Germany Ties Cultural Funding to Israel Allegiance

Germany has passed a resolution to restrict public funding to critics of Israel under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

On Thursday, MPs in the German Bundestag (parliament) voted for the resolution, entitled “Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany”, which ties funding for cultural and scientific projects to support for Israel in several ways. Though legally non-binding, the resolution implies the threat of future legal action by German federal and local authorities against those who fall foul of it.

Despite months of lobbying to soften the resolution, the final text has been described by many – including some of Germany’s most prominent Jewish cultural figures – as a historic attack on the country’s democratic freedoms.

The resolution says that recipients of state funding must not “question” Israel’s right to exist, must not participate in boycotts of Israel and must subscribe to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, a definition that is widely perceived – including by its own author – as “chilling” criticism of Israel.

Tabled in the wake of 7 October, the resolution presents itself as a response to the uptick in antisemitic incidents following the Hamas attack and subsequent, plausibly genocidal Israeli response.

In the months since it was first proposed, the resolution has attracted widespread criticism for its alleged attempt to protect Israel under the guise of protecting Jews – in a manner legal scholars have suggested may be unconstitutional.

A special responsibility.

Germany’s post-war identity has been built around a sense of responsibility towards the state of Israel as a defence against future Holocausts – many Germans describe Israel as their Staatsraison (the reason for the state). The country is Israel’s second-largest weapons supplier after the United States, approving €326.5m (£271m) of military exports in 2023. Germany has, however, scaled back its military support for Israel since 7 October: it sent just €14.5m (£12m) in weapons between January and late August.

Nevertheless, Germany’s support for Israel is strongly reflected in the text of the resolution, which mentions the country 34 times, often without reference to Jews: “Israel has the right under international law to defend itself against attacks that violate international law,” it states.

Germany also places a strong emphasis on fighting antisemitism at home – it appoints both state- and local-level antisemitism commissioners, and is one of the only countries where Holocaust denial is an imprisonable offence – however this often manifests as fighting Israel’s critics. Like much of the western world, the German government understands antisemitism largely through the lens of the so-called “new antisemitism” that derives not from the far right but the far left, and involves criticism of Israel tipping into hatred of Jews. Such antisemitism is often described as being “imported” from Arab and Muslim countries, despite no evidence that such groups are responsible for the majority of antisemitic incidents.

Thursday’s resolution builds on previous parliamentary attempts to address antisemitism by cracking down on the pro-Palestine movement. In 2019, the Bundestag passed a motion condemning the Palestinian civil society-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as antisemitic. Similar local resolutions have subsequently been ruled unconstitutional. In 2022, a German federal court found that Munich’s anti-BDS resolution “violates the fundamental right to freedom of expression” after the city attempted to refuse to allow a public venue to be used to debate BDS.

Such controversies have not prevented the UK parliament from introducing its own, legally binding version of Germany’s anti-BDS resolution in February this year. Anti-BDS laws are also in place across several US states.

As well as in the Bundestag, this crackdown on pro-Palestine sentiment has also manifested on the streets, with pro-Palestine protesters (including Jews) often met with police violence.

A people divided.

The antisemitism resolution has laid bare deep divisions among German Jews over their relationship with Israel and resulting understanding of antisemitism. The state-funded, politically and religiously conservative Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany, or ZdJ) has supported the Bundestag resolution, while much of secular, progressive German Jewish civil society has vociferously opposed it

In August, a group of over 100 Jewish artists, writers and scholars living in Germany published an open letter expressing their outrage at the proposed resolution. The signatories claimed the resolution would not protect but would in fact “endanger” Jews in Germany by synonymising them with Israel, “a notorious antisemitic trope”. The group added that the resolution would ironically end up targeting large numbers of non- and anti-Zionist Jews, “plac[ing] thousands of Israeli and other Jewish academics and artists under suspicion by the German state.”

Signatories of the letter, including conductor Daniel Barenboim’s son Michael, Unorthodox author Deborah Feldman and scholar Susan Neiman, have outspokenly condemned the resolution.

Speaking to the German state media outlet Deutsche Welle, Barenboim said: “The protection of Jews is not the objective of this resolution. The resolution refers to Israel constantly, which, in my view, fulfils two objectives.

“Firstly, it seeks to hold Palestinians and their supporters responsible for antisemitism in Germany and threatens to expand the silencing of this group via cancellations, censorship, police repression and the like. Secondly, it attempts to justify Germany’s complicity in Israel’s atrocity crimes, a result of decades of dehumanisation of Palestinians.”

Imported antisemitism.

In September a group of civil society organisations including Amnesty International wrote to German MPs expressing their view that the resolution was in “danger of restricting fundamental and human rights”.

Like many observers, the letter noted that the resolution fails to account for the massive surge in far-right antisemitism in Germany, instead majoring on what German politicians commonly call “imported antisemitism”. An early draft of the resolution highlighted “the shocking extent of antisemitism based on immigration from Muslim-majority countries”, which in the final text was amended to “immigration from the countries of North Africa and of the Near and Middle East”.

“This perpetuates the narrative of purely imported antisemitism,” the civil society groups wrote, “which we strongly oppose and which, moreover, is not supported by findings from crime statistics.”

Among the two recent “antisemitism scandals” cited in the resolution are Palestinian artworks that attracted antisemitism allegations at a 2022 art fair and a recent speech given by the Israeli and Palestinian co-directors of a documentary about the West Bank. The text makes no mention of the synagogue shooting in Halle in 2019, when far-right extremist Stephen Balliet killed one passer-by and attempted to murder 68 worshippers.

In late October, several German legal experts made a last-ditch effort to propose alternative wording for the antisemitism resolution. Their text condemned the Hamas “massacre … without reservation” but also asserted that “antisemitic crimes … are predominantly the result of rightwing extremism”. Despite significant pushback, the final resolution text remained largely unchanged.

The text was agreed upon last week by members of the ruling coalition comprising the Social Democratic party (SPD), the Free Democratic party and the Green Party, as well as members of the opposition Christian Democratic Union. The leftwing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance voted against the resolution, while Die Linke (the Left party) abstained. One SPD parliamentarian, Nina Scheer, broke her party’s consensus to criticise the resolution ahead of the vote, which she said “prevents the naming and addressing of possible breaches of international law and thus violates constitutional law.”

A protest camp was established outside the Bundestag on Wednesday afternoon, staying overnight until the vote on Thursday morning. Activists have claimed that Berlin police imposed several restrictions on the camp, including that speaking languages other than English and German would be banned without 24 hours’ notice.

City police have previously imposed language restrictions on Palestine protests, in what is widely understood as a racist move against Arabic speakers. Berlin police have previously claimed that such rules enable them to monitor speeches for illegal content.

Update, 7 November 2024: A previous version of this article referred to the resolution as a law. This is incorrect. It is a legally non-binding document which may form the basis of future legal action.