Coalition and opposition lawmakers agree to pass a text that acknowledges a politically inconvenient reality.
By Canaan Lidor, JNS
Germany’s coalition parties and the main opposition faction agreed on Saturday to pass a Bundestag resolution on antisemitism that for the first time will see the legislature name Muslim immigration as a driver of the problem.
The draft resolution, which will be nonbinding, also calls to end pubic funding for entities that engage in antisemitism or seek to boycott Israel. It also reaffirms Germany’s support for Israel.
Gady Gronich, a Jewish community executive based in Munich, welcomed the draft resolution. “I hope it leads to positive developments on the ground vis-à-vis the religious freedom and security of the Jewish community in Germany, which is facing major challenges right now,” Gronich told JNS. He is CEO of the Conference of European Rabbis and chief of staff for its president Pinchas Goldchmidt.
The text is scheduled to come up for a vote in the Bundestag next week. The agreement to support it follows a long negotiation between the left-leaning government coalition led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the opposition center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Unlike multiple previous resolutions and laws passed by the Bundestag against antisemitism, the draft resolution, a copy of which was obtained by JNS, explicitly references the antisemitism of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Doing this is controversial in Germany, where mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa is a major voting issue and ideological divide between an immigrant-friendly left and the apprehensive right.
“In recent months, the alarming extent of antisemitism has become apparent, based on immigration from the countries of North Africa and the Near and Middle East, where antisemitism and hostility toward Israel are widespread, also due to Islamist and anti-Israel state indoctrination,” the draft resolution reads.
Women attend an anti-Israel rally in Berlin on Nov. 29, 2023. Photo by Matthias Berg/Flickr.
This section of the resolution prompted criticism by some on the left, including Kai Ambos, a prominent jurist who recently wrote a book that asserts that Israel may be practicing apartheid in Judea and Samaria.
At a recent panel debate, Ambos argued that the reference to antisemitism among Muslims was scapegoating. “The antisemitism exists as a problem in this society and then suddenly have a new enemy: the Islamic antisemitism,” he said. He also opposed legislation on this issue. “You have artists, scientists. This is a societal theme, it shouldn’t be at the discretion of lawmakers in parliament,” he said.
This invited rebuke by Ahmad Mansour, an Arab-Israeli author who lives in Germany and has spoken out frequently against left-wing and Muslim antisemitism. Ambos’s rationale is “a dangerous mistake,” Mansour wrote on X. “We should look at EVERY form of antisemitism and warn against it, both our own and that of immigrants,” he said.
Daniel Eck, a contributor to the right-leaning Mitte Punkt website, told JNS: “While everyone has identified far-right antisemitism as a massive problem, the left and the Greens weren’t able to speak about imported antisemitism by Islamic immigrants. So the discussion about the multi-partisan resolution had been stuck for months.”
“Enough with terrorism against Jews,” the sign reads at a pro-Israel rally in Berlin on Oct. 22, 2023. Photo by Nick Jaussi/i.A.v. Campact/Flickr.
When the resolution passes, the “sad reality” of Islamic antisemitism will be “finally acknowledged” by the government, Eck wrote on X, adding, “The resolution must now lead to concrete action at all levels of government.”
Germany has what many call a special relationship with Israel, born out of a recognition in the German political class of its perceived responsibility to guarantee Israel’s survival following the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their helpers. However, guilt over the Holocaust has often been cited as motivation for allowing mass immigration from Muslim-majority countries.
This has ushered in Muslim antisemitism, along with many other societal issues that are helping the popularity of the anti-immigration far-right in Germany.
In 2023, Germany saw a 95% increase in documented antisemitic incidents over 2022, up to 5,164 cases last year. Half of them, the German interior ministry said, occurred after Oct. 7, 2023. On that day, thousands of Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted another 251, plunging the region into war amid an explosion of antisemitic sentiment worldwide.
According to German interior ministry, 58% of incidents in 2023 involved far-right perpetrators, an increase of 36% over the previous year. The ministry, however, does not have a category for attacks inspired by Islamic religion or culture as such. The other rubrics are “left wing” (eight incidents); “foreign ideology” (1,186); “religious ideology” (531) and “other” (373).
Critics of how German authorities collect hate crime statistics against Jews have long charged that they’re designed to downplay left-wing, Islamist and anti-Israel perpetrators, and inflate the far-right’s share.
The draft resolution is expected to pass because the parties that have agreed on it have a majority of 611 seats out of the Bundestag’s 733. It names also right-wing extremism, casting doubt on whether it will have the support of the right-wing, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which has 76 seats.
The increase in antisemitism “is due both to increasingly open and violent antisemitism in right-wing extremist and Islamist circles as well as to a relativizing approach and increasing Israel-related and left-wing anti-imperialist antisemitism,” the draft says.
Christians from across Germany gathered with Jewish leaders to voice their support for Israel, May 2021. Photo by Levi Dörflinger/ICEJ.
The government should “develop legally secure, particularly budgetary, regulations to ensure that projects and plans … with antisemitic goals and content are not funded,” the text reads. It calls for promoting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.
Titled “Never Again Is Now: Protect, Preserve and Strengthen Jewish Life in Germany,” the bill will come up for a vote just after the annual Nov. 9 commemorations in Germany and beyond of the Kristallnacht Nazi pogroms of 1938.
The German government should continue to “actively support the existence and legitimate security interests of the State of Israel,” the text states. Israel has a right to “defend itself against attacks that violate international law and thus the recognized duty to protect its citizens from terror while upholding its obligations under international law,” it continues.
“It must be ensured that no organization and project is financially supported if it spreads antisemitism, questions Israel’s right to exist, calls for a boycott of Israel or actively supports the BDS movement,” the text reads. In 2019, a majority of Bundestag lawmakers passed a resolution saying the BDS movement against Israel is antisemitic.
“Legal loopholes should be closed,” the text of the current resolution also states, “in particular to criminal law as well as to residence, asylum and citizenship law in order to ensure that antisemitism is combated as effectively as possible.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a German-Jewish community leader told JNS: “It seems like the coalition government is worried about the far-right’s rise, so they put out a nonbinding resolution that looks tough.”
Average Germans see that “people from Muslim countries are behind much antisemitic violence, but also just plain criminal unlawfulness,” the man said. “This is a first attempt to acknowledge it so the government doesn’t appear too detached.”
The text, he added, “is good but without an action plan—which is what I’m missing here. It’s a bunch of pretty words that will not help German Jewry through one of its worst crises after the Holocaust.”