‘Acting Like a Law’: Regulating ‘Care’ Through Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution
By Sophia Hoffinger
In May 2019, the German Parliament (Bundestag) passed a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a campaign initiated in 2005 by Palestinian civil society actors to pressure Israel into complying with international law. The resolution passed with the support of all major political parties, except for Die Linke and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The latter had initiated the process of formulating a resolution on BDS in the first place, but one demanding an outright ban on BDS. The final resolution described BDS as an expression of both old and contemporary antisemitism: for the parliamentarians, withdrawing collective purchasing power – boycotts – constitutes a modern iteration of the 1933 Nazi boycott initiated against Jewish businesses in Germany (Kreutzmüller 2024).
Only this time, antisemitism, which many of the parliamentarians regard as inherent to the calls for a boycott, is ‘imported’ to Germany by Palestinian and other Arab migrants. The resolution postulates that no public funding should go into platforming BDS activists or those who support the goals of BDS, effectively calling for a boycott against the boycott movement. In the following months, many publicly funded institutions followed the resolution, even though the resolution does not have binding effect passed as a ‘simple’ (‘schlichte Beschlüsse’) resolution – an expression of a political stance held by Parliament, rather than be ratified in law (‘echte Beschlüsse’). The resolution was quickly adapted by institutions as if it were law, using the text to justify a number of cancellations of artists, political activists, academics, and events.
Despite Germany’s claim to having a robust and dynamic “memory culture” when it comes to the genocides committed by the Nazi regime, many criticized the resolution as a tool to censor Palestinians’ demands for an end to occupation, equal rights for all citizens, and the right to return.

For German-Palestinian lawyer, Ahmed Abed, these cancellations evidenced that the rigid application of the resolution made it act like a law. In doing so, it unjustly discriminated against proponents of a non-violent and antiracist movement, violating their fundamental rights to free speech and freedom of assembly (Article 5 and Article 8 of Germany’s Basic Law) (Samour and Abed 2021). Abed, together with three activists who came together as the Bundestags 3 for Palestine (BT3P), began a still-ongoing legal battle against the Bundestag, which insisted that the rights provided by Germany’s Basic Law also applies to their clients, who have been affected by cancellations. While Sara Ahmed has argued that most antiracist speech acts are non-performatives and do not produce the effect that they utter, this resolution was followed by a whole range of social action (Ahmed 2006).
The story of the anti-BDS resolution in Germany, which I followed during my doctoral research between 2020 and 2022, raises pertinent questions about the relationship between law, the state, and the mobilization of antiracist principles: what does the application of a non-legally binding resolution as quasi-law reveal about the underlying norms shaping perceptions of history, Palestinians, Jews, and their relationships with Germany? How does the resolution frame and recognize different iterations of racism (such as antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism) and antiracism? And what can be salvaged of Germany’s “memory culture” if it is used by the state to enact new forms of violence against new minorities? Whilst laws are coercive, I suggest that quasi-laws (Gould 2022) like the BDS resolution present a site where we can follow the iteration and sedimentation of norms, which gives insights into how care is distributed between racialized subjects in Germany. In the following section, I recount the debate around the resolution in the German Parliament, which revealed a civilizational narrative that embedded the care for Jewish life within and bound by the care for the German self. This care came not only at the expense of democratic rights of Palestinians in Germany, but facilitated a growing discourse of deportability of Palestinians as the enemy of German Staatsraison – the reason of state.
Caring States: Selective anti-Racism
On May 17, 2019, the German Parliament, the Bundestag, came together for a plenary session to discuss three proposals regarding the BDS movement. All three resolutions condemned the BDS movement as an illegitimate tactic, but they erred differently on the scale between banning the movement (proposed by the AfD), or merely condemning it and upholding the right to freedom of speech and assembly (proposed by the Left). The resolution proposed by the big coalition saw itself as somewhat in the middle, declaring to “confront the BDS movement resolutely – fighting antisemitism” without a legal ban. On the day, Claudia Roth, vice-president of the Bundestag, introduced the debate without much detail and set a debate timer of just under 30 minutes. First to take a stand at the podium was Axel Müller, speaking on behalf of the Christian Democrats, who told parliament that whilst B D S seemingly are only “three letters”, a lot more hides behind them. He continued to explain what he sees as a lack of democratic culture amongst Palestinians (“who haven’t voted in 15 years”). For the MP, the BDS movement has “unfortunately been influenced by the propaganda of the NS dictatorship.” The next speaker, a member of the far-right AfD, pushed this historical comparison further and claimed that “BDS prepares for the “Endlösung” (final solution), but this time in the Middle East. […] It [BDS] smells like 1933.” Closing the debate, Social Democrat Helge Lindh refers to the demands made by BDS as “the highest form of historical insensibility,” insinuating that – rather than hurting Jews, BDS hurts Germans. Indeed, the resolution that was passed emphasized that it was in the service of protecting Jewish life in Germany and German Staatsraison – at the core of which lies Israel’s security. Yet, such an articulation of the reason of state also serves German state building interests.
