German Neofascists Have Longstanding Ties to Palestinian Terrorists—and to BDS

At present, discussions of contemporary anti-Semitism often focus on a distinction between anti-Semitism of the far left and of the far right—sometimes devolving into debates about which poses a graver threat. An examination of the career of Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, one of Germany’s most well-known neofascists, suggests that the distinction might be far blurrier than is usually assumed. As Sam Izzo writes, Hoffman’s paramilitary organization, the Hoffman Military Sports Group—founded in 1974 and banned in 1980—had a long history of cooperation with Palestinian terrorist groups, to which it supplied secondhand vehicles:

Hoffmann’s initial connection to the Palestinians was likely through Udo Albrecht. Albrecht was a German freelance criminal who fought with the Palestinians in the 1970 Black September uprising in Jordan against King Hussein, leading a militia of neofascists called the Freikorps Adolf Hitler. Sometime in the late 1970s, Albrecht introduced Hoffmann to Abu Ayad, a senior officer in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). . . .

At times, German neofascists directly aided Palestinian terror attacks. For example, Der Spiegel revealed in 2012 that two German neofascists, Willi Pohl and Max Abramowski, aided Black September in the Munich massacre [of Israeli athletes] in 1972 by transporting the terrorists and helping them acquire passports.

[C]onnections between the European far right and Middle Eastern terror groups persist. In 2017, a delegation of the German far-right party Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) met with Hizballah in Lebanon. The Jerusalem Post later revealed that Hizballah and the Assad regime had a joint PayPal account with Der Dritte Weg, linked to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While PayPal shut down the account in January 2019, this did not end the relationship. . . .

Using the language of liberation from foreign “occupation,” today’s alt-right, neofascists, and Middle Eastern extremists seek to rid their countries of what they see as a rootless global liberal hegemony while looking backward toward an idealized ancient past, which they hope to achieve through radicalization and terrorist violence.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Fascism, Germany, neo-Nazis, Palestinian terror

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society