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Blog, Features, Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds

Omid Mehrgan: Palestine the Wound: A Report on the Iranian Reception of the Cause

Image 1: Stamp of Iran memorizing the Day of Qods, printed 1986

A Postscript Note: I finished writing this piece prior to the Israeli-US attacks on Iranian cities and nuclear facilities, which killed over a thousand people. There is, therefore, no trace of that consequential war in the piece. Another event also took place between the time of writing this and the onset of that war: the “For Palestine” rally on the 22nd of May in front of the University of Tehran to protest the Gaza Genocide. Though modest in size, this marked “a moment when a diverse group of citizens, without any formal call, unaffiliated with power centers, and beyond prevailing ideological frameworks, raised their voices in defense of the human dignity of the Palestinian people” (Shabani 2025). When I speak of the losses of the Iranian Left in the following paragraphs, I would like to remember such delicate gains, too.

Taking stock of the Iranian response to the Palestinian cause since the Nakba can point out a history of militant solidarity but must also face the melancholic realization that the Iranian Left has lost something big. What mediated the two—and this can be the great irony of Middle Eastern history—was 1979 Revolution in Iran. An epoch–making event that emerged as a resistant block against imperialist forces and a powerful state backer of Palestinians in its secular and religious strains, the Revolution went on to transform the very meaning of relating to Palestinian anticolonial resistance. Whether, and how exactly, the government that was established in its wake helped Palestinians since is a convoluted topic with many chapters, yet to be studied. What is less obscure is the fact that the Iranian Left—a material, discursive, and cultural force in giving birth to modern revolutionary Iran—no longer possesses any seductive and material forces for performing a necessary double task today: building a working class movement strong enough to push back against the increasingly harsh oligarchic capitalism inside Iran, and helping resist the US–Israeli aggression in the region that is piling up ruins after ruins in its trail. Iran’s Islamic Republic has largely alienated the real forces on the ground from which it once appropriated the Palestinian cause. Those forces that it has instead recruited and organized—legions of the unemployed and of undocumented immigrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan to be deployed to Syria during the 2010s (Azizi and Vazirian 2022)— it has not done so based on labor. But nor have the progressive forces inside or outside Iran succeeded to win the marginalized and increasingly impoverished masses who periodically take to the streets only to face brutal repression.

The net result has been the loss of a political identity in Iran that could understand itself in a collective way by identifying its real sources of vitality. An epitome of this phenomenon which can be called apolitical radicalization, the Diaspora Opposition politics of “subversion” (barandaazi) in the past Iranian long decade (from 2009 Green Movement to when Iranian forces left a fallen Syria in 2024) has shifted toward the right to the bewildering extent that siding with Israel has become a form of performing resistance against the Islamic Republic (Shams 2025). The war industry has recruited its own figures from the exiled (Shohadaei 2023). Many, many people embrace them, apparently. But, under the black sun of Gaza that has cut through all statuses, identities, positions, forcing each to reckon with itself anew, Iranian political culture too is bound to find itself re-evaluated for its own actors and observers. And because the word “Palestine” has for decades permeated official discourses of politics in Iran to the point of exhaustion, speaking to it in relation to emancipatory politics is exceptionally difficult.

In such an atmosphere, writing about Iran in English is more aporetic for me today than ever before. By “today” I mean a moment in history marked by two consequential events that have changed much about Iran: The Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement (following the death-in-custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Jina Amini in Tehran in September 2022) and the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation. Months after the women and girls’ life-and-death historic fights in the streets with the riot officers over the mandatory hijab (with clear socio-political victories) were widely repressed, October the 7th took place. On around the anniversary of the Palestinian assault on Israeli settlements near Gaza’s borders, a video came out showing the correspondent of the London-based TV Iran International writing the movement’s slogan in Persian on the wall of a destroyed home in Gaza (Middle East Monitor 2024). The obscene contrast between the message and the medium, between the words life, woman, freedom, and that context of suffocating blockade, lethal masculinity, and death, posed the question: How could those words be allowed to travel to the abyss of Gaza with pure affirmation and total blindness to its setting? The smiling ease with which the Israel-based Iranian reporter performed the act in front of the camera demonstrated a secure confidence in the public reception of his horrid message. He probably felt it like an act of resistance rather than pervert violation. Reportedly, the news outlet, funded by Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, is being watched by millions of Iranian households, having widely been preferred over the standard BBC Persian and a host of hopeless national TV channels (Gamaan 2023). Was there no symbolic counterforce defying this messaging? Apparently, not. The vocal figures of the WLF movement did not voice any visible solidarity with Palestinians, nor articulated any radical critique of Israeli aggression to prepare people for protecting themselves against identifying with the aggressors. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and prominent activist who spent years in jail and has been particularly vocal about solitary confinement and death penalty in Iran did not mention the word Gaza in a statement she issued from Evin prison where he called for an end to ”war.” The media coverage of her statement in English added the word “Gaza” (IranWire, November 1, 2023).

