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Nestor Gorojovsky:
> I mean that given the fact of the Holocaust and the permanent drumbeat
> in favor of Israel in post WWII Germany, the position of someone
> attacking Israel in Germany is as difficult
This notion is fairly widespread among leftists outside Germany, and seems
plausible for obvious reasons, but it's actually just not true.
One of the current governing parties, the CDU, does indeed make ritual
professions of the Federal Republic's "special responsibility" for Israel
during official state ceremonies and things of that nature, but that's mainly
for the credulous international press and other states.
The other governing party, the right-wing liberal FDP, has flirted openly with
pro-Palestinian positions in the past through the now-deceased Jürgen
Möllenmann. Nowadays it only keeps such positions burning on a low flame,
though as the party of large capital, it obviously has more of an interest in
expanding the sphere of influence of German capital in the Middle East, and
hence is more open to flirting with pro-Arab policies or mild hints at anti-war
positions with regard to Afghanistan, though obviously that's difficult given
the current coalition partner.
The mainstream bourgeois media, like Der Spiegel or the Süddeutsche Zeitung,
are regularly full of reports of Isreali atrocities, and the Springer-owned
Welt Online even regularly closes the comments feature for its articles on
Israeli, because it nows the percentage of anti-Israel (and often enough
anti-Semitic) comments will be quite high.
What *is* true is that within the left in Germany, there is a fairly widespread
anti-Israel sentiment, compared with the left in other countries. That sort of
thing is the unfortunate consequence of a left that thinks the proper task of
leftists is to get mixed up in the territorial claims of opposing national
collectives.
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