Anti-Israel group accuses Buchenwald Memorial of 'repression against solidarity with Palestine'

The anti-Israel and anti-Zionist group Kufiyas Network is reportedly planning to hold a keffiyeh protest outside the Buchenwald concentration camp after the former Nazi concentration camp imposed a ban on “pro-Palestinian” symbols frequently linked to violence and threats against Jews worldwide. The far-left anti-Zionist group has accused the memorial site of "massively intensifying repression against solidarity with Palestine."

The protest is scheduled for April 11–12 and is organized by radical far-left groups including the Kufiya Network, Jüdische Stimme (Jewish Voice), and Palästina-Solidarität Köln. The network describes itself as an initiative composed of queer people, Jews, and anti-fascists. However, its small Jewish contingent does not enjoy support from the vast majority of Jews in Germany.

The group decided to organize the protest after one of its members, Anna, was reportedly banned from visiting the concentration camp for wearing a keffiyeh. 

Last August, a German court ruled to uphold the ban on the keffiyeh scarf at the Buchenwald Memorial. The decision was made after members of a radical communist German organization praised the Hamas Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis and tried to undermine the Holocaust memorial by making false comparisons between the Holocaust of six million Jews and the Hamas-initiated war in Gaza. 

The Kuffiyas claims that Buchenwald has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial,” inaccurately equating Israeli defense operations against the genocidal terrorist organization Hamas with “genocide.” The radical group also claims that Buchenwald “consistently spread Israeli propaganda and provided ideological support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

However, the accusations are not supported by facts on the ground. Buchenwald does not engage in politics and focuses on its mission to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities. 

The anti-Zionist group further argued that Buchenwald has “cynically linked” the keffiyeh to German fascism and antisemitism, “therefore relativizing and whitewashing German responsibility for the genocide of European Jews by shifting it onto the Palestinians.”

The group also claimed that at the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald in April 2025, the Jewish philosopher Omri Böhm was “disinvited under pressure from the Israeli embassy for having criticized Zionism and the genocide in Gaza.”

The anti-Zionist group went even further, claiming that Buchenwald’s ban on the keffiyeh has been implemented in order to “ideologically justify Germany’s renewed participation in genocide – and to do so in a place where genocide was committed 81 years ago.”

“We are concerned that attempts are being made to inappropriately exploit the commemoration,” explained a spokesperson for the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in an interview with the German site NZZ. 

It has become a central feature in contemporary antisemitism to demonize Israel by falsely equating the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. 

In October 2024, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) condemned the anti-Israel and antisemitic UN official Francesca Albanese for comparing Israel with Nazi Germany. 

“The constant statements made by [Albanese] comparing Israel to Nazi Germany are not only deeply offensive, but a gross distortion of history,” the WJC stated. 

Earlier this month, France urged the UN to fire Albanese after she described Israel as an “enemy of humanity” at an Al Jazeera forum, using classic antisemitic descriptions of Jews. 

A growing number of countries, including France, have condemned Albanese’s antisemitism and called for her resignation. 

“By recently describing Israel as an ‘enemy of humanity,’ she has crossed an additional threshold, fitting into rhetoric that constitutes contemporary forms of antisemitism,” the French lawmaker Caroline Yadan stated.