Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner on Tuesday said US President Donald Trump’s heavily criticized plan to rebuild Gaza and resettle Palestinians deserves a “closer look.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong to think radically and in a completely new way,” Felix Klein told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung newspaper.
The commissioner argued that Trump does not want to drive out Palestinians, but only to resettle them while Gaza is rebuilt.
“After all, you don’t sleep in your house while you’re renovating it, and the massive destruction basically calls for the comprehensive construction of a completely new infrastructure,” said Klein.
His comments were immediately disowned by Germany’s Interior Ministry, which Klein’s office is a part of.
Klein “did not speak for the federal government, but expressed his personal opinion,” a spokesman for the ministry told dpa.
That commissioner wouldn’t happen to be a member of AfD would he?
Also for his analogy to make sense the plan would have to include handing Gaza back to the Palestinians after it was rebuilt, not giving it to a bunch of Jewish settlers and rich foreigners.
AFAIK he is not member of any party. He was given this office in 2018, by the CDU/SPD coalition government and has lasted since. Before that he was a career diplomat in the foreign ministry. Unfortunately he is quite emblematic for how quickly the supposed center of German politics are willing to be in defiance of international law, the German constitution and basic human rights, when it comes to Israel.
Klein also belongs to the people that try to shift the blame for Antisemitism in Germany from the predominant far right and Nazi perpetrators onto “Leftists” and “Islamists”. For a more throughout analysis of the absurdity of the “Anti-Antisemitism” comissioner system in Germany i can always recommend this article from the Jewish Currents:
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-strange-logic-of-germanys-antisemitism-bureaucrats
A lot of his plans deserve a closer look but I guess that’s not going to happen for at least four years.
His plans don’t deserve any attention at all. They should all be discarded out of hand.
A lot weren’t discarded out of hand, so they deserve a closer look by a criminal court.