When a Nazi comparison makes sense: The BDS movement against Israel

An excerpt from the op-ed follows:

The proliferation of pro-BDS activities in Germany prompted Felix Klein, the German government commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism, to write in the daily Die Welt in August that “the BDS movement is antisemitic in its methods and goals.” He added that BDS’s “Don’t buy!” stickers on products from the Jewish state are “methods from the Nazi period.”

According to the German intelligence report from May, boycotts of products from the Jewish state are a “new variation of anti-Semitism.” This is the first instance of a domestic intelligence agency labeling boycotts targeting Israeli products as anti-Semitic and a security threat.

The following month, in June, an intelligence report from the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate arrived at the same conclusion. “The Third Way’s slogan ‘Boycott Products from Israel’ and … betray significant parallels to the anti-Jewish agitation of the National Socialists,” the agency wrote.

The intelligence agency copied a graphic from The Third Way’s website featuring the slogan, “Boycott products from Israel: 729=Made in Israel.” The number 729 is used in barcodes to identify Israel-based companies, although not necessarily where a product was manufactured. 

It is worth noting that the party platform of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union declared in 2016, “Who today under the flag of the BDS movement calls to boycott Israeli goods and services speaks the same language in which people were called to not buy from Jews. That is nothing other than coarse anti-Semitism.”

Read the full op-ed from The Hill here.

Benjamin Weinthal reports on human rights in the Middle East and is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @BenWeinthal.

Asaf Romirowsky is the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME). Follow him on Twitter @ARomirowsky. 

Follow the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.