The leadership of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, a state-subsidized organization, has largely accommodated the anti-Israel and pro-Islamic Republic of Iran policies of the country’s left-of-center coalition government.
To confront the worst German antisemitism scandal of this century—the Scholz government’s decision to impose an arms embargo on Israel during its seven-front war against Iran and its proxies—the 105 Jewish communities with their roughly 100,000 members should stay away from the November 9-10 Kristallnacht remembrance events with government officials.
There is a precedent for shunning Holocaust commemoration events because of pro-Iranian-regime policies in Europe. In 2010, this writer reported that Ariel Muzicant, the then-head of the Jewish Community of Vienna and the Jewish Communities of Austria, became the first major European Jewish leader to boycott such an event, because of the policies of the Austrian government.
Muzicant said his decision to stay away from the annual Mauthausen concentration camp memorial in the Austrian parliament constituted a “silent protest.”
He cited the then-Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger’s cordial welcome of then-Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki, a key speaker at the infamous 2006 Teheran Holocaust-denial conference. Muzicant has, however and unfortunately, mellowed and now serves as president of the European Jewish Congress.
Germany’s Green Party foreign minister Annalena Baerbock has worked overtime to endanger the security of Israel during its existential war since Hamas massacred nearly 1,200 people on October 7, 2023. Her weapons embargo against Israel may very well have contributed to Hamas and Hezbollah murders of Israeli soldiers and citizens.
5 View gallery
Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and former Foreign Minister Israel Katz
(Photo: Oz Shechter, GPO)
She has also hosted antisemites and anti-Israel activists at least 11 times during the war, including for a special dinner at the foreign ministry. The German-Jewish activist Malca Goldstein-Wolf went as far as to urge the Simon Wiesenthal Center to list Baerbock on its list of the most severe outbreaks of Jew-hatred for 2024.
It is unclear why Dr. Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and the council’s executive director, Daniel Botmann, are passive actors in this hour of danger. Germany’s official Jewish community has not demanded that Berlin end diplomatic and trade relations with Tehran. The community has also not mobilized its members for a demonstration against the German government’s anti-Israel policies, including its endorsement of the ICC case to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.
Some attribute the lack of a robust Zionist consciousness and action among Jewish leaders like Schuster and Botmann to a kind of dhimmitude psychology, where community leaders and many members are chock-full of servility toward the modern German state.
A German-Jewish writer summed up this condition with a joke: Two Jews are incarcerated in a concentration camp. One says, “Shlomo, there goes an SS man. Ask him what they plan to do with us.” Shlomo replies: “Just don’t provoke him, Moishe, the German could get angry.”
To further illustrate the dhimmitude condition with a quote attributed to Lenin: "If Germans ever stormed a train station, they'd buy platform tickets first."
Many Jews’ slavish loyalty to the German government combined with the obvious conflict of interest—Jewish communities depend on the federal and state governments for their budgets—contributes to a feeble community’s refusal to stand up to disastrous anti-Israel and anti-Jewish policies.
Germany’s self-image and rehabilitation require the participation of Jews and Israelis. During the discussions about the proposed Holocaust memorial in Berlin in the 1990s, a German diplomat told a reporter for the Der Spiegel newsweekly, “We need the memorial to present ourselves to the world, above all to the U.S.”
While Germany tends to energetically favor Jews who don’t fight back, when there is a bleep on the cardiac monitor from pro-Israel activists and German Jews against the custodians of the status quo, outrage surfaces.
Uwe Neumärker, the director of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, aka the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, criticized the idea of holding a pro-Israel protest at the memorial against the then-Iranian president, Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The political co-option of the site is worrisome,” Neumärker said in early 2007.
His comment helps to explain why German Jews should use every Holocaust event to protest against Iran’s regime, Hamas and Hezbollah, and the appeasement of the Islamic Republic by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government.
In the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Blume stokes antisemitism, Jewish community leaders Barbara Traub and Rami Suliman have failed to mobilize their members to protest against Stuttgart’s Mayor Frank Nopper, who enables the funding of a pro-Hamas group on the city’s website.
Philipp Peyman Engel, the editor-in-chief of the community’s newspaper, Jüdische Allgemeine, should begin to run aggressive investigative exposés on German state-financed antisemitism and urge a general strike of Jews against all city, state and federal Holocaust remembrance events.
The Jewish weekly is financed by the German government. But desperate times require confrontational solutions. Engel and his paper’s journalists are risk-averse and provide too much print to opponents of the Jewish state, including antisemites.
One reporter for the paper, the non-Jewish writer Michael Thaidigsmann, took to X this year to congratulate the antisemitic German official Michael Blume on receiving additional funds for his work. Blume is tasked with fighting antisemitism but two German courts ruled that he can be termed antisemitic because of his slashing attacks on British Army officer Orde Wingate (1903-44), the “father of the IDF,” and Goldstein-Wolf.
In the state of Baden-Württemberg, where Blume stokes antisemitism, Jewish community leaders Barbara Traub and Rami Suliman have failed to mobilize their members to protest against Stuttgart’s Mayor Frank Nopper, who enables the funding of a pro-Hamas group on the city’s website. Traub and Suliman are also indifferent to the flourishing German-Iranian trade in the state and a city partnership between Freiburg and Isfahan. The same Isfahan where Iran’s regime produced drones and missiles that were fired at Israel.
A modest step to counter the pro-Iran-regime and anti-Israel policies across German federal, state, and local governments would be for the county’s Jews to engage in some muscular Zionism and walk away from the Kristallnacht events with politicians.
Benjamin Weinthal is a Writing Fellow for the Middle East Forum.
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