Die Linke’s Israel Problem: When Antifa Embraces Antisemitism

For the members of Germany’s Left Party (Die Linke), the evils of this world are easily identified: the rich, the fascists—and Israel. While the fight against all these perceived evils was duly invoked at the party’s recent weekend conference, it was the resolutions and attacks against Israel that garnered the most public attention.

A resolution adopted at the conference states: “Israel is using the starvation of the civilian population as a method to accelerate the sustainable destruction of all livelihoods and the permanent forced displacement of Palestinians. The Left strongly condemns these war crimes.”

The conference also adopted a contentious definition of antisemitism aligned with the so-called Jerusalem Declaration. While asserting that hating Jews as Jews is indeed antisemitic, the declaration critically refuses to categorize boycotts against Israel and its people as antisemitic, effectively providing a fig leaf of legitimacy for organizations such as the pro-Palestinian BDS movement to continue their delegitimization campaign against the Jewish state.

Voices that spoke against adopting this declaration found themselves marginalized, managing only to ensure that a call for the release of Hamas hostages was at least dutifully included.

The fact that the party conference devolved into a showcase for the anti-Israel lobby came as no surprise. This lobby’s visual presence was highlighted by the ubiquitous keffiyeh—the unofficial uniform of Israel’s detractors—worn by many attendees.

Problems before the conference even began

The problems emerged even before the conference started. In the run-up, Ulrike Eifler, a member of the party executive, effectively called for Israel’s destruction in a post on X. The image showed an outline of an area encompassing Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank completely covered in handprints colored in the Palestinian flag.

The Left party’s success in February’s election, where it gained 7.9% (a 3% increase from 2021), was one of the election’s biggest surprises. The party was revitalized after nearly disappearing in the preceding EU election by riding a wave of antifa sentiment and simplistic, pseudo-leftist rhetoric. Their central election slogans included “abolish billionaires,” “we fight the rich,” and “learn from history: ban the AfD.” Just days before the election, the party organized a demonstration calling for a “just peace in Palestine and Israel” while condemning “war crimes from all sides”. 

Rising antisemitism in Germany

This anti-Israel stance, which reached new heights at last week’s party conference, comes at a time when Jews in Germany face increasing threats. Jewish students have repeatedly been harassed, attacked, and in some cases severely injured. In February last year, a 31-year-old Israeli was beaten up, suffering a complex midface fracture and brain hemorrhage. The perpetrator, a German-born student of Lebanese origin, received a three-year prison sentence.

Jews have been advised by German police to remain inconspicuous, refraining from wearing kippas or speaking Hebrew in public. Several attacks—or foiled attacks—on synagogues and Jewish sites have occurred across the country. Since October 2023 alone, over 10,000 antisemitic offenses have been registered in Germany, including shocking displays of old antisemitic tropes such as shouts of Jews as “filth” at a Berlin demonstration.

A party’s contradictory stance

Antisemitism was the central element of Nazism and one would expect a party that prides itself on being anti-fascist to take an unambiguous stand supporting Jews, Jewish life, and the world’s only Jewish state. Yet, the toxic alliance of antifa and left-wing antisemitism has taken its clearest form within the Left Party.

The reasons aren’t difficult to determine: The party has been promoting a Manichean worldview built essentially on resentment, blaming certain groups for all of society’s problems for years (“the rich”—a narrative chillingly reminiscent of old Nazi propaganda about wealthy Jews).

There’s also the Left’s longstanding and deep-seated hatred of “the West,” expressed in calls to “decolonize.” Israel’s detractors have cast the Jewish state as the epitome of the West’s worst crime—a supposedly colonial oppressor and “apartheid state.” The delusions of identity politics, which categorize people according to their backgrounds, have become a staple of the Left’s politics. Jews have been categorized as privileged “whites,” while Palestinians have been embraced as the West’s ultimate victims (and as such, beyond criticism). 

Historical roots of the problem

The Left Party’s antisemitism, however, has deep roots. When the party’s predecessor was founded in the 1990s as a successor to the former East German ruling party, it built directly on Stalinist anti-Zionism. According to one report, a leading member of the PDS (as the party was then called) described Israel’s founding as the worst aspect of Jewish history—echoing the old Stalinist slogan “Zionism is racism.”

Historian Jeffrey Herf describes how former East Germany (GDR) supplied weapons to Palestinian terrorists and assisted in terror training, waging an undeclared war against the Jewish state. Decades later, the new Stalinists show equal nonchalance toward Hamas. In 2010, a group of parliamentarians from the Left Party joined the Turkish-led Mavi Marmara flotilla, which aimed to break Israel’s Gaza blockade (imposed by Israel to pressure Hamas).

In 2014, the party’s then-chairman Gregor Gysi, himself of Jewish heritage, was chased down a corridor of the German Parliament by two anti-Israel activists while walking to the toilet. They were angered because Gysi had canceled an event in protest of Israel’s alleged “war crimes” during Operation Protective Edge, which aimed to stop Hamas rocket fire. The scandal became known as “toilet gate.” 

Weak responses and dangerous alignments

Some leadership members have reacted to the criticism of antisemitism by stating that open discussions must be allowed. And there is some truth to that. The German establishment has always had a tendency to stifle unpleasant and embarrassing debates by restricting free speech. In 2024, a Palestine congress in Berlin was forcefully broken up, and invited participants, including the Greek Left politician Yanis Varoufakis, were prevented from entering the country. Such actions, which only confirm left-wing antisemites’ persecution narratives, deserve criticism. However, no one needs to resort to antisemitism to defend free speech, and the Left party leadership—with its loud campaign to ban the AfD—is hardly a trustworthy defender of this basic right.

In truth, the Left Party has done more to normalize antisemitism than the far-right. When neo-Nazis marched in Dresden in February 2024, commemorating the British bombing of the city, the far-right fringe party Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland (NPD) attracted attention with a banner reading: “Yesterday Dresden: Today Gaza. Bring Genocide to Justice.” When it comes to Israel and antisemitism, there’s an eerie alignment between the left and the far-right fringe.

A growing recognition of the problem

Thankfully, due to the party’s ongoing antisemitism problem, several prominent members have resigned from the party, including former Berlin Senator for Culture Klaus Lederer and musician Andrej Hermlin. The hatred of Jews, Hermlin says, is part of the party’s DNA.

We can only hope that others will begin to recognize this disturbing reality as well.