Michael Smith:
> Sad to say, almost anything from Germany on this topic is worthless
There's no shame in not being able to read German, but if you were able to, you'd have caught this:
It's actually an attack on pro-Israel tendencies within the German left.
Still, a cursory look at her links list should've given you an indication of her politics (Norman Finkelstein, etc.)
> They're still doing penance for their grandfathers' crimes.
This is fairly ignorant of recent (West-)German history. A lot of the critical discussion of nationalism and anti-Semitism within the left since 1989 was actually formulated as a response to the implicit and explicit anti-Semitism of the 1968 generation.
Ignorant outsiders confused by pro-Israel or anti-anti-Zionist positions within the contemporary German left assume it indicates some sort of unbroken continuity of guilt and shame since 1945, when in fact the New Left of the 60s and 70s was stridently anti-Zionist, often gliding over into anti-Semitism (such as the planting of a bomb in the West Berlin Jewish Community Center by the "Tupamaros West Berlin").
anti-anti-Zionism and anti-anti-Americanism within the contemporary left in Germany is not an act of overcompensation for some perceived legacy of guilt passed down from the grandparents' generation so much as an elaborate political response to what are perceived as the political shortcomings of the '68 and immediate post-68 generation. A lot of the groundwork for this discussion was already laid in the 1980s, such as when the urban guerilla group the "Revolutionary Cells" engaged in a self-critique of the selection of Jewish passengers during the Entebbe hijacking.
Somebody not familiar with the debates of the extra-parliamentary left in Germany over the last 30 years can't reasonably be expected to be familiar with all this, but that doesn't stop the ignorant from engaging in all kinds of armchair psychology about the motives of such discussions.