More than a decade ago, in a crowded bar in Tel Aviv, my friend and I found ourselves talking to a group of German tourists. At the time, the world was watching Israel’s 2012 Gaza operation unfold. “Most Palestinians are terrorists,” one of the Germans explained to my friend, a Jewish Israeli who opposed the attack. And: “Not supporting the IDF is betraying your legacy.” A German, whose family is, like my own German family, implicated in historical atrocities, lecturing an Israeli about what moral or political lesson she may or may not derive from that very history was a grotesque sight to watch.
In German society today, however, such views seem normalised. Support for Israel is seen as a prerequisite for a newly constructed, collective German identity. While a degree of sensitivity towards Israel seems understandable given Germany’s brutal antisemitic history, the issue has turned ever more problematic in recent years. Palestinians, artists and curators from the so-called global south and leftwing Israelis are regularly reprimanded, dismissed or cancelled for views on Israeli policies that are deemed unpalatable. Last week, the Social Democratic co-party leader Saskia Esken even called off a meeting with Bernie Sanders due to his stance on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Sanders lost many family members in the Holocaust.
