Under the headline "Witch Hunt," this past weekend Haaretz ran interviews with a few Germans who said that their country was "persecuting" critics of Israel. The interviewees were referring to the German government voting to characterize BDS activity as anti-Semitic. This decision allowed BDS studies, conferences, and exhibitions to be excluded from German academic and cultural activity, which we should remember is mostly public and taxpayer-funded.
But the German government was surprised by an unexpected response: a petition by leading Jewish and Israeli lecturers who tried to explain to the German government, from their comfortable seats at the University of Haifa, Tel Aviv University, and Bar-Ilan University, that the BDS movement on German campuses should not be seen as anti-Semitic, but rather as legitimate criticism of Israeli policy.
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It isn't clear how many signatories to the petition have visited university campuses in Germany, how many of them read German (or Arabic), or how many of them used their scientific/methodological knowledge to collect data before reaching that conclusion. They could have spoken to their Jewish colleagues at universities in Germany or asked for information from organizations that take Jewish students to hospitals after they are attacked by BDS operatives. These events have been filmed and documented.
In the age of political correctness, the difficulty in calling things by their name (such as Jews being attacked by Muslims) currently characterizes most German states and comprises fertile ground for the rise of populist movements, nearly all of which serve as the antithesis to postmodernism. Defining BDS as anti-Semitic, the German government hoped, would keep it off campuses and could thereby be brought to an end.
But what appeared to the signatories to the petition here in Israel as a mere desire to pressure Israel to withdraw from the territories operates there as a movement dedicated to the "genocide" Israel is supposedly perpetrating, making it allowable to commit violence against those identified with it. For the psychologists among us: Israel's supposed "crimes" have made it legitimate to reclassify violence against Jews from "dormant" to "operational."
On the operative level, BDS activists write, say, and declare that their goal is to make Israelis feel uncomfortable in the academic sphere that was open to them across Europe, which they thought would lead them to pressure their leadership to retreat, and quickly, from the territories.
The German government did not define BDS as anti-Semitic out of worry for the fate of the Jews. We were not and will never be subjects to be protected by European governments. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel is fearfully watching her country's "Turkish Land," which ignores coronavirus public health orders and is seeing more and more deaths and the growth of a de facto ex-German autonomy. Merkel has repeatedly expressed her frustration, making it clear that her country had taken in refuges "so they would become Germans." She heard the voices and sees the processes. For her, stopping the BDS cells is a trial, a pilot, a test case. If she fails there, the country's campuses will be invaded by jihadist and neo-Nazi students. She is not motivated by love for Israel, but by fear for Germany. Much like it wasn't fear for freedom of speech in Germany that motivated the authors of the astonishing petition she received – it was a ceremony of a gang that sees no one other than themselves.
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