Peace movement | Where are the anti-war protests?

According to organizers, half a million people demonstrated against Israel's war in Gaza in Great Britain over the weekend, and 100,000 in the Netherlands. Germany is Israel's second-largest arms supplier. Shouldn't an anti-war movement finally form here as well?

However, this is long overdue – not only because of arms deliveries, but also because of Germany's special responsibility for the secure existence of the State of Israel. The current policies of the Israeli government also pose a grave threat to the country itself.

A year and a half ago, US leftists claimed that Gaza was the modern-day Vietnam—a conflict that could give rise to a global anti-war movement. What do you think of this theory?

I am fundamentally skeptical of such comparisons. For all the parallels that can be drawn between wars, there are always significant differences. We should apply the universalist norms of international law when assessing conflicts. On this basis, we can state that the USA waged a genocidal war in Southeast Asia, resulting in three million Vietnamese victims. And we can now state that the actions of the Israeli armed forces and government constitute genocide as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention. This is also the view of renowned Jewish-Israeli genocide researchers such as Omer Bartov , who had taken a much more cautious assessment in the early months of the war. Bartov, incidentally, reached his conclusion before the Netanyahu government imposed a blockade of vital goods on Gaza in March. This measure is another important criterion in the definition of genocide.

If we think from the perspective of a peace movement: What might universalist positions look like that could be equally represented on the wars in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine and that go beyond the symbolic appeal to silence the guns?

As I said, the UN Charter of 1945, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions all establish universalistic principles by which we can measure governments and states. However, for some of those who consider themselves part of the peace movement, this universalistic standard no longer applies. They rightly accuse NATO and the West of applying double standards, but in doing so, they themselves ignore any criticism of Putin's policies. It is true that the promise made to Gorbachev in 1990 not to expand NATO eastward was broken, and that the US has withdrawn from important arms control and disarmament treaties since 2003. But this reference must not be used to justify or trivialize the Russian war of aggression in February 2022, as the organizers of the Berlin peace demonstration in October 2024 did, for example. The one-sidedness of this call for a demonstration was the reason why many peace organizations did not participate in the demonstration . This seems to me to be a fundamental problem of the peace movement today: neither in Ukraine nor in Gaza can a consensus be reached on universalist positions.

All arms deliveries to Israel would have to be stopped. Furthermore, the German government would have to join Great Britain and France, which threatened sanctions this week if Israel did not lift its blockade of Gaza.

I'd like to come back to Russia in a moment, but perhaps we could stay with Gaza for a moment: What might a position on this war look like in Germany? And how could a firewall be built against anti-Semitism?

We are in the midst of a debate about which definition of antisemitism to use. At the last Left Party conference, there was a dispute over whether to refer to the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) or the definition of the Jerusalem Declaration (JDA). Unfortunately, Jan van Aken, whom I greatly respect, and Vice President of the Bundestag Bodo Ramelow acted as if this were a purely academic dispute. Yet both could know that the IHRA definition, as adopted by the German federal government and many state parliaments since 2019, is a complete manipulation. The eleven examples of Israel-related antisemitism listed above were never actually adopted at the meeting of the 31 IHRA associations in Bucharest in May 2018, but were added later, incidentally under massive influence from the German Foreign Ministry. This has been concealed to this day. And, of course, it was done in this form in order to be able to defame any criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitic . In my opinion, the JDA is perfectly adequate for combating anti-Semitism. It states quite clearly that any action against people because they are Jewish is anti-Semitic.

And what would be the right demands of a peace movement regarding the Gaza war?

First, all arms deliveries to Israel would have to be stopped. Second, the German government would have to join Great Britain, France, and Canada, who threatened sanctions this week if Israel does not lift its blockade of Gaza.

If it is so easy to formulate correct demands, why is there no movement in Germany that takes them to the streets?

