The adoption by the Bundestag (parliament) on Thursday of a so-called “antisemitism” resolution once again underlines the fact that the German ruling class supports genocide and has never truly broken with fascism. The resolution has nothing to do with the fight against antisemitism or the protection of Jewish life. It is an extreme right-wing text aimed at defending Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians and criminalising and suppressing any criticism of it under the false accusation of “antisemitism.”

In the context of Israel escalating the extermination of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip and expanding its genocidal war to Lebanon and the entire region, the resolution expresses solidarity with this policy. “We call on the government to continue to actively advocate for the existence and legitimate security interests of the state of Israel as a central principle of German foreign and security policy,” the adopted text states. 

And further: “Israel has the right, under international law, to defend itself against attacks in violation of international law and thus the recognised duty to protect its citizens from terror while upholding its obligations under international law. We call on the German government to continue to advocate for this right in international forums and with international partners.”

The Bundestag could not make its support for Israel’s genocide, which is estimated to have already killed more than 200,000 people, mostly women and children, any clearer.

To put it plainly: Israel has no “internationally enshrined right” to “defend” itself against the Palestinian people, whom it unlawfully oppresses and whose land it occupies. As the judge of the International Court of Justice, Navanethem Pillay, recently stated, “a distinction must be made” between Israel and Palestine, because “one is the occupier and the other is the occupied.”

In fact, the Israeli army is not fighting a defensive war, but an imperialist war of extermination. The real war aims go far beyond the destruction of Gaza. Israel serves as an extended arm for Berlin and the other imperialist powers to militarily enforce their economic and geostrategic interests in the Middle East and worldwide. The arming and support of the Israeli killing machine is part of the larger plan to bring the entire Middle East under imperialist control and to expand the war offensive against Russia and China.

As in the past, this requires the militarist enforced conformity of the whole of society. The resolution repeatedly calls on the German government to suppress the enormous opposition to the genocide even more harshly. “The German Bundestag reaffirms its decision to ensure that no funding is provided to organisations and projects that spread antisemitism, question Israel’s right to exist, call for a boycott of Israel or actively support the BDS movement,” the text reads.

Above all, the cultural sector and universities, which have repeatedly been the scene of numerous protests against the genocide, are to be cleansed. “There must be no room for antisemitism in the arts and culture or the media,” the resolution states. 

And at universities, “the proper conduct of events must be guaranteed.” “Antisemitic behaviour” must “have consequences.” Therefore, “schools and universities should be supported in continuing to make use of their legal options or to implement appropriate measures.” These include “the application of domiciliary rights, exclusion from teaching or studies, and even exmatriculation in particularly serious cases.”

The fact that this is not about fighting real antisemitism, but about suppressing opposition to genocide, is underlined by the resolution’s demand to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which was adopted by the Bundestag in 2019, “as authoritative.” The IHRA definition is an ahistorical and anti-democratic construct that defines any political opposition to Zionism and to Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians as “antisemitic.”

It has long been a central element of a right-wing campaign that uses the accusation of “left-wing antisemitism” to criminalise the growing opposition, especially among workers and youth, to imperialism and war. The Bundestag resolution provocatively states that a purported increase in antisemitism since October 7 2023 “can also be traced back to a relativising approach and an increase in Israel-related and left-wing anti-imperialist antisemitism.”

If the resolution is titled “Never Again Is Now,” and cites the crimes of the Holocaust to justify the genocide of the Palestinians and the establishment of a dictatorship at home, that is the height of criminality. To put it bluntly, when Germany’s ruling class aligns itself with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, it is in fact aligning itself with its own genocidal traditions. 

And the same applies to the question of antisemitism. It is not the opponents of the genocide, including many Jews, who are promoting antisemitism, but the imperialist governments. The very attempt to associate Jewish people collectively with the murderous policies of the extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime is antisemitic through and through. 

Nothing could make the deeply reactionary character of the resolution clearer than the fact it corresponds one-to-one with the policies of the Alternative for Germany (AfD)—a party whose leaders glorify Hitler’s Wehrmacht (Army), agitate against the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and stand in direct political and familial continuity with the Nazis who industrially exterminated 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. 

In her speech in the Bundestag, the deputy parliamentary leader of the AfD faction, Beatrix von Storch, said that by adopting the resolution, the federal government was implementing the racist and authoritarian programme of the far right. She said that “this joint motion” was “the admission of the former coalition parties [SPD, Greens and Liberal Democrats, FDP] and the CDU [Christian Democrats]” that the “explosion in antisemitism in Germany has something to do with immigration and Islam.” 

She said she could still well remember the gasps of shock and horror here, especially from the Greens, when the AfD warned about imported Muslim antisemitism. But now, she said, “we read in this motion, co-tabled by the Greens, about antiemitism that is based, and I quote, on immigration from the countries of North Africa and the Middle East.” 

And the motion’s “proposed solution” was also “directed at us: to exhaust repressive possibilities, particularly in criminal and citizenship law and in asylum and residence law. In plain speech: put Muslim antisemites on a plane and send them home. ‘Goodbye!’ and not ‘Auf Wiedersehen!”’

There is hardly anything more repulsive than a Nazi politician like Storch, granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister Johann Ludwig Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, raving against Muslims—and ultimately also against Jews who are against genocide—in the name of combatting antisemitism, and threatening them with persecution and deportation. But this is the policy of the entire ruling class.

The motion following the line of the AfD was introduced into the Bundestag by the parties of the now failed three-party coalition—SPD, Liberal Democrats and Greens—and the Christian Democratic (CDU/CSU) faction. Although the Left Party abstained, its speaker Gregor Gysi left no doubt that his party supported the basic orientation of the resolution and Germany’s support for Israel and thus for the genocide. “The existence and security of Israel is part of Germany’s raison d’état,” he asserted. 

Only the deputies of the Left Party splinter group, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) voted against the resolution. However, they were trying to cover their own tracks. Right at the beginning of the Gaza genocide, BSW representatives in the Bundestag, at that time still members of the Left Party parliamentary group, had unanimously supported tabling a pro-Israeli motion from the coalition parties and the CDU/CSU and celebrated it as a “German contribution in the fight against terror.”