A self-confessed terrorist linked to the infamous Entebbe hijacking is running for a board position with Germany’s hard-left Die Linke party at their national convention this weekend.
Germany’s Die Linke (The Left) Party, the present incarnation of Socialist Unity, the ruling Marxist-Leninist faction under Communist East Germany’s single-party state during the Cold War, is hosting its national convention in Potsdam.
National broadsheet Die Welt states 82-year-old Gerd Schnepel hopes to be elected despite his open admission of having been a member of a radical Palestinian-left terrorist cell in the 1970s. Because he went to Nicaragua in 1978 and escaped extradition, and the statute of limitations on non-lethal terrorism crimes in Germany is 20 years, it is stated that Schnepel does not fear arrest now that he has returned to Germany.
Per his own admission, urban guerrilla group ‘Revolutionary Cells’ member Schnepel bombed an American defence and communications contractor ITT building in Nuremberg, over the business allegedly supporting the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, ran a printing press forging identity papers, and was the boyfriend of one of the Entebbe terrorists.
It is stated that in his manifesto for the Die Linke election, he boasts of being a veteran of “four years in the Revolutionary Cells”, including working with the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a banned terror group.
While the Revolutionary Cells was responsible for dozens of bombings and killings, including participating in the 1975 OPEC Siege with Carlos the Jackal, the most infamous attack was the 1976 Entebbe hijacking. The infamous hostage situation saw the German leftists working with Palestinian terrorists to take Air France Flight 139, which was flying from Tel Aviv to Paris, and divert it to Entebbe Airport, Uganda.
The terrorists released the non-Jewish passengers, demanding the release of Palestinian militants held prisoner in Israel in return for those they had kept. Four hostages were killed. Israeli special forces released the remaining passengers in a daring raid a week later, killing seven hijackers, one of whom was Schnepel’s then-girlfriend.
Schnepel has claimed his then-girlfriend didn’t speak a word of the planned attack to him beforehand, and he only learned of it from the radio, and latterly has been part of an effort to launder the reputation of the hard left terror groups, calling them ” ‘anti-fascists’… ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ but not ‘anti-Semitic’”.
The only Israeli fatality of the Entebbe rescue was commando Yonatan Netanyahu, the elder brother of now-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The drama for Die Linke, which, even as recently as 2024, Die Tageszeitung reports, the “tax the rich” and open borders party was seen as “ageing… a sinking ship”, comes as the far-leftist party is surging in popularity.
Long kept alive by a small band of leftist purists, the also-ran party, which routinely polled only a couple of per cent at the start of the century, has surged in the polls and now scores as high as 11 or 12 per cent. Its membership has more than doubled in two years after the October 7 Attack in Israel, as German politics bifurcates, and as ultra-left extremism rises. Indeed, once unthinkable, the party could even potentially become a future government coalition partner.
Yet the recent rise of the German hard-left party has even caused concern among its long-time stalwarts, given the distinct possibility that a majority of members attending this weekend’s conference will be new signups whose views on party policy appear to diverge significantly from those of the post-Cold War old guard.
German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that votes on party policy, rules, and leadership ballots could go in unanticipated and potentially unwelcome directions, at least for the longer-standing members.
The present party leadership is aware that the huge influx of new members is preoccupied with the Middle East. Presently, the leftist party affirms Israel’s right to exist; an unusual position among the hard left in most Western countries now, but part of Germany’s post-war legacy that makes, or did until recently, antisemitism a total social taboo. The social media activity of the new members in Die Linke makes clear they do not share this position, and that many want to declare a genocide in Palestine, and speak of a ‘single state solution’.
The legacy party leadership has already started pushing back against its new party members. Senior Die Linke Member of Parliament Sören Pellmann said: “If someone specifically questions Israel’s right to exist, then the question must be asked whether he or she is in the right party”. Yet it may not be their party to command for long.
Most of the new members are very young and more female, and consequently, the party’s average age has tumbled in the past two years. Whether the irony of the longstanding membership of a pro-mass migration, open borders party suddenly being pushed into a minority and potentially outvoted by an unexpected influx of outsiders has been appreciated is not yet clear.