All this shift to the right in mainstream Iranian opposition politics, if not in people themselves, shows an astounding departure from the pre-Revolutionary times when Palestine shaped the discourse of both the Marxist left and the radical Shia’ clergy as well as Muslim intellectuals. Recent scholarship has shed light on the indebtedness of Iranian political culture to the Palestinian cause from around the time of the Nakba onward (Alavi 2019, Elling and Haugbolle 2024, Sadeghi-Boroujeni 2025). This was in the aftermath of the US-sponsored 1953 Coup that blocked the path of a popular national independence movement. In attempts to break through the total political blockage of the post-Coup era beyond traditional party politics already crushed by the Shah, Iran’s guerrilla movement (1970-79) learned tactics of armed struggles from Palestinian fighters in the refugee camps of Lebanon and Syria, gaining insights into the deep ties that linked capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism in the region—places destined to define the future trajectory of Iran’s political life for decades to come (Vahabzadeh 2010: 12-15, Montazeri 2024). The Palestinian cause effectively contributed to a revolution in Iran, having ended the Monarchy’s alliance with America and Israel. In this way, it seems, Iran in its turn shaped the trajectory of the Palestinian cause by becoming the first state officially incorporating it into its very identity—and that in the wake of Camp David’s deal with Israel which lost Egypt for Palestinians. Did this victory come with a curse?

The Cause after the Revolution rapidly moved from the streets to the institutions and the law in Iranian politics. Such a shift took place in the context of a bloody fight for power primarily between the Leftist parties and the Islamic Republic Party (IRP) in the first couple years after the 1979 Revolution. The IRP clerics reluctantly had to deal with the more secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leadership. To win over the socialist, guerrilla forces who had legitimate claims to the Revolution, the IRP moved to rid the Palestinian cause of its leftist discursive elements. One telling example was when their official newspaper Jomhuri-ye Eslami published the headline “Arafat pleads to Muslims of the world against Israel’s expansive offensives,” while Arafat’s 26 August 1979 plea addressed diverse universal identities including “public conscious around the world” and “resisting nations of the world.” (Alemzadeh 2024, 12) It was a real case of inclusive exclusion or exclusive inclusion. Yasser Arafat’s unfortunate decisions in key moments, from trying to mediate the releasing of the American hostages held by Iranian revolutionaries during the Hostage Crisis to siding with the invader in the Iraq-Iran war, only facilitated such a move.

“Felesteen” in Persian thus started losing its original socialist ring, becoming more and more Islamic—a tendency that culminated in the Islamic Republic’s consequential rapport with the Islamic Jihad and then Hamas a couple decades later. These were, of course, the contingent tendencies in Palestinian history within various contexts to which the Iranian support adapted. The nature of this support has been reported not to have dictated internal politics of Palestinian movements. Nizar Banat, the Palestinian intellectual killed by Palestinian Authority forces, said: “Whether Fatah, PLFP, Communists, anyone; it [Iran] never intervened in the ideological conceptions of our resistance.” (Banat [2021]) Even so, the name of Palestine did not enjoy such political diversity inside postrevolutionary Iran. With the violent suppression of the Left during the 1980s, Iran’s popular politics inevitably moved towards a liberal-democratic rights-centered activism in civil society in the Reformist Era (1995-2004). The pro-government forces, in turn and in effect, started building up a new security practice and discourse that gave rise to the Axis of Resistance in the aftermath of failed American interventionist projects that generated a vacuum in which floated many fragmented forces sponsored by regional and international powers. Palestine was won for national security and largely lost for justice and freedom (Alemzadeh 2025).

