The broad issue of Germany’s history and its relation with the country’s reaction to the Hamas attack on October 7 2023 were at the center of professor Dirk Moses talk at the “Protesting Crises: Progressive Social movements in the Face of Authoritarian Backlash” international conference. Professor Moses presented his work for a paper to be published in a forthcoming volume – “Jewish Fear and the German State: Erasing Palestine in the Name of Absolute Safety,” in Europe’s Question of Palestine, ed. Sultan Doughan and Hanan Toukan (New York: Columbia University Press).

(This is an attempt to summarize professor Moses talk with some quotes from his chapter).

According to Moses, who is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York and has broadly studied German history, Genocide and Memory Studies, the reaction from “historically insecure official German establishment and existentially insecure official representatives of the small Jewish communities” has led to “and attempted erasure of Palestine advocacy and even Palestinian public existence in Germany”.

This conceptual frame that conceptualizes “Jews in Germany as fragments of a globally dispersed people—the Jewish people—who survived mainly in the State of Israel, which expresses Jewish self-determination, the German political class a priori equates anti-Zionism and antisemitism: like mainstream Jewish organizations” is the peculiar form taken by a phenomenon that has often been repeated in the attitude of the authorities towards protests in solidarity with Gaza in various European countries (we interviewed professor Neve Gordon on the UK).

In Germany, the state’s moral legitimacy after the Holocaust depends on guaranteeing Jewish safety—conceived as both physical protection and existential security through solidarity with Israel. Consequently, any recognition of the Palestinian narrative is perceived as a threat to Jewish wellbeing and, by extension, to the moral foundation of the German state itself.

Moses situates the German state’s postwar legitimacy in a redemptive project of moral rehabilitation through the protection and revival of Jewish life. Both conservative and progressive elites see Jewish safety as central to Germany’s restored identity even if this idea is not shared by the German public opinion: “The great majority of Germans distrust the media’s reporting of the Gaza conflict, do not feel historically responsible for Israel, oppose its destruction of Gaza, as well as the German state’s virtually unqualified military and diplomatic support of Israel”.

This sense of duty—articulated by Angela Merkel’s 2008 speech at the Knesset that Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsräson (reason of state)—binds Germany’s ontological security to Israel’s survival. Jewish life in Germany is celebrated as proof of national redemption “and to that end, the German state facilitated the largescale migration of post-Soviet Jews in the 1990s and 2000s, which one scholar described as “reforesting”.  In this context, Zionism provides the emotional and political framework for that renewal. However, this model excludes those Jewish voices that do not identify with Israel or have an active role in pro-Palestinian movements and sustains latent racial hierarchies: non-Jewish minorities, especially Muslims, are excluded from the redemptive narrative, and postcolonial or anti-racist critiques are often denounced as antisemitic.

The pursuit of ‘absolute safety’ generates a culture of fear within Jewish communities and state institutions. Moses traces how the adoption of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism in which “Holocaust remembrance was replaced, or now used for, anti-antisemitism action, specifically to have state parties adopt the IHRA’s expansive definition of antisemitism to include “anti-Israel” advocacy”, is at the “origin of the anti-Zionism=antisemitism trope”. The result is a discourse that transforms perceived insecurity into policy, institutionalized through antisemitism commissioners, legislation, and the repression of Palestinian solidarity (Donatella Della Porta has extensively written on this bureaucratization of the fight against antisemitism in Germany in her book on the issue). Jewish wellbeing becomes inseparable from Israel’s security, while any criticism of Israel is cast as a potential threat to Jewish life in Germany. This securitized logic sustains moral panic, amplifying perceived dangers rather than addressing real antisemitism.

The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, intensified Jewish fears and catalyzed an emotional rupture. In his talk, Moses reviews quotes from German Jewish intellectuals and artists who express their fears and unease about growing anti-Semitism and tend to merge the idea of Jewish identity with that of Israeli identity. Jewish writers and intellectuals described feelings of abandonment, betrayal, and existential threat, likening their experience to the eve of the Holocaust. Media and political elites amplified this sentiment, portraying Muslims, leftists, and pro-Palestine activists as sources of renewed antisemitism. Moses highlights how this collective trauma has been instrumentalized to justify further restrictions on speech and protest, even when empirical evidence for antisemitic violence remains limited.

Following October 7, the Bundestag adopted resolutions such as ‘Assuming Historical Responsibility—Protecting Jewish Life in Germany’ to formalize the state’s protective duty. These measures extended the Staatsräson into cultural, academic, and migration policy, introducing ideological vetting mechanisms and equating pro-Palestinian activism with antisemitism. Moses views this as a new form of authoritarian liberalism, where the defense of Jewish wellbeing legitimizes repression and undermines democratic freedoms. Paradoxically, even Jewish dissenters—especially anti-Zionist voices—are targeted by these policies, illustrating that ‘safety for some Jews means danger for others. “As Michael Barenboim from the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin observed, only Jews who “support the policies of the Israeli government” are protected by the parliament’s proposed measures. Those who opposed them, like him and the Israeli-German psychoanalyst Iris Hefets, are exposed to police brutality along with Arabs and those who demonstrate against the war. Safety for some Jews means danger for other Jews; indeed, about a third of those cancelled in the current repression are Jewish. In response, the former Human Rights Watch director, Kenneth Roth, accused the country of “abusing Staatsräson”.

Moses concludes that German Zionism, far from resolving the moral legacy of the Holocaust, reproduces its structural anxieties. By binding Jewish wellbeing to state power and Israel’s military security, Germany inadvertently perpetuates racial and political exclusion. The post-Holocaust German state thus sustains its legitimacy through a dialectic of redemption and repression, in which Palestinian erasure and the silencing of critical Jewish voices become conditions for moral self-affirmation. The tragic irony, Moses suggests, is that a policy intended to secure Jewish life risks reinstating the very dynamics of fear and exclusion it seeks to overcome: “The tragedy of the post-Holocaust German state is that the tradition of Jewish modernity responsible for Weimar Culture is being repressed by a dialectic of nationalist redemption for Jews and Germans.”