Shocking, extensive state-sponsored German antisemitism against Israel

The Green party-dominated government in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg (B-W) has been running an antisemitic campaign against Israel since Hamas massacred nearly 1,200 people on October 7. The bill of particulars against the B-W government of the party’s governor Winfried Kretschmann is long.

The state’s scandal-plagued commissioner tasked with fighting antisemitism, Michael Blume, told the German wire service dpa in May that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing the fight against antisemitism a disservice with his behavior. Blume added, “We clearly notice that Israel-related antisemitism is increasing sharply.”

Blume claimed, "Right-wing extremists from Israel, the USA and Europe, but also the Netanyahu government, use the accusation of antisemitism in an inflated way and exploit it. That doesn't help us at all if we want to fight antisemitism honestly.”

Pinning the blame on Jews for antisemitism is a defining feature of Jew-hated. That helps to explain why Roman Haller, a Munich-based former director of the German office of the Claims Conference (the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany), wrote in a public letter to Blume that he should resign after he said Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas “is doing us a lot of harm in Europe.”

Haller wrote to Blume, “Your recent statement regarding the attribution of antisemitism is outrageous and leaves me speechless as a Holocaust survivor who is used to some things. Your statement not only counteracts the constant assurances of the State of Israel's right to defend itself, but also encourages the very people against whom you—especially as an antisemitism commissioner—should fight. Because what you are saying is pure antisemitism.”

Taxpayers in B-W pay an antisemitic bureaucrat, Blume, to fight antisemitism. German courts twice ruled that Blume can be termed antisemitic. After he expressed sympathy for the ICC prosecutor’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Israel’s government slammed Blume: “Comments that we have seen from Mr. Blume in the past about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and throughout this war demonstrate that he often lacks moral clarity.”

This writer can exclusively reveal that Artur Abramovych, a 27-year-old German-Jewish literary scholar of Ukrainian origin, quoted Felix Klein, Germany’s federal commissioner assigned to combating antisemitism, as saying Blume “is becoming more and more of a burden.”

Klein’s alleged stinging criticism of Blume is the first instance of the German federal government taking Blume to task for denigrating German Jews, Israel, Zionism, and Iranian dissidents who support the right of the Jewish state to exist.

When I approached Klein, he did not explicitly deny his criticism of Blume. “I cannot remember speaking to Mr. Abramovych ‘on the sidelines of an event in the Bundestag in 2023,’” he said.

Klein offered no defense of Blume after his outbreak of antisemitism in May.

Blume and the largely anti-Israel and pro-Iran regime government in B-W have failed to combat antisemitism in the state. According to the state’s most recent intelligence report, the police registered 317 antisemitic crimes in the three months after Hamas-led terrorists murdered nearly 1,200 people in Israel on October 7. In contrast, there were 245 antisemitic crimes in all of 2022.

Governor Kretschmann, a former supporter of the communist mass murderer Mao Zedong, has funded the antisemitic, pro-BDS preacher Mitri Raheb in Bethlehem with a grant of $32,000.

The Green party formed a coalition government with the Christian Democratic Union in the state. The CDU in Baden-Württemberg has a long history of tolerating Jew-hatred. Blume is a member of the CDU.

The state elected the former Nazi naval judge Hans Filbinger as governor in 1966, and he won re-election, holding the post through 1978 and enjoying enormous popularity as a patriarchal figure. Filbinger later defended his Nazi-era work imposing executions on deserters, saying: “What was right then cannot be wrong now.”

The head of the CDU in B-W, Manuel Hagel, has defended Blume’s antisemitism.

Abramovych said, “Blume's confused ideology clearly has anti-Jewish traits and seems to be increasingly aligning with the worldview of left-wing radical post-colonialism. The fact that the state government of Baden-Württemberg has still not thrown Blume out shows that Kretschmann doesn't give a damn about Israel and Judaism and that the CDU in Baden-Württemberg are just vicarious agents of the Greens. In Germany, real antisemites are not fought, but instead are placed in positions responsible for combating antisemitism.”

The mounting complaints against Blume have been ignored, with some German Jews and Israelis arguing that Kretschmann and the CDU party want a civil servant to stoke antisemitism against Israel. Before October 7, Blume liked and reposted an antisemitic X post calling for Netanyahu to “tear down” the security barrier in Judea and Samaria that stops Palestinian terrorist attacks. The Post compared Israel’s anti-terror fence to the Berlin Wall.

There is no shortage of B-W politicians enabling Hamas and Iran’s regime to spread antisemitism and raise funds via their proxies in the state. The CDU mayor of Stuttgart, Frank Nopper, allows a pro-Hamas group, Palestine Committee Stuttgart, to raise funds on the municipal website.

The mayor of Freiburg in B-W, Martin Horn, is a passionate supporter of his city’s partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran in the city of Isfahan, where Iranian officials hold an annual al-Quds event urging the eradication of Israel. Isfahan is also one of the main locations for Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and drones.

Baden-Württemberg’s government and a number of mayors in the state are sponsors of antisemitism. The pressing question is: Will voters in the state experience a change in attitude and elect political parties and politicians who do not aid Hamas and Iran’s regime and stoke virulent antisemitism?

Benjamin Weinthal is a Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum.