The German Reason of State as State Anti-Semitism

Dirk Moses

City College of New York

A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY. He is a scholar of genocide and international affairs, memory studies, and modern Germany.

Raised in Brisbane, Australia, he was educated at the Universities of Queensland (B.A. 1987), St. Andrews (M.Phil. 1990), Notre Dame (M.A. 1994), and California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 2000). Before coming to City College, he was the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from July 2000 to July 2022. Between 2000-2010 and 2016-2020, he taught at the University of Sydney. He held the Chair of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute, Florence, from 2011 to 2015.

Dirk has written extensively in the fields of genocide and memory studies. His latest book, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, appeared in 2021. An updated and abridged German version was published in 2023 as Nach dem Genozid: Grundlage für eine neue Erinnerungskultur.

Recent anthologies include The Holocaust Museum and Human Rights: Transnational Perspectives on Contemporary Memorials (2025), The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Victims Perpetrators Justice and the Question of Genocide (2024), Patriotic History and the (Re)Nationalization of Memory (2023), and Genocide: Key Themes (2022).

He has held fellowships at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC; and at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow.

Dirk has been senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011, and co-edits the War and Genocide book series for Berghahn Books. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of African Military History, Journal of Perpetrator Research, Patterns of Prejudice, Memory Studies, and the Journal of Mass Violence Research. He also serves on advisory board of the UCD Centre for War Studies, the Memory Studies Association, and the RePast project.

In an article published online in March 2024, the historian Andrew Port wrote about “Germany, Gaza, and Genocide.” He summarized what he called the “postcolonial catechism” critique of official German memory culture thus:

• German authorities have imposed from on high an ‘official state policy’ that dictates ‘proper’ ways to remember Germany’s past, resulting in the country’s once admirable efforts at Vergangenheitsbewältigung assuming a ‘static’ quality limited solely to the genocide of the Jews, while ignoring earlier German colonial atrocities—and current ones worldwide. 
• At the same time, Germany’s sense of responsibility for the Nazi past has produced a cloying philosemitism that finds its clearest expression in ‘unconditional solidarity’ with Israel. 
• This has led to serious violations of civil liberties and free speech: cancel culture run amok, litmus tests for state funding and citizenship, the banning of symbols and slogans deemed anti-Semitic, all in an effort to silence critics of Israel, including Jewish ones. 
• By preventing Germans from thinking clearly about the current political situation, memories of ‘past shame’ are also being instrumentalized to ‘suppress debate’ about disturbing developments abroad, especially in the Middle East. 
• But that is not all: by automatically disqualifying reasonable and justified criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitic, German watchdogs are stoking xenophobic sentiment and using it as a weapon against ‘undesirable’ immigrants who, they claim, harbor such distasteful views.

In my view, this is an accurate analysis of the current crisis of state power and political freedom in Germany. By mid-2024, German authorities in different states had banned protest marches and slogans (“from the river to the sea,” “genocide,” “apartheid”), and police had violently dispersed Palestine solidarity events, not hesitating to brutalize visibly Jewish participants. While the judiciary stood in the way of an even greater crackdown by reversing demonstration and slogan bans in some states, it could not prevent the general repression. Universities, research foundations, and literary festivals sacked international academics from guest professorships and withdrew prizes from writers for criticizing the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and/or having signed BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel) statements, even if long ago. A community organization lost its funding for inviting a left-wing Jewish organization, whose account was frozen—likely illegally—by a state bank. Local academics were vilified in the press and threatened by government ministers for supporting the right of students to protest the war. This is only a small sample of incidents in a climate of fear stoked by the state and the press. Not for nothing did one journalist write of “German McCarthyism.”

However, Port thinks the view of postcolonial critique is “distorted, exaggerated, and unduly polemical” and that it ignores important context. While assuring readers that he does “not deny that some Germans have made accusations of anti-Semitism in an instrumental way: to stoke xenophobia and advance an anti-immigrant agenda,” nor attempt “to justify or excuse official excesses in response to perceived anti-Semitic agitation and calls for violence,” he ultimately uses the notion of context to make the state repression appear as a reasonable reaction to the heedless provocations of Arab and Jewish demonstrators against Israel’s campaign in Gaza. In light of the German past, what option did authorities have other than to repress the demonstrations given that their chants (“from the river to the sea”) implicitly call for the destruction of Israel, he asks? Port thereby participates in the discourse of the German Staatsräson—the country’s unqualified support of Israeli security as part of Germany’s reason of state—which depicts the Palestinian call for equal rights as akin to genocide. This rhetorical sleight of hand is typical of the German landscape that counts anti-war demonstrations in its statistics on anti-Semitic incidents, thereby licensing the conclusion that anti-Semitism has increased dramatically since October 2023. It demonizes Palestinians in Germany. 

However, while Jewish safety in Germany and Israel is the German Staatsräson, that safety is conceived in a partisan manner: in Israel-centric terms. Thus Jews who disagree are othered along with Arabs as “Israel haters.” In effect, Jewish peace activists urging an arms embargo are condemned by German officials in the centuries-long tradition of framing progressive Jewish voices as dangerous rebels against legitimate (Christian) sovereignty: yesterday’s Jewish Bolshevik is today’s anti-Zionist Jew. 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 oppose them are exposed to police brutality along with others on the street. In other words, safety for some Jews means danger for other Jews; indeed, about a third of those canceled in the recent repression are Jewish. 

The current repression—the police excesses against demonstrators; the erosion of political rights; the attack on universities, culture, and “postcolonialism;” the use of anti-Semitism accusations to express anti-immigrant and Islamophobic racism; the general culture of denunciation—demonstrates that the Staatsräson cannot be the “right” answer to the Nazi past. The febrile political sensibility and its effects also show, I think, that Staatsräson inadvertently transports the catastrophized political culture of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, into German political culture. It endures in the ossified categories implicated in the Holocaust by classifying Germans and Jews as ontologically distinct, the latter living as welcomed guests in the homeland of the former, with the danger of reversal, as Jews now openly fear. It also persists in homogenizing Jews as a monolithic entity, thereby effacing the pluralism of Jewish lifeworlds—like the many Jews not represented by politics of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Jüdische Allgemeine newspaper. It is evident in the temporal slippage between the Nazi period and present day, like the equation of the non-violent BDS movement with the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, in the denunciation of student encampments as reruns of Nazi anti-Semitic student activism, and in the accusation that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler.”

In trying to exorcise its anti-Semitic demon, German leaders are inadvertently activating it as well as other German demons: in targeting progressive Jews and in using anti-anti-Semitism measures against Arabs and leftists, all the while undermining the Rechtsstaat in the name of state power and whiteness. Even Zionist Jews who oppose the Israeli government and its war are not spared. In this way, Staatsräson becomes a form of state anti-Semitism, driven by an army of non-Jewish, state-employed anti-Semitism commissioners.