Fear and premature obedience are enormous in our country. When the IHRA definition was adopted in the Bundestag in 2019, Jürgen Trittin, a member of the Green Party, said in an interview that so many politicians from all parties voted for the IHRA only because they feared being defamed as anti-Semites. This bias is one side of the problem. The other, which I consider much smaller but which we must also keep in mind, is that there are groups on the fringes of the movement that downplay the crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Here, too, we need a clear demarcation in order to be able to defend universalist positions.

And what about Russia and Ukraine? What might a universalist position look like in this regard?

Any appeal would first have to state that Russia has started a war in violation of international law and call on Putin to end it. Based on this, one can legitimately criticize the positions of Western governments. For example, the false threat claim that if Ukraine is defeated, Russia will next attack the Baltic states, Poland, or Germany – a claim used to justify the arms buildup in our country. In addition to calling for a ceasefire and negotiations, I believe the peace movement should also make proposals on the matter. For example, for referendums conducted by the UN and/or OSCE in Crimea and the disputed Donbass regions. With the option of granting regions with a Russian-majority population extensive autonomy within Ukraine. Russian should be the first official language, and – very importantly – the regions should be able to levy their own taxes. In Yugoslavia, the skimming of Croatian tourism revenues by the Serbian-dominated central state was a key driver in the outbreak of the civil war in the 1990s.

You argue a lot about diplomatic solutions that remain within the logic of the nation-state and must be supported by governments. We, who are involved in movements, naturally have very limited influence on this. What could anti-miliarists do to make wars more difficult to wage? Accept deserters?

First, I'd like to contradict your thesis. History shows that governments act differently when there's domestic political pressure. If we took to the streets with 200,000 people, we wouldn't be doing it as occupational therapy; we'd want to exert pressure. Incidentally, the acceptance of deserters is also a matter of government policy. We would have to enforce in the EU that Russian, but also Ukrainian and Belarusian conscientious objectors, who do come, are granted asylum without any problems. At the moment, this is being denied to Russian deserters. And it is also being made more difficult for Ukrainian men to stay here. There is a ruling by a German court according to which a state can suspend the right to conscientious objection in an emergency situation. This will also have enormous consequences in Germany itself if – as is foreseeable – compulsory military service is reintroduced. Because with this argument, the constitutionally guaranteed right to conscientious objection can be overridden... But of course, we as a movement can also take action ourselves and accept Russian or Ukrainian men and hide them from the authorities. Or financially support organizations that work on behalf of these men – Connection e. V. in Offenbach , for example.

How do you assess the normalization of armament and the military, as we are currently experiencing in Germany?

I find this extremely disturbing. It's a level of militarization I can't remember in my lifetime. Even during the bloc conflict of the 1970s and 1980s, Germany was less militarized. By this, I don't just mean defense spending, but the military penetration of society: the access of Bundeswehr members to schools, the tank-compatible expansion of bridges and roads, and the recruitment of minors by the Bundeswehr – which represents a blatant violation of the UN Charter of the Rights of the Child. There hasn't been a comparable militarization of society since 1945. What I find most disturbing about this, however, is that this development provokes hardly any opposition.

This process is being pushed by the Greens. Ralf Fücks, longtime director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and Anton Hofreiter, a former Green "leftist," are barely discreetly advocating for Germany's entry into the war. How do you explain this?

The notion that all Greens were once pacifists or even merely critics of the military is, of course, false. Ralf Fücks and other leading Greens came from Stalinist K-groups that harbored strong sympathies for authoritarian regimes. Given this background, I'm not entirely surprised by their development. As a party, the Greens broke their peace policy backbone in 1999 with NATO's air war against Serbia and Montenegro, which violated international law. This was enforced at the time by Foreign Minister Josef Fischer – with the Holocaust-downplaying remark "Never again war, never again Auschwitz." He thus equated the human rights violations of the Serbian army in Kosovo with the genocide of the Nazis in Auschwitz. It was a terrible comparison, but one that resonated with the Greens. The party never addressed this capitulation. This is also why those Greens who still hold anti-military or even pacifist views are marginalized within the party today.