The Blogs: When anti-Zionism comes for Jews in Germany

Jews know this language, even when it arrives in newer clothes. A German political party may call it opposition to “today’s Zionism.” Jews hear something more familiar: another attempt to turn Jewish self-determination into a moral offense.

At a state party congress in March, the Lower Saxony branch of Germany’s Left Party, Die Linke, passed a resolution rejecting what it called the Zionism of today. That wording matters because it was not aimed at some long-dead intellectual tendency, nor at one cabinet, one minister, one battlefield decision, or one disputed legal doctrine. Critics, among them Jewish leaders and anti-antisemitism voices inside and outside the party, read it as an attack on Zionism as a living political reality and, with it, on the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself.

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, did not treat the resolution as some muddled intra-party paper that outsiders had unfairly exaggerated. He said the party had made “real existing Zionism” into an enemy image. He said its demonstrative rejection of the only Jewish state was an attack on the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. He called left-wing anti-Zionism what too many people in polite European politics still refuse to call it: poorly disguised antisemitism.

He was right to strip away the euphemisms so quickly, because euphemism is exactly how this politics survives. It survives by pretending to be finer, narrower, and more sophisticated than it is. It hides behind edits, procedural clarifications, and semantic fog. After the backlash, the state branch issued a clarification arguing that an earlier headline rejecting Zionism had remained in place only for technical reasons after the text was amended. That may satisfy insiders. It does nothing to change the public meaning of what was passed. It says the target is not Zionism as such, only a certain political form of it. The text itself, however, was hardly restrained. It invoked “genocide” as an ongoing condition, used “apartheid” as a defining category, and demanded the enforcement of international arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. This was not narrow criticism. It was maximalist by design. But the substance is always easier to grasp than the alibis that follow it. A party resolution in Germany placed Zionism itself in the dock, then acted offended when others noticed.

That matters not only because of what was passed, but because of where it was passed. In Germany, of all countries, one should not have to argue from scratch why turning Zionism into a political enemy is more than another piece of activist theater. Yet that is exactly where parts of the contemporary left now are: still speaking as if Jewish sovereignty were the scandal, still treating the existence of the Jewish state as something morally stained at its core, still dressing up this old hostility in the language of conscience.

What makes the whole episode more damning is that the warning came not only from outside the party, but from people who knew exactly what they were looking at. Even before the congress, the party’s own anti-antisemitism working group warned that the motion treated Zionism as a monolith and risked alienating Jewish members. Those warnings were ignored. Andreas Büttner, Brandenburg’s antisemitism commissioner, left the party over the line that had now been crossed. I interviewed Büttner earlier this year after an arson attack on his property, and he spoke bluntly about how anti-Jewish hatred in Germany increasingly reappears in anti-Zionist language. His resignation matters for the same reason his warning mattered: it came from someone who had already seen, up close, what happens when euphemism replaces honesty.

Büttner’s resignation also shattered one of the favorite defenses in this milieu: that alarm over anti-Zionist excess comes only from hostile outsiders, conservatives, or reflexive defenders of Israel. It did not here. It came from someone who had already spent months warning that anti-Jewish hatred in Germany increasingly adapts itself to the moral language of the present.

That is the larger problem, and it reaches far beyond one party congress. Anti-Zionism has become the preferred vocabulary through which old animosities now try to pass as enlightened politics. It offers the speaker a sense of moral elevation while leaving the target unmistakable. The hatred no longer has to announce itself crudely. It can arrive dressed as theory, solidarity, or historical correction. It can flatter itself as brave. It can even imagine itself humane.

But what it keeps circling back to is the same old demand: that the Jewish state justify its existence in a way no other nation is asked to do.

That is why this argument is not really about one resolution, or even one party. The Lower Saxony vote matters because it exposed a pattern with unusual candor. First comes the sweeping denunciation. Then comes the semantic retreat. Then comes the effort to recast the backlash as a failure of interpretation rather than a response to what was plainly said. This ritual has become so common in parts of European political culture that many people no longer notice how revealing it is. The radicalism is always meant to be taken seriously. Only the consequences are not.

And yet the consequences are the whole story. Once Zionism itself is recast as the scandal, everything built around Jewish self-determination becomes easier to treat as suspect: Israeli self-defense, Jewish national memory, even the idea that Jewish vulnerability might have led, for reasons grounded in history rather than ideology, to a sovereign state that is not open for moral revocation by European activists.

This is where the anti-Zionist left remains most dishonest with itself. It still prefers to believe that the only real antisemitism is the old, vulgar kind, the swastika, the slur, the street-corner conspiracy. That form still exists, of course. But so does another form, one more fluent in the approved language of progressive politics, one that knows how to speak of anti-racism and human rights while making the Jewish collective the exception to every rule it claims to defend.

In that worldview, other peoples are allowed history, trauma, self-preservation, and national continuity. Jews are allowed remembrance. They are not so easily forgiven sovereignty.

That is why Schuster’s reaction mattered beyond the immediate scandal. He understood that this was not a wording dispute but a boundary dispute. The question was whether a German political party could attack Zionism as a living political reality and still expect to be treated as operating safely within the bounds of democratic decency. His answer was no, and he was right. A politics that turns the Jewish state into an “enemy image” is not merely confused. It is crossing into something darker, whether it admits that to itself or not.

The broader tragedy is that this harms more than Jews. It also degrades any serious politics of peace. Palestinians deserve advocates who can argue their cause without making hostility to Jewish statehood the emotional center of their worldview. They deserve something better than European movements that reduce the conflict to a morality play in which Jewish sovereignty itself must remain permanently accused. That kind of politics does not clarify anything. It hardens illusions, rewards absolutism, and makes an already unbearable conflict even harder to speak about honestly.

What happened in Germany should therefore be read with less surprise than concern. The language may shift. The moral styling may change. The old instincts do not disappear so easily. They adapt. They learn new phrases. They borrow prestige from fashionable causes. And when challenged, the response is often to police the reaction more aggressively than the offense itself.

That is what made this resolution so revealing. It did not create the problem. It exposed it. The language may be new, the instinct is not. And Jews have learned, at far too high a price, what happens when hatred of Jewish sovereignty first asks to be treated as nuance.