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On Tuesday evening, in the building of the
left-wing newspaper Junge Welt in east Berlin, the rich allegro sounds of
the first movement of Mozart’s clarinet quintet filled the halls, played by
the Palestinian Nasmé string and clarinet ensemble. Half a dozen heavily
armored police officers, ordered there by Berlin’s mayor, stood in the
corridor. The tense atmosphere was punctuated by the lyrical strings, while
the crowd waited eagerly and somewhat anxiously for the appearance of one
of the United Nation’s best-known figures.
A few days earlier, an event featuring Francesca
Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, at the so-called Free University of Berlin had been cancelled
after the German capital’s mayor called her appearance “a disgrace”; the
Israeli ambassador to Berlin is reported to have requested the cancellation
because of Albanese’s critical comments about Israel. A re-scheduled event
at Junge Welt was only permitted with the presence of police.
“Talking about Israeli violations of Palestinian
rights has always been sensitive in Germany. But the problem has escalated
to the point that is really, really scary,” Albanese told the press before
her talk. Germany’s support for Israel, known as the Staatsräson, has
become a major domestic political issue in recent years and especially
since the Israel-Gaza conflict escalated after the Hamas attack on October
7 2023, with the country using harsh laws intended to combat neo-Nazis
against Palestinian activists. “After a while it really gets under your
skin,” Albanese added. “There has been a crackdown on freedom of
expression, of freedom of assembly.”
The newspaper’s publisher, Dietmar Koschmeider,
told Drop Site that police were monitoring the event for any illegal
speech, including from members of the audience. “What I experienced today,
I haven’t seen in 30 years, it’s terrifying,” Koschmeider said. Though the
event, which featured readings of children’s poetry and a panel with
Albanese and Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman, ended peacefully,
participants feared a repeat of last year’s Palestine Congress, where armed
police shut down an event and livestream—and arrested a Jewish activist for
calling a police officer antisemitic.
What observers both domestic and international
have missed, however, is that the German mainstream’s rejection of
international law and civil liberties and the rise of its far right are
intrinsically linked. Germany’s far-right party, the Alternative for
Germany (AfD), has played a key role in forefronting Staatsräson for
its own purposes—using the topic as a wedge issue to demonize migrants from
Muslim countries as well as left-wing activists.
This Sunday’s election is set to see the best
result for the far-right in German post-war history, with AfD predicted to
finish second, ahead of both incumbent chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social
Democrats and the Green Party. But, by pushing anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant,
and anti-Palestinian laws to the political forefront, AfD has already
mainstreamed its agenda and changed the country.
The right has pushed the boundaries of what is
acceptable, manipulating Germany’s culture of reckoning with its past into
a commitment to defend Israel at all costs and no matter how extreme its
actions. This proxy nationalism is defended by an unholy alliance of right,
left, and center. Almost all German political parties, media, police,
citizenship authorities, and even universities and cultural institutions
are working together to suppress activists, scholars, and even the UN’s
special rapporteur.
“I was really shocked by the political pressure on
the universities and the anti-Palestinian racism, and I intend to write a
report about it,” Albanese, the U.N. rapporteur, told Drop Site after the
event. “It’s clear that there is racism against the Palestinians here,
negating their identity.”
Under the mayoralty of Kai Wegner of the
conservative Christian Democrats—whose party is predicted to lead in
Sunday’s national elections—the city of Berlin has turned into a flashpoint
for cracking down on pro-Palestinian speech, with protesters regularly
brutalized, including
Jewish students at a university occupation and women at marches
protesting violence against women, as well as at a memorial for people killed by a
right-wing terrorist.
Wegner had previously said in September 2024 at a
town hall meeting that in Gaza, “a genocide isn’t taking place, period.”
After a United
Nations special committee found Israel’s warfare methods “consistent
with genocide,” his office responded to a Drop Site request for comment
that “there is no reason to correct or add to the statements.”
“Zionist McCarthyism”
Germany has been struck with what political
analyst Hans Kundnani calls “Zionist
McCarthyism”—the
cancellation of events, funding, media campaigns, and police brutality
regularly administered to those who criticize Israel’s occupation of
Palestine and the brutal war in Gaza. Even leading human rights groups and
senior European government figures have warned of this repression. “Freedom
of speech is at stake in Germany,” said Petra De Sutter, Belgium’s deputy
prime minister. Amnesty International condemned Berlin police violently
shutting down a protest due to what the police called the “public safety
risk” of foreign languages, particularly Arabic, being spoken and sung.