In terms of security—in the post-9/11 world, where the US-led Coalition forces invaded countries to the left and the right of Iran (Gregory 2004)—Palestine appeared in the depth of a fortified field seen from the heights of Iranian plateau. The “offensive defense” strategy brought Iranians extremely close to Israeli fortifications around the Golan Heights—perhaps too dangerously close. Iran’s oldest ally through decades, Syria, made this progression possible. The same troublesome route that Iranian guerrilla fighters during the sixties and the seventies took from Tehran to Beirut to join PLO militants was upgraded in the mid-2010s into a highway trodden by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) overseas forces (Magnier 2021). The story of Iran’s intervention in the Syrian War, its human toll, political economy, and geopolitical import, is yet to be told. But the claim on the part of the Islamic Republic has been that we are defending our borders against imperialist and Zionist assaults at military, cultural, social, media levels. Intellectuals, activists, artists, and the entire middle-class cultural makers were never fully convinced. The presence of American-Israeli footprints in any major national disaster from the eight-year Iran-Iraq War to devastating sanctions and terror attacks throughout the past four decades has been documented, and yet Palestine is absent from the most progressive political discourses in Iran.

A central question for the highly fragmented, disorganized Iranian leftists today is why many Iranians appear to go along with the cruelest forces in the world today. A big bulk of answers given do not pose the question or clarify its premises adequately or in good faith, providing instead conclusions that only beg the question anew. They tend to use the language normally deployed by pro-Israeli platforms. For instance, Ali Afshari, a former organizer of the Iranian student movement turned regime-change activist, asks why there is no sympathy with Palestinians in Iran without discussing in any terms what it is they should sympathize with. This is because the author cannot even name the situation: the genocidal killings of a people daily. It is either “Israel’s war” or a “conflict.” And yet, he reserves the naming for Hamas, summing up his answer by setting the equation thus: “Meanwhile, the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, against Israelis by Hamas only reminded the Iranian people of their government’s ideological, turbulent, and costly foreign policy.” (Afshari 2024) In this piece as in several others about the topic of Palestine and Iran, authors tend to draw on one slogan first heard chanted in the 2009 protests: “Neither Lebanon, Nor Gaza, I’ll give my life for Iran.” (Ziaberi 2025) It is presented as a confirmation of the Iranians’ judgment on the fate of the Palestinian cause in Iran. The texts omit the other slogan that I heard in the streets of Tehran that same year also within the Green Movement: “People, why are you sitting down, Iran has become Palestine.” The origin of the slogan goes back to the time of the Iranian Revolution. It signified the understanding that Palestine has a universal import, shedding light on any situation where an indigenous population is being suffocated by forces of the state or states. The generational continuity between 1979 and 2009, evident not least in their shared slogans, was broken in the long decade following when Iran went to Syria. The relation to Palestine both made and broke it. (In a correspondence, Akbar Masoumbaigi, a prominent intellectual and a veteran organizer in the Iranian leftist movement, told me about the origin of the slogan which he had heard in the streets of Tehran at least as early as 1979. Before the date, he said, similar slogans were common.)

Today, while there have been statements from Iranian feminists, artists, scholars, and activists against the Gaza Genocide (A Call to Action 2024, Moezidis 2025), most Iranian identifications with the suffering of Palestinians much more resemble a spirit of appropriation: “We too are undergoing genocide. We too are occupied. We too are under (gender) apartheid. We too are colonized, even if by a regime which we brought to power through a revolution.” Iranian protests proclaim such positions in the BBC Persian service or on Iran International, much of it is also echoed in recent works by scholars on “internal colonialism,” “gender apartheid” used for Iran without naming Israel (Eskandari 2023, Seltzer 2023, Elyasi 2024; for a critique, see Shohadaei and Mehrgan 2024). Or conversely, at its worst, as in Afshari’s piece quoted above, they go for the equation: Hamas represents for Israelis what the Islamic Republic means to Iranians living under its rein. Although the reason for this has much to do with how official apparatuses of power, policy, and media in Iran have failed to incorporate the Palestinian cause they inherited from a revolution into projects of social justice domestically, many individuals and groups in civil society, too, have participated in what can be called a pervert relation to Palestine: absolute negation or absolute cooptation.

Disappearing with the Left is thus the very possibility of the solidarity of singular experiences of oppression and empire. What has been lost is the very possibility of an Iranian political identity. Palestine is not only a moral or humanistic cause—which, given the incredible ethical indifference at the global institutional level to the daily massacres and starvation in Gaza, can only mean coming catastrophes. It is rather also a mode of relating to the politics of material conditions of life that touches all forms of politicization in the globalized ecologies of war and of remnants of life today. The Iranian Left realized with much pain through Palestine: Anti-imperialism without class struggle is empty, and class struggle without anti-imperialism is blind. In the case of Iran today, the double task has pressed the Left, or any real progressive politics (the women’s movement in particular) to the point of collapse as it must deal with this: an oligarchic capitalism backed by state repression inside and genocidal imperialist forces outside against which, well, that very repressive state has posed a resistance—for now.

