A brazen act of state repression

A draft resolution aimed at “countering anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel at schools and universities” is expected to be passed by the German parliament in December. The draft appeared barely a week after the passage of the controversial “Never Again is Now” resolution, which called for combating antisemitism in wider society by refusing public funding to groups, organisations, and individuals critical of the Israeli government. 

That resolution was passed despite protests from over 100 Jewish intellectuals in Germany who argued in an open letter that it would “weaken, rather than strengthen, the diversity of Jewish life in Germany by associating all Jews with the actions of the Israeli government”. Legal experts underscored the threat the resolution posed to constitutionally protected rights to freedom of expression and assembly. And yet the newly released document goes even further to stifle not only criticism but all debate on Israel’s military actions.

Proposed by a coalition of parliamentary groups from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU), the Green Party, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the resolution calls for the creation of a “free space for discourse” through the protection of “Jewish and Israeli pupils, students, teachers and staff” from “hostility and threats.” Student protests and encampments are specifically identified as the sites from which “anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic slogans, among other things, are spread”.  

Taking the rise in reported antisemitic attacks in Germany since October 2023 as its premise—a point to which we will return—this resolution dangerously collapses any distinction between hate crimes against Jewish people in Germany with criticism of the Israeli state, which the International Court of Justice (ICJ) believes is committing a plausible genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. 

On 21 November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and his former defence minister on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are accused of creating “conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza”.  

At precisely this moment, the draft resolution invites the German public to become willing supporters of censorship by warning them that “anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and anti-constitutional statements are being made and acts committed under the guise of freedom of expression”.

Cringeworthy and dangerous

But of course, criticism of a government’s actions is not equivalent to discrimination against that nation’s majority population—a simple sociological truism that is wilfully obscured in German political debate today.

Students and lecturers who protest the actions of the Israeli state are not inherently antisemitic. Students around the world, along with people across society, are justifiably horrified by the violence and shocking depravity of live-streamed images of death and destruction of educational, medical, and civilian infrastructure—acts that surely constitute genocide. The impunity with which the siege on Gaza has been conducted, along with the dehumanisation of Palestinian life, has been wilfully enabled by the German, UK and US governments.  

Yet this resolution says nothing about Germany’s ongoing military support for the plausible genocide Israel is currently waging against the Palestinian people in Gaza—effectively silencing criticism of its own complicity. Manipulatively politicising Jewish identity, this resolution deliberately masks the unlawful deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and completely fails to mention the ongoing case against Israel at the ICJ.

Compared with other national models for enshrining the protection of particularly vulnerable communities in state policy, the approach promoted in Germany seems uninterested in developing diverse or nuanced Jewish German life. The coalition government has not included any persons of Jewish origin, nor made formal plans to increase the representation of Jews—or any other minorities—in power-holding positions.

At this critical moment, it is highly likely that not a single Jewish person has the right to vote on the resolution, due to the negligible representation of Jewish people in the Bundestag. This follows a longstanding precedent in European nations of curtailing Jewish voices and has a troubling echo in history. The only Jewish cabinet minister present when Britain passed the Balfour Declaration staunchly opposed it. He warned that the outcome would lead to further antisemitism since it implies that Jews and other religious and ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together. 

The draft resolution contains vague and hardly reassuring promises to bring about a “safe space” for Jews by, for example, conducting more research on antisemitism. But what kind of spaces and communities are implicated here? Why are the “Middle East conflict” and “groups from outside” singled out as key areas for combating antisemitism?  

In this respect the draft resolution is hopelessly dishonest. The Bundestag accepts the highly contested IHRA definition–a definition that even its own authors have repudiated as a means for fighting antisemitism. Parts of the draft, moreover, are unselfconsciously antisemitic. Germans (assumed to be non-Jewish!) are called upon to expand their horizons through a “meet-a-Jew” initiative: cringeworthy and dangerous at once. 

Openly xenophobic

Far from actively nurturing debate, the resolution instead delineates a series of chilling punishments for dissenters. Students, including Jewish students, who call on Israel to halt its military campaign and change course can be accused of breaching the safe space. “Disenrollment” and “further legal” action are ominously recommended for “serious” cases.

Teachers are to be subjected to state-approved “education” on the history of Israel, presumably so they will have refrain from teaching anything that counters the official view and thus invites legal censure. Loaded terms like “abuse” of freedoms of speech, are mobilized to invite German educators to discipline their students and colleagues, inducing them to prevent “prohibited statements and actions” in the name of “cohesion and mutual understanding”. 

Couched in the language of the highest moral rectitude, the resolution rests on a series of Orwellian inversions. Academics who challenge the fact that their tax contributions support the military destruction of the entire higher education sector in Palestine could face arrest in the name of safeguarding academic freedom. The students and teachers who bravely call for peace and adherence to international humanitarian law are tarred as threats to the fabric of good German society. 

Most disturbing are the resolution’s openly Islamophobic and xenophobic elements. The Ministry of the Interior attributes the majority of antisemitic and anti-Muslim attacks to far-right extremists. And yet the resolution spotlights “groups from outside” (read: Muslim migrants), and in doing so adopts the rhetoric of the far-right. By positing that “people and groups from outside are abusing an open and democratic discourse space for their propaganda” (emphasis added) the resolution deflects responsibility for antisemitism away from Germany, instead implicitly linking it to the “increasingly diverse student body”. 

The description of the massacre conducted by Hamas is contrasted in the opening lines of the text with an agentless “war in the Gaza strip”. Given the choice to focus attention on Hamas’ attack, and then to omit the huge and rising death-toll of Palestinians who are being killed and systematically starved, as the recent report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food highlights, this draft institutionalises racist misrepresentations of current events.  

The planned resolution should be understood as a strikingly brazen act of state repression targeting solidarity with Palestinian victims of war crimes. Misquoting and ignoring the key findings of research on antisemitism from Konstanz University (2024)—which demonstrated that universities were spaces with less antisemitism than elsewhere in society—the draft privileges Jews, and in particular Jewish organisations that support the Israeli government, above other citizens, above scientific accuracy and above education.   

It thus accomplishes exactly the opposite of what it calls for in its preamble: a German higher education environment open to critical discourse and debate. It weaponises the protection of one minority to naturalise the racist view that the annihilation of Gazan life should not be challenged. It is a manifestly discriminatory resolution that explicitly protects some lives above others.