Michael Wolffsohn: The Church is engaging in a scandalous reversal of perpetrators and victims in the Middle East conflict

The 2025 Protestant Church Congress will again be a highly politicized event. But as a political actor, the church is one of many political actors and has, through its own fault, squandered its role as an earthly moral, almost metaphysically legitimate authority.

Nevertheless, I accepted the invitation to the 2025 Church Congress because of the topic of the discussion I am to participate in: "A Question of Trust? German Memory after October 7." I fear that it is not so much the panelists but rather the masses present who want to conflate the two topics of "Germany's (Eternal?) Guilt" on the one hand and "Middle East, Israel, Palestine" on the other, in order to "prove": "Back then, the Germans committed genocide against the Jews; today, the Jews, or rather Israelis, are doing the same to the Palestinians." In other words: "Israel = Nazis." Dikes must be built against this counterfactual current of opinion. Therefore, I beg for absolution because of these extenuating circumstances.

The theme of German culture of remembrance is the burden of the history of National Socialism from 1933 to 1945, and its aftermath after 1945 up to the present day. The protagonists of this remembrance, in the truest sense, are the current and future descendants of the Germans who lived in the "Third Reich."

For approximately 140 years, Israelis and Palestinians have been the actors in the Middle East conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. What is almost always avoided, for tactical, current, and misunderstood reasons of integration policy, is a broader perspective.

If we look beyond the Nazi-German murder master to his willing accomplices outside of Germany, it is clear that the Nazi murder master's willing accomplices included numerous collaborators in Europe, the Palestinian leadership at the time, other Arab-Islamic nationalists in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, as well as Iranian, European, and non-European anti-colonialists who fought alongside the fascists against the Western or Soviet colonialists. One might consider the Ukrainian, Muslim Caucasus, and Hindu-Indian nationalists.

This concludes that, for factual and historical reasons alone, the equation "Jews/Israeli = Nazis," particularly popular among supporters of postcolonialism theory, is fundamentally wrong. In part, the proximity of anticolonialism and fascism is more accurate.

If one addresses the Nazi past today (inflatedly), please do so not by ignoring or tabooing essential facts. Rather, the motto of the "New York Times" ("NYT") applies: "All the News That's Fit to Print." It should be mentioned in passing that the "NYT" doesn't necessarily follow this guideline either. "Jews/Israel = Nazis" is the favorite topic of postcolonialists. Since a theory doesn't necessarily have to contain something that hasn't been refuted, the postcolonial movement is not a theory, but rather a set of counterfactual constructions.

From all this, it follows that by choosing the theme "A Question of Trust? German Remembrance after October 7," the organizers of the Protestant Church Congress implicitly but unequivocally embraced the postcolonial, counterfactual claim "Jews/Israel = Nazis," which has been loudly trumpeted almost globally and millions of times. In this way, the scandalous reversal of victims and perpetrators receives quasi-ecclesiastical sanction.

In doing so, the Protestant Church once again presents itself and qualifies itself as a political actor. At the same time, it disqualifies itself as a secular and, even more so, a religious-moral, almost metaphysical authority. It is – with or without cases of abuse – interchangeable and inferior to real politics in the field of would-be politics, because politicians are better at politics.

Once again: It's a shame, because religiously, theologically, and beyond the German borders, in terms of human ethics, there are many questions and comments that could be asked and said about the topic of "October 7th." For example: What should, what could, be considered a reaction to October 7th, 2023? Jesus' message from the magnificent Sermon on the Mount (New Testament, Matthew 5:44)? "But I say to you, love your enemies." Or does "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" (Old Testament, Exodus 21:24) apply?

Can one demand that Jews/Israelis love or even spare their Hamas enemies? Should the Jews and other victims of German National Socialism have loved Hitler and his fellow criminals? Anyone who answers affirmatively would inevitably conclude that the war against Hitler's Germany was thoroughly immoral.

"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is completely misunderstood anyway. It's often interpreted as a call for savage revenge. The exact opposite is true. It means the balance between the crime and the punishment. The punishment should not be more severe than the crime. This is called proportionality. There's no trace of revenge, and the order of every constitutional state is based on precisely this proportionality between the crime and the punishment.

War and proportionality are structurally mutually exclusive. In war, A wants to impose its will on B, i.e., to win and consequently be stronger than the other. It's not proportionality, but victory or defeat. Modern international law attempts to narrow the structural gap between the military necessity of victorious superiority and the human, morally required proportionality. Honorable, but historically so far completely unsuccessful.

The Holy Bible, shared by Jews and Christians, also offers plenty of food for thought on the topic of "genocide." Consider the (entirely unhistorical) biblical account of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Children of Israel. When the military opportunity presented itself under King Saul, they received God's command to destroy the Amalekites, who had long before brutally blocked their access to the land. King Saul defeated the Amalekites utterly but failed to carry out God's command for genocide, which provoked both the divine wrath of the judge-prophet Samuel and the divine wrath of God. King Saul was punished.

Not only atheists, we today probably (and hopefully!) sympathize with King Saul in this regard and not with the anything but loving biblical God.

However, anyone who reads the biblical text carefully will recognize that the author(s) of this biblical story tell it in a multifaceted way, for Saul is not only a tragic, pathetic figure at the end – unlike David and Solomon, who are truly not portrayed as the personification of human virtues. It's no wonder that the biblical Saul inspired important writers such as Karl Wolfskehl, André Gide, and Botho Strauss to create plays that are well worth reading and seeing.

Especially starting from the political sphere, countless questions of existence and meaning lead back to the primal religious, the primal human. But no, at the Protestant Church Congress, we are dealing with the simplistic, counterfactual, explosive, and ultimately anti-Semitic equation of Jews, Israelis, and Nazis. Anyone who practices remembrance in this way today will fail not only in terms of remembrance politics, but also in general politics, both today and tomorrow. The church will abolish itself as a religious authority.

Michael Wolffsohn is a historian and publicist. This text is a slightly abridged version of the author's speech at the Protestant Church Congress on May 1 in Hanover. His most recent book, "Hostile Proximity: Of Jews, Christians, and Muslims," ​​was published by Herder-Verlag, Freiburg, 272 pages, CHF 29.90.