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German cultural institutions, together worth a billion euros in taxpayers' money, reported this year for the Hanukkah festival, the Jewish festival of lights, theatrically claiming that censorship and self-censorship had prevailed in the country since the Bundestag demanded that anti-Semitism and anti-Israel boycotts not be promoted by the state.
Absurd enough - even if the princes of the German cultural landscape emphasized with their “Initiative GG 5.3 cosmopolitanism”, they did not want to boycott themselves, but only to work with anti-Israel boycotters.
For Christmas, some important Christian institutions have now raised their voices and linked and interwoven the boycott of Israel with the good news of Christmas.
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Marc Frings, General Secretary of the Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), rejoices on Twitter: “It's great how initiative GG 5.3 Open-mindedness has put BDS back on the agenda.” Mind you, he wants to see the boycott (BDS) on the agenda, not the one engage in critical dialogue with boycotters.
That may be surprising for the ZdK, but less so for Mr. Frings.
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In his previous work for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Ramallah, he never tired of promoting representatives of the Kairos-Palestine Document, which combines BDS with traditional elements of Christian-anti-Judaist disinheritance theology - like the Lutheran pastor at the Christmas Church in Bethlehem, Mitri Raheb.
Theology professors such as the Stegemann brothers criticized the “de-Judgment” of Jesus in Raheb's theology.
In 1965 Rome readjusted the relationship to non-Christian religions with the declaration Nostra aetate of the Second Vatican Council.
In 1986 Pope John Paul II spoke of the "older", "preferred brothers" and the "bond [of the Church] to Judaism".
It was believed that only the integristic circles around the Pius Brothers were mistaken on this question.
Now the Central Committee must also be asked what its attitude towards the Jewish and democratic state and the Jews is.
Who exactly is to be released?
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The Jerusalem Association of the Evangelical Church does it even better.
On the side of the venerable association, which owes its legal capacity to a cabinet order from the King of Prussia of August 11, 1868 for the purpose of representing the German Evangelical Church in the Holy Land, the “Christmas call of the Kairos-Palestine campaign” is distributed.
The 2009 Kairos-Palestine Document is theologically and politically unacceptable.
It plays with the ambiguity of which Israeli-occupied Arab country is to be liberated: areas beyond the 1949 armistice line or at least the entire national territory from Haifa to Eilat, and it disguises the fact that the occupation was preceded by Arab aggression against Israel.
It ignores any Palestinian responsibility, but not only calls for a boycott against Israel, but above all is completely out of the question theologically.
With the term revolution, it claims a break with the biblical-Jewish tradition: Jesus brought "a new teaching" regarding "subjects like the promises, the election, the people of God and the land".
The exegetical criticism rightly raised in the paper against biblically founded political claims is reduced to absurdity by this formulation.
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It is a theology that has strange echoes of the theology of German Christians.
No, not every supporter of BDS is anti-Semitic, the campaign is in terms of means and effects.
If it is amalgamated with old anti-Judaist theology, it becomes finally toxic.
At the Jerusalem Association, the Christian Christmas message turns into a BDS appeal: The Norwegian pastor Rostrup undertakes to “ensure the transmission of the good news ... with the new and different logic of love through boycotts, de-investment and sanctions act".
Jews as Christ murderers
This writing is also rich in anti-Judaism.
The Arab theologian Al Khouri recounts: “God made three gentile sages to follow a star to witness a miraculous event that would change the course of history.
While the ancient Jews were blind to see the signs of heaven and to recognize the birth of their king, God opened the eyes of the Arab-Nabatean sages “- combined with the little-claused theological-political reproach to Israel that it became the wisdom of the wise to this day to ignore it.
Jewish blindness to the Christian message, a classic Christian anti-Jewish sermon.
Church father Justin cursed the Jews as Christ murderers and interpreted the loss of statehood and the land of Israel for the Jewish people - after the destruction of Jerusalem and the failure of the Bar Kochba uprising - as real, visible evidence of the theological judgment of the rejection of Israel.
Martin Luther, too, triumphantly claimed the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem as evidence of the erroneous belief of the Jews.
For centuries, actually until 1948, this shaped the teaching of the Christian churches.
Since then, some of the Christians have simply not been able to stop their anti-Israel activities in spite of Protestant synodal resolutions to the contrary and despite Vatican II.
One wanted more clarity and consistency from the church leaders.
Volker Beck, formerly MP of the Greens, is a lecturer at the Center for Religious Studies (Ceres) at the Ruhr University in Bochum.