Anti-Zionism’s German Roots
While Islam traditionally treated Jews with contempt, antisemitic conspiracy theories imported from Germany escalated this animosity by vilifying Jews as agents of diabolical evil.
Anti-Israel activists in Germany who call on the country to “free Palestine from German guilt” not only downplay our Holocaust responsibility but also ignore the significant role that German antisemites played in shaping anti-Zionism in the Middle East. Their influence reflects a deep-rooted and enduring anti-Zionist strain within German antisemitism that predates even the rise of Nazism.
I’m not suggesting that Germany is to blame for Jew-hatred and anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East. Islamic anti-Judaism traces back to the religion’s early scriptures, and Israel’s military and economic success challenges claims of Muslim superiority. Moreover, Israel’s very existence frustrates Islamist ambitions for a caliphate in what they regard as Muslim lands. However, as historian Matthias Küntzel points out, while Islam traditionally treated Jews “with contempt or condescending toleration,” imported antisemitic conspiracy theories escalated this animosity by vilifying Jews as agents of diabolical evil.
First translated into Arabic in 1925, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated document falsely purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination, gained significant traction in the Middle East amid rising tensions between Arab and Jewish populations in the British Mandate of Palestine. The forgery was weaponised by Arab-Palestinian nationalist and Islamic groups to stoke anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment, linking their cause to a broader conspiracy narrative most virulently promoted by German antisemites. “I believe in the inner, but not the factual, truth of the Protocols,” future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary in 1924, reflecting his ideological commitment to the antisemitic myth.
The mass persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews that followed the Nazis’ rise to totalitarian power in the 1930s and 40s captured the attention of fervent anti-Zionist zealots in the Middle East. Muslim leader, Arab-Palestinian nationalist, and anti-Jewish fanatic Amin al-Husseini actively collaborated with the Nazi regime in the hope that Adolf Hitler would support his opposition to the establishment of a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine. He was pushing at an open door. Just a month before their first meeting in 1941, Hitler had declared, “The attempt to establish a Jewish state will be a failure.”
Al-Husseini’s Islamic nationalist movement shared with the Nazis a constitutive belief—rooted in deep and pervasive conspiracy paranoia—in what historian Saul Friedländer termed “redemptive antisemitism”—the idea of achieving “redemption,” or liberation, through the eradication of the Jews. This alignment presented the Nazis with an opportunity to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state and extend their extermination campaign into the Middle East. On 7 July 1942, the Germany-based international Nazi propaganda station Radio Zeesen, with which al-Husseini was affiliated, broadcast the following message in Arabic:
Arabs of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine, what are you still waiting for? The Jews are planning to rape your women, kill your children and destroy you. According to Islam, defending your lives is a duty that can only be fulfilled by destroying the Jews … Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these minions of English imperialism. Your only hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they destroy you.
Remarkably, as historian Martin Cüppers notes, “Husseini remained the undisputed leader in Palestine even after World War II.” As late as 2002, al-Husseini’s successor, Yasser Arafat, continued to hail the Nazi collaborator as a hero, referring to himself as “one of his soldiers.” As Cüppers explains:
In the Middle East, there was no ideological break in 1945. After escaping French custody to Egypt, al-Husseini was immediately recognized by the Arab League. The Arab Higher Committee, representing the most important political parties in Palestine, was reestablished under his leadership. Al-Husseini participated in the war against the newly founded Israel with volunteer forces and continued to spread his antisemitic tirades of hate well into the 1960s. All of this was largely ignored by the West.
Nazi ideology, propaganda, and action lastingly shaped the conflict in the Middle East, leaving a legacy that lives on in Islamist terror organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which are committed to Israel’s destruction. Through them, we can hear the same deluded hatred of Jews, seen as nefarious conspirators alien to the land. The Holocaust serves as “proof of concept” for these Islamofascists’ genocidal aims.
Against this backdrop, democratic Germany’s commitment to Israel’s security as a matter of national priority—its “reason of state”—becomes even more understandable. Zionism, as a movement for Jewish emancipation in their ancestral homeland, is inextricably linked to the German Holocaust and its lasting impact, including its reverberations throughout the Muslim world. This connection was tragically highlighted by the murder and abduction of Holocaust survivors on 7 October 2023.
Slavoj Žižek misses this crucial point when he claims, “The Germans are trying to absolve themselves of their guilt by endorsing Israeli injustices against another group!” As a young anarcho-leftist, I would have shared the Slovenian philosopher’s view. I also mistakenly believed that my anti-Zionism could be neatly separated from German antisemitism.
