The Masada-Complex (1)

Until recently, Michael Schiffer worked for the US organization USAID. Prior to that, he was employed by the US Department of Defense and as a staff member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Schiffer is an American Jew.

He is a Zionist and has dedicated his entire life to Israel.

Now he is settling scores.

With himself. With American Jews. With Israel under Netanyahu. With me. With you. With ‘us’.

With the pro-Israel scene.

Pause.

In his article “What Netanyahu’s Israel is costing American Jews. The legitimate response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has devolved into something that violates every ethical principle Judaism holds sacred“ in the Times of Israel (TOI) on August 25, 2025, which was highlighted as a “featured” article by the TOI editorial team and received over 360 comments as of August 31, Schiffer writes the following:

As an American Jew and former US national security official, I have spent my adult life navigating the complex relationship between my Jewish identity, my American values, and my support for Israel. Like many in my generation, I was raised on stories of the Holocaust and the miracle of Israel’s rebirth, schooled in the necessity of Jewish self-determination, and taught that Israel represented the best of Jewish values made manifest in a modern democratic state. That faith is now shattered.

His contribution has an intellectual, moral, and Jewish analytical depth that is virtually impossible to find in any Jewish Zionist author in Germany, let alone in non-Jewish, oh-so-pro-Israel German and other activists or even academics.

For Schiffer says:

The results of this worldview are now visible for all to see in Gaza. What began as a legitimate response to Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks has devolved into something that violates every ethical principle Judaism holds sacred. Entire neighborhoods have been erased. Families starve while food trucks wait at borders. Children die from preventable diseases as food and medicine are weaponized. The images that flash across our screens each day represent not just a humanitarian catastrophe, but a moral collapse that should horrify anyone who claims to speak in the name of Jewish values.

The bottom line is: fighting for Israel and Zionism means fighting both against Hamas, Iran and Jihad as well as against Netanyahu and the antidemocratic policies and trends in Israeli political culture alike. That is what Michael Schiffer tries to do in his piece, in my view.

Of course, it is very good when people are actively pro-Israel. When they don’t live apolitical lives, concerned only with consumption and family or family and consumption or solitude and consumption, the cheapest airline tickets or the best organic bread (in Germany, that is very important) or couples’ vacations and consumption, but instead get involved. Being democratically active, defending themselves against Nazis as well as against Arab and Turkish antisemites in the neighborhoods of Berlin, where they themselves no longer want to live anyway.

It is very good when people take a stand against hatred of Jews and antisemitism. That is why a new pro-Israel scene has emerged in Germany since around 2000/2002, driven by anti-German sentiment. But liberals, bourgeoisie, and increasingly conservatives have also been involved in this scene for years. It succeeded in getting the Bundestag to declare the antisemitic BDS movement antisemitic in 2019.

It has prevented or disrupted several award ceremonies for anti-Israel agitators. This scene has developed an awareness that Israel must be actively supported and that Zionism means self-determination and sovereignty. Since September 11, 2001, they have clearly recognized left-wing and Muslim antisemitism and have published books, given lectures, held demonstrations and rallies, published texts, and sparked discussions in both the bourgeois arts pages and the left-wing media.

Many have decoded postcolonial antisemitism, others have also attacked New Right antisemitism, and some have even made Holocaust trivialization an issue, even if this has only occurred marginally, since it would then also be necessary to deal with antisemitism in Ukraine and the pro-Holocaust perpetrator monuments there, and the pro-Israel scene does not want that.

But the bottom line is that this scene has at least dealt intensively with anti-Zionist antisemitism. For about 25 years.

Only parts of this scene ever had a problem with sexism or Trump, and this scene had hardly any problems with Holocaust trivialization from the outset, at least when it came from Lithuania, the Czech Republic, or Ukraine.

Then Corona came along, and the scene celebrated the misanthropic, medically disastrous, non-evidence-based, irrational Corona policy and the pandemic turn of the Merkel and Scholz governments. Every independent-minded epidemiologist and every critic was publicly stoned as a conspiracy theorist, Nazi, or antisemite in the marketplace of anti-social media, on the radio, on TV, in the supermarket, or on the street.

In the mid 1990s, I studied modern society, medicine, technology and criticism of traditional medicine with Professor Ivan Illich (1926-2002) at the University of Bremen (the green-white city, the colors of the soccer club Werder Bremen, with the truly Zionist fans and staff who supported Hersh Goldberg-Polin during his captivity and urged his release, and now remember him), who would have been the best critic of the irrational, antidemocratic and fanatic response of almost all countries, including Israel and Germany, to the Corona crisis and SARS-CoV-2.

Masks? Did not work at all, all empirical studies are proof of this. I was in Sweden during that crisis. While in Germany every single shop, restaurant etc. was closed for the “unvaccinated” and masks were obligatory everywhere, Sweden was a free country, only big public events were prohibited. That was in Winter 2021/22. No apartheid against the unvaccinated in Sweden, that was the rational response to that virus.

We know from empirical research that vaccinated people can as easily transmit the virus and get sick as the unvaccinated. That made the entire vaccination policies useless, from an epidemiological point of view. It was completely useless to get vaccinated and to think one cannot transmit the virus then!

A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Justice from November 2021 had the proof for this:

No significant differences in time to last RT–PCR positive test were found. Median duration of RT–PCR positivity was 13 days among fully vaccinated participants versus 13 days among participants who were not fully vaccinated (p=0.50; Figure 2); and 10 days among participants with known history of prior SARS–CoV–2 infection (regardless of vaccination) versus 13 days among participants without any known prior infection (p=0.12). (…) No statistically significant difference was detected in the duration of viral culture positivity (Figure 4) between participants who were fully vaccinated (median: 5 days) compared with those who were not fully vaccinated (median: 5 days; p=0.29).“

It is very important to emphasize these empirical medical findings. Because the pro-Israel camp in Germany, Europe and the US widely accepted the irrational ideology of the vaccine industrial complex and supported vaccine mandates. Millions of people could not travel to the US without vaccination, nor to Israel. But vaccinated people were potentially exactly as infectious us not vaccinated people! Keep that in mind when these people – and scholars – argue against irrationalism or conspiracy ideologies next time. It was irrational and totalitarian to exclude non vaccinated people from public life for many months or even years (taken restrictions to enter the US, let alone Australia or New Zealand).

At the end of the crisis, Sweden had a lower fatality rate than Germany and most countries in Europe. Just look at the infection fatality rate – most people still do not even know the difference between the case fatality rate and the infection fatality rate, due to the fact that they did not listen to leading epidemiologist worldwide, Professor John P.A. Ioannidis from Stanford University.

His bulletin for the World Health Organization from October 2020 already analyzed, empirically based (!), the low infection fatality rate of Covid-19, at 0,23 per cent. The ordinary flu in West-Germany in 1968/70 had an infection fatality rate of 0,29 per cent, no one took notice of that drama at the time.

Almost all pro-Israel activists and scholars in Germany embraced the authoritarian approach in regard of Corona. As always, they also ignored the discourse in Israel itself, as we will see in part 2 of this essay.