The state of Saarland, Germany’s smallest Bundesland proper, is picturesque: carved out of the densely forested lowlands of the river Saar, it borders France and Luxemburg, and with no major cities, it is generally not talked about much in German discourse. Yet beneath this quaint exterior lurks the dark underbelly of a near-totalising Zionist consensus in the organised left.
Months of Zionist harassment from ostensibly left groups in Saarland have frustrated attempts at organising for Palestine solidarity. And, in a twist especially common Germany, this harassment has often come from the parliamentary “left”, from members of Die Linke, often with close ties to Zionist organisations. The Left Berlin interviewed a member of Die Linke — who wishes to remain anonymous — about a recent event organised by the newly-founded Saarland chapter of the Sozialistisch-Demokratischer Studierendenverband (SDS), Die Linke’s student wing. The SDS, which had managed to attract a considerable anti-Zionist membership, invited experts from Amnesty International to talk about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This event, entirely predictably, went down like a lead balloon.
Can you set the stage for us a bit? What does the political landscape in Saarland look like?
There’s a lot of different actors in Saarland with many different positions when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Age groups have a lot to do with it — for example, the oldest leftist organizations in Saarland are represented by really old Marxist-Leninist tendencies, like the MLPD or DKP. There are also a few Trotskyists, but they’re not organized in Saarland. These older groups are organized in groups like the Friedensnetz, where they get together with groups across the border, in France and Belgium, mostly for demos around stuff like anti-militarism.
The middle-aged leftists here sort of form the bureaucratic body of Die Linke. They’re extremely focused on parliamentarism and winning elections, and they mostly do not actually organize outside these channels. But also they have good ties with state-funded think-tanks and NGOs, here in Saarland as well as in the rest of Germany. This group is extremely staunchly Zionist. This is partially for material reasons — it gives them proximity to the electoral system, to other parties and their Stiftungen, and to other foundations like the Amadeu Antonio Stiftung.
What separates the political situation in Saarland from other parts of Germany, however, is that the youth section of Die Linke (as well as the student organizations) tend to be extremely Zionist. The local Linksjugend, for instance, have close ties to a group called Aktion 3. Welt — this state funded think-tank that’s supposed to promote fair trade, produce and stuff like that, have better relations, better economic relations with the third world. You know, ethical coffee from Colombia and stuff like that. But if you go to their website, most of what they say is about Israel and Palestine — mostly manufacturing consent for Zionism, with close ties to figures like Ahmad Mansour.
The upshot of all this is that younger, recently-politicised Germans in their early twenties end up simply leaving the party because of how close to Zionism the Linksjugend Saar is. They just tend to stop organizing — they’ll show up for the demos against the AfD, or against anti-abortion marches and stuff like that. But apart from that, they’ll avoid joining organizations because there is no alternative.
How has this affected student organising around Palestine?
So, I’ve helped organise events with Students for Palestine. They’ve held meetings and reading circles, and they’ve been trying to communicate with the university to screen a series of films that show the situation in Palestine. And the uni always used to try to direct discourse along the lines of what is permissible, etc., so we were always told to be aware of the risks of antisemitism for example.
When asked to be more precise about what that actually is, the uni has always tended to have this line, where they want us to prepare a document that shows an awareness concept: if somebody says a particular thing, how will you respond to that? How will you throw people out when people say the wrong thing and stuff like that? All of this time, Students for Palestine weren’t really sure about how to formulate such a thing because the uni didn’t want to settle on a specific definition of antisemitism. This was in part because of the influence of the Landesregierung on this matter — If you look up the antisemitism commissioner for the state of Saarland, for instance, he is a legal scholar. And if you open any of his legal evaluations, what stands out is that his catchphrase is that nobody really knows what antisemitism is.
The implication is basically that it’s a really hard-to-define, vague concept, and therefore you have to be mindful of your words all the time because nobody can actually settle on a definition (even though we can!). The university is obviously operating within a framework that we see is very typical of the German state. You see how the Bundestag kind of keep passing these non-binding resolutions on what is or what is not antisemitic with the IHRA definition, but they make it non-binding so that you cannot make any challenges in court or attack its premises.
So, it’s supposed to be vague by definition and by design. And what tends to happen when it is left vague on purpose with both the uni as well as the bureaucrat refusing to, you know, adopt one definition or the other, it kind of leaves the room for discourse open, but also you said one wrong thing and you can be arbitrarily defined as crossing a line that you didn’t even know existed. So, that’s the situation at the university and that’s how they’ve been stalling students for Palestine for a year now.
And how did the Saarland SDS become a thing?
Two months ago, a few people in the left scene decided to start a local chapter of the SDS; these people also happened to be oriented very clearly towards Palestine solidarity. They ran for elections and won 5 out of 33 seats in the student parliament. At this point the uni’s approval didn’t matter anymore, because they had become part of the student parliament, allowing them to book rooms and organise events for eg. pretty autonomously without having to go through the university administration — which is what helped them invite Amnesty to talk about Gaza.
And the university tried to cancel this event?
Yeah — I talked to comrades within the SDS and it turns out that the uni threatened to cancel it using the Rechtsaussicht mechanism, that allows the presidency of a university to override the decisions of the student body when it feels it is appropriate, and when it deems the integrity of the university threatened. The president didn’t realise the event was happening until pretty late, since it went through the SDS and not him. Banning it last minute would have been a huge controversy though, which is why they settled on a compromise — a day before the event, he went and invited Saarland’s antisemitism commissioner to moderate the event, to prevent the event from ”going out of hand”.