Omid Mehrgan is a philosopher teaching in the Department of Liberal Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Narrowest Path: Antinomies of Self-Determination in Four Aesthetic Studies (Brill, 2024) and the translator of several key philosophical texts into Persian.

References

‘A Call to Action: Against the Imposed ‘New Order’ in the Middle East’. No-to-Genocide, October 2024, https://www.no-to-genocide.com/english.

Afshari, Ali. 2024. ‘Why are So Many Iranians Seemingly Indifferent to the War in Gaza?’, Stimson, May 13, 2024. https://www.stimson.org/2024/why-are-so-many-iranians-seemingly-indifferent-to-the-war-in-gaza/.

Alavi, Seyed Ali. 2019. Iran and Palestine: Past, Present, Future. New York: Routledge.

Alemzadeh, Maryam. 2024. “The Islamic Republic Party and the Palestinian Cause, 1979-1980: A Discursive Transformation of the Third-Worldist Agenda,” in Rasmus C. Elling and Sune Haugbolle, eds., The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond (Oneworld Academic, 2024)

Alemzadeh, Maryam. 2025. ‘Iran, Palestine and the Axis of Resistance’,Middle East Report, no. 313, Winter 2024. https://merip.org/2025/01/iran-palestine-axis/

Azizi, Hamidreza, and Amir Hossein Vazirian. 2022. ‘The Role of Armed Non-State Actors in Iran’s Syria Strategy: A Case Study of Fatemiyoun and Zainabiyoun Brigades.Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 25 no.3: 540–57. https://doi:10.1080/19448953.2022.2143864.

Elling, Rasmus C. and Sune Haugbolle, eds. 2024. The Fate of Third Wordlism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine and Beyond. London: Oneworld Academic.

Elyasi, Arefe. 2024. ‘Gender Apartheid: Unraveling Systemic Segregation and Its Socio-Legal Implications’. Master’s thesis, Global Campus of Human Rights, 2024. https://repository.gchumanrights.org/handle/20.500.11825/2779

Eskandari, Sarah 2023. ‘Internal Colonialism in Iran: Gender and Resistance against the Islamic Regime’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, no. 4 (November 2023): 739–743.

Gamaan. 2023. ‘Iranians’ Attitudes Toward Media 2023’. September 8, 2023. https://gamaan.org/2023/09/08/iranians-attitudes-toward-media-2023/

Gregory, Derek. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. London: Blackwell.

Magnier, Elijah J. 2021. ‘The Axis of Resistance’s road from Tehran to Beirut is open and secure’, The Cradle, August 12, 2021. https://thecradle.co/articles-id/5976.

Moezidis, Ciara. 2025. ‘(Dis)Entangling Iran and Palestine/Israel: The Lesser-Known Narrative of the Pro-Palestine Iranian Diaspora in the U.S.’ Jadaliyya, 28 January 2025. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/46477

Montazeri, Omid. 2024. ‘Abandoned Legacy: The Left of Iran and Palestinians’, Verso Blog, June 12, 2024. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/abandoned-legacy-the-left-of-iran-and-palestinians?srsltid=AfmBOooi5BMPMWFD8brHOu9HBoHLQyTfVPIcfiBIyGNhrJWIorw2_AXm.

Nizar Banat. [2021]. ‘Nizar Banat on Iranian support of Palestinian resistance’, The East Is a Podcast YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHqSH7Gwc7g&t=3s. Accessed September, 21, 2025.

Sadeghi-Boroujeni, Eskandar. 2025. ‘Iran and the “Axis of Resistance”: A Brief History’, Jadaliyya, May 19, 2025. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/46685/Iran-and-the-%E2%80%98Axis-of-Resistance%E2%80%99-A-Brief-History.