This McCarthyism across the political spectrum was
accelerated and instrumentalized by the far-right, who realized that
portraying antisemitism as primarily foreign or left-wing would help
achieve its political goal of demonizing Muslims and Arabs.
The early stages of this crackdown was
branded “atonement
gone haywire” by philosopher Susan Neiman, who wrote a book, Learning
From the Germans, about the country’s memory culture. Nieman, who is
Jewish, swiftly disowned her own book’s thesis after encountering the
“straightforward McCarthyite practices in which many people, from the
director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin to the Palestinian German
journalist Nemi El-Hassan, have been forced from their jobs, and many
others have been denied funding, prizes, or performance space.”
The party has also arrived on the global stage,
with explicit support from Elon Musk—who, according to the
Washington Post,
has used X to amplify AfD, tweeted multiple times that “only AfD can save
Germany,” and invited its candidate for chancellor Alice Weidel to a
discussion on X. AfD was suddenly sharing space with the ascendant global
far right and reportedly meeting Vice President JD Vance at the Munich
Security Conference—while Scholz was snubbed.
In late 2024, the AfD became the first far-right
party to win a state election in Germany since the Nazis. In 2025, a
post-war political taboo—known as the “firewall”—against collaboration with
the far-right was loudly broken with the conservative Christian Democrat
opposition working with them to pass a Bundestag (German parliament)
resolution about restricting the right to asylum. Liberal Germans were
outraged, with hundreds of thousands going out on the streets to protest.
Though openly embracing Nazism is effectively
illegal, the party’s co-founder Alexander Gauland notoriously downplayed
the Nazi dictatorship as a mere “birdshit” in one thousand proud years of
German history—allowing the party to flirt with Nazi rhetoric and advance a
xenophobic nationalist politics. Firebrand state leader Björn Höcke has
been convicted twice under anti-Nazi laws for using the Nazi paramilitary
slogan, “Alles für Deutschland” (everything for Germany) and at a
party conference recently delegates celebrated their candidate Alice
Weidel’s speech with “Alice für Deutschland.”
Under the comparative stability of former,
longterm chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany was often internationally
celebrated as a liberal country that had admirably faced the weight of its
dark history. Welcoming refugees, ruling out cooperating with the far
right, and repenting for the crimes of the Nazis made the erstwhile
homeland of National Socialism appeared to Europe’s liberal
classes to a powerful bulwark against the rise of the far right.
But it was also Merkel who coined the Staatsräson that made
German support of Israel a “reason of state” for the country, a key part of
national interest and identity, from the stage of the Israeli Knesset in
2008. Almost all
German political parties, alongside local authorities and even cultural
institutions have joined together in an alliance reaching from right and
far-right through the center and even parts of the left to defend the
“Reason of State” and crack down on migration from supposedly antisemitic
countries, citizenship for foreigners, and civil liberties such as freedom
of speech and assembly and academic freedom.
As a result, recent years have seen drastic
repression against solidarity with Palestine in Germany, with criticism of
Israel often portrayed as antisemitic. This has obviously only accelerated
since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s brutal war
on Gaza.
Indeed, during her X space with Musk, AfD party
co-leader Weidel described Adolf Hitler as a socialist, adding after that
“only the leftish [sic] Palestinians criticize [pro-Israel] policies here.
You have a deeply vested antisemitism within the leftish movement, and it
was always that case.”
“The nationalist party has questionable interest
in protecting Israel, but doing so helps wave away Nazi allegations while
also pushing the notion that Jewish life is at risk from imported
antisemitism,” say Chris Reiter and Will Wilkes in their forthcoming book
about German decline, Broken Republik. The idea that
antisemitism comes from abroad is “much easier for mainstream Germans to
accept than the domestic variety. The assertion, which isn’t backed up by
official statistics, helps promote an agenda that seeks to clamp down on
migration from Muslim countries,” fitting right into the AfD’s agenda.
