Überkleben
The “Antifa” Sticker
I was walking to the grocery store, melting under the sun of the hottest day recorded in German history, when a sticker on a lamppost caught my eye. Dark blue, declarative, unmistakable: “Antifa heißt Solidarität mit Israel!” (English: “Antifa means solidarity with Israel!”). I read it once, twice, three times to dispel my confusion. These words refused to settle into coherence. Anti-fascism, the doctrine of resistance against imperialist authoritarian terror, the historical force that physically fought the blackshirts and the brownshirts in the streets and ideologically dismantled the logic of “the master race”, is now being redefined as unconditional loyalty to a settler-colonial apartheid state currently conducting a genocide in real-time. Disgusting historical revisionism.
I looked closer. The sticker bore the website of Emma & Fritz (emafrie.de), an “ideology-critical” group out of Stuttgart. And underneath it, visible at the edges where the small sticker had failed to fully cover, was another sticker, this one from MERA25, Yanis Varoufakis’ pan-European leftist movement.
In German street culture, überkleben (literally: to paste over; or stick over another sticker with one of your own) is no accident. It is a deliberate act of erasure, a covering up, and a sectarian declaration of disagreement and hostility. Emma & Fritz obscured MERA25 to broadcast their own grotesque inversion of history.
Emma & Fritz: “anti-capitalists” supporting an imperialist ethno-state
Emma & Fritz present themselves as a radical left educational collective. Their website archives lectures on police brutality, housing crises under Vonovia, and the violence of the capitalist “megamachine.” They speak the language of anticapitalism, feminism, and internationalism. They also gesture toward Rojava, the Kurdish autonomous project, with a vague, aesthetic solidarity.
But these are mere accessories. The organizing principle of their politics, the hill they have chosen to die on, and to bury others on, is their adherence to the Anti-Deutsche (“Anti-German”) current. This strain of the German “left” emerged after reunification, convinced that German national character is irredeemably poisoned by the Holocaust and that the sole path to redemption lies in unconditional, uncritical, near-fetishistic support for the state of Israel. They fly Israeli flags next to red (communist) and black (anarchist) ones. (Interestingly, the E&F sticker design co-opts the traditional double flag Antifa logo in antifascist solidarity, and swaps it for dual white flags, as if they have given up on opposing fascism altogether. Look at it again. Maybe it’s apt.) They chant against German nationalism while embracing a foreign ethnonationalism with near-religious fervor. They have taken the unique, unspeakable trauma of European Jewry and weaponized it to justify a project of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East. They are zionists.
Their slogan—“Antifa heißt Solidarität mit Israel!”—is a shibboleth. A reverse purity test designed to purge the left of anyone who dares to view the occupation, the siege, the apartheid across Palestine, and the relentless bombing of Gaza through a materialist lens, while supporting the American colony responsible for unlimited wealth extraction across the entire Gulf.
an “anti-fascist” disguise…
Let us name what this slogan actually accomplishes. Anti-fascism, in its authentic historical expression, is a commitment to universal human dignity. It recognizes that fascism is a recurring logic of capital in crisis, a logic that designates certain populations as disposable, as “untermenschen”, as obstacles to be removed. The anti-fascist fights any state that practices mass violence, any ideology that posits racial, religious, or national supremacy, any project that expels, starves, and bombs a captive civilian population into submission.
By this measure, unconditional solidarity with Israel constitutes a complete inversion of anti-fascism. The Israeli state subjects millions of Palestinians to a system of military occupation, land theft by settlement expansion, collective punishment, and before our very eyes, a campaign of destruction that scholars and human rights organizations alike have rightly labeled genocide. Israeli officials openly cite biblical texts to justify their land theft and in true capitalist fashion, sell these stolen plots and stolen homes in synagogues across the world. Settler-Soldiers film themselves playing with and dancing in the underwear of their victims in destroyed Palestinian homes. Cabinet ministers speak of starving the entire population of Gaza. Proponents preach of the Occupation Forces not going far enough. This is the playbook of settler-colonial brutality, identical in its structural mechanics to the historical processes that produced the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the ethnic cleansing of the Americas.
Emma & Fritz have taken the vocabulary of resistance and repurposed it as a shield for the benefit of the oppressor. Their “anti-fascism” functions as an apology for a state that meets every reasonable criterion of contemporary fascism: militaristic nationalism, racial and religious hierarchy, territorial expansion, and the dehumanization of a subjugated population. They do not fight fascism. These Anti-Deutschen perform it in a different costume, using German guilt as an alibi to allow yet another genocide.
MERA25
Before I cover that sticker (which I intend to do) I want to peel back the layers of the group Emma & Fritz supporters chose to cover up. MERA25, to their credit, refuses to bow to the Anti-Deutsche fetish. They organize protests against the Israeli president’s visits to Berlin, of which, one of the founders, Yanis Faroufakis, was banned from Germany for. They acknowledge Palestinian suffering. They do not wrap themselves in the Israeli flag and call it internationalism.
But their framework remains trapped in a liberal-reformist cage. The two-state “solution” they advocate functions as a permanent Band-Aid for a terminal amputation. That framework, inherited from the failed Oslo Accords, legitimizes the colonial entity while carving off tiny, disconnected bantustans for the native population. It does not address the material reality of settler-colonialism: the theft of land, the control of water, the systematic destruction of Palestinian agriculture and infrastructure, the open-air prison of Gaza. A two-state solution, under current conditions, is no resolution, but rather a rationalization of theft and a recognition of the colonizer’s right to exist en masse at the expense of the colonized.
