Due to an email from Felix Klein’s office, the adult education centre withdrew from a talk with the renowned Israeli professor Moshe Zuckermann. He therefore criticised German solidarity with Israel.

The persecution of Israeli intellectuals in Germany has gained another facet: The Heilbronn chapter of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) tried to prevent a lecture by the renowned author and academic Moshe Zuckermann in Heilbronn and was partially successful. An event on the conflict between Israel and Palestine originally planned together with the Adult Education Centre (VHS) for 12 March had to be held by the Peace Council alone at another location in Heilbronn.

Zuckermann publicised the incident in an article on the blog “Overton” at the weekend, writing: “I can now boast that I have been officially declared an anti-Semite by the German government.”

The reason for the relocation was an email from the office of German anti-Semitism commissioner Felix Klein to the VHS. Leonard Kaminski, chairman of the Israel-solidarity lobby organisation “Werteinitiative” until 2023 and now Klein’s personal advisor, denounced Zuckermann as “highly controversial due to his positions on Israel” and made false accusations. Zuckermann quotes the email in full in his article.

The message from the office of the anti-Semitism commissioner to the VHS was triggered by an allegation made in Heilbronn by the DIG, which also acts as a lobby organisation, that Zuckermann openly promotes the BDS boycott movement. Unsettled by this, the VHS sent a request for information to the Federal Ministry of the Interior and asked, among other things: “Are you aware of any statements by Z. that have demonstrably left the protected area of freedom of expression and turned into violations of legal interests?”

Until 2018, Zuckermann was Professor of Philosophy and History of Humanities and Social Sciences at Tel Aviv University, where he grew up as the son of Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors. In his younger years, he described himself as a left-wing Zionist, but abandoned the ideology after the first Lebanon war. As the editor of many books on the Holocaust, the politics of remembrance and anti-Semitism, Zuckermann still intervenes in debates in Germany and Israel today.

In his writings, Zuckermann also criticises the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. The email from Felix Klein’s office also contained a misrepresentation in this regard: It stated that the professor “also holds the view that apartheid against non-Jews prevails in Israel as a matter of principle”. However, he only uses the word for the West Bank, Zuckermann tells “nd”. In the heartland of Israel, too, hey says, the Palestinians have been second-class citizens since the state was founded in 1948.

The VHS received the response to the request for information from the Ministry of the Interior directly from Klein’s office. It also claims that Zuckermann spoke as a speaker at an event organised by the BDS boycott movement in 2022. However, BDS was not even discussed there, Zuckermann explained when asked by “nd”. He also considers the campaign to be fundamentally wrong, as it is not effective and therefore does not really serve the fight against the occupation.

“In Germany, the accusation of anti-Semitism has become a political weapon,” says Zuckermann about the claims. “The moment they risk being accused of anti-Semitism, people fall silent. This is what Felix Klein has been given the mandate for.”

Peter Ullrich, anti-Semitism researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, takes a similar view: “Criticism of anti-Semitism in Germany has gone off the rails, partly because it is almost only interested in criticism related to Israel. This certainly exists, but the accusation is used in a completely marginalised way. Felix Klein is an exponent of this,” says Ullrich to “nd”.

Zuckermann considers the philo-Semitism expressed by Klein & Co. to be anti-Semitic itself: “In purely scientific terms, anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism stem from the same resentment; in both cases, ‘the Jews’ are abstracted. Either they are demonised or they are all referred to as Einstein. Every German who is unreflectively in solidarity with Israel therefore also harbours a bit of anti-Semitism.”

Published in German in „nd“.

Image: Moshe Zuckermann, Arne List (CC BY-SA 3.0).