German obstacles to solidarity with Palestine won’t stop us
JVL Introduction
An informative interview with Wieland Hoban, the Chair of the German organisation Jewish Voice for a Just Peace. Here he outlines the particular difficulties encountered in Germany for those who stand in support of Palestinian rights and for peace and justice for all between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) Sea.
We have posted several articles about the situation in Germany but in many ways, their treatment of those who support Palestinians and oppose what Israel is doing, let alone who oppose the idea of a Jewish State is strongly reflected in the actions of other states. We need only consider the proscription of Palestine Action and the prosecution of Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s Ben Jamal and Stop The War’s Chris Nineham as examples from the UK and consider that in the USA many public sector workers and local legislatures are expected to explicitly oppose BDS in order to gain or keep jobs or contracts.
LL
This article was originally published by Red Flag (Austria) on Mon 23 Feb 2026. Read the original here.
The German Jews standing up for Palestine
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently called support for Israel “a lasting historical responsibility”. Germany is the second largest arms supplier to Israel, and the government suppresses pro-Palestinian sentiment internally in the name of protecting Jews. Prominent Palestinians are banned from entering the country, and police violently attack demonstrations and tie people up in court. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis demonstrate with impunity and even receive protection from the police.
The domestic intelligence service has categorised Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East—an organisation of German Jews who support Palestinian rights—as a “foreign extremist organisation”, and the University of Jena recently banned its chairperson, Wieland Hoban, from speaking there.
During a visit to Germany in November, Janey Stone, co-author (with Donny Gluckstein) of The Radical Jewish Tradition (Interventions, 2024), caught up with Hoban to talk about how Germany’s support for Israel is presented as recompense for its past, challenging antisemitism amid the resurgence of the far right and the Palestine solidarity movement in Germany today.
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If German politicians are genuinely repentant for the Nazi holocaust why do they support a Jewish state in the Middle East, a policy that will inevitably mean that less Jews will live in Germany?
For me the particular tragedy of the Holocaust is that White Europeans slaughtered other White Europeans. The Nazis denied that Jews were authentic Europeans and ironically Zionism says something similar by saying that Jews are a race apart who really belong in the Middle East.
We of course only have the word of whoever went up the mountain to talk with God for how the conversation went, if at all. God, I suppose could be contacted for his/her version of this story so vital to the Jewish entitlement to Palestine. God seems to be taking a back seat of late and may not answer any call, but it’s surely worth a try?