Germany: On the way to authoritarianism in the service of Zionism
![Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L), and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shake hands after a joint press conference following their meeting in Jerusalem [LEO CORREA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]](jpgiR_ZCSUmlQ.jpg)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L), and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz shake hands after a joint press conference following their meeting in Jerusalem [LEO CORREA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
January 31, 2025
Germany’s unqualified support for the Zionist genocide has accelerated its transformation from an already hollowed-out neoliberal democracy into an authoritarian society.
After 15 months of inhumane crimes against the Palestinians, Germany’s political elite are more intent than ever on suppressing any criticism of this heinous slaughter.
Every effort is being made to prevent the Zionist genocide from being described as such, and every solidarity support for the victims of one of the worst crimes against humanity in modern history is being criminalised.
With the adoption of the resolution ‘Never again is now: Protecting, preserving and strengthening Jewish life in Germany’ in November 2024, the Bundestag made it possible for the government to intervene in social life quite principally to defame and punish as anti-Semites anyone – Jews and non-Jews – who raises their voice against the Zionist settler-colonial-apartheid regime and its war crimes.
Now, however, the Bundestag is attacking central aspects of democracy in the service of Israel.
The state’s attack on universities and research
On Wednesday, just a few days before the Bundestag elections, the parliament passed another resolution entitled ‘Anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel at schools and universities’ in a rush, largely unnoticed by the public.
This resolution is nothing other than a far-reaching state attack on the autonomy of universities and the freedom of research and teaching.
Due to the terrible experiences with the centralist cultural and educational policies of the National Socialists, most state constitutions in today’s Federal Republic of Germany grant universities the right to self-administration within the framework of the law, while the freedom of research and teaching at universities and universities of applied sciences is guaranteed in Article 5 (3) of the Basic Law and protects teachers and academics from state interference in their research and teaching content.
This post-fascist consensus has now been broken by a grand ‘democratic’ coalition of Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals and Christian Democrats.
The glorification of the Zionist apartheid state and its racist ideology by German parliamentarians goes so far that they are prepared to give up a fundamental right enshrined in the Basic Law and a central post-fascist element of Germany’s federal order.
It is an incredible act of historical forgetfulness that the German Bundestag wants to restore the state’s right to right to intervene into the cultural sovereignty of the federal states to sanction students, teachers and professors to silence and criminalise the remnants of critical thinking at German universities.
While this once affected Jewish students and academics as well as German critical academics in principle, in the future such a restored education system will primarily attack members of the university, whether German or of Arab origin, who oppose the Zionist settler-colonial apartheid state and its war crimes.
To place these students and scholars under general suspicion shall and will incite fellow students and colleagues to denounce and slander them.
All this is typical of an authoritarian system and has nothing to do with protecting the Jewish people – but there are already cases of anticipatory obedience.
The case of Technical University Munich
On 22 January, students and staff of Technical University Munich (TUM) – one of Germany’s lauded universities of excellence – requested a meeting to discuss TUM’s cooperation with Israeli universities.
In a video, a representative of the administration is seen waiting at the door, letting students pass into the lecture hall, while a TUM security guard directs participants inside.
However, once inside, the students and employees were immediately locked in the room for three hours as TUM accused them of trespassing and called the Munich police.
This deprivation of liberty, instigated by the TUM management, concluded with the identification and thorough search of all participants.
What the staff and students wanted to discuss were the findings of a study by the TU-affiliated group Academics for Justice.
TUM, to name just one of the six cases brought to light, cooperates with Ariel University, which is located in an illegal settlement in the West Bank and is itself rejected by academics and students in Israel and internationally.
Three aspects are of interest here, as the cooperation violates both international law and the position of the German government, which classifies illegal settlements as contrary to international law. Nevertheless:
· TUM offers a doctoral position in partnership with Ariel University, including on-campus housing. The report underscores the depth of this collaboration, citing activities such as a workshop conducted by TUM within the illegal settlement and a joint research proposal published in 2024.
· Current participation of TUM in a research project of the Israeli state arms company Rafael.
· TUM’s current military research with Israel’s Technion University and the close cooperation with Prof. Ben-Asher, an expert in missile guidance and ballistic missile defence. Ben-Asher is a high-ranking military expert and has been working for Israeli arms companies for decades.