Seltzer, Lena Yasmine 2023. ‘Gender Apartheid in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The Intersection of Religion and Human Rights’. Master’s thesis. Università degli Studi di Padova, 2023. https://thesis.unipd.it/handle/20.500.12608/50102

Shabani, Azadeh. 2025. ‘From Tehran, “For Palestine”: Disrupting the State’s Discursive Monopoly on Anti-Imperialism and Pro-Palestine Solidarity’, Jadaliyya, June 11, 2025. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/46777/

Shams, Alex. 2025. ‘Our Man for Tehran’, Boston Review, August 6, 2025. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/our-man-for-tehran/

Shohadaei, Setareh, and Omid Mehrgan. 2024. ‘“Apartaidi jensiati”, “jang alayhi zanan”, ya tasahobi dobareyi muqavemati zanan?’ [‘Gender Apartheid’, ‘War on Women’, or the Reappropriation of Women’s Resistance?] Radiozamaneh, May 27, 2024. https://www.radiozamaneh.com/818312/

Shohadaei, Setareh. 2023. ‘Is Masih Alinejad Really the Voice of the Iranian Women’s Movement?’, Public Seminar, September 13, 2023. https://publicseminar.org/2023/09/is-masih-alinejad-really-the-voice-of-the-iranian-womens-movement/

Vahabzadeh, Peyman. 2010. A Guerrilla Odyssey Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979. Syracuse: Syracuse State University.

Ziaberi, Kourosh. 2025. ‘Iranians Have Become Desensitized to the Question of Palestine’, New Line Magazine, November 17, 2025. https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/iranians-have-become-desensitized-to-the-question-of-palestine/

Cite as: Merghan, Omid 2025. “Palestine the Wound: A Report on the Iranian Reception of the Cause” Focaalblog October 6. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/10/06/omid-mehrgan-palestine-the-wound-a-report-on-the-iranian-reception-of-the-cause/

Blog, Features, Staying-With Palestine. Making and Remaking Postcolonial Worlds

Nico Putz: On Anti-Deutsche and Neo-Imperial War

Image 1: Pro-Palestine demonstration in Berlin, October 2023. Photo by Montecruz Foto

This forum has shed light on vastly different but interrelated contexts of Palestine solidarity. The essays draw attention to the interplay of shifting solidarities with Palestine and the amorphous formation of “the (political) left” across geographical and temporal contexts. Germany, although not belonging to the postcolonial and neocolonial contexts as in the other essays, is one among many puzzle pieces interlocking with political realities elsewhere, and across worlds. Like other “post”- imperial regions, Palestine continues to be an uncomfortable question mark in the German national narrative of post-Nazi redemption. It is a question mark which has split the German radical left into two seemingly irreconcilable sects: a staunchly pro-Zionist, pro-American, and markedly bellicose faction—the Anti-Deutsche—and their equally convicted counterpart, the pro-Palestinian, anti-colonial, and supposedly antisemitic Anti-Imperialists. The German and international media cyclically regurgitates this dichotomy, with every escalation of violence in Palestine sparking German leftist networks to organize protests both in support and in opposition to Israel, at times clashing violently with one another. While inter-factional violence amongst leftists is certainly not unique to this context, the locking of arms between members of the Christian Conservative Party (CDU) with antifascist groups at pro-Israeli protests just might be.

German leftists who continue to stand with Palestine were not surprised by the intensification of governmental restriction and police violence targeting pro-Palestinian support. After all, the post-war political discourse in West Germany branded anti-Zionist and otherwise pro-Palestinian leftist voices and positions as antisemitic at least since the 1960s. By the 1990s this radical pro-Zionist stance manifested increasingly in many radical leftist circles across reunified Germany. Triggered by the geopolitical fall-out resulting from the presumed end of the Cold War, like the Yugoslavian wars and the invasions of Iraq, the Anti-Deutsche left emerged as a distinct political current in the country. In this essay, I aim to deliver a longue durée of the German debate around Palestine and Israel through the idiom of this idiosyncratic political formation, pointing at entanglements that continue to link the imperial-colonial to the present. Perhaps, this helps to explain why broad sections of the German left find it easy to look the other way at the face of the destruction of Gaza or the targeting of political dissent at their own doorstep.

In the wake of the Berlin Wall and informed by Nazi atrocities as well as their acceptance of a paradigm of collective guilt, a diverse group of authors and organizers saw the potential rise of a Fourth Reich on the horizon of a reunified Germany. The rise of right-wing extremist attacks in both Germanies seemed to confirm their prophecy of a resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism reminiscent of the Nazi era and German imperialism. This fear motivated the formation of groups that explicitly identified as antinational and later Anti-Deutsch, emphasizing a critical stance toward German history and identity, opposing German national sentiments, symbols, and slogans. (Hagen 2004, Errlanger 2009)

While a sizable, heterogenous section of the Anti-Deutsche movement eventually continued down a theoretical path, which led them to disavow themselves from “communism” and even “leftism” altogether, in the beginning they very much saw themselves as communists. But from the start, they sharply diverged from the broader radical left by challenging the prevailing anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist consensus. The West German New Left had often aligned itself with anti-colonial national liberation movements and socialist governments in the Global South, while being critical of Israel, in particular since the 1967 War. The West German radical left stood in solidarity with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinians. Similarly, in socialist East Germany, solidarity with the PLO and a critical stance towards Israel had been an element of the raison d’état (Staatsräson). Breaking with this leftist tradition, Anti-Deutsche took a militant stance of unconditional solidarity with Israel. This position was not only a political choice but framed as moral imperative grounded in their recognition of Israel as the refuge and homeland of Holocaust survivors.

