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Benjamin Weinthal

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Benjamin Weinthal,

Benjamin Weinthal

Analysis

Germany outsources its Israel hatred now

November 18, 2010 14:28
After Kristallnacht: this year’s commemoration was marred
2 min read

The Mayor of Frankfurt Petra Roth's decision to invite hardcore anti-Israeli academic Alfred Grosser to deliver the keynote speech at last week's commemoration of Kristallnacht, a wave of state-sponsored violence against German Jews on November 9, 1938, triggered a bitter public row in Germany and Israel. What's more, this outsourcing of hatred of the Jewish state to anti-Israeli Jews has become an annual fixture.

Last year, then-German president Horst Köhler issued the Federal Merit Cross, one of the country's most prestigious awards, to Israeli lawyer Felicia Langer, who has equated Israel with Nazi Germany and the former South African apartheid regime.

Mr Grosser, a French intellectual born to a German-Jewish family, is cut from the same cloth as the late British-American Historian Tony Judt, who argued that a cause of antisemitism was Israel and Jews. Mr Grosser, like Mr Judt, lacks credentials in the Middle East debate (and an understanding of modern antisemitism), but has German media outlets spreading a thesis that, if propounded by a non-Jewish German, would be labelled as being infected with antisemitism.

By comparing Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the Hitler movement's persecution of Jews, critics argue that Mr Grosser panders to majority resentments against Israel and helps sanitise German guilt about the crimes of the Holocaust. Mr Grosser also argues that, "Criticism of Israel and antisemitism have nothing to
do with each other. It is rather Israel's policies that promote antisemitism globally."