How did “imported antisemitism”, a far-right anti-immigrant buzz phrase, make it into the political mainstream? After all, Germans didn’t exactly need to import antisemitism. But this is the way we see it in Germany: if you haven’t committed genocide you can’t properly claim to be against it. I’m not making this up. You couldn’t make it up. Indeed, the political scientist Esra Özyürek discusses the belief in her excellent 2023 book Subcontractors of Guilt.
The thinking behind it is that because of our history, we teach the next generation to make sure it will never happen again. At school we studied the Holocaust every year. We didn’t learn to analyse antisemitism, but we learned to be very wary of it – or as the writer Max Czollek put it: “Today Germans know mainly one thing about Jews: that they killed them.”
Immigrants to Germany need to know a bit more than that if they want to become German citizens. They need to know when the state of Israel was founded, and who is allowed to become a member of one of the 40 Maccabi sports clubs. If you’re not born in Germany you have to prove you’re not antisemitic by learning facts about Jewish people.
But even if you were born here, like me, the statistics still refer to you as an immigrant if one of your parents comes from a different country. And as such, you are viewed with suspicion when it comes to the antisemitism you may have “imported”. During the last election, Merz suggested revoking German citizenship from dual nationals if they committed a crime. When asked if that meant, for example, getting on a bus without a ticket, he made it clear it related to antisemitism.
However, antisemitism is not a criminal offence in German law, so we see it everywhere. Jews have been arrested for holding up signs reading “Jews against genocide”. An Irish protester was arrested in Berlin for speaking Irish at a demonstration for Palestine because the authorities did not have an Irish translator present to check if they were “importing antisemitism” too. This has gone so far that the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner has reprimanded Germany for criminalising protest against the war in Gaza – including curtailing the use of Arabic at protests. In the end Merz didn’t get his way, but he drove the message home: Germans like me with foreign heritage are Germans on trial.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
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