As criticism of Israel continues to be criminalized, Jewish anti-Zionists are increasingly coming into the crosshairs of the intelligence services and political actors.
A heavy blow to Germany’s Staatsräson: On Monday, the Berlin Administrative Court ruled against the Federal Republic of Germany and in favor of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (JS). The domestic intelligence agency must remove its designation of the Jewish association as a “proven extremist endeavor”—the highest level of surveillance—from its 2024 report. There, JS had been listed in the sections on “left-wing extremism,” “foreign-related extremism,” and in a footnote on “extremist pro-Palestinian groups”—marking the first time since the secret service’s founding in 1950 that a Jewish group was included in its spy report. JS has now successfully challenged this in court.
The anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist positions of Jewish Voice did not justify its listing, the judges argued. The court found no call for violence, nor any endorsement of violence as a political means, in JS’s statements or its statutes—a requirement for listing an organization as a “proven extremist endeavor.” Much of the proceedings revolved around the question of where Jewish Voice stands on the so-called “right to exist” of Israel. For an anti-Zionist group, its position on this “right” is not difficult to guess. And, neither in international law nor in national legislation, is such a “right to exist” codified. It quite simply does not exist—which is why, one might argue, right-wing Staatsräson hardliners have to drift into the metaphysical and treat it as if it were divine: praising the invisible and persecuting its rejection as blasphemous heresy. Anyone who publicly “denies the right of the State of Israel to exist” is to be made criminally liable in the future, according to a draft law by the CDU-led Hessian state government—which would amount to punishing the denial of the existence of unicorns with up to five years in prison. A turn to mysticism and superstition shapes Germany’s march toward authoritarianism.
The initial inclusion of Jewish Voice in the domestic intelligence report triggered fierce criticism of the state and strong solidarity with JS from within the Palestine solidarity movement. In contrast to Germany’s treatment of Staatsräson-aligned Jewish organizations, this attack carries a distinctly sinister undertone. The Central Council of Jews in Germany represents around 89,000 members across 105 organized communities, which tend to be more conservative and pro-Israel in orientation—amounting to just over 40 percent of all Jews living in Germany. It receives 22 million euros annually from the state, constituting the dominant share of its budget. By contrast, an association of progressive, often secular Jews advocating for a just peace and opposing the crimes of the Israeli state is targeted by Germany’s domestic intelligence service: the Federal Republic, as the state continuation of the Third Reich, is once again dividing Jews into good and bad.
The court’s decision on Monday is “a scandal,” fumed Israel’s right-wing ambassador in Berlin, Ron Prosor, on X. “Does the perpetrator first have to quote ‘Mein Kampf’ before people are willing to clearly call out antisemitism?” Prosor asked, with breathtaking crudity toward the Jewish group, many of whose members’ relatives were persecuted, gassed, and tortured by Hitler’s henchmen. In a direct attack on the separation of powers, the right-wing Prosor assails the court’s decision and could thereby arguably run counter to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which in Art. 41 explicitly states that diplomats “have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of [the receiving] State”—but international law, as we know, hardly counts for the right-wing “value partners” within the Israeli government.
The significance of Monday’s proceedings for a potential ban of Jewish Voice was also discussed repeatedly during the hearings. Surveillance and data collection by the domestic intelligence agency would form the basis for such a ban procedure, the lawyer for the respondent explained. Bans have already targeted groups within the Palestine solidarity movement, such as the prisoner support network Samidoun, which is close to the Palestinian PFLP. Give it a few more years of rightward discursive shift and steroid-fueled pro-Israel self-radicalization in politics and media, and the German state will surely feel empowered to ban Jewish organizations again as well—all in the name of anti-antisemitism, of course.
Beyond the attacks by the domestic intelligence agency, Jewish Voice is also facing pressure from other actors. The group has been repeatedly debanked: in 2024, Berliner Sparkasse froze its account, and earlier the Bank für Sozialwirtschaft had already done so. Hesse’s “antisemitism commissioner,” Uwe Becker, called in January for JS to be banned entirely, claiming it acts “very clearly against the spirit of understanding between peoples.” In September 2024, the right-wing CDU politician honored soldiers of the Israeli army in a café in Frankfurt am Main; he said he had thanked “the soldiers for their service in defending Israel,” referring to a military that at that point had already been committing genocide for eleven months and was boasting of grave war crimes via livestreams on TikTok and Instagram. Last September, he also called for a ban on the Palestinian keffiyeh in German streets, arguing that it “glorifies terror.” Does Becker consider such openly racist attacks to be in line with “the spirit of understanding between peoples”?
While JS succeeded on Monday in having its designation removed from the 2024 domestic intelligence report, the chamber rejected its second request—to also prohibit the German government, on a preventive basis, from mentioning JS in its future spy reports and in other statements by the Interior Ministry. It therefore remains to be seen whether the domestic intelligence agency will include JS in its 2025 report. Its publication is expected in the coming months. Politically, that is certainly desired, but JS would also challenge such a designation in court. And it remains questionable whether the German state will prefer to spare itself another humiliation like the one on Monday.
For the intelligence agency’s lawyer, Wolfgang Roth of the law firm Redeker Sellner Dahs—which has repeatedly represented the German state in cases involving complicity in Israeli crimes, including over German arms deliveries to the Israeli regime for the genocide in Gaza and in the BT3P lawsuit against the 2019 anti-BDS resolution—delivered a truly poor performance. His argument, repeated several times, was that while JS had never actually uttered the words they would like to put in their mouths, it nonetheless did so—wily, as it were—“implicitly”; that “between the lines, everything is clear,” and that this is precisely the space where violence is “promoted.” All of this strongly recalls former Berlin State Minister for Culture Joe Chialo, who accused the left-wing migrant cultural center Oyoun in Berlin-Neukölln of harboring “hidden antisemitism.” Once again: the state, as it moves toward authoritarianism, must rely on elves and goblins to justify its repression—we may not be able to see them, but they are really there, scout’s honor, pinky swear!
Even if Monday’s ruling is to be welcomed, no one should be under any illusions. Isolated indications that the judiciary is (still) not fully politicized along Staatsräson lines, and that the separation of powers can still function, do not obscure the broader trend we are witnessing in this sick country. Germany is marching toward authoritarianism, and the broad-based attack on Palestine solidarity serves as the testing ground: brown, foreign, left-wing, majority-minoritized—the perfect object (because it lacks a lobby) for establishing the baton as the new normal in this country.
Yet, according to several polls, the population largely holds critical views of the Israeli government and its support by Germany—Staatsräson is a reactionary instrument of power wielded by political and media elites, forced through against the population and necessarily tied to a perversion of the concept of antisemitism. And increasingly, Jewish individuals are becoming targets of these attacks. The German state is, of all things, fighting Jews in the name of combating antisemitism.
