AfD party split on Israel-Jews see them as danger either way

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As millions of German voters head for the polls on Sunday, pollsters predict historic success for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party. Since its inception in 2013, the AfD has been plagued by antisemitic incidents and the leadership appears to be split over its attitude towards Israel and the war in Gaza.

This struggle within the AfD came to light in October last year, when parliamentarian and AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla criticized Chancellor Olaf Scholz for his ongoing support for Israel in the form of weapons exports to the Jewish state.

“With your delivery of weapons to Israel you accept the dehumanization of all civilian deaths on both sides,” accused Chrupalla. “You are not contributing to de-escalation, but instead you throw oil on the fire.”

The AfD chairman criticized “exclusive declarations of solidarity” towards Israel and “one-sided party standpoints.” Yet in the same speech, Chrupalla declared himself to be a supporter of Israel’s right to self-defense.

His remarks led to a storm of indignation within the AfD itself. The right-wing populist party has from the get-go presented itself as a strong ally of Israel. In 2019, it demanded a complete and enforceable ban on all Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activity in Germany. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror onslaught in southern Israel, the first press release by the AfD in the Bundestag stated: “Israel and the Jewish people can count on our full solidarity.”

However, geopolitical developments seem to have caused a break from this self-proclaimed solidarity. The AfD distinguishes itself from the governing social democrats, greens and liberals as well as from the opposition Christian democrats by being strongly pro-Moscow. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin is allied with Israel’s archenemy Iran, some in the AfD leadership are now pivoting away from their traditional pro-Israeli stance.

This in turn has led to harsh criticism from fellow AfD brass. On the basis of anonymity, several high-ranked party officials attacked their chairman in Welt magazine.

ne anonymous AfD parliamentarian called it “left-wing pacifist nonsense”. “It would be refreshing if Chrupalla just once would take a position on foreign policy that differs from Moscow’s,” they added.

Other AfD members wondered whether it would be smart to take a line on the Israeli-Arab conflict that is almost identical to that of the German extreme left.

But Chrupalla is not the sole AfD voice with anti-Israel views on the war in Gaza. Jürgen Pohl, a member of the federal parliament in Berlin from the eastern German region of Thuringia and often a mouthpiece of the white nationalist wing of the AfD, supported his chairman in words that are virtually indistinguishable from those used by the European anti-Zionist left: “Israel is allowed to do anything, the others nothing, and we are supposed to support that.” Pohl also said that “the genocide” in Gaza needs to be stopped.

A long history of antisemitism
The split inside the AfD is one between a conservative wing that wants to free itself from accusations of antisemitism — not unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France — and a white nationalist faction that is rooted mostly in the eastern regions of the former communist German Democratic Republic. Many of the hardliners have a history in other extreme right-wing and neo-Nazi organizations.

AfD has a long list of antisemitic incidents since its founding in 2013. One of many examples is Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who since 2016 has been a member of parliament in the eastern region of Sachsen-Anhalt. In 2018, Tillschneider said that the Central Council of Jews in Germany is “using Islam to bring about multicultural relations.” Most instances of this replacement migration theory aren’t quite as explicitly anti-Jewish; often dog-whistles such as “globalist elites” are used instead.

In 2021, Bavarian AfD activist Stefan Bauer compared coronavirus vaccines to the Zyklon-B gas used by the Nazis to exterminate European Jews during the Holocaust. While Bauer was unceremoniously kicked out of the party, Tillschneider is still a member of the Sachsen-Anhalt regional parliament. He recently compared Israel’s methods in its war against Hamas in Gaza to the Holocaust.

The most well-known antisemitic incident within the AfD is the infamous “Dresden speech” that Björn Höcke delivered in 2017. Höcke leads the AfD faction in Thuringia’s regional parliament and is seen as a powerhouse within the party. In a speech in the eastern city of Dresden, he spoke about the Memorial for the Murder Jews of Europe in Berlin. “Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of its capital,” said Höcke, who later tried to convince the outraged German press that he used the word “shame” to describe the Holocaust, not the monument.

