Last year, Michael Blume, the commissioner for combating anti-Semitism in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, came under fire for a series of anti-Israel statements, including one condemned as anti-Semitic by Natan Sharansky. Benjamin Weinthal notes that this sort of problem seems endemic to Germany’s various state and federal officials charged with countering bigotry against Jews. For instance:

Nearly all sixteen German states have commissioners assigned to combat anti-Semitism. The city-state of Berlin has five. In North Rhine-Westphalia there are 22 commissioners, and a federal commissioner exists along with an EU counterpart.

The commissioner of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, Gerhard Ulrich, who served as a Protestant bishop for northern Germany, preached sermons laced with contemporary anti-Semitism. Ulrich sees the Jews as warmongers—in language that recalls the Hitler movement blaming Jews for a global war: “Therefore we cannot accept it when a modern state invokes this God and His promises when war is waged,” he declared.

Ulrich reduced the cause of conflict and suffering in the Middle East to one country: “The name ‘Israel’ is burdened with the horror and misery of this Middle East war.” He also likened Israel’s security barrier, which has prevented Palestinian terrorism, to the former East Germany’s Berlin Wall.

Sadly, German officials and the EU state apparatus will likely ignore calls to change their behavior. To [quote the interwar German-Jewish journalist Kurt] Tucholsky, “Here the one pointing out the filthiness is perceived as much more dangerous than the one producing the filth.”

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.