Reiter & Wilkes point out that Israel isn’t mentioned once in the AfD’s
platform, but “Islam” and “Muslim” are mentioned 50 times.
Daniel Weissmann, a political communications
scientist who studies antisemitism research, said the AfD “didn’t pioneer
this idea that antisemitism is left-wing, but they jumped on it at the
perfect time. The AfD made this explicitly political—they pioneered this as
political weapon within the parliamentary framework with the first draft of
the BDS resolution” in 2019.
Many view this non-binding Bundestag resolution
that branded the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel
as antisemitic as a watershed moment in the development of a
political omertà around Israel. Welcomed at
the time by
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and various Israel lobby
organizations, the initial proposal came from the AfD, which explicitly
claimed BDS “originated in antisemitic and anti-Zionist initiatives of Arab
groups.”
“And then, of course, all the other parties
immediately panicked and said that we must not leave this to the AfD under
any circumstances,” said historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, rector of
Berlin’s Wissenschaftskolleg at a press conference. It
shouldn’t look as if the AfD is the only party here that is doing something
against antisemitism, which would be quite ironic.” An adapted version of
the resolution—which likened BDS’s “Don’t Buy” stickers slapped on Israeli
products to the Nazi boycott of Jewish goods—passed with support of all
parties except the left-wing party, Die Linke, and the AfD, who voted for
their own versions. (Die Linke has seen a last minute rise in the polls and
is predicted to win enough votes to cross the 5% threshold to return to
parliament.)
“The AfD is the one that got the ball rolling.
They are driving the policies of the other parties,” agreed Weissmann.
In November 2024 a similar resolution
provocatively titled “Never Again is Now” applying the disputed IHRA
definition of antisemitism—which clearly limits criticism of Israel—to
research and arts funding also passed. This time the AfD voted with almost
all the other parties. The Staatsräsonquerfront—a term I have
coined to describe an alliance from across the political divide to defend
Germany’s reason of state—sprang into action.
When the law was passed, senior AfD politician and
granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister Beatrix von Storch celebrated
the motion, claiming in a speech to the Bundestag that its “suggested
solutions go in our direction.” The law promises to “exhaust repressive
possibilities, especially in criminal and citizenship law” to fight
antisemitism, which von Storch translated into “put Muslim Antisemites on
the plane and, bye, back home.”
In her speech, Storch also mocked the outraged
gasps when the AfD started to talk about “imported Muslim antisemitism” but
pointed to the motion’s language which points to “antisemitism from the
countries of North Africa and the Middle East” which she called liberal
“Green codes for Muslim, imported antisemitism.”
“The Staatsräson was there before
the AfD but the AfD instrumentalized it,” said Ilyas Saliba, research
fellow at Berlin’s Global Public Policy Institute. Saliba is also a member
of the KriSol Alliance for Critical Scholarship that formed in response to
the German education minister creating
lists of academics to strip funding after they signed a public letter to defend their
students’ right to protest for Palestine.
The idea to strip these critical academics of
funding had come from the powerful Bild tabloid newspaper, which is
vociferously pro-Israel and makes their journalists sign that they agree
with Israel’s “right to exist” alongside their employment contracts. The
education minister seemed to think attacking academia in the name of
the Staatsräson would have been an easy political win—with
the measure only being stopped by a small number of defiant civil servants.
“With more vote share for the AfD, the other
parties have moved in their direction - this helped them morph the Staatsräson into
something that has become very dangerous for civic space, academic and
artistic freedom, and freedom to protest” continued Saliba.
Critics charge that the AfD have realized the ways
that they can manipulate both Germany’s vaunted “memory culture” and strict
infringements on free speech. “For the AfD there’s been a rapidly growing
awareness of the opportunities presented by Israel,” said Deborah Feldman,
author of both Unorthodox and Judenfetisch, about
Germany’s frequently bizarre and fetishizing relationship with Jews. “All
of the laws designed to keep the far right from power can be used to target
their opponents by presenting themselves as the protectors of Jews.
Initially Nazis tried to argue for free speech but they realized they could
become beneficiaries of those laws by using them against their opponents.”