Anti-Deutsche criticized the left for a tendency to relativize or downplay the Holocaust, and accused it of harboring latent antisemitism, lurking in its admittedly at times quite militant anti-Zionism. In consequence, the attitude toward the Palestinian question became a defining and divisive issue in activist circles. A further point of departure was the Anti-Deutsche’s stance on war and military interventions beyond Palestine, where they further broke with traditional leftist pacifism and anti-imperialism. This shift became particularly pronounced starting with the Gulf War in 1991, with a decisive split in the movement during the wars in Yugoslavia and continuing through the post-9/11 era. As I will show, the Anti-Deutsche ideology took shape not just in response to the German responsibility for the Holocaust, but also in reaction to violent conflicts which ensued with the global transition out of the Cold War’s stalemate, rather than out of a German exceptionalism. In fact, it is the Anti-Deutsche’s discursive linkage between these post-Cold War conflicts and the Holocaust, that have been a decisive factor in building the movement’s political identity and its relations with other formations on the left and beyond.

To fully understand this development, let’s retract again to the global sixties and the New Left. Like many other locales, the post-war generation of the left in West Germany emerged from universities and had—also in response to the Stalinist interventions in a range of popular uprisings—began to align itself with China rather than the Soviet Union. Further exacerbated by the atrocities committed in Vietnam, this anti-imperialism, which some have called Third-Worldism, became staunchly anti-American, with American foreign policy often branded as fascist. The German New Left had begun the decade trying to break their parents’ deafening silence. They acknowledged the bloodsheds of the World Wars and the genocidal Nazi apparatus, while pointing at influential members of society with previous allegiance to the Nazi Party—judges, politicians, generals, professors, etc. Reframed onto Palestine, this translated to an understanding of Israel as colonial enterprise backed by the American empire and its Western allies, with the 1967 War crystalizing this position further, thereby shaping the German New Left as “the natural home of camaraderie with Palestine,” as Roy puts it in the forum’s introduction. The unfolding dialectical radicalization of the West German state and the New Left had eventually even produced a brief active alignment between some militant elements of the German left and some militant elements within the PLO, namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Jean Améry (1912–1978), author and Holocaust survivor, was among the earliest to denounce leftist anti-Zionism as disguised antisemitism. Published from the mid-1960s onwards, his essays stressed Germany’s obligation to support Israel as a refuge for Holocaust survivors. He condemned the New Left’s equation of West German state repression with Nazi crimes as a gross relativization. In 1974, Hermann L. Gremliza became editor-in-chief of the West German leftist monthly Konkret (published since 1957 – except for a short break in the 1970s). While Konkret at the time still published opinions of the pro-Palestinian Red Army Faction, Gremliza would incorporate Améry’s critique and become a key figure among the early Anti-Deutsche. Despite this, he was still able to sufficiently locate a sympathy for the Palestinian cause to make statements unthinkable from German intellectuals today. For instance, he said in 1985: “Why, instead of the poor Arabs, shouldn’t the legal successors of the perpetrators [of the Holocaust] provide the Jews with a state territory, for example, Bavaria […].” Around this time, other authors like Eike Geisel and Wolfgang Pohrt appeared in Konkret, highlighting again the persistence of antisemitism and criticizing the left’s loose commitment to the PLO. Moishe Postone, a key figure for Wertkritik, reinterpreted Marx to show antisemitism as a distorted critique of capitalism. His ideas influenced later Anti-Deutsche groups and publications like Krisis, EXIT!, and Austria’s SINet. By incorporating psychoanalytic insights to critique ideology and nationalism, Ideologiekritik (critique of ideology) became central to certain strands of Anti-Deutsche theory. (Erlanger 2009: 100) While the (re-)discovery of and/or engagement with critical theory, particularly the Frankfurt School, had a long tradition within the German New Left, it gained a centrality in Anti-Deutsche theory, which eventually led to some eliminating Marxism and communism from their ideology.