Gerfried Ambrosch
But the reality is that anti-Zionism already played a crucial role in German antisemitism long before the Nazis rose to power. This makes historical sense, as both financially and organisationally, “the early Zionist movement was rooted in German lands, and German was the lingua franca for a global conversation about the future of the Jewish people,” according to the Center for Jewish History. However, if German antisemites opposed Jewish presence in public life and society, why were they also against the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine—a distant destination to which Jews could emigrate?
In the 1901 edition of The Jewish Question as a Racial, Moral, and Cultural Question, the influential antisemitic German philosopher Eugen Dühring characterises Zionism as “part of the Jewish threat itself,” warning that it will lead to “an increase in Jewish power.” In earlier editions of the book, first published in 1881, he merely expresses doubts about Zionism’s feasibility and sustainability as a solution to the Jewish “problem.” However, by the turn of the twentieth century, Dühring’s anti-Zionism had become far more radical:
The thing that now slithers across the world would, in this way, be given a kind of head, and the encircling of nations, as well as the infiltration into them, would become even more harmful and dangerous than before. … It would be a peculiar task for modern and better nations to want to provide an additional head to the Hebrew serpent, which, to the shame and detriment of these nations, has been at work long enough.
Dühring—who is perhaps best known through Friedrich Engels’s 1877 polemic Anti-Dühring and referred to by Friedrich Nietzsche as “the foremost moral loudmouth even among his peers, the antisemites”—was a philosophical trailblazer for National Socialism. He pioneered racial antisemitism and advocated a “socialism of the Aryan people,” ultimately calling for the “extermination of the Jewish people,” decades before Hitler made his first appearance. Indeed, it was Dühring’s radically racist antisemitism that prompted Theodor Herzl to abandon his earlier belief in assimilation in favour of Zionism.
Hitler’s speech “Why Are We Antisemites?”—delivered at Munich’s Hofbräuhaus on 13 August 1920—marks one of his earliest public attacks on Zionism. Drawing on Dühring’s ideas, he declared, “The entire Zionist state is meant to be nothing more than the final, perfected university of [the Jews’] international rascality, and from there everything will be orchestrated.” In 1925’s Mein Kampf, Hitler reiterates this sentiment, adding, “For while Zionism tries to make the rest of the world believe that the ethnic self-consciousness of the Jew would find its fulfillment in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews once again slyly deceive the naive goyim.”
This early focus on Zionism helped Hitler frame Jews not merely as Germans of Jewish faith who could assimilate, but as a distinct, alien race exploiting and subverting Germany. Moreover, in his obsessive and paranoid quest to eliminate what he perceived as an existential threat, he could not tolerate a sovereign Jewish state where these “enemies” of the German people might find refuge and regroup. Such a state would also undermine the narrative, championed by Dühring and other German antisemites, that Jews were parasitic nomads, racially incapable of establishing and governing a nation of their own.
Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, author of Zionism, the Enemy of the State (first published in 1922), saw “all Jews as Zionists, and Zionists as the representatives of all Jewry,” as historian Francis R. Nicosia has noted. But this view ignores the fact that, as Nicosia points out, Zionism was not particularly popular among German Jews until antisemitic hostility and pressures began to escalate.
Rosenberg accused the Zionist Association for Germany of being “nothing more than an organisation engaged in the legalised undermining of the German state,” charging Zionist Jews with betraying Germany during World War I in exchange for a national home in the British Mandate of Palestine. Yet he asserted that “Zionism is, at best, the impotent attempt of an incapable people to achieve productivity; more often, it is a means for ambitious speculators to create a new staging ground for world exploitation.”
Thus, while German antisemites denied Jews the capacity for nation-building, they also condemned Zionism as a cunning strategy to establish an independent power base for an alleged global Jewish conspiracy. It is no coincidence that a similarly schizophrenic form of antisemitism pervades anti-Zionist Palestinian discourse, which simultaneously portrays Jews as subhuman animals and as overly powerful occupiers.
Zachary R. Goldsmith
In Weimar Germany, opposition to Zionism was not limited to racist antisemites. The influential German Communist Party (KPD) vehemently rejected it from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
As historian Olaf Kistenmacher points out, the first headline to mention Zionism in the KPD paper Rote Fahne (“Red Flag”) in 1925 read, “Zionism, watchdog of English imperialism.” Moreover, in its 1932 manifesto Communism and the Jewish Question, the party pledged to fight Zionism “just like German fascism.” This stance reflected a broader rejection of national movements and nation-states. Revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, for example, argued in 1909 that “the historical task of the proletariat is the abolition of [the modern ‘national’] state as a political form of capitalism.”
