The Jewish owner of an Israeli-style restaurant in Munich was forced to close his eatery due to rising anti-Semitic pressures, Benjamin Weinthal reported Sunday in The Jerusalem Post.
Florian Gleibs said he shuttered the Schmock Israeli restaurant after 16 years last week in response to growing agitation against the Jewish state in the German capital, which increased after the 2014 war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
“People from the educated, well-off middle class have decided to hold me responsible as a representative of Israel, according to the motto: ‘What you people are doing is nothing different than what we Germans did back then [in the Holocaust],” Gleibs told the daily paper Die Welt.
Gleibs, who is not Israeli, tried to avoid the hostility by placing a sign in the restaurant window that cautioned: “We are not involved with politics.” However, he said he continued to be targeted.
He told Die Welt that he “sees antisemitism as more emotional now than before [the 2014 war].” Gleibs recounted that people have approached him “on the streets screaming ‘Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come here and fight alone.’” This phenomenon was described by the paper as “antisemitism” that is “disguised as criticism of Israel.”
This characterization was supported by Markus Schäfert, the spokesman for Bavaria’s domestic intelligence agency, roughly the equivalent of the FBI, who said that “anti-Zionist antisemitism pretends to criticize Israel but, in fact, rejects Israel’s existence.”
Charlotte Knobloch, the chairwoman of Munich’s Jewish community and a Holocaust survivor, told the Post last month that the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel “disguises the socially unacceptable ‘Don’t buy from Jews!’ as a modernised form of Nazi jargon by demanding ‘Don’t buy from the Jewish state.’”
BDS leaders have repeatedly affirmed that their campaign does not simply protest Israeli policies, but seeks to dismantle the state altogether. BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti, an opponent of the two-state solution, said in 2014 that Palestinians have a right to “resistance by any means, including armed resistance,” while leading activist As’ad Abu Khalil acknowledged in 2012 that “the real aim of BDS is to bring down the state of Israel.”
[Photo: Schmock-muenchen]