During the debate, articulations of a German responsibility to fight antisemitism qua BDS not only depicted the boycott movement as „new Nazis,“ but further dehumanized Palestinians by reiterating the racist trope of them being undemocratic in contrast to the irreproachable democratic nature of the Israeli state. One independent MP called Palestinian refugees an “invention,” seeking to discredit BDS’ insistence of the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Such entangled expressions of dehumanization, victim blaming (insinuating Palestinians are at fault for their oppression because they are undemocratic), and denial of Palestinians’ experience (such as exile) form part of a larger matrix of anti-Palestinian racism, according to Yasmeen Abu Laban and Abigail Bakan (2022). The care for antisemitism thus came at the expense of a more passable expression of anti-Palestinian racism, ordering the two racisms hierarchically. Whilst comparisons between BDS and Nazism from the far-right AfD were particularly ironic, the entire political spectrum debating the proposed resolutions upheld the value of Jewish life, whilst swaying on the side of Palestinians’. For decolonial scholar Alana Lentin, “a proxification of antiracism that can be observed in the current performative preoccupation with antisemitism obscures the workings of race further still.” (Lentin 2020: 135). At the Bundestag, we could observe how care for antisemitism was deeply intertwined with a care for the German self. BDS was depicted as “the highest form of historical insensibility,” which turned Germans into victims of Palestinians’ demands for freedom.
Acting like a Law
“I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about it: my hands are tied.” Hilla sits opposite me in the corner of a small café in Berlin, her hands held up next to her face, palms facing me. Hilla is a German-Jewish artist and performer, who has long been part of various Jewish solidarity groups with Palestine in Germany, including one that had their bank account cancelled twice over the group’s BDS-support. Behind the thick black frames of her glasses, her warm brown eyes take on a questioning, critical look. “But who is tying your hands?” she asks me rhetorically. In front of me, Hilla re-enacts a scene that she experienced with the organizer of an event, who invited her to perform in Munich in 2017, only to then disinvite her, citing the Munich’s non-binding resolution on BDS. Hilla’s act underlines the agency that individuals, like the event organizer who disinvited her, relinquish to the sovereign pretensions of the quasi law. In this way, ordinary citizens participate in perpetuating the script that allows the resolution to act like a law, claiming that they are bound by the rules set by the rule of law. During our conversation, she tells me of the hundreds of emails that flooded the organizers’ inbox, asking them to disinvite Hilla. Printed out, the emails fill a whole binder. “You can come and do some antisemitism research at this archive,” she jokes. Asking Who ties your hands asks about the coercive power of non-legal BDS resolutions and what makes people follow them. It punctuates the murky space where law and norms become conflated and individual agency is rescinded to the force of quasi laws to legitimize non-legal forms of exclusion.
With reference to the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, Rebecca Gould argues that quasi-laws “seek to regulate the social order in morally relevant ways” (Gould 2022: 156). Their implementations, when lacking legal legitimacy, open up avenues for liberal states to curtail civil liberties, such as free speech, in subtle ways. She explains that enacting quasi-laws, like the IHRA definition and BDS resolutions, rests on “proxies of the state” who “pursue their agendas through threats of legal prosecution, borrowing from the coercive force of law, while lacking democratic legitimacy.” (ibid). In Germany, these proxies of the state who allow BDS resolutions to act like law, come in the shape of federal government and state commissioners for Jewish Life and the Fight against Antisemitism (Antisemitismusbeauftragte). This new group of technocrats were tasked with identifying, reporting, and potentially persecuting antisemitic crimes. In a report published by the Jewish Currents magazine in 2023, Peter Kuras shows that despite the commissoners’ mandate to identify antisemitic incidents, few have special expertise in the field of antisemitism or Holocaust studies, they receive no training prior to taking up their role, and none of the appointed commissioners are Jewish. Citing an interview he did with Felix Klein, the federal antisemitism commissioner, the last point is a deliberate choice. As Klein explains:
“The fight against antisemitism is a problem for the whole of society. It isn’t a problem for the Jewish community to face by itself […]. I mean, it’s not as though the most pressing problem with antisemitism in Germany is among Jews.” (ibid).
The first of which took up office after a group of antisemitism experts produced a 312-page long report for the German Parliament, detailing the challenges they saw in preventing antisemitism. Crucially, this report hinged predominantly on the notion of a “new antisemitism,” – a form of antisemitism that, according to proponents of the theory, increasingly took shape after the second intifada, and which had Israel – understood here as representing Jews collectively, as its target. Through the notion of ‘new antisemitism,’ Brian Klug (2003) claims, Muslims and Arabs became the new “locus classicus” of antisemitism. From the ‘new antisemitism’ the idea of ‘imported antisemitism’ was derived, which has gained momentum over the last few years and painted migrants who came in the wake of the 2015 mass movements as Trojan horses and harbingers of new antisemitisms (Özyürek 2016).
