Refreshing pocket of resistance By Benjamin Weinthal Tags: germany, Ira, zionsim The German Left Party, the successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, which refused to recognize Israel between 1949 and 1989, is hardly a bastion of support for the Jewish state. Nothing more than “New Year’s firecrackers” was the phrase invoked by Norman Paech, a parliament member from the Left Party, as well as its foreign policy spokesman, following his trip to the Palestinian territories in late April, to play down the danger of Hamas missiles that have been fired on Israeli cities since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip. Paech says “there is no anti-Semitism in the Mideast,” and though he acknowledges the sentiment does exist in Germany, he argues that its cause is Israeli militarism. He has an affinity for employing Nazi terminology when describing Israel in the German media.Yet a refreshing pocket of resistance has formed within the Left Party, whose members seek a sharp break with the prevailing anti-Israeli posture characteristic of Germany’s third-largest political party. The BAK Shalom Working Group (BAK is from the German word Bundesarbeitskreis, meaning “federal working group”), a pro-Israel group within the Left Party’s young members federation, demanded Paech’s immediate resignation from his position in an opinion piece published by the popular Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel earlier this month. Benjamin Kruger, a BAK Shalom spokesman, told me that Paech sees “Hamas as an ally of the Left Party,” whereas BAK Shalom views it “as a terror organization.” He added that the 60-member BAK Shalom, a caucus made up of students, young professionals and working people under 35, aims to advance a “platform against anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and regressive capitalism.”While BAK is attempting to dissolve prejudices against Israel in a bottom-up fashion, the co-chairman of the Left Party, Gregor Gysi, a dynamic political personality and gifted speaker, delivered a dense 16-page speech in mid-April to members of the Left Party-aligned Rosa Luxemburg Foundation at an event marking Israel’s 60th anniversary. Declaring that, “anti-Zionism can no longer be a tenable position for the German left in general, nor for the Left Party,” Gysi wiped more salt into the open wound of the anti-Israeli Left by asserting that Israel’s existence ought to be defined by his party as part of Germany’s “national interest.”   Advertisement   The reactions were predictably unsettling. “I consider it legitimate to be against Zionism. After all, it has apartheid-like characteristics,” said Ulla Jelpke, a leading Left Party member of the Bundestag. Her former employer, the neo-Stalinist left daily junge Welt, whose coverage of Israel drips with hostility, wrote, “With his commitment to Zionism, Gregor Gysi overturned coordinated left-wing foreign policy.” Responding to Jelpke, Sebastian Voigt, a co-founder of BAK, cited the contemporary relevance of the Austrian Jew Jean Amery’s comment about the German Left in the late 1960s: “Anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm.” The origin of the shifting plate tectonics in the left can be traced to the Second Lebanon War in 2006. While the Left Party executive committee member Wolfgang Gehrcke placed himself in the front row of a demonstration with 2000 anti-Israel supporters in Berlin that August, in which such slogans as “No room for Israel” and “Hezbollah until victory” were ubiquitous, Katja Kipping, a 30-year-old Left Party member of parliament from the southern city of Dresden, issued a position paper castigating the anti-Zionism and so-called “anti-imperialism” of the party. Already then, Kipping called on the party to move “beyond its anti-Zionism.” Kipping and BAK Shalom represent wings of the same nondogmatic leftist segment of the party that seeks to dismantle the Left Party myth that Israel’s existence represents an outpost of American-style imperialism in the Middle East. Yet journalist and writer Tjark Kunstreich, a seasoned observer of leftist politics in Germany, told me that the pro-Israel position is still “marginal” within the Left Party. In fact, he criticized Gysi for failing to completely divorce the party from its anti-Zionism. Kunstreich said that even if “Israel is a fact” for Gysi, the Left Party leader still has not brought himself to say, “We view the Israel project as good.” “We need a clear ‘yes’ to the recognition of the State of Israel,” said the party’s parliamentary secretary Dagmar Enkelmann. That the discussion revolves around accepting the State of Israel shows that the overwhelming majority of the Left Party’s rank-and-file and leadership is still stuck in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, Ilan Mor, the charge d’affaires at Israel’s Berlin Embassy, says that such pro-Israel voices as BAK and Kipping’s are welcome. Mor participated in a panel discussion with BAK members celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary in early May. According to a late-March poll, the Left Party has the support of 13 percent of German voters, and, following its string of local state election victories in Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Hesse this year, it is a force that must be reckoned with. As a result of those victories, the Left Party added 3,000 new members, and now has a card-carrying membership base of 73,455 (compared to some 530,000 each for both the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats). The strength of the Left Party in regions of Eastern Germany has contributed to the coalition governments in such federal states as Berlin, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left co-govern. It’s still too early to tell whether the Left’s apparent softening toward Israel is the sign of a permanent change. At the Party’s convention last weekend, neither a resolution nor a discussion to abandon its anti-Israeli platform was on the Party’s agenda. Kunstreich analyzed the conference as a “defeat” for the pro-Israel strand within the Left Party because there was “no sign” that the membership “shares the position” of BAK. The Left Party reinforced its opposition to sending German troops to Afghanistan, and its reelected co-chairman, Oskar Lafontaine, a former chairman of the SPD before he defected to the Left Party, continues to flirt with the mullah regime in Iran. He has not spoken out against the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran, and it was only internal party pressure that forced him to cancel a visit with Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran in 2006 because his presence would have coincided with the Iranian Holocaust-denial conference, thus sidestepping a public relations debacle for the Left Party. A plan to introduce a motion at the party convention to condemn the “serious human rights violations” in Iran, and “tie the economic relationship with an improved human rights situation” did not get off the ground. The disturbingly warm relations between their party and the Islamic regime is an overriding priority for BAK Shalom. “The discussion of these issues has begun. BAK Shalom will do everything to accelerate it. Developments in the Left Party should be exciting,” wrote co-founder Voigt in the Tagesspiegel piece this month. Benjamin Weinthal is a Berlin-based independent journalist.