Pressure builds on German Fridays for Future over Greta Thunberg’s Gaza claims

Pressure is building on the German branch of the climate action group Fridays for Future (FFF) to break with activist Greta Thunberg after her organisation described Israel as an apartheid state perpetrating genocide in Gaza.

German FFF said it had not been informed in advance of a post from the organisation’s international Instagram account this week, accusing Israel of “75 years of oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.

The post accused western media of failing to report on “how many Gazans, half of whom are children, are martyred EVERY day by Israeli strikes and that, right now, Israel is bombing everything BUT Hamas”.

German FFF head Luisa Neubauer insisted on Friday that the international organisation did not speak for all national organisations, which are organised autonomously at local level.

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“No, we do not agree with the content,” Ms Neubauer (27) wrote on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, days after speaking of her “horror” at the Hamas attacks during a pro-Israel gathering at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

A day after the October 7th attack, German FFF said it was “outraged” by the “unprecedented Hamas terror against Israel” and urged supporters to attend solidarity marches. The organisation has also adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”.

The IHRA adds that “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti-Semitic”.

This week’s Israel-critical remarks are not the first from the international FFF organisation and, after similar comments in the past, Ms Neubauer said “there’s little more we can do than distance ourselves”.

Leading Jewish organisations disagree. The Central Council of Jews in Germany suggested on Friday that the German FFF branch should force a “real decoupling”, including a name change, from the international organisation.

“One expects nothing more from Fridays for Future International than crude distortion of history, demonisation of Israel and now conspiracy ideology,” said Josef Schuster, council chairman.

The three weeks since the October 7th Hamas attack have seen cracks emerge not just with the FFF Swedish founder and her “Free Gaza” campaign but also internally with its own German members.

On her personal social media, German FFF spokeswoman Elisa Bas claimed a “pogrom mood” existed towards Palestinians in Germany and protested about “genocide and those who are forced to remain silent about genocide”.

[ How attitudes to Israel are shifting – and hardening – in the wider German population ]

German politicians have joined calls for the German FFF to break with the Thunberg group. For Marcel Emmerich, a leading Green MP, the international FFF organisation is “spreading the worst kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories ... that one can only feel ill”.

Germany’s Bild tabloid suggested that Ms Thunberg had undergone a “bitter moral collapse” by adopting “martyr” language of Islamists and conspiracy theories about co-ordinated mass media lies.

“Luisa Neubauer and Greta Thunberg’s shared path must end here,” it argued. “Anything else would be poison: for their credibility, for climate protection, and above all for the intellectual climate of young people in Germany.”