How should Jews remember October 7th? Germans know the answer

"Representatives of Jewish interests are making things too easy for themselves...”

Photo by Abdulmomen Bsruki on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

On Monday, October 7th, Josef Schuster, the head of the Central Council of Jews, appealed for the day to be reserved for memorials to the 1,400 Israelis who were murdered or kidnapped on the same day a year previously.

“Anyone who is not able to feel at least a little empathy for Jews, for the people of Israel, on a day like today, will never do so and has a huge problem,” Schuster said.

For the past year, week for week, protesters have taken to the streets of German cities to condemn Israel’s response to that attack.

Allegedly, the protests are about universal human rights. Placards on view typically cite a case awaiting judgement at the International Court of Justice as proof that Israel is carrying out a genocide.

You might expect then, that on the anniversary of the day that Palestinian terrorists raped, murdered and torched their way through southern Israel, these same advocates of universal justice would see it as appropriate to demand that Hamas release the dozens of hostages still in their captivity.

After all, they could go back to their marches against Israel’s alleged war crimes on the very next day.

Was it too much for Schuster to hope that October 7th could be about Jewish victims killed on that day?

Well, of course it was.

I think I’m on fairly safe ground in asserting that the gaggle of people who turned up in solidarity with Israeli hostages at the Brandenburg Gate on Monday were not the same people who march through Kreuzberg every weekend calling for solidarity with Palestinians.

Instead, the vanguard of the human rights movement tried to take October 7th and remove all the Jewish victims from it.

In Frankfurt, over 1,000 people marched to commemorate “a year of genocide in Palestine.” The invitation to the protest didn’t see the need to make a single mention of the massacres by Palestinian gunmen that took place a year previously.

Frankfurt city authorities had tried to ban the march, arguing that its timing was “an extreme provocation” and that the likelihood of anti-semitic hate crimes being committed was high.

“Frankfurt has caved in to the pressure of the Zionist lobby!” an enraged post by the organisers on Instagram claimed. They took the city to court - and won. Which would suggest that replacing the word ‘Jew’ with ‘Zionist’ is enough to convince a judge that references to a sinister Jewish lobby is perfectly legitimate.

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A post shared by @freepalestine_ffm

In Berlin, several hundred people responded to the call for a Großdemo on Monday evening focused entirely on Israel’s actions in Gaza. Rowdy participants hurled bottles at police and journalists. Later in the evening, demonstrators attacked police officers with fireworks and set rubbish bins ablaze.

The night before, a march to “end the genocide in Gaza” attended by several thousand people in the capital was shut down by authorities after it descended into violence. Some 20 police officers were reportedly injured after being pelted with stones and bottles.

Call me old-fashioned, but protests held specifically to coincide with the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust that completely ignore the victims of that massacre are about as explicit an example of antisemitism as you are likely to come across these days.

It is tempting to say that, less than a human lifetime after this ancient hatred reached its murderous apotheosis under the Nazis, it is suddenly back in full force.

That is the conclusion of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In an article titled “Germany has abandoned its Jews” it reported that the country built on the rubble of Nazism is once again a place in which Jews are afraid to show their religion in public.

The truth is more disturbing, though. Israel has always provided a valve for a particular type of German to vent their repressed resentment of Jews. Whenever over the past 60 years conflict flared in the Middle East, antisemitism has reared its head in Germany.

In the late 1960s, a Marxist group called Tupamaros West Berlin laid a bomb in a Jewish community centre that was supposed to detonate during an event to mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht. Luckily, the device failed to detonate.

The group justified the attempted murders as a legitimate response to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land in 1967. “Every event in West Berlin is ignoring the fact that Kristallnacht is being repeated every day by the Zionists in the occupied territories,” the group stated.

That crime was typical of an era when left-wing extremists went to the Arab world to be trained in guerrilla warfare by terrorists, whose atrocities against Israeli civilians they then justified as part of the struggle against “imperialists and Zionists.”

Most notoriously, German and Palestinian terrorists worked together to hijack an Air France flight from Tel Aviv in 1976. They forced the plane to land in Entebbe, Uganda, where they separated Jewish passengers from non-Jews. They then threatened to kill all the Jews if Bonn and Tel Aviv didn’t give in to their demands. After Israel decided to free the hostages by force, Germany’s radical left fumed that the operation was a “blitzkrieg carried out by Hitler fascists.”

It wasn’t just the militant left that tried to justify the killing of Jewish civilians. Reporting in 1982, a correspondent for the Tageszeitung - favoured newspaper of the Greens - accused Israel of a “reverse Holocaust” during its battle with Palestinian militants in southern Lebanon.

The correspondent, Reinhard Hesse, endorsed killing Israelis as “the only way to stop them from murdering more people.” Those comments were no career killer: Hesse went on to become former chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s principle speechwriter.

What explains this shameful history of antisemitism among certain factions on the German left?

For some, antisemitism was a pragmatic calculation during the Cold War. German Marxists needed the weapons and expertise of Palestinian terrorists. In return, they supported the killing of Jews by imagining Israel as a bulwark of US-led capitalist terror.

Others suggest that the urge to see new Hitlers in various Israeli leaders is a subconscious attempt at personal salvation from the crimes of parents and grandparents during the 1940s. The repeated pattern of comparing Israel to the Nazis reveals “an obvious thirst for the alleviation of one’s own guilt,” journalist Veit Medick has argued.

Perhaps the explanation lies deeper still.

Some leading left-wingers have seen parallels between their cause and that of the antisemites. Ulrike Meinhof, the grand dame of Germany’s Marxist terror movement, argued in the 1970s that the hatred of Jews was “anti-capitalist” and an expression of “the dull wish for freedom from money and banks.” In Germany, it is not uncommon for left-wing extremists to switch to the far-right later in life.

Whatever the motivation, the reflex to ignore Jewish pain on the German left doesn’t appear to be going away.

Left wingers are “in large numbers antisemites,” concluded Sasha Lobo, star columnist for Der Spiegel in a recent reckoning with his own political tribe. A substantial part of Germany’s cultural and intellectual left has been “conspicuously silent or completely ignored anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli violence,” wrote Lobo.

Surely though, Germany’s liberal establishment, with their proud Erinnerungskultur, is able to make clearer moral distinctions?

I offer only as evidence the words of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, bastion of German liberal journalism, which published a piece on October 7th admonishing the Jewish community for trying to claim the day for themselves.

“As understandable as their wish for clarity is, representatives of Jewish interests are making things too easy for themselves,” the newspaper tutted. “There aren’t just 30,000 Jews in Berlin, but 180,000 Middle Easterners, including 40,000 Palestinians.... They have just as much right to have their pain and grief heard.”

Tja. Maybe we should also turn Holocaust Remembrance Day into a day of mourning for all the victims of World War II.