A key catalyst in the emergence of the Anti-Deutsche, came in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Many West German leftist, from anarchists to formerly Maoist members of the Green Party, opposed reunification, fearing a “Fourth Reich” would emerge out of a newly reunified Germany. The Gulf War of 1991 was another pivotal moment in the definition of Anti-Deutsche. While attacks on the German peace movement for its alleged anti-Israeli and anti-American positions had been present before unification, this first invasion of Iraq radicalized some of the antinational left further, which immediately split the movement. Gremliza and others supported the war—a position that was unprecedented for the general anti-war ethos of the radical left. Their argument framed the war as a necessary defense of Israel from Iraqi chemical weapons and, by extension, a stand against a new form of fascism and antisemitism. Although this pro-war position did not gain majority support within the antinational movement at the time, it nonetheless established an analytical framework for the Anti-Deutsche, which involved drawing analogies between contemporary conflicts in the postcolonies, framing the United States and its allies as antifascist forces opposing new forms of fascism and antisemitism beyond the Global North.

The Kosovo War (March 24 to June 9, 1999) served as another point of departure, profoundly impacting the Anti-Deutsche’s ideological development and their relationship with the broader German left. This conflict, which saw NATO intervention to decisively shift the tide in favor of Kosovo Albanians, culminating in the withdrawal of the Serbian army and the establishment of an international protectorate over Kosovo, marked Germany’s first active military involvement since 1945. In his speech at the Green Party’s special conference on May 13 of that year, the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer notoriously defended the NATO assault on Yugoslavia by stating: “Auschwitz is incomparable. But I stand on two principles: never again war, never again Auschwitz, never again genocide, never again fascism. Both belong together for me.”

This implicit Auschwitz comparison and the humanitarian justification for military action ignited an intense debate within both the Green Party and the left in Germany and Austria. In a highly idiosyncratic and anachronistic interpretation, some Anti-Deutsche viewed the Kosovo conflict primarily as a German war against Serbian nationalism, asserting that Germany was leading the intervention with the Americans in a subordinate role. Conversely, the Anti-Deutsche themselves supported Serbia and vehemently opposed NATO intervention, seeing it as a direct continuation of German nationalism and imperialism, replicating the alliance between the Croatian fascists of the Ustaše regime and the Nazis. The remainder of the antinational left on the other hand, tended towards an abstract rejection of both Serbian nationalism and the NATO intervention, condemning all parties involved.

The next external impetus for controversial Anti-Deutsche stances followed soon thereafter in shape of the attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001. This confirmed their monochrome assessment of (militant) resistance to Western modernity as inherently antisemitic, in turn radicalizing their position on Palestine and beyond. The Anti-Deutsche then endorsed military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as essential for the defense of Israel and Western civilization. We can see here, as with the cases of the Gulf War and the Kosovo War, how the German image of the postcolonial (particularly Muslim) world has been closely intertwined with the responsibilities resulting from the Holocaust and a narrative of a benevolently superior West. This militant pro-war and pro-Israel stance considerably deepened divisions within the German left and, notably, even within the Anti-Deutsche’s own ranks. While a minority retained some critical perspectives on US foreign policy, a significant faction fully embraced a pro-American, pro-Israel position and the broader Global War on Terror. In their evolving analysis, political and even cultural Islam was increasingly viewed as a new fascism, analogous to fascism in the German tradition. Their uncompromising rhetoric led to their exclusion from various left-wing anti-fascist demonstrations and a general alienation from anti-fascist circles, but, at the same time, they won support from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, even attracting some party-members to participate in protests they had organized.

The Anti-Deutsche strongly oppose the traditional left-wing sympathy for Palestine. The Second Intifada and subsequent uprisings were almost exclusively framed as inherently antisemitic attacks on Israel, and Anti-Deutsche discourse consistently emphasizes Israel’s role as a crucial bulwark against global antisemitism and Islamist extremism. Anti-Deutsche critique categorically rejects any concessions to Palestinian movements, indiscriminately devaluating perspectives as diverse as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, often drawing parallels to Nazi antisemitism.

Over time, the Anti-Deutsche movement became increasingly isolated from other leftist groups. Some members began publishing in conservative media outlets, further blurring the boundaries between left and right, and provoking criticism from both sides. Despite this, the Anti-Deutsche remain a unique phenomenon in German political culture.

