On June 27 of this year, the Act to Modernise Nationality Law came into force in Germany. “Well- integrated” foreigners (a liberal racist euphemism for “assimilated beyond recognition”) can now obtain German citizenship after five years of residence instead of eight and do not have to give up their previous citizenship anymore, according to a press release published on the Federal Interior Ministry’s website.

However, in order to acquire the much sought-after German nationality, which comes in second place in this year’s Henley Passport Index, the applicant cannot express “racism, antisemitism or any other form of hatred,” the news release goes on to say.

Weaponising citizenship

What sounds like a reasonable demand has a more guileful back story, given the fact that a key motive behind this post-October 7 legislative overhaul has been the weaponisation of immigration against Palestine solidarity in the service of "Israel’s" ongoing colonial genocide in Gaza.

Germany’s revamped citizenship law now requires applicants to declare their belief in "Israel’s" right to exist, making the Federal Republic the only country in the world where one has to pledge loyalty to a foreign country in order to become naturalised. Failure to comply can lead to one's application being rejected.

The Interior Ministry’s public service announcement conveniently omits the Zionist motivation behind the new law, not once mentioning "Israel". Instead, it refers to an applicant’s commitment “to upholding the values of a free society”, going on to say that “[a]cts motivated by racism, antisemitism or other forms of contempt for human dignity are incompatible with the guarantee of human dignity enshrined in Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law.”

Since "Israel" began its apocalyptic campaign of death and destruction in Gaza, the “fight against antisemitism” has become synonymous with anti-Palestinian repression in Germany. The conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism is intentional and based on the notorious IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates targeted criticism of "Israel" with universalist Jew-hatred.

In post-October 7 Germany, this politicised and increasingly institutionalised interpretation of what constitutes anti-Jewish animus has become the weapon of choice for the German government and its stenographers in the mainstream media in their crusade to silence those who call for an immediate end to "Israel’s" genocidal frenzy in Gaza.

Denying someone citizenship and thereby preventing them from becoming a full-fledged member of society on the basis of their refusal to accept a settler colonial apartheid entity’s right to exist on the ethnically cleansed ancestral lands of an Indigenous people is just another excessive move in the German government’s desperate attempts to stem the tide of solidarity for the Palestinian cause.

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German McCarthyism

Weeding out anti-Zionists who, once naturalised, will have the right to vote which in turn could help change the hegemonic political discourse with regards to Palestine/"Israel" for the better, is the latest expression of Germany’s McCarthyist climate of fear and denunciation, with Germany’s local foreigner registration offices acting in a persecutory manner reminiscent of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the Second Red Scare in the US.

While the Interior Ministry PSA does not mention "Israel" by name, Germany’s updated naturalisation tests do not even try to hide their fanatic pro-"Israel" bias. Of the seven grossly invasive and wildly offensive gotcha questions that feature in the “Declaration of Loyalty and Acknowledgement” segment of a citizenship questionnaire made public on social media by a Hamburg-based law firm that specialises in migration law, five were transparently geared towards unearthing an applicant’s anti-Zionist proclivities:

“What are your views on the antisemitic and anti-Israel rallies and riots that have taken place in Germany and in other states?”

“What are your views on Israel’s rights [plural?] to exist?”

“In December 2017, thousands of people protested in Berlin with slogans such as 'Hamas, Hamas, gas the Jews.' What are your views on that?”

“Recently, a SWR [regional public broadcaster] presenter called for the boycott of products manufactured in Israel. What are your views on that?”

“According to surah 3,75 of the Qur’an, Jews are crooks, according to surah 3,78 they are liars, according to surah 4,160 they are devious usurpers, according to surah 5,64 they are war mongers. What are your views on these text passages?”

Far from possessing the integrity to truthfully paraphrase Quranic verses, notice how those whose orientalist hermeneutics have fabricated this racist nonsense do not even know how to cite a religious text properly, using a comma instead of a colon.

States have no inherent right to exist

In the case of a Palestinian man whose citizenship application was rejected because he, according to the minutes of a hearing he was summoned to by Bavaria’s domestic intelligence agency, said, “There is no Israel. There are Jews, but not Israel as a country,” when asked if he recognised "Israel" as a sovereign state, an administrative court ruled that naturalisation is to be denied if "Israel’s" right to exist is rejected by the applicant.

The court would do well to heed the words of international human rights lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese:

“There is no such thing in international law like a right of a state to exist. Does Italy have a right to exist? Italy exists! If tomorrow, Italy and France want to merge and become Ita-France, fine. This is not up to us,” Albanese told a reporter from the right-wing Toronto Sun. “What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

By forcing citizenship applicants to accept what Ghada Karmi in her latest book refers to as “a colonial state in occupation of the totality of historic Palestine”, the German government has come up with a creative, yet cruel way to safeguard the country’s "Israel"-deifying Staatsräson for years to come.