The tradition that the SPD and the Greens want to follow in Berlin

The “ideology that created the Holocaust was not defeated in 1945.” This statement by the Israeli journalist Guy Goldstein and his co-author Alex Steinman should be taken into account by the SPD and the Greens, who are now negotiating a government coalition with the Left Party in Berlin.

Goldstein and Steinman continue: “The gas chambers were closed, but the machine that made them possible and the system that weaponized anti-Semitism with anti-imperialism and anti-Western hatred was just repackaged, moved to new places and rebooted under new management.”

In fact, a historical line can be drawn that ends with the Berlin Hamas friends of the Left Party - and begins a hundred years ago with the formation of a foreign organization of the Hitler movement (NSDAP/AO) in the Egyptian capital Cairo. Its founder was Alfred Heß, the younger brother of Rudolf Heß, who later became Hitler's “deputy”.

The task of the NSDAP/AO was to spread anti-Semitic sentiment among the Egyptian elites, write Goldstein and Steinman. Of course, it wasn't initially particularly successful: by 1933, the group came to the realization that "traditional European anti-Semitic pamphlets 'fell on deaf ears' in Egypt."

The Cairo National Socialists laid out the possible solution in a letter to Berlin: The conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine must be “relocated” to Egypt and anti-Zionism should be turned into a vehicle for anti-Semitism.

The “concept of race” was unknown in the Arab world, explains historian Matthias Küntzel. The National Socialists initially wanted to argue racistly here too. “They realized: People just don’t like it, they don’t have a chance.”

That's why they "switched" - from the "racist argument of hostility to Jews to the religious argument." They "discovered that Mohammed had fought against Jews, which is also true. But it is a one-sided view of the Koran and the Islamic writings."

In fact, a propaganda machine was created as a result, which in particular included the “Deutschlandsender Zeesen”. He broadcast religious chants and inflammatory speeches against Jews on a shortwave frequency that could be received worldwide.

Sample: “How hateful and brutal they are towards Muslims was recently made blatantly clear in Palestine, the Holy Land.” Palestine is “the country that they (the Jews) want to use as a base in order to spread their power from here to all neighboring Islamic countries.”

One of the prominent speakers on this station was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. He had served the Hitler government since 1933 and lived in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, lavishly endowed with only 75,000 Reichsmarks per month, and from 1943 even 90,000 Reichsmarks, as well as an “Aryanized” villa, staff and bodyguards.

He also traveled as a propagandist through Sunni-dominated countries in the Middle East. Al-Husseini was a personal friend of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna.

This movement, which is still active and from which Hamas later emerged in the Gaza Strip, was also founded in Cairo in 1928, just shortly after the NSDAP/AO. The National Socialists had finally found their “vehicle,” that is, the method with which they combined anti-Zionism with their anti-Semitism.

The French-Lebanese political scientist Gilbert Achcar, a left-wing intellectual, describes the effect: In Egypt, in the second half of the 1930s, the revolutionary “Young Egypt” movement, from which the future head of state Nasser emerged, quickly slipped into anti-Semitism.

As late as 1939, one of their leaders, Ahmad Hussein, insulted the hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany as “backward” and complained about its negative effects on Palestine. But the following year he “actively launched an anti-Jewish campaign” in his movement and distributed a list of Jewish shops in Egyptian cities for the purpose of boycotting them.

The Nazi movement's right-wing hatred of Jews had found its way into the Middle East, into right-wing and left-wing circles. Decades later it spilled back through left-wing channels to where it came from.

In the 1960s, it was the “Palestinian Liberation Organization” (PLO), founded by Yasser Arafat, that gained influence in the West German student movement and the left-wing APO. Arafat had been chosen by Amin al-Husseini as his successor to lead the Palestinian Arabs.

His most powerful feat was to convert the term “Palestine” into a synonym solely for the Palestinian Arabs. Arafat's PLO was politically left-wing and largely secular in orientation.

The still active left-wing radical terrorist organization PFLP (“Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine”) was integrated into the PLO structures. It is banned in Germany but is nevertheless relevant to the current situation in Berlin. Because the PFLP is considered the political home of Ibrahim Ibrahim. The man who the designated future mayor Elif Eralp is afraid of, according to a marginal note on the manuscript of a “Spiegel” interview.

Ibrahim was born in 1956, is said to have grown up in Lebanon as an Arab Palestine refugee and came to the western part of the then still divided city of Berlin in 1974. Since 1979 he has appeared continuously as an activist, as an official of radical Palestinian groups and left-wing radical parties, such as the “Arab Workers' Union”, the “Palestine Democratic Committee” or the rather sectarian communist party “MLPD”.

He repeatedly announced parades and anniversary events for the PFLP and Intifada. Of course, Ibrahim also maintains contacts with the Palestinian religious wing, namely Hamas.

It emerged in the Gaza Strip in the 1950s as a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood - in a sense, an Islamic counterforce to the secular PLO. Armed and financed by Iran and allegedly supported by Qatar and other Arab countries, Hamas organized the attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

Around 1,200 people were murdered outright; The terrorists took around 250 other Israelis hostage. Both wings, PFLP and Hamas, are in Berlin under the umbrella of a group called the “United Palestinian National Committee” (VPNK), which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has linked to Ibrahim.

This brings the historical line that began in 1926 into the present. Photos of the Neukölln Left Party's election party and Ibrahim celebrating with them caused a stir after the 2026 House of Representatives election.

He was photographed with Bundestag member Ferat Koçak and Vanessa Emde, who won the direct mandate in the Neukölln 1 constituency in the House of Representatives election.

Although the Left Party and its protagonists firmly deny that they are anti-Semitic, they do not deny the anti-Zionism that goes with it. Guy Goldstein and Alex Steinman write, alluding to the NSDAP/AO's letter to Berlin at the time: "This strategy, written in 1933, is still in force today." The SPD and the Greens should take a close look at who might have a say in the coalition negotiations without actually sitting at the table.