Indeed, from the campaign trail in the east Berlin
district of Lichtenberg, von Storch told Drop Site that “‘From the river to
the sea’ means kill all Jews—I don’t think we should have that free speech,
I don’t think that’s a good idea.” In 2018, when von Storch was
investigated for online
incitement for anti-Arabic comments, Weidel decried “censorship” and then-leader
Gauland said, “freedom of opinion came to an end in 2017.” But since 2019,
AfD has become one of the strongest advocates for curtailing the wrong type
of speech from the wrong type of people.
Feldman thinks that the AfD was effectively
following Netanyahu’s footsteps. “At some point the far right realized that
the best way to normalize their issues was to align with the Israeli far
right. Israel would use the narrative of Holocaust memory to achieve this
exceptional status to break rules,” she said.
Weissmann agrees. “The AfD recognize this
narrative for the cultural power it has, but it happened at the time that
the global right saw a blueprint in Israel for itself—the AfD would have
never adopted the narrative of Holocaust memory if there hadn’t been Israel
as a shining ethnically pure city on the hill.”
Liberal Israelis charge that this works both
ways, with an
op-ed in the Haaretz broadsheet arguing that “under the patronage of
Musk and Trump the Israeli government is training the new Nazis in Germany”
and that “the Israeli silence in front of [the AfD] and Musk protection is
a critical milestone on the way to their full legitimacy in Germany.”
Israel’s “exceptional status” is perhaps more obvious in Germany than
elsewhere, with the country, a co-founder and major funder of the
International Criminal Court, making clear that it would not implement an
outstanding warrant against Netanyahu.
“The last 18 months have been to the favor of the
AfD,” said Matthias Goldman, Professor of international law at EBS Law
School, amid “large scale debates about migration, the conflict in Gaza and
the relationship with international law.”
“There has been a turn away,” he continued, “from
formerly held beliefs in an internationally open order and the rule of law
and fundamental rights. Questioning that goes quite some way towards an
ethno-nationalist framework advocated by the AfD from the start. The more
you think in terms of national interests and less in terms of human rights
or global interests the more that will benefit a political force like the
AfD.”
United for Democracy?
In January, when Friedrich Merz, the conservative
Christian Democrat leader and frontrunner for German chancellor, announced
plans to vote alongside the AfD to radically reform asylum law, hundreds of
thousands went out into the streets to protest.
Merz, who served on the powerful U.S. investment
firm BlackRock’s advisory board when he stepped back from frontline
politics during Merkel’s tenure, was seen by his CDU party as an
archconservative prince across the water. After his return to politics, he
promised to “halve” the AfD by distancing himself from his longtime rival
Merkel’s relatively liberal migration policies. This has clearly not
worked, with the far-right party more than doubling in popularity since
Merz became leader.
“The more the other parties talk about the core
issues of the radical right and the more they try to copy the policies that
the radical right, the more successful these parties become,” said Heiko
Giebler, a political scientist at WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
Merz has increasingly adopted AfD-style rhetoric
on migrants. During the debate on his proposed law with the AfD, Merz falsely
claimed that
there are “daily gang rapes coming from asylum seekers.” In September, Merz
made a similar claim that “far more than half come of gang rapes come from
migrants or people with migrant backgrounds.” These claims were based on an
erroneous interpretation of statistics, which initially
came from AfD requests, according to an analysis by Drop Site News.
“The police crime statistics for” both states of
North Rhine-Westphalia and Berlin “show that in the majority of cases, the
suspects identified in gang rapes … did not have German citizenship (54%)”
a CDU spokesperson told Drop Site, adding that “police crime statistics
only record citizenship, not the broader migration background. The latter
covers a larger group of people."
These statistics only refer to suspects, not
criminal convictions, while Berlin and North Rhine Westphalia are both
relatively diverse states and not representative of broader German
society—this would be akin to cherry-picking crime statistics from Louisiana
and Georgia and claiming they represent the whole of the U.S..
The recent protests echoed those from early 2024,
when over a million and a half people took to the streets to protest a
supposedly secret plan for “remigration”—deportation and repatriation of
non-ethnic Germans—which was followed by a dip in the AfD’s support. In a
sign of how rapidly the AfD has shifted the Overton window, it now proudly
advertises the formerly scandalous term “remigration” on posters and at
party conferences, as AfD surged to its former height of 22 percent in the
polls.