And Varoufakis’s pet concept, “Technofeudalism,” is a symptom of this same intellectual timidity. He insists that we are entering a new epoch of digital rentiers, distinct from the capitalism Marx analyzed. This is a retreat from revolutionary conclusion into managerial techno-optimism. Marx long ago mapped the path from industrial accumulation to finance capital to imperial collapse. The concentration of capital into monopoly platforms, the extraction of data rents, the subordination of labor to algorithmic control; these are not a rupture with capitalism. They are capitalism entering its terminal phase, the death rattle of a system that has exhausted every productive possibility and now survives only by cannibalizing itself and the planet.
Varoufakis coins neologisms to avoid saying what is obvious: the system is over, and the path forward is not a redesign of feudalism but the overthrow of the entire capitalist mode of production. One need not agree with him on these points to recognize that his party at least faces the right direction, but the impulse to rebrand rather than revolutionize reveals the same deep-seated reluctance to face the dialectical hammer.
Emma & Fritz covered MERA25 because MERA25, even in its reformist timidity, poses a threat to their purity. For the Anti-Deutsche, any acknowledgment of Palestinian humanity, even the weak, conditional acknowledgment of a two-stater, is treason. They demand total ideological submission. This is the logic of a cult, not the logic of the revolutionary.
dialectics, imperialism, the national question
To understand why Emma & Fritz, and their counterparts more broadly, are not just wrong but reactionary, we must apply the tools of dialectical and historical materialism.
Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism (Lenin wrote a whole book about it). It is the phase where finance capital dominates, monopolies strangle competition, and great powers fight for global domination through colonial and neocolonial means. Israel is not a lonely democracy besieged by barbarism. Israel is a settler-colonial garrison state, armed to the teeth by the United States, serving as the regional enforcer for Western imperial interests. Its economy is fused with the global military-industrial complex, which has for decades used Gaza as a testing ground for weapons capabilities and surveillance technology. Its existence depends on the continuous displacement of the native population. The Anti-Deutsche ignore this material infrastructure entirely. They treat Israel as a metaphysical entity, a sacred exception to the laws of imperialism, a state whose violence is always justified because of a history that happened on another continent, decades ago. This is idealism of the most vulgar sort; a substitution of moral abstraction for concrete class and historical analysis.
Dialectics teaches us that contradiction is the motor of history. Every phenomenon containing its opposite within itself. The Zionists, who were once the victims of European anti-Semitism, have become the perpetrators of a new ethnic cleansing, this time against the Palestinians. This is not a moral judgment; it is a material observation of how oppressed groups, when given state power and backed by imperialism, can reproduce the very structures that previously harmed them. The Anti-Deutsche refuse this truth. They have frozen history at 1945, treating the Holocaust as the only event that matters, as a justification for all atrocities, and the state of Israel as the only legitimate vessel for Jewish safety. These “leftists” have abandoned dialectics for a static, pseudotheological ahistoricism. They refuse to see that the logic of genocide is what matters, not the identity of the perpetrator.
The National Question provides the final nail in their coffin. Lenin distinguishes between the nationalism of the oppressor nation and the nationalism of the oppressed. The nationalism of a people struggling against colonial domination (Palestinian nationalism) is qualitatively different from the nationalism of a settler-colonial state. Zionism is not a liberation movement; it is a decades long project of conquest and displacement, backed by the full weight of global capital. From my principled perspective, the only progressive position is solidarity with the Palestinians, the only oppressed people in this conflict. Emma & Fritz and the entirety of the Anti-Deutsche coalition invert this entirely. They treat Palestinian resistance as inherently antisemitic and Israeli militarism as inherently progressive. They have taken the side of the oppressor and decorated it with performative left-wing aesthetics.
a sticker, a warning, a duty
As I stood before that street pole, staring at the laminated lie, I understood what I was looking at. Emma & Fritz are not a fringe curiosity. They are the canary in the coal mine of the European left. They represent what happens when historical guilt curdles into reactionary fetishism, when class analysis is abandoned for moral posturing, and when the memory of one genocide is weaponized to justify another.
The next time you see one of these pro-fascist stickers, do not walk past. Scrape it off, or slap your own sticker on top. The streets are a battlefield of messaging, and every sticker is a claim on your consent. I took care of that one. I refuse to let the corpses of European Jewry be used as a cudgel against the Palestinians (or the Lebanese), and I refuse to let the actions of an apartheid ethnostate monolithize the sentiment of all people of Jewish faith. More than anything else, this sentiment drives antisemitism. Israel’s actions bear the primary responsibility for all Jews being judged, not just Zionists, many of latter aren’t even Jewish.
Solidarity is universal or it is meaningless. The grammar of anti-fascism applies equally to Gaza and Palestine as it did to Auschwitz and the rest of Europe.
The Anti-Deutsche have failed to uphold that basic requirement. They have embraced the logic of the oppressor and called it liberation. They have flipped the meaning of resistance so completely on its head that they now stand shoulder to shin with the very forces anti-fascism was born to oppose.
Cover them up. Peel them off. Every last one.
(No, this is not limited to stickers. This is a metaphor for all fascist and genocide apologia and related rhetoric to be refuted.)
more photos
Below is a small collection from the dozens of photos I have taken (except for the “Fight For Fascists”, found on reddit) across Germany. Enjoy.
Die ersten zwei Drittel hab ich gelesen ... dann war mir der Rundumschlag zu viel. Wahrscheinlich ist es in dschland immer noch verboten den Rasen zu betreten.