The party’s new ‘moderate’ face
Enter Alice Weidel, AfD’s top candidate in Sunday’s election. Unlike her co-chairman Chrupalla who hails from the relatively less well-off eastern region of Saxony, Weidel was born in Baden-Würtemberg, a wealthy southwestern region of Germany.

Weidel has helmed the AfD since 2017, when she became co-chair alongside Alexander Gauland. Seen as another member of the extremist white nationalist wing of the party, Gauland, who was born in the eastern city of Chemnitz, supported Höcke after his Dresden speech but lost his parliamentary immunity in 2020 when he was indicted for tax fraud.

Weidel leads the AfD’s more moderate wing, which includes ongoing support for Israel, as she expressed in an interview with Elon Musk, who has been promoting the AfD on his social media platform X. “Only AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote in December.

Weidel expressed her ongoing support for the Jewish state, but at the same time was criticized for what many Germans labeled “historical revisionism.” Addressing claims that her party was a National Socialist reincarnation, Weidel declared that the AfD is the opposite of the Nazi party, since according to her Hitler was a “socialist.” Historians were quick to point out that Hitler imprisoned tens of thousands of communists, social democrats and trade unionists in concentration camps.

The apparent conflict between Weidel’s pro-Israel stance and Chrupalla’s Moscow-aligned dalliance with anti-Zionism has likely come too late to persuade German voters to turn away from the AfD. For months the party has been hovering at around 20% popularity in the polls, double what it achieved in the 2021 federal elections. Garnering one-fifth of the electorate would make the AfD the second-largest party in parliament, behind only the center-right Christian democrats, whose leader Friedrich Merz has ruled out working together with the AfD in a coalition government.

It would be a historic result; not since the Nazis in the 1930s has a far-right German party achieved such a substantial share of the vote — the reason for the Central Council of Jews in Germany to label both the AfD and the radical left-wing Sahra Wagenknecht Coalition, or BSW party, “a danger” to the Jewish community. Council president Josef Schuster complains that “right-wing antisemitism and left-wing Israel-hatred find a home in the AfD and BSW.”

BSW, which split from another far-left party, Die Linke, hovers around the electoral threshold of 5% in the polls.

That Schuster’s warning can hardly be regarded as excessive is confirmed by findings of the Bundesambt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV, Germany’s national intelligence service.

Since 2021, the BfV has put the AfD under suspicion of right-wing extremism, both because of its ideology and its contacts with known neo-Nazis. One report by the BfV consisted of 52 pages listing antisemitic incidents within the party. The intelligence service labeled Der Flügel (“The Wing”), a white nationalist group within AfD led by Björn Höcke, as a “certified right-wing extremist attempt against the free democratic order” in Germany.

The same label was attached to the Junge Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD’s youth movement. Only in January this year did the party leadership disassociate itself from the party’s extremist youth in an attempt to present itself as more socially acceptable.

Judging by the poll numbers, Weidel and the more moderate wing of AfD have succeeded in offering themselves as a viable alternative for voters worried by mass immigration and a looming economic crisis.

It's kind of weird seeing Palestinians, young college kids and neo-Nazis walking together in unison to protest Israel.

As has been often pointed out what is weird is seeing some LBGTQ+ advocacy organizations not only protesting Israel but supporting Hamas.

It seems that if you want to unite groups with seemingly intractable differences have Jews move in.

Yep. Right-wing ideology trying to run in 2 opposite directions at the same time. It's a bit like that with immigration - half the righties want to chuck them all out, the other half want them to stay and drive pay and working conditions down.

Yep. Right-wing ideology trying to run in 2 opposite directions at the same time. It's a bit like that with immigration - half the righties want to chuck them all out, the other half want them to stay and drive pay and working conditions down.