Is Germany targeting Jewish voices?

“In 2024, Jewish money is once again being confiscated by a German bank.” This is a headline that makes for uncomfortable reading in Berlin. It is part of a story currently making the rounds on social media and being described as a “worrying echo of history.” But there is more to this story than meets the eye. And it goes right to the heart of Germany’s Holocaust dilemma.

The country responsible for arguably the biggest crime in history does not want to be seen as suppressing Jewish voices

The headline was thought up by the activist organization Jewish Voice for Peace which says its account with a Berlin bank has been frozen — and not for the first time. The group claims that the German police “have been politically persecuting us as a Jewish organization for some time,” and that it “will not be intimidated by this… arbitrary, politically motivated freezing of our account, which is unacceptable in a democracy.”

With a statement in German and English, Jewish Voice rightly assumed that this would generate outrage around the world. For Germany, it will no doubt create a major headache.

Jewish Voice is a highly controversial organization in Berlin. It is openly anti-Zionist, accuses Israel of “apartheid and genocide,” and uses its funds to campaign against the Jewish state. It also supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which campaigns for Israel to be boycotted and completely ostracized by the international community. It is because of this support for BDS that it says its accounts have been closed.

Jewish Voice frequently faces criticism from the Central Council of Jews in Germany which is the largest Jewish federation in the country. The council receives government funding and sees itself as the political voice of German Jews. It accuses Jewish Voice of supporting “antisemitic” activism — an accusation that carries serious weight in history-conscious Berlin. Jewish Voice has in turn accused the council of using political pressure to get it shut down.

All of this is a moral minefield for Germany. The country responsible for arguably the biggest crime in history — the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children during World War Two — does not want to be seen as suppressing Jewish voices eight decades later.

But because of the Holocaust, Germany also wants to give its unequivocal support to Israel. And that position is now increasingly coming under fire, including from some Jewish groups.

Former chancellor Angela Merkel told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 2008 that “threats to you are threats to us.” The current chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to uphold the same principle following the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7. He reiterated that “Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson (reason of state) and we will act accordingly.” When you follow that statement to its logical conclusion, it compels Germany to oppose organizations that it thinks pose an existential threat to the state of Israel. One such organization is Jewish Voice.

The Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, passed a resolution in 2019 that declared the arguments and methods of BDS “antisemitic” and resolved to “oppose it resolutely,” calling on all government levels and institutions to do the same. A few weeks later, Jewish Voice had its bank account canceled. The bank had been pressured by the Central Council of Jews in Germany and clearly did not know what to do. It described the situation as “lose lose” — it was facing antisemitism accusations from two Jewish organizations.

This, in a nutshell, is Germany’s Holocaust dilemma. Former president Joachim Gauck told the Bundestag in 2015 that there was “no German identity without Auschwitz,” summing up how deeply engrained the Holocaust is in the very foundations of the country. Germany has drawn both praise and bemusement for the way it deals with the darkest chapters of its own history. “I know of no other country in the world,” wrote Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, about the vast memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, “that at the heart of its national capital erects monuments to its own shame.” This shame has led to the conviction that Germany must support all Jews.

Now faced with opposing Jewish voices, Germany finds itself in a situation where it is being asked to side with some Jews against others, with both sides ready to draw on the same historical arguments.

Last year, a German foundation withdrew a prize for political thinking, which it had awarded to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen. Gessen had criticized Germany’s Holocaust memory culture as a “political instrument” and compared the war in Gaza to an Eastern European ghetto being liquidated by the Nazis. The trouble for the foundation was that Gessen is from a Jewish family, and has ancestors who were murdered in the Holocaust. Germany now stood accused of telling Jews how to remember the Holocaust correctly.

Meanwhile the tensions and divisions over the right response to the Israel-Gaza conflict in the West is being exploited by Russia. Its propaganda channel RT was quick to respond to the news of the bank ban in Berlin, lamenting Germany’s “repression” against “a Jewish organization that fights for peace and justice in the Middle East, no less.”

However the bank or Germany as a country responds to Jewish Voice’s accusation that “the German state is co-operating with Israel’s apartheid and genocide,” it will not be able to avoid being told by both Jewish and non-Jewish people around the world that it is drawing the wrong conclusions from its own history.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.