The point of this was obviously to police people’s speech, to bring them closer to the bounds of acceptable speech — given his history, these bounds are left intentionally vague. The university also alerted the police and the media, asking them to be on the scene in case anything went wrong. In the end, the SDS posted to their Instagram that they had agreed to the terms of this compromise to allow the event to proceed.
How did things go down at the event?
So Prof. Rixecker, who was invited as a moderator, was asked to give a foreword to set things into perspective — the perspective being that everything Israel is doing now is a reaction to October 7, and so on. The usual thing. There were supposed to be two reports presented, the first on genocide, and the second on apartheid. The first report was very well-presented: we already know the arguments, like proof of genocidal intent, and so on. The speaker pulled out quotes of what Israeli public figures (Netanyahu, Gallant, etc.) had said. And at the end of the first talk, there was supposed to be a round of Q&A (with the commissioner looking through every question and answer for evidence of antisemitism), that would then lead to the second talk.
The Q&A lasted the entire evening, there was no time for the second talk on apartheid. It was all pretty well-received though, apart from a few hecklers. The first member of the audience to ask a question during the Q&A, for eg., started by shouting at the Amnesty speaker, accusing them of representing a specific narrative by quoting only the government officials who say they want to commit a genocide, but not the officials that say they do not want to commit one (as if the two cancel out somehow). Another person — Hanna Akgül, who is actually in the Linke Saar Landesvorstand — argued that Amnesty was changing the definition of genocide to very narrowly make it fit this situation. There were also people arguing that everything the Israeli leadership said was an emotional response in the days after the “most dramatic event in Israeli history”, to which people obviously pointed out that you could find similar comments from two weeks ago.
The hecklers were clearly a minority, however, and most people were quite moved by the report. There was also testimony from a person from Gaza, who had lost many of his family in arbitrary airstrikes. Rixecker did have to concede that these were war crimes, with his sanctioned assessment being that that charge was sufficient — because it does not matter to the mothers whether their children died in a war crime or a genocide. Rixecker’s general stance was that what Israel are doing can be understood to hold the population of Gaza collectively responsible, but that at the same time, the civilians did hold a bit of responsibility for what happened. He basically tried to imply that there was some parallel between German civilians getting targeted during (for eg.) the firebombing of Dresden, vs. how Palestinian civilians are currently being targeted. To me, this was the crux of the evening — because this comparison is really breaching Germany’s own framework of Shoah-Relativierung.
This was something that most of the people in that room felt uncomfortable with at this point, and some of us felt that this stance deserved a proper critique from the left. But before anybody could publish anything, he was already getting attacked from the right.
What do you mean “attacked from the right”?
Hannah Akgül — the lady from the Die Linke Landesvorstand — also happens to be a member of the Deutsch-Israelischen Gesellschaft (DIG). She went on to upload an official statement on behalf of the DIG’s Junges Forum (JuFo Saar), saying that she found it unacceptable that this antisemitic event was even allowed to take place. The JuFo Saar are particularly terrible — they’ve hosted journalists from Israel Hayom (an Israeli Likud-adjacent tabloid) and have gone as far as to attack a Saarland newspaper for deigning to interview a Gazan who has lost family in the genocide. They also happen to be packed with Die Linke and Linksjugend members in Saarland.
Rixecker has also been attacked in an open letter by the Netzwerk Jüdischer Hochschullehrender; the man is now responding to open letter with open letter, fighting for his job and trying to defend himself from accusations of antisemitism. Other groups attacking him include Wertinitiative, a conservative German-Jewish NGO who have been criticised for their anti-migration positions, and their trivialisation of actual antisemitism within the AfD and Die Heimat. The Israeli consulate in Münich has also put out a statement, saying that if an antisemitism bureaucrat participates in an event that calls Israel genocidal or an apartheid state, he is the “wrong person at the wrong place”. These flames of outrage eventually found their way into mainstream state politics, with the CDU, the AfD, and the Greens all questioning whether the man was fit to retain his job. Given that the man’s a lifelong SPD member, the SPD-majority state government stood by him, defending him as someone who was “not offering a stage, but limiting it” — in his capacity as a law professor at the university, and not as the antisemitism commissioner.
Where do we go from here?
Frankly, there’s very little point in trying to engage with a lot of the antideutsch, or with the explicit right. I’m speaking as an anonymous member of Die Linke here — considering how the party is stuffed to the gills with Zionists in so many Bundesländer, particularly Saarland, I am very concerned for the future of left-wing parliamentary politics in Germany. We need an actual campaign to hold the rogue politicians in the party accountable for their attempts to sabotage people to their left, or people taking a principled stance against genocide — both within the party and without.
Die Linke is, by its very design, radically democratic — with local, regional and state chapters having strong autonomy. This is a good thing, and it also results in important resolutions (such as the federal resolution to adhere to the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, instead of the IHRA) taking a while to trickle down or trickle up before finally taking hold countrywide. At the same time, flagrant violations of such resolutions, although technically permissible, need to be seen as a bad faith attempt by the centrist bureaucratic and right-wing zionist factions to steer the party back into the comfortable arms of a reformist coalition with the Greens and the SPD. In betraying (or actively persecuting) Palestine, Die Linke chooses to betray every other mass progressive movement. When Die Linke’s Bremen & Mecklenburg-Vorpommern chapters voted for Merz’ war credits, strong condemnations and calls for resignation followed by other chapters of the party. Similar demands for consequences, for a chapter that pushes genocide denial and routinely collaborates with the right wing of the Israeli political spectrum, are a bare minimum.