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On 30 January, Uwe Becker – the so-called commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against anti-Semitism in the German state of Hesse – demanded that the organization Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East (Jewish Voice, for short) should be banned. Pointing out that it is already classed as “a certified extremist organization by the Verfassungsschutz” (Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, equivalent to the FBI), he called it “not a voice of peace, but a voice of hatred” because it “vilifies [Israel] as a terrorist state.”
The timing of Becker’s rant is piquant in view of the near-simultaneous paperback publication of Germany’s Jewish Problem by Wieland Hoban, Anglo-German chair of Jewish Voice, a book in which these (mostly non-Jewish) commissioners feature prominently and unflatteringly.
Hoban is a prolific translator of texts by, among others, Theodor Adorno, Peter Sloterdijk and Jürgen Habermas – ironically enough, German philosophers not known for progressive views on Palestine.
He is also a composer, in which capacity he witnessed Germany’s cancel culture firsthand in 2018 when his proposal for an Israel-critical composition provoked Björn Gottstein, the then director of the Donaueschingen Music Festival, to explain that “although [he] gave composers a free hand in their use of political content, he would not tolerate any criticism of Israel.” As a fellow composer and activist, I wrote about this in The Electronic Intifada at the time.
Germany’s Jewish Problem consists of articles written by Hoban for the progressive Brussels-based news startup The Battleground between October 2020 and September 2024, with a foreword by Israeli-born Berlin-based psychoanalyst Iris Hefets, an afterword by US author Mitchell Plitnick, founder and president of ReThinking Foreign Policy, and a new introduction (August 2025) by Hoban. The original version was published in January 2024 as an e-book called German Apartheid Politics: Memory, Democracy and Genocide by Battleground Books.
In an interview with Phil Butland of The Left Berlin, Hoban describes the new title as “quite provocative … a formulation that could be used by someone with anti-Semitic intent.”
Of course, the Nazis were such a “someone.” Their Jewish problem was the very existence of Jews, and their final solution was mass murder.
Hoban doesn’t claim mechanically that the “Jewish problem” has morphed into a “Palestinian problem.” Rather, he sees both as intertwined in complex ways, and his unraveling of these complexities is absorbing and disturbing.
In Germany, he tells us, “a country with 80 million inhabitants, most Germans have never met a Jew.”
“Jews are something abstract, something exotic for most people … and many Germans lack an understanding that Jewish people and the so-called Jewish state are not the same thing.”
“Alarming behavior”
Germany’s first postwar chancellor Konrad Adenauer “had recognized that the road to international rehabilitation had to lead through Israel – because, as he explained in retrospect in a 1965 interview, ‘One should not underestimate the power of the Jews, even today,’” a not unfamiliar anti-Semitic trope.
Consequently, “German officials insist on reinforcing the conceptual connection between Jews and Israel at every opportunity, even as they proclaim that holding Jews responsible for Israel’s crimes is anti-Semitic.” This may explain “the alarming behavior towards Jews – in many cases Israelis – who oppose Israel’s political practices and ideological foundations.”
This behavior is typified by those notorious anti-Semitism commissioners – described by Hoban as “state-appointed officials whose supposed anti-discrimination work inevitably involves lobbying for Israel.”
Uwe Becker, the Hessian commissioner whom we have already met, told “the Israeli academic Moshe Zuckermann,… the son of Polish concentration camp survivors, that he was not welcome in the city [Frankfurt] because of his opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.” For Hoban this proves “that no degree of Jewishness is enough to escape the condemnation of pro-Israel Germans.”
The Baden-Württemberg commissioner Michael Blume called Jewish Voice “supposedly Jewish” and “self-appointed.” Hoban clarifies that “because he could not deal with non-Zionist opinions voiced by Jews, he adopted the tactic of questioning their Jewishness.”
It’s worth pointing out that the Verfassungsschutz’s classification of Jewish Voice’s supposed “extremism” intensifies that designation with the adjective “auslandsbezogen” (“foreign-related”), implying that its defense of Palestinian rights constitutes support for Hamas, which the EU lists as a terrorist organization.
Thus the “philosemitic McCarthyism” (a term coined by the philosopher Susan Neiman) targeting anti-Zionist Jews overlaps with discrimination against Germany’s Palestinian diaspora – ironically (the ironies mount up) the largest in Europe – and other immigrant communities that can easily be accused of “terrorist” sympathies.
Hoban points out that “plans to deny German citizenship to immigrants and refugees … if they express unwelcome views about Israel … are now proclaimed openly even by mainstream politicians.” Germany “frames [Israel’s] founding purely as a rectification of the Holocaust and derides the Palestinians for getting in the way,” given that their allotted role is “to do the work of German atonement.”
The popular phrase “imported anti-Semitism” implies, absurdly, “that Germany lacks home-grown anti-Semitism and therefore needs to import it, the message is that what has been imported can be exported again – that is, deported.”
“By expanding its repression in this way, the German state [has] officially declared war on Palestinian identity.”
Anti-Semitism, philosemitism, McCarthyism, cancel culture, genocide, the war on an oppressed people’s identity … On reading Hoban’s alternately harrowing and scathing account – and it needs to be read – one might be forgiven for concluding that Germany’s Jewish problem is insuperable.
Hoban’s assessment is ominous: “It has become increasingly clear that, for all its anguished breast-beating and displays of remorse, this country was never fully denazified.”
Nonetheless, all is not lost. “Even in Germany, many new activist groups have formed, especially ones led by students, including many second- or third-generation Palestinians,” Hoban writes.
“Many young activists have learnt a great deal, about both practical organizing and colonial history, within a remarkably short time. While not all of this activity can be sustained, something has been set in motion that cannot be reversed.”
Raymond Deane is a composer, author and activist based in Dublin, Ireland, and Fürth, Germany.
Cross-posted from The Electronic Intifada
Germany’s Jewish Problem: Genocides Past and Present, by Wieland Hoban
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: ISBN 9781682196755
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