Recent polls have found disturbingly high levels of anti-Israel sentiment in Germany. Evelyn Gordon assigns part of the blame to the depiction of Israel in German textbooks—which in turn reflect the ideology of the German elite:
In the dogma of modern liberal elites, the nation-state is passé. The fact that most of the world still consists of nation-states in no way challenges this dogma; after all, you can’t expect benighted regimes to have reached this level of enlightenment yet. Israel, however, is a potent challenge to the dogma: it’s a modern, Western, democratic, human-rights-respecting country that nevertheless proudly proclaims itself the nation-state of the Jewish people.
And there’s only one way for liberal elites to resolve the cognitive dissonance this causes without sacrificing their cherished dogma: by sacrificing Israel. Or, in other words, by painting it as a racist, warmongering, benighted country no different from all the other unenlightened nation-states.
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