agitator speechless, if only he knew it: because some parties in Eisenkot’s camp refuse to cooperate with the Arab parties, that bloc stays below 60 seats. Ra’am, an Arab party with Islamic roots, holds five seats and could become the kingmaker after the election. In a supposed apartheid state, Arab lawmakers help decide who governs. No German seminar on “settler colonialism” has an explanation for that, because no one there knows the Knesset from the inside.
Germany already showcased its ignorance in 2023. When hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the judicial overhaul, they were suddenly heroes in Germany. They were quoted, celebrated and used as star witnesses against their own state. Then came October 7, and within hours those same people were standing at the border in uniform. From that moment on, for many in Germany, they were no longer democrats but perpetrators. That exposes the whole hypocrisy: Israelis are only sympathetic in Germany as long as they can be used against Israel.
And this is exactly why this election is a litmus test for Germany. For three years, the standard excuse on German streets has been: we are not against Jews, not against Israel, only against Netanyahu, against Ben-Gvir, against Smotrich. Fine. Then let’s watch closely what happens if Netanyahu loses. If a former chief of staff or a former prime minister forms the government. Will the rallies shrink? Will the graffiti on synagogues stop? Will Jewish children be able to wear their kippah openly again? No. None of that will happen. The hatred will remain, because it was never about Netanyahu. Netanyahu was just the most convenient fig leaf. The hatred is aimed at the Jewish state and at the Jews who refuse to renounce it. Anyone who claims otherwise either hasn’t been listening or is lying deliberately.
When that happens, and it will, the last excuse is gone. Then Germany will have to admit that its problem is not in Jerusalem but in Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Duisburg and Potsdam. In staff rooms that look away. In lecture halls that capitulate. In public authorities that duck. In newsrooms that adopt Hamas figures unchecked and put three question marks behind every Israeli statement. In party headquarters that fight antisemitism only when it sits with the political opponent.
What needs to be done is no secret. We need commissioners with real powers instead of fig leaves. We need a judiciary that prosecutes calls for annihilation consistently and uniformly across the country. We need an assembly law that does not ennoble incitement against Jews as freedom of opinion. We need university presidents who draw consequences or leave. We need cultural funding tied to clear conditions. We need schools that teach the antisemitism of the present, not only that of 1938. And we need a German public that finally understands Israel for what it is: a sovereign, democratic state with its own politics, its own conflicts and its own answers. Not a projection screen for German guilt, and not an educational project for German foreign-policy makers.
Germany did not fail because it did nothing. It failed because it did the wrong things and felt morally superior while doing them. It confused remembrance with action, dismay with protection, commentary with knowledge. On Tuesday, Israelis will make their choice, loud, divided, sovereign and democratic. For once, Germany should keep its mouth shut that evening, and then finally do its own homework.
