MP stoked antisemitism in Bundestag speech, says expert

In an unprecedented full-frontal attack on the foreign policy spokesman for the largely anti-Israel Left Party in Germany, the country’s leading expert on Jew-hatred on Thursday accused the MP of stoking antisemitism against Israel and Jews in his Bundestag speech.

Henryk M. Broder, the prominent German-Jewish columnist for the Die Welt broadsheet paper, wrote in his Welt column about Left Party MP Gregor Gysi’s tirade against Israel.

“A sentence that justifies an initial suspicion that even one like Gysi could not be entirely free of antisemitic residue that was widespread in the [German Democratic Republic], especially in nomenklatura circles.”

Gysi delivered a speech against Israel’s plan to extend sovereignty to the West Bank.

The commentator Broder cited a passage in Gysi’s speech as being packed with bias because Gysi appears to single out only Israel for opprobrium. “For many Jews it is more than shameful if Israel, in particular, has to be associated with violations of international law, occupation, and humiliation of the Palestinians,” Gysi said.

The column by Broder, who has testified in the Bundestag about post-Holocaust antisemitism in Germany, is believed to be the first allegation of antisemitism against Gysi, a well-known lawyer in the now-defunct East German socialist state – the German Democratic Republic.

Critics accused Gysi of blaming Israel and Jews for antisemitism – a pattern that has a tradition in the history of Jew-hatred since the modern founding of the Jewish state.

Gysi said during his address that “Israel’s reputation will become significantly more negative worldwide when the annexation plans are implemented. This also affects Jews everywhere. Neither they nor Israel will become safer, on the contrary.”

Broder declared that “Gysi’s feigned concern for Israel’s reputation and its consequences for Jews around the world also contains a thinly veiled threat.

If there is an attack on Jews or a Jewish facility anywhere, the Jews will be jointly responsible. Because they watched Israel humiliate the Palestinians and did nothing about it. It is the precedent justification for an act of terrorism that is just being hatched somewhere. Because the Jews are to blame for everything, including what happens to them.”

When asked about Broder’s column, Gysi told The Jerusalem Post by email: “Broder’s claim is utter nonsense. Not only that I myself have Jewish ancestors, some of whom were murdered during the Nazi era, [and] not only that I had a particularly close relationship with my Jewish grandmother, [and] not only that I always had a close relationship with the Jewish community in Berlin during the GDR period, but my visits and discussions in Israel and Palestine prove the opposite. The difference is very simple. Broder, and probably you too, find [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his politics to be great. Many Jews in Israel and elsewhere and I just don’t.”