Hyper-Zionism

Germany remains unmatched across Europe in its unconditional support for the Israeli state. Since October 7, 2023, the German state has particularly distinguished itself in its brutal repression of anyone who dares to speak out against Israel's crimes in Palestine. What is going on? In this urgent collection, leading authors including Hans Kundnani, Nahed Samour, Adam Tooze, and Dirk Moses, explore Germany's pathological commitment to the state of Israel. The book investigates the many levels at which Germany's "hyper-Zionism" operates, with essays on the country's memory culture - Erinnerungskultur - around the Holocaust and its effect on Arab and Muslim Germans, the state's protection of Israel as a foundational staatsr-son, and the self-destruction of German cultural institutions in the name of defending Israel. The collection also probes the twin phenomena of philo- and antisemitism that permeate contemporary German institutions. The situation in Germany reverberates across Europe and beyond. Hyper-Zionism shows how history, politics and bad faith conspire to create a stifling culture of suppression, silencing and violence.

Hans Kundnani is an Open Society Ideas Workshop fellow and a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany's 1968 Generation and the Holocaust, and The Paradox of German Power. He is a columnist for the New Statesman and also writes for Dissent, the Times Literary Supplement and Foreign Affairs.