Postulating that the new antisemitic threat is being ‘imported’ also implies that it can be deported. Threats of deportations have become particularly salient after Hamas’ attack on October 7, and the subsequent genocidal retaliation by the Israeli state, which saw hundreds of people protesting on Sonnenallee in Berlin, a street colloquially known as “Arab Street.” Despite continuous police bans on Palestine protests, curtailing the Right of Assembly since the Nakba Day 2022, a commemorative day held on May 15 to remember the catastrophic forced expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, inhabitants of Berlin kept returning to the streets in protest, risking arrest. In response to the illegalized assembling of people on Sonnenallee, chancellor Olaf Scholz declared: “We finally have to deport people more often and faster.”
Conclusion: Suspect BDS
Considering the performative power of the BDS resolution highlights what norms underwrite the German state’s efforts in managing Palestinians and Jews against the backdrop of historic responsibility. In the most recent annual report on the Protection of the Constitution, published by the federal domestic intelligence agency, BDS was listed as a “suspected extremist case” [extremistischer Verdachtsfall] and described as an expression of “secular Palestinian extremism.” Meanwhile, the right to BDS (Bot 2019) – to this day – is still pending due to the difficulty of bringing non-binding resolutions in front of constitutional courts. Legal contestations over BDS remain negotiated in administrative courts. The latest framing of BDS raises fears of further surveillance and curtailing of freedom of speech and assembly for those who support the call to boycott and opens further avenues for an outright ban on BDS. Since October 2023, many new legal cases against activists for partaking in protests and over slogans like “from the river to the sea” (Brockhaus, Düsberg, and Göllner 2024) have been seen in front of German courts. Increasingly, these court cases target people’s legal status to remain in Germany, suggesting an intensification of processes of juridification, which sees state authorities test the legal possibilities of framing BDS and popular slogans as violent speech acts, and thus illegal.
The murkiness created by the anti-BDS resolution is important to examine closely because it also sheds light on how quasi-laws could shape the conditionality of citizenship and democratic space in Germany in the not-so-distant future. In doing so, the resolution’s effects point to the stratification of violence in the name of care. From the assumed violence of a call to boycott, to the violent enactment of a border regime that threatens with deportations. The performativity of quasi-laws thus brings into starker relief the norms that shape the line between which subjects are afforded with care and which ones are excluded from the protection of the law.
In this article I highlighted the repressive character of the anti-BDS resolution. However, the anti-BDS resolution, given that it targets people beyond allegiance to the BDS movement, also bound new groups of people together. As one of my interlocutors, Rosa, whose public appearances was cancelled in 2021 over her BDS support, described it: “It’s like a rite of passage when you’re pro-Palestine in Germany.”
References
Abu‐Laban, Yasmeen, and Abigail B. Bakan. 2022. ‘Anti‐Palestinian Racism and Racial Gaslighting’. The Political Quarterly 93 (3): 508–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.13166.
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. ‘The Nonperformativity of Antiracism’. Meridians 7 (1): 104–26. https://doi.org/10.2979/MER.2006.7.1.104.
Bot, Michiel. 2019. ‘The Right to Boycott: BDS, Law, and Politics in a Global Context’. Transnational Legal Theory, September, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/20414005.2019.1672134.
Brockhaus, Robert, Benjamin Düsberg, and Nikolas Göllner. 2024. ‘Zwischen Fluss, Meer Und Strafbefehl’. https://doi.org/10.59704/f1f3ad168eb31be6.
Gould, Rebecca Ruth. 2022. ‘Legal Form and Legal Legitimacy: The IHRA Definition of Antisemitism as a Case Study in Censored Speech’. Law, Culture and the Humanities 18 (1): 153–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872118780660.
Klug, Brian. 2003. ‘The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Antisemitism’. Patterns of Prejudice 37 (2): 117–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322032000087973.
Lentin, Alana. 2020. Why Race Still Matters. Cambridge, UK Medford, MA: Polity Press.
Özyürek, Esra. 2016. ‘Export-Import Theory and the Racialization of Anti-Semitism: Turkish- and Arab-Only Prevention Programs in Germany’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (1): 40–65. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417515000560.
Samour, Nadija, and Ahmed Abed. 2021. ‘Will the German Judiciary Protect the Right to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions?’ The Palestine Yearbook of International Law Online 22 (1): 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1163/22116141_022010_006.
About the Author
Sophia Hoffinger is a researcher and anthropologist, whose work focuses on the intersections between Palestine solidarity movements in Germany, legal mobilisations, transnational racial politics and German state building. She has completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and is currently working on a monitoring project that traces repression and shrinking civic space issues in Germany.
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Citation: Sophia Hoffinger, ‘Acting Like a Law’: Regulating ‘Care’ Through Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 03.06.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/59320
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Forum Transregionale Studien (June 3, 2025). ‘Acting Like a Law’: Regulating ‘Care’ Through Germany’s Anti-BDS Resolution. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 19, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/141qc