Israeli Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor warned on Tuesday of an “immediate threat to the existence” of the Jewish community in Berlin following a far-left party’s election victory in Berlin a regional election that underlined growing polarization in German society.
“The strong showing of Die Linke Party in the Berlin election should worry everyone who cares about the continued existence of Jewish life in this city,” Prosor told the dpa German press agency. “The completely uninhibited antisemitism that has broken out in this party takes on a new political dimension with its rise to become the leading force” in the Berlin area, he continued. For the Jewish community in Berlin, this transforms a theoretical threat into “a concrete and immediate existential danger,” he said.
The leader of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, meanwhile, urged political parties in Berlin to exclude Die Linke even though it achieved unprecedented gains in a regional election.
“I appeal to the SPD and the Greens not to help this party into Berlin’s City Hall,” the council’s president, Josef Schuster, wrote in a statement that his office shared with JNS on Tuesday.
Schuster’s statement was a call to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Green Party to exclude Die Linke from any coalition agreement. The party for the first time won the largest share of the vote in the elections for Berlin’s state parliament on Sunday, with 25.7%. Schuster said Die Linke has “repeatedly crossed the line into antisemitism.”
In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a northeastern state of Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) right-wing party won with 38.2%. The council has consistently called for excluding AfD from government, citing the proliferation of antisemitic incidents within that party’s ranks.
In his warning about Die Linke, Schuster noted a performance last month during a Die Linke campaign event featuring the rapper Dahabflex in Berlin’s Neukölln district. The rapper chanted: “Yallah, Yallah, Intifada” and “Death to the IDF.”
Schuster said he was “deeply concerned” about “the fact that a party whose campaign stage was used to openly call for people’s deaths has emerged victorious.” Die Linke’s assurances that it opposes antisemitism, Schuster added, “are nothing more than lip service. The party no longer has any credibility in combating the hatred of Jews that it tolerates and allows to flourish unchecked within its own ranks.”
Earlier this month, Prosor urged Germans to recognize left-wing antisemitism.
“Germany looks to the right. It must not be blind in its left eye,” Prosor wrote on X. “The danger of right-wing extremism is obvious. It is discussed, named, and condemned. Left-wing antisemitism deserves exactly the same clarity,” he added.
Berlin state chairwoman of Die Linke, Kerstin Wolter, told dpa following Prosor’s warning: “I reject, with all due courtesy and clarity, the accusation of ‘completely uninhibited’ and ‘systematic’ antisemitism in our party, as made by Ambassador Prosor.” She added: “Israel’s right to exist and the protection of Jewish life are clear positions of the Left Party. And that is precisely what we will advocate for.”
Last year, Die Linke Party bosses in Berlin, where the party has one of its strongest bases of support nationally, submitted a draft resolution they said would serve as a compromise between anti-Israel members who accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and of being an apartheid state, and members who reject these criticisms.
The draft did not explicitly classify Israel’s actions as genocide, but accused the Israeli government of the most serious war crimes, Die Welt reported, and demanded trials against the “main perpetrators of this war” as well as “reparations” to be paid by Israel and its allies, including Germany. The party subsequently adopted a compromise resolution, while sponsors withdrew several harsher proposals.
The party’s chapter for youths and young adults in Berlin adopted a vehemently anti-Israel resolution a month before the Berlin party branch passed its compromise.
Die Linke Youth claimed in the resolution that a “destruction of the Palestinian people by the Israeli state” was underway. It continued: “Confronted with genocide, we as a left-wing youth organization have failed to acknowledge the colonial and racist character of the Israeli state project, which from its beginnings to the present day is expressed in the conquest of new territories and the expulsion of their inhabitants,” as well as “to unequivocally name and condemn the crimes of the Israeli state, from the apartheid system to the genocide in Gaza.”
