It was last Sunday in Amsterdam that the world's view of Greta Thunberg suddenly shifted. She was bundled up against the November chill, wearing a gray, quilted jacket as she stood on a stage in front of a vast crowd. Her hair fell loosely over her shoulders.

Event organizers estimate that 85,000 people turned out, making it perhaps the largest climate demonstration in the history of the Netherlands. But Thunberg, as shown by the black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh wrapped around her neck, had something else on her mind. As a climate justice movement, "we have to listen to the voices of those who are being oppressed and those who are fighting for freedom and justice." The reference was to the Palestinians.

A woman who was standing on stage with her, also wearing the Palestinian kaffiyeh, claimed that Israel was perpetrating "genocide in my country." Greta Thunberg did not contradict her.

Thunberg has changed since the summer of 2018, when she became famous. She is no longer a girl. And she no longer seems shy or hesitant in the spotlight. Rather, she looks like a self-confident, 20-year-old woman.

Back when she rocketed to global prominence, she was just 15 years old and often wore her hair in two braided pigtails, making her look even younger. She first attracted attention by sitting in front of Parliament House in Stockholm holding a sign made of scrap lumber on which she had scrawled in black: "Skolstrejk för klimatet," or school strike for the climate.

"She seemed like the loneliest girl in the world," says climate activist and businessman Ingmar Rentzhog. "As if she had the weight of the entire world on her shoulders." Rentzhog is the one who made the photo that turned Thunberg into a household name.

That summer was hot and dry, and wildfires were blazing across Europe. Before long, this girl who was warning about all the bad things that would happen if people continued to go on living the way they were had the world's attention. Greta Thunberg essentially became the mirror of humanity's bad conscience. But she was also a ray of hope.

It was the beginning of the Fridays for Future movement, the onset of shifting views about the climate in many parts of the world. Indeed, climate protection quickly moved to the very top of the global political agenda. And she, the schoolgirl from Sweden, became an icon – the foremost advocate for a better world.

She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She met with the pope, with former U.S. President Barack Obama, with Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio and with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world at the time. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be seen with her.

There were, of course, plenty of people who weren't Thunberg fans. She was, after all, discussing uncomfortable truths and demanding that politicians take more decisive action to slow climate change. She was also challenging older generations to change their climate-damaging lifestyles.

But she was right, and she had science on her side – findings that she cited herself. "More than 26,000 scientists in the German-speaking world have confirmed that our cause is just," reads a statement on the website of the German chapter of Fridays for Future.

All that, though, was before Greta Thunberg's appearance last Sunday. What happens now?

Back in Amsterdam, uneasiness began spreading among the audience during Thunberg's speech. Erjan Dam of the Netherlands described the situation to DER SPIEGEL a day after the event. Some people, says Dam, began leaving the demonstration. "When Greta Thunberg or other leading activists constantly speak about the Palestinian question, it creates disunity," Dam says. "I felt like I was being taken advantage of – as did many other participants."

At some point, he could no longer stand it, and he climbed up onto the stage. Nobody tried to stop him. He grabbed for the microphone and tried to speak into it, but she refused to let go, resulting in a brief tug-o-war. At some point, Dam was able to speak into the microphone: "I came here for a climate demonstration, not a political view." Some in the audience booed and other activists on stage pulled him away.

Thunberg smiled – a strangely condescending smile.

She pulled the microphone back and called after Dam: "Calm down, calm down, calm down." It sounded like an order. Or was it a request? Calls for others to calm down usually come from a position of superiority. It was a brief scuffle between young and old, between a woman and a man.

Greta won on Sunday, for the time being. Soon after Dam was ushered off the stage, she joined in with chants of: "No climate justice on occupied land!" And soon, she was back in control of the stage and of the crowd. She had managed to defend herself. But at what cost?

She showed the world where she stands on the Middle East conflict. And demonstrated her approach to Israel – cold and distanced.

Serious and Justified Criticism

A few days after the incident, it can no longer be said that Greta Thunberg is the clear victor of the mini conflict on the stage in Amsterdam. She now finds herself on the business end of serious, justified criticism. And dismay, particularly in Germany. Many are left with the feeling that the admiration they once had for Thunberg was mistaken.

It's not the first time that she has used the climate movement to throw her support behind the Palestinians. In fact, it has been something of a recurring pattern. For example, in a message posted to the social media platform X, she demanded solidarity for the Palestinians and Gaza without mentioning the Israeli victims of the Hamas terrorist attack at all.

Indeed, since the orgy of violence visited upon Israel by Hamas on October 7, she has never expressed sympathy for the Jews murdered and molested by Hamas of her own accord. She has only said anything about the victims when pressured to do so, and even in such instances, she has been evasive.

Thunberg has shown no solidarity with Jews despite the fact that Hamas has made no secret of their desire to annihilate Jewish life. Despite the fact that anti-Semitism around the world has swelled  since the attack. Despite the fact that Israeli flags are being burned, Jewish children are afraid to go to school and Jewish adults are seeking to avoid being recognized as Jews on the streets.

But Thunberg does feel empathy – for the Palestinians. And that's not wrong. For decades, Palestinians have had little control over their own destiny, and in the war that Israel is now waging in reaction to the Hamas attack, civilians are suffering and dying.

Israel's allies have also found it necessary to repeatedly warn the country's government to adhere to international humanitarian law and ensure proportionality. But the existence of the nation of Israel is not up for negotiation. Jews have been persecuted for centuries. And 6 million of them were murdered in the Holocaust.