The excellent TUM, as these collaborations show, does not care in the least about international law, and not even up to 200,000 slaughtered Palestinian civilians are enough for them to end their shameful collaboration with Israeli universities, which are simply part of the Zionist regime of extermination.
While the actions of the TUM management may be shocking, following the adoption of the Bundestag resolution, this could soon be the everyday experience of students, staff and professors at German universities as they oppose Germany’s unreserved support for Zionist ethnic cleansing and genocide
However, the unity in the political establishment from extreme right to left to unreservedly support this resolution would not have been possible without both repression and manufacturing consent.
The repressive high priests of anti-Semitism
In recent years, pretending to fight anti-Semitism, Germany has implanted a new caste into German society called Commissioner for Anti-Semitism (Antisemitismusbeauftragte), whose representatives are now present in almost every state institution, in public administrations, cultural institutions, organisations and universities.
These commissioners are powerful and obviously know infallibly what is anti-Semitic. Their main task is therefore to accuse anyone who opposes the official German position on what the Zionists are up to of anti-Semitism, baselessly and slanderously.
Their judgement has the effect of destroying professional careers and thus the life plans of individuals, withdrawing funding from cultural institutions or civil society organisations and creating a repressive social climate of fear.
All this shows that the term ‘Anti-Semitism Commissioner’ is a completely misleading term, because these high priests are in fact ‘pro-Zionism commissioners’.
Instead of protecting Jews in Germany, they defend the genocidal Zionist settler colonial regime; instead of supporting Jews when they declare genocide in Palestine not to happen in their name, they subject them to smear campaigns and do everything they can to silence them to protect the Zionist settler-colonial apartheid state.
And instead of considering that in more than 80 per cent of cases of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany, the perpetrators are Germans from the extreme right, they fantasise about what they call “imported anti-Semitism”, spread propaganda for genocide and place any dissenting opinion under the verdict of anti-Semitism.
And, of course, they were a critical actor in a political process in which legitimate criticism of Israel was redefined as “Israel-related anti-Semitism”, which Germany now considers an anti-Semitic offense, and which – as intended – increases the number of alleged anti-Semitic crimes.
In addition, together with the “German-Israeli Society” or the “Central Council of Jews”, the most powerful, genocide-justifying Zionist interest groups in Germany, they stir up anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and especially anti-Palestinian sentiment in order to discredit and criminalise migrants from the Middle East and thus whitewash the crimes of right-wing extremist Germans.
In this way, all these pro-Zionist actors are not only joining the politics of the extreme right in Germany but are in fact the stirrup holders of across the country.
Germany’s fatal consensus
Neither this suppression of any criticism of Zionism and the Zionist regime nor the climate of fear would be possible in today’s Germany without pro-Zionist propaganda in the German mainstream media that, over the years, has also played a decisive role in transforming Germany into a society in which opposition to the rulers’ advocacy of genocide is seen as an insult rather than a democratic virtue.
Germany’s move towards an autocratic, undemocratic system is not without echoes of the country’s worst times. In 2023, according to Hans Kundnani, the German newspaper Die Zeit published a shocking investigative report based on leaked emails from Springer CEO Mathias Dopfner. In one of the emails, Dopfner gives a summary of his political beliefs, which ends with an extraordinary and chilling phrase that also aptly describes the political consensus that has emerged in Germany in the last few decades: “Zionism über alles”.
MEMO Monitoring: Exposing the German media’s pro-Israel bias
This confession by a German, who is the most powerful figure in the European media system, is shocking, as his “Zionism above all” is fatally reminiscent of the first line of the German national anthem during the Nazi era: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”.
This resonance is no coincidence. Rather, it exposes Dopfner as a radical advocate of an ideology of white supremacy, as can be found quite naturally in Springer’s so-called “quality newspaper” Die Welt or the tabloid Bild.
These Springer newspapers spread hatred against Muslims and Arabs and have dehumanised Palestinians in the 15 months of Zionist genocide in a way that reminds any reader who can use their own brains of the darkest days of newspaper publishing in Germany.
Both the repression and control of public discourse by Germany’s pro-Zionist commissioners and their allies and the Springer press’s racist agitation have paved the way for the authoritarian transformation of Germany in the name of supposedly combating anti-Semitism.
With the adoption of another disastrous pro-Zionist resolution, Germany’s parliamentarians have now decisively advanced this process.
Germany going astray.