The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates this week condemned the German Bundestag for condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) as anti-Semitic, suggesting the vote was one more example of the way Israel uses the European Holocaust to force European governments to bend to Israel’s wishes.
“Israel continues to impose its wishes on the representatives of the European peoples by blackmail them using the historical German stigmatization of the Jews to achieve what it [Israel] wants,” the PA foreign ministry said in an official statement.
The Bundestag’s resolution last week declared that the “all-encompassing calls for boycotts in their radical nature lead to the stigmatization of Israeli citizens and citizens of Jewish faith as a whole. This is unacceptable and worthy of the sharpest condemnation,” noting that the “pattern of argument and methods of the BDS movement are anti-Semitic,” adding that the BDS’s calls to boycott Israeli artists and the “Don’t Buy” stickers applied to Israeli goods “recall the most terrible phase of German history.”
According to Deutsche Welle, the resolution was brought by all the centrist parties in the Bundestag, including Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union, as well as the Social Democrats (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Greens. In fact, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) submitted an alternative resolution, calling for a ban on BDS. Even the socialist Left party called for the condemnation of any anti-Semitic BDS statements.
To which the PA foreign office responded saying that “the [Bundestag] decision came under the pretense that BDS aims to strip Israel of its right to self-defense, which reflects first that the role and action of the organization is so influential that Israel and its supporters began to look for a pretext or justification for attacking the organization and distorting its image.”
The BDS movement for its part tweeted that “the German parliament’s equation of the nonviolent BDS movement for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism is based on outright lies. It’s not only anti-Palestinian McCarthyism, it is a betrayal of international law, German democracy and the fight against real anti-Jewish racism.”
Well, it appears that the entire German parliament disagrees. Go figure.