Those who, like Thunberg, gloss over the suffering of the Israeli women who were raped by Hamas terrorists in front of their children on October 7, and the suffering of parents whose children were murdered before their very eyes – those who ignore such suffering because the victims were Jewish Israelis, they are aligning themselves with the views of anti-Semitism. At the very least.

Does that mean that Greta Thunberg has betrayed the climate movement and taken on the role of propagandist?

Volker Beck, president of the German-Israeli Society, says that her appearance in Amsterdam "marks the end of Greta Thunberg as a climate activist." In a post on the social media platform X, he wrote that she is "from now on, a full-time Israel hater."

The Israeli Embassy in Berlin also took to the X platform, writing that it was "sad how Greta Thunberg again used the climate stage for her own purposes." The post continued in English: "No stage for antisemites!"

Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said of Thunberg on the German broadcaster Welt-TV: "I believe there is no doubt that she is very, very naïve. Anti-Semitism is always an extremely serious accusation. But what I have seen – I am very close to making that accusation."

And Green Party co-leader Ricarda Lang, a woman leading the political party that is closer to the Friday for Future movement than any other in Germany, was likewise clear about her views of Thunberg's appearance in Amsterdam: "completely obscene."

There were some in Germany who were willing to defend Thunberg. Former Left Party leader Bernd Riexinger told DER SPIEGEL: "She is being treated too severely. It is justifiable to criticize Israel for how it is treating the civilian population of Gaza. It is a humanitarian catastrophe. That isn't anti-Semitism, nor is it a playing down of the horrific terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas." Still, Riexinger is relatively alone with that viewpoint on the democratic segment of the German political spectrum.

Germany's political royalty is firmly on the side of Israel. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, like Angela Merkel before him, has repeatedly said that Israeli security is an important element of Germany's raison d'état. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck of the Green Party produced a powerful video in which he urged his fellow citizens to shun anti-Semitism in all its forms, noting that Germany has a special responsibility. The establishment of the country of Israel after the Holocaust, Habeck noted, was a promise of security for Jews.

What about Thunberg's allies?

The climate movement is now facing a potential schism. The German chapter of Fridays for Future has distanced itself from the international movement, with Luisa Neubauer, the group's most prominent member in the country, telling DER SPIEGEL in an interview that "the loss of trust is immense.

The Climate Movement's Waning Influence

But does this mean the end for the climate movement? That would be disastrous. Temperatures seem to reach new record highs every year, and wildfires again flared up around the world last summer – in Greece, Italy, Canada, Hawaii and elsewhere. The glaciers in the Alps are melting away. The next UN Climate Change Conference is set to begin in Dubai later this month, and pressure from outside is badly needed.

Yet even before events last Sunday, the climate movement had been losing its urgency. First, it was the pandemic that robbed the movement of its momentum, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 then stole the public spotlight. The war is also consuming vast quantities of money, leaving less for other issues. And in Germany, voters are growing dissatisfied with their government, of which the Green Party is a member – the party that has always been on the political forefront of the battle against climate change.

Meanwhile, radical groups of climate activists – like Extinction Rebellion and the Last Generation – have infuriated large swaths of the population with their mutilation of landmarks and traffic-blocking stunts. Their reputation has also rubbed off to a certain extent on the more moderate Fridays for Future movement.

And now, many people – particularly in Germany – have lost a climate role model in Greta Thunberg.

German writer Sven Hillenkamp, who has been living in Stockholm for many years and is also active in the climate movement, told DER SPEIGEL that elements of the Fridays for Future movement have become ideological. He says it has slowly become a left-wing radical, autonomist movement – just without the violence. The chants that Thunberg has begun using more often during her speeches, says Hillenkamp, have served to almost completely mask her extraordinary speaking ability.

Does that mean that Thunberg has radicalized? "Yes, absolutely," says Hillenkamp.

The case of Greta Thunberg is also symbolic of a further divide. Thunberg is on the left side of the political spectrum, and a fissure has suddenly opened up in the global left. Left-wing Israelis and leftist Jews feel as though they have been betrayed by their political allies around the world. In an emotional essay in the influential German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, French-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz accused the international left wing of having "shamelessly left the Jews in Israel in the lurch."

At universities in the United States, left-wing students are holding pro-Palestinian demonstrations, some of which give vent to pure anti-Israeli hatred. At Harvard, one of the most respected universities in the world, some left-wing students blame Israel alone for the escalation of violence in the Middle East. Jewish students there no longer feel safe.

One of the Hamas targets on October 7 was a trance festival , with at least 260 participants in that festival being murdered. But in the left-wing, political segment of the techno scene, Hamas terrorism is seen as part of the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

Indeed, this isn't just about the climate movement or the leftist movement. The entire political scene is undergoing a restructuring. Making things even more complicated, not every expression of solidarity with the Jews is free of mendacity. When someone like French right-wing radical Marine Le Pen takes part in a demonstration against anti-Semitism, her primary motivation is likely her well-known hatred for Muslim immigrants.

On this vast canvas, Greta Thunberg is just one character among many, albeit a particularly famous one. Still, her case is symptomatic of the current fractures running through the left and raises important questions like: Where do the anti-Israeli attitudes of many on the left come from? Where is the climate movement going? What are the larger political consequences?

First, though: Who really is Greta Thunberg?

Greta Was an Unhappy, Stubborn Child

The book "Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis