In this brief interview, Martin Cüppers refers to Islamic antisemitism in Germany as a “reimport.” That terse designation builds on his core thesis that during the 1930s Nazi Germany exported its particular brand of antisemitism, with all its uncompromising viciousness, to the Arab world, where it spread and festered and eventually came to define the Arab–Israeli conflict. With the considerable immigration from the Arab world into Germany, especially after 2015, this same Nazi legacy has returned to Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany, which made serious efforts to develop a memory culture and to face up to the German culpability for the Shoah, had in effect opened its doors to carriers of some of the same Nazi values that it had done its best to overcome. The refugees from the Arab world were Germany’s own “return of the repressed.”
Cüppers’s argument about Nazi ideology as a source for Palestinian and more broadly Arab antisemitism is part of a larger body of scholarship that includes the publications by Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Elham Manea in particular. Thanks to this research, the claim has become incontrovertible that Nazi Germany played a significant role in shaping the ideology of the Arab–Israeli conflict in ways that continue today and that explain the unique brutality of the October 7 Hamas attacks as well as the aspiration for a massive elimination of Jews from the region. It is exactly that which finds expression in the frequent call for Arab Palestine––فلسطين عربية—which means Arabs only, and no one else (one looks in vain in the founding documents of the PLO or Hamas for any commitment to minority rights).