Assessing the Anti-Deutsche’s s impact on German society, particularly the left, is challenging, primarily because it was never bound to a monolithic rhetoric. Beyond unwavering support for Israel and a tendency to back US – led invasions, their positions were at times unpredictable and spontaneous responses to current events. Recurring popular declarations of the Anti-Deutsche left’s demise and irrelevance, or its public stripping of “leftist” status, further complicate impact assessment. As early as 2006, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (a major German think tank affiliated with the leftist party Die Linke) published an article implying that the Anti-Deutsche did not fit traditional leftist ideals of optimism, anti-capitalism, and nuanced critique (Erdem 2006). Yet, the Anti-Deutsche’s voice persists in the German public arena, the academy, the media, and in the parliament. Partially, this is explicable by the careers of some Anti-Deutsche, particularly later generations, who might not identify as such anymore but could be bringing their Anti-Palestinian stance along the way up the career ladder.

The Anti-Deutsche were and are an amorphous group, producing sometimes valid and necessary critique of ideological narratives, sometimes cultural agitprop like danceable tunes, and occasional high-meta theory of society under capitalism. To the reunifying German left, they were also the source of countless headaches, accusations, rifts, and breakups, some culminating in symbolic and even physical violence between potential comrades. Alienating their contemporaries, the early Anti-Deutsche have made a lasting impact on future generations, who often diluted the former’s hardcore positions, but simultaneously spread their ideology in academia, the press, and leftist institutions. In Germany, the secret service in charge of surveilling and defining political extremism, has recently re-discovered the Anti-Deutsche left, after deeming its divisive potential exhausted back in 2007. The reports of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz have in response to the developments on and following October 7 included a new section, titled Auswirkungen des Nahostkonflikts und Antisemitismus (Consequences of the Conflict in the Middle East and Antisemitism), in which they acknowledge the continued existence of radical leftist groups with a militant pro-Zionist stance. Yet, the German state’s tradition of ontologically separating Palestinian secular anti-imperialists in Germany from their “native” German counterparts on the other hand, continues in an unbroken chain reaching across several decades of annual reports. Consequently, the Palestinian organization Samidoun, which the German state considers a frontal organization of the PFLP, is lumped in with militant Islamists, Kurdish and Punjabi separatists, and Turkish right-wing extremists, in a separate chapter titled Auslandsbezogener Extremismus (Foreign-related Extremism). This revealing manifestation of Staatsräson might also explain the mainstream acceptance of the criminalization of this organization in 2023.

Taking stock of the larger German scene, Chancellor Friedrich Merz earlier this year welcomed the US-Israeli attack on Iran as a justified strike against an immoral “terror regime” at war with the West’s liberal values. Merz and his government’s views are driven by two core beliefs, both entangled with the legacy of Germany’s post-war leftist schisms: (1) that the post-Cold War transatlantic order, driven by liberal markets and values, is the best path to a democratic and equitable society, and (2) that Islam and Palestinian nationalism are incompatible with this order. These beliefs are increasingly prevalent across the German political spectrum, often as a frantic catching-up to the alt-right’s political gains. Paradoxically, these views often overlap substantially with positions developed from an extreme left that feared the remilitarization of Germany overseen by Merz and his predecessor. As Omid Mehrgan puts it in this forum, Palestine here is a “mode of relating to the politics of material conditions of life that touches all forms of politicization in the globalized ecologies of war and of remnants of life today.” It is also a mode of explication, for those among the readers who may have been stupefied as to why Germany’s repression of pro-Palestine demonstrations on the streets of Berlin and elsewhere have been so over-the-top violent. These demonstrations, in spite of everything, challenge the very trajectory of politics in Germany, especially leftist politics, since the Nazi event.

Nico Putz researches Afro-Asian entanglements during the Cold War at Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and is on the editorial board of MIDA Archival Reflexicon. 

References

Erdem, Isabel. (2006). Anti-deutsche Linke oder anti-linke Deutsche? UTOPIE kreativ (192), 926–39.

Erlanger, Simon. (2009). “The Anti-Germans – The Pro-Israel German Left. Jewish Political Studies Review 21, (1–2), 95-99.

Hagen, Patrick. (2004). Die Antideutschen und die Debatte der Linken über Israel. MA thesis, University of Cologne, 2004, 2-7, 58.

Cite as: Putz, Nico 2025. “On Anti-Deutsche and Neo-Imperial War” Focaalblog September 27. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/09/27/nico-putz-on-anti-deutsche-and-neo-imperial-war/