‘Hyperzionism’: How Germany’s conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism allowed a far-right return

In the week leading up to Germany's historic elections, a supporter of pro-Israel politician Karoline Preisler wrote that they had “experienced antisemitism up close” after being confronted by a pro-Palestine activist on the U-Bahn in Berlin.

Preisler, a Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician and lawyer known for her provocative one-woman counter-protests at pro-Palestine demonstrations, posted the video to X.

In it, she is seen brandishing an English sign reading “Intifada is a call to violence” at two men she called “racist white terror supporters”.

There was a problem, though. While neither Preisler nor her supporter are Jewish, the heckler they accused of antisemitism is, and was wearing a shirt reading “Another Jew for a free Palestine”.

In response, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, commented: “Feeling threatened by Jews who oppose genocide defies epistemology. Time to patent misplaced victimhood.”

The incident came just before Germany’s far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) won a decisive election in Germany's eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, the strongest result for a far right party since the Second World War.

The far-right accounts for by far the largest share of antisemitic hate crimes in Germany, making up 84 percent of perpetrators’ political motivation.

Despite this, the majority of public discourse in Germany equates antisemitism with anti-Zionism and critique of Israel, even among Jews, repressing pro-Palestinian speech and protest with extraordinary violence. 

Externalisation of guilt

In 2019, the AfD put forward a motion to completely ban the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. 

This led the way for the German government to pass a non-binding anti-BDS resolution calling on institutions not to platform anyone remotely associated with the movement to boycott Israel, and has caused several public figures to be cancelled or disinvited from events for signing BDS petitions.

'Even though the AfD downplays its antisemitism and emphasizes its Zionism, it still follows the same playbook with its fascist predecessors'

- Esra Ozyurek, University of Cambridge

AfD MP Jurgen Braun said at the time that his party was a true friend of Israel in the German parliament, claiming “antisemitism comes from the left and Islam”. 

The AfD even made Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair their poster-boy after he called the EU an “evil globalist organisation”.

“As antisemitism has been equated with the critique of Israel, far right actors have been able to hide their antisemitism and present themselves as transformed,” Esra Ozyurek, an expert on Holocaust memory at the University of Cambridge, told Middle East Eye. 

“Even though the AfD downplays its antisemitism and emphasizes its Zionism, it still follows the same playbook with its fascist predecessors in demonizing a religious/ethnic minority,” she explained, “scapegoating them for problems in society which have nothing to do with them, and trying to unite a ‘nation’ through the exclusion of a minoritised group.”

Staatsrason

Though Germany's ties to Israel date from not long after its founding, the sense of Israel as a fundamental part of German national identity is more recent phenomenon, with the externalisation of Holocaust guilt onto Muslims only emerging after 9/11. 

In 2008, then-German chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech in the Israeli Knesset proclaiming that Germany’s unequivocal support for Israeli security was part of the country’s Staatsrason, or “reason of state”. 

For Hans Kundnani, editor of the book Hyper-Zionism, this marked a shift where “Germany went from a universalist understanding of the lessons of the Nazi past to a more particularist one”, moving the meaning of “Never Again” from “Never Again for everybody” to specifically protecting not even Jews, but the nation state of Israel.

'Support for Israel has less to do with love for Zionism, but mostly the necessity at all costs to protect the redemption of Germany'

- Daniel Cohen, Rice University

“Merkel wanted to take support for Israel out of democratic contestation, to kind of lock it in…before it is too late”, Kundnani explained. 

Indeed, loyalty to Israel now spans the political spectrum, with nominally left-wing parties like the German Greens and Die Linke routinely conflating pro-Palestinian sentiment with Nazism.

This attitude is not reflected in the wider German public: in 2025, polling found almost 80 percent of German voters believe Israel’s actions in Gaza are unjustified, while 62 percent believe they constitute genocide.

Meanwhile, only 10 percent fully support the idea that Israel’s security should be Germany’s raison d’etat. This holds true across political divides.

Partially, the shift is down to generational and demographic changes, with younger and immigrant Germans more likely to oppose Israel and support Palestine. Berlin is also home to the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Middle East.

Preisler is a kind of “moral crusader” who goes around looking to get into these confrontations with the public, Kundnani said, explaining that he believes her posture of moral superiority is typical among German elites who defend Israel.

“The way Germans think about it,” he said, is that “we did our exemplary engagement with the Nazi past, we have this exemplary memory culture, better than anyone else,” and thus feel “morally superior to the whole world.” 

Antisemitism is therefore considered to be an “external problem because it has been solved internally”, blaming immigrants for “reimporting antisemitism” back into Germany, since other countries, especially Muslim ones, haven’t dealt with it as well as Germany.

It has “become a matter of national identity,” Daniel Cohen, historian at Rice University, told MEE, where “anybody who is defending Palestinian rights” is labelled “unGerman” or “non-German” in the interest of protecting a certain German identity - “a German white identity, since the fear of antisemitism is also the fear of immigrants”.

“Support for Israel has less to do with love for Zionism, but mostly the necessity at all costs to protect the redemption of Germany,” Cohen said, referencing the German idea that the country has managed to deal with the shame of its antisemitic past to create a "nirvana" free of anti-Jewish hate. 

‘Philosemitic McCarthyism’

Key to this is the role of Germany’s army of Antisemitism Commissioners, who regularly weigh into public discourse to “cancel” figures associated with the pro-Palestine movement. 

Most commissioners are not Jewish, but self-identifying Christians who have pointed fingers at everyone from German Israeli academics to Jewish South African photographers.

One such commissioner, Michael Blume, prompted backlash when he called Judische Stimme (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East), a network of German Jews who support Palestinian rights, “ostensibly Jewish”, drawing an official complaint from the organisation.

Blume has a history of making strange comments about Judaism: during a 2015 conference, he told the audience Jews are not a race but part of an ancient school that brought literacy to the world and the origins of antisemitism lie in a resentment towards Jews for their special gift of literacy.

'In deep shock': Germany reacts to far right's seismic win in local election

Read More »

Cohen explains that this philosemitic admiration emerged immediately after the Second World War, preserving Germany’s problematic mythologisation of Jews by opportunistically co-opting their identity.

Despite the country’s tiny Jewish population, Jewish baby names are the most popular among German parents, while the trend of Germans converting to Judaism has drawn criticism as an attempt to atone for their family’s Nazi past.

Susan Neiman, who wrote a book in 2019 celebrating Germany’s model memory culture, has since acknowledged that the process has gone “haywire”, contributing to what Kundnani calls “hyper-zionism”.

Neiman termed this “philosemitic McCarthyism”, where “the determination to root out antisemitism has shifted from vigilance to hysteria”, particularly after the Hamas-led 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.

Amid this witchhunt, Judische Stimme was categorised by Germany’s domestic intelligence service as a “foreign extremist organisation” – although this has since been overturned in a Berlin court.

“For Germany’s governing policymakers, Zionism is the answer to Nazism,” Udi Raz, board member of Judische Stimme, and author of upcoming book JEW. DESPITE GERMANY, told MEE. 

However, “these are…continuations of the same supremacist ideology put into practice by Nazism,” he said. But while Nazism placed Jews “outside the category of the superior, Zionism places us within it.”

“The unconditional support of Germany’s government for Israel suggests that Germany has never fully de-Nazified,” Raz said.