While, according to Kistenmacher, some leftist groups advocated for “the creation of a Jewish communist society in Palestine,” the Communist International expected its members, including Jewish ones, to strategically support Arab-Palestinian nationalism in opposition to British imperialism, even as antisemitic pogroms were already occurring in Palestine. These pogroms targeted not only new Zionist settlements but also long-established Jewish communities. For the KPD, however, the violence signalled the beginning of a much-awaited “Arab insurrection.” Kistenmacher cites a Rote Fahne article from 1929:
Particularly characteristic of the development of this movement is that the attacks by the Arabs are no longer limited to the Jewish population but are beginning to target their main enemy, British imperialism. … The blows that the Arab natives strike against the Zionist bourgeoisie and Zionist fascism in Palestine are simultaneously blows against England.
This skewed identification of Zionism with fascism and imperialism, coupled with the glorification of Arab “resistance,” continued to influence the Left’s discourse on the Israel-Palestine issue in postwar Germany. Initially, the collective trauma of Nazism and the Holocaust led many German leftists to support Zionism as a progressive cause. However, anti-Zionism gained significant traction during the 1960s, particularly within the left-wing student movement. Political scientist Martin W. Kloke attributes this shift primarily to the Six-Day War of 1967, a defensive conflict during which Israel captured significant territories and emerged as the preeminent military power in the region.
By reviving old anti-imperialist tropes and making crude comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, German leftists once again found themselves supporting antisemitic extremism and terrorism in the Middle East under the banner of anti-Zionist solidarity with Palestine. One particularly explicit flyer, distributed at a protest against an Israeli academic speaker in Kiel, West Germany, in 1969, read, “Schlagt die Zionisten tot, macht den Nahen Osten rot” (“Beat the Zionists to death, make the Middle East red”).
Essayist Jean Améry, a Nazi resister and Holocaust survivor, warned in 1969, “Anti-Israelism, or anti-Zionism, contains antisemitism like a cloud contains a storm.” That same year, radical-left terrorists attempted to bomb a Jewish community centre in West Berlin, explicitly linking their anti-Zionism to a rejection of German guilt. In their warped logic, “The Jews who were expelled under fascism have themselves become fascists who want to wipe out the Palestinian people.” Three years later, when Palestinian terrorists massacred five Israeli athletes, six Israeli coaches, and a West German police officer at the Olympic Games in Munich, Ulrike Meinhof, a key figure in the Red Army Faction and an icon of the radical Left, expressed open solidarity with the attackers.
Izabella Tabarovsky
Another shift on the German Left—which manifested as widespread support for Israel—gained momentum around the time of the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Zionist leftists within the Antifa movement, known as Antideutsche (“anti-Germans”), rallied behind the slogan, “Down with Germany, solidarity with Israel, for communism.” By putting forward a radical critique of German identity and historical responsibility in relation to antisemitism, they spotlighted the deep roots of “Israel-related antisemitism”—antisemitic resentments and stereotypes projected onto Israel—embedded in Germany’s past. Today, German progressives still largely share this perspective, despite growing Islamist and postcolonial influences.
By contrast, Germany’s Far-Right predominantly rejects the notion of historical accountability. Björn Höcke, a leading figure in the highly successful Alternative for Germany (AfD) party once infamously complained, “We Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of our capital,” referring to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial. While the AfD ostensibly supports Israel, many of its members promote conspiracy theories laden with the antisemitic tropes that have been intrinsic to anti-Zionist discourse for over a century—now repackaged and stripped of explicit references to Jews.
A 2023 incident at an AfD convention in Bavaria illustrates this. After state election candidate Katrin Ebner-Steiner declared that her party makes policies for “its own people” and does not work for “globalists and financial elites,” whom she accused of pursuing the “Great Reset,” someone in the audience shouted, “We are ruled by the Jews!”
Zionism—the idea of a national home for a persecuted minority in its ancestral land—became a focal point of antisemitic conspiracism early in the history of German antisemitism, culminating in the industrialised murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children. The Holocaust underscored, once and for all, the necessity of a sovereign state for Jews. Yet, anti-Zionist narratives, steeped in age-old resentments and stereotypes, have transformed Israel from David to Goliath in the imagination of its adversaries.
Germany today honours its historical responsibility to the Jewish people by supporting Israel in its fight against genocidal Islamofascism in the Middle East—much to the chagrin of growing legions of domestic Israel-haters and antisemites. The increasingly overt antisemitism of emboldened Islamists and incorrigible anti-Zionists on our streets demands an equally principled approach, one that upholds and reinforces German democracy’s foundational maxim: “Never again.”
