On January 13, 2017, a German regional court ruled that a lower court had been correct to find no anti-Semitism in the attempt by a group of Muslim men to burn down a synagogue in the city of Wuppertal.
The failed firebombing attack had occurred in 2014, during the Israeli conflict with Hamas in Gaza. In 2015 the lower court found that the men had intended their actions as a protest against Israel—with the result that the adults in the group deserved to have their sentences suspended, freeing them from jail time. And now, after review by a superior court, the German legal system has affirmed that German synagogues are legitimate targets of protest against Israel.
Remember this moment, for the German courts have exposed the mechanism by which opposition to Israel proves indistinguishable from opposition to Jews.
Perhaps at one point, a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism was notionally possible. But those days have been gone for many years, lost in the mists. And now, even the attempt to make the distinction becomes a way of insisting on a Jewish difference. “Anti-Zionism is the new dressing for the old passion of anti-Semitism,” as the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy tried to tell a New York audience on January 11—and it is perhaps worth noting that the synagogue in Wuppertal was built on the site of a previous synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938.
To see the logic at play, suppose that three white men had attacked a traditionally black church in Birmingham, Alabama, scrawling graffiti and trying to set the church on fire. Caught and convicted, they were sentenced to a year in jail—with the jail time suspended. Yes, the judge explained, they had been unlawfully violent and thus deserved to be convicted. But he suspended their sentences because their purpose in attacking the African-American church had not been to harm Americans but to protest the failure of the Nigerian government to halt the kidnapping of schoolgirls by the radical African militia Boko Haram.
Or suppose something similar, but this time in Manila. After a court in the Philippines convicted several citizens of defacing a local mosque, the judge suspended their sentences—on the grounds that, however illegally they had behaved, they were engaged in legitimate political protest over the oppression of Christian guest workers by the Islamic government in Saudi Arabia.
And then suppose that three men in Germany were arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue. After their conviction, however, their sentences were suspended—again on the grounds that their admittedly illegal violence was motivated by a desire not to hurt German Jews but by a legitimate wish to protest the policies and actions of the foreign state of Israel. They were, as the court explained, trying to draw “attention to the Gaza conflict” and so had not been motivated by anti-Semitism.
Only the last of these three events is true, of course. But more to the point, only the last is even imaginable. Black citizens of the United States are never taken as symbolic representatives of African governments. For that matter, imagine the outcry if a judge condoned violence against the places of worship of native citizens who happened to be Muslim—because a distant government was doing something objectionable.
And then we have the Jews. If trying to set fire to a local synagogue is merely a criticism of Israel, then every Jewish house of worship is a symbolic embassy of a foreign power: a stand-in for the nation-state of Israel. And Germans prove not to be Germans when they attend a synagogue. The salient fact is instead that they are Jews.
The psychology by which anti-Zionism falls into anti-Semitism has been on display for years. We saw it in the United States in 2014 when a Temple University student punched a Jewish undergraduate and called him “kike” for arguing about Israel. And in 2015 when UCLA and Stanford student boards were caught interrogating non-Israeli applicants about Israel, just because they were Jewish.
What the German courts have revealed, however, is not so much the psychology as the logic by which anti-Semitism has returned to the West. A strong case can be made that modern anti-Zionism was always a subterfuge, born from an anti-Semitism trying to disguise itself. But now even the need to wear that mask seems gone. The German Muslims who attacked the Wuppertal synagogue in 2014 took Germany’s Jews as representatives of Israel, and in 2017 the German courts agreed, simply as a matter of law.
Think about that for a moment. Once non-Israeli Jews have been legally recognized as symbols of Israel, not even a ray of daylight can slip between opposition to Israel and opposition to Jews. We needn’t pretend anymore. Needn’t nod sagely and agree that anti-Israeli groups—the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movements, for example—could theoretically avoid singling out American and European Jews. Needn’t listen when the tattered old subterfuge is trotted out again to excuse attacks on synagogues.
Once and for all, anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. German courts have told us so.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