Some are also skeptical of the sincerity of the
protests themselves, seeing the mostly white German crowds as, at best,
silent and, at worst, complicit in the repression. “Over the past eighteen
months, Germany has consistently demonstrated that while it may stage grand
performances of anti-fascism, it remains deeply complicit in upholding the
very structures of fascism,” said anti-Zionist Jewish writer Emilia Roig,
who was targeted with wanted posters outside a university event where she
was due to speak, on
her Substack.
“Those who actively challenge these
structures—whether through their politics, activism, or public speech—are
not celebrated as defenders of democracy but punished, ostracized, and
vilified” she continued, asking “do you really trust the people who claim
to oppose the AfD but refuse to condemn the Israeli government’s far-right
policies?”
Germany’s Dual “Loyalty Declaration”
In late January 2025, Dror Dayan, a filmmaker and
activist for the German branch of Jewish Voice for Peace, appeared before
Berlin’s main criminal court in Moabit.
Dayan had provocatively uttered the phrase, “From
the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on social media in response
to an article in November 2023 saying that the slogan should be prosecuted.
Since Hamas was officially labeled a terror group in Germany in the wake of
the October 7 attack, the phrase has been criminalized under the same law
that bans the swastika—despite multiple
courts finding
any link between the slogan and Hamas to be spurious.
Reporters were not allowed to bring in their
laptops to the court, and the police representative due to give an expert
opinion on why the slogan is linked to Hamas called in sick, so the case
was delayed. “I think it’s just another repression tactic,” said Dayan.
“The point is to just make people tired, to not come, to not show
solidarity… the German justice system was too cowardly to take it on.”
The German chapter of anti-Zionist group Jewish
Voice for Peace has been a key target of repression by the German state,
with its bank
account illegally shut down in March 2024, and many of its mostly
middle-aged Israeli activists have been detained
at protests for signs like “another Jew for a free Palestine” and “stop
the genocide in Gaza.”
In a sign of how commonplace the repression of
journalists and activists has become, the former editor-in-chief of Junge
Welt, Stefan Huth, was arrested just after the hearing was adjourned, with
an officer claiming somewhat incredulously that he had recognized him from
a demonstration against the Covid lockdowns in the summer of 2021, an
allegation Huth vociferously denies. “As a journalist I don’t go to
protests anyway, and I don’t share the politics of those demonstrations.”
Citizenship—and with it the bounds of German
identity—has emerged as a central battleground. Reforms brought in by Olaf
Scholz’s outgoing centrist “traffic-light coalition” liberalized dual
citizenship, but allowed more invasive, political questions during the
“loyalty declaration” section of the application process.
Applicants for citizenship in the southwestern
city of Stuttgart are asked, “What do you think of the antisemitic and
anti-Israel events that have taken place in Germany and elsewhere?,”
according to documents obtained by Drop Site—meaning pro-Palestine protests
during Israel’s assault on Gaza. It also asks, “Do you support Israel’s
right to exist?”
Drop Site asked the Stuttgart municipality press
office to comment about the new citizenship laws requiring applicants to
answer questions about “the recognition of the special and close
relationship between the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of
Israel, in particular that Israel's security and right to exist are part of
German Staatsräson.” The press office responded that “if
Israel's right to exist is called into question, the naturalization
authority examines whether this is due to an anti-Semitic attitude.”
One applicant in the state of Baden Württemberg
also received a question asking leading and highly political questions,
taking Qu’ranic verses out of context. The Stuttgart office told web
page islamiq.de that
this was a “one-off mistake” that they “deeply regret.”
Helen Fares, an activist and former public TV
presenter whose call for a boycott of Israeli goods was also reportedly
included in the list of issues for applicants to comment on, called it
“both appalling and deeply revealing.”
“This is not just an isolated “mistake”—it is a
reflection of a broader, systemic attempt to criminalize any solidarity
with the indigenous people of Palestine and to silence those who speak up
against apartheid and genocide,” she said, calling the claim “neither
credible nor acceptable” because “Germany’s institutions reflexively shield
themselves from accountability when it comes to suppressing pro-Palestinian
voices. This is not an accident—it is a continuation of a calculated
crackdown on dissent.”
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