At one of the biggest Christian events in Germany, the protestant church assembly with over 150.000 visitors on the first weekend of May, several of the main speakers spread misinformation and prejudices against Israel. The event, which was subsidized by German authorities with over eleven million Euros, tried to inflict hate against Israel at a German audience that usually has a neutral-positive approach towards Israel. Michael Wolffsohn, a well-known German Jewish history professor, criticized the event harshly and accused the church of reversing the victim and the perpetrator: "The organizers of the Protestant Church assembly implicitly adopted the postcolonial and counterfactual claim "Jews/Israel = Nazis".
The program of the church assembly, which takes place every two years, includes prayers, bible lessons as well as political discussions and many famous national politicians like the chancellor and the president attend.
A resolution calling the German government to "finally recognize the state of Palestine" passed with the necessary quorum of support. The text of the resolution doesn´t mention Oct 7th, but states that the German government should immediately recognize a Palestinian state in order to end "violence and expulsions and death" and promote peace in the middle east.
This year's program included a workshop "Christians in Palestine". The workshop used a modern map of Israel, where the city of Tel Aviv did not occur, and other Israeli towns had Arabic names only (Al-Majdal instead of Ashkelon, Bir Saba instead of Beer Sheva, Asdoud instead of Ashdod). For most Arabs, a map like this expresses the wish to undo the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. By showing only the names of Arab villages, which were in or nearby the location of modern Israeli towns and are today in most cases included in the cities, it denies the Jewish-Israeli existence and leads to the unrealistic idea, to remove the state of Israel and establish a Muslim-Arab country instead on all the land.
The leader of the workshop was Sally Azar, a Christian-Arab resident of Jerusalem. On 7th of October 2023, she posted in the afternoon "Gaza just broke out of prison" in her Instagram story. This sentence is widely understood as a clear support of the Hamas attack and massacre in southern Israel. In the weeks after Oct 7th, she posted a lot of content from Al-Jazeera affiliated media, a Qatari channel which is illegal in Israel. Azar has a Jordanian citizenship. Already a few years ago she stated, that the doesn´t wish to obtain Israeli citizenship, which she is eligible for because of her residency in Jerusalem, because she rejects the state of Israel.
In the workshop, she promoted the narrative that the Israeli presence and Jewish extremists were the biggest threat to Christians in the middle east, and Christians would live in harmony with Muslim Arabs. The workshop included a working group about the impact of Oct. 7th, which did not mention the Hamas massacre or the Israeli hostages at all and solely focused on Israeli military actions and "settler violence". Not mentioned was furthermore, that Israel is the only country in the middle east where the number of Christians is growing, and in a survey in 2021, 84% of Christians were satisfied with life in Israel.
Meanwhile, on the main stage of the event took place a discussion of the writer Eva Menasse and the German ambassador in Israel, Steffen Seibert, who spoke via Zoom on a big screen. It was attended by several thousand visitors. Menasse alone spoke for over one hour, and criticized the state of Israel and the Israeli government harshly in almost every topic. She accused Israel of being an Apartheid state and extensively quoted Omer Bartov explaining, why to call the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide. Furthermore, she denied the existence of Israel-related antisemitism and blamed the Israeli government and Ron Prosor, the Israeli ambassador in Germany, of using antisemitism-accusations as a tool to shut down criticism. She criticized the German authorities handling of the sentence "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", which is often used in pro-Palestinian protests and considered as a support for Hamas: "This slogan is not per-se anti-Semitic."
In fact, many international law scholars say that the accusations of apartheid and genocide don´t apply on Israel and are used to defame and delegitimize the state of Israel in the world. The term Israel-related antisemitism is widely researched by German and international university scientists as a description of antisemitic acts committed with a motive of hostility against the Jewish state (e.g. arson with Molotov cocktails in the synagogue of Wuppertal 2014, the perpetrators explained in court they intended to protest the war in Gaza).
In the end, Menasse called for donations for what she called "incredible brave NGOs in Israel". She named a few of them, which are worth supporting in her opinion: the so-called Parent´s circle, Breaking the Silence and "NGOs that are going with Palestinian Bedouins to the sheep fields, to prevent settlers from starting to shoot at them" as well as an "organization of Israeli mothers and grandmothers standing at the checkpoint, to prevent illegal treatments of Palestinians and informing them about their rights".
All of those NGOs have in common, that they massively promote anti-Israel bias outside of Israel.
The German ambassador in Israel, Steffen Seibert, pointed out that in his view the war in Gaza is no longer justified because of the massive destruction of Gaza, and that "the since 1967 ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory must end. The constantly rising settlements are also in international law an injustice. And the violence of extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian farmers, which expanded in the last 2-3 years, is unacceptable."
All in all, there were no positive speakers about Israel on the main stage. It is unclear, why the leaders of the protestant church in Germany organize such one-sided events that promote prejudices and bias against Israel. With the German government subsidizing such events with millions of Euros, it is not surprising that the public opinion about Israel declined massively in Germany in the last years according to recent polls.
One sign of hope remains: At the church assembly, one booth of a center-right political thinktank handed out small pins with the slogan "I stand with Israel", and the Israeli flag in the form of a heart. A lot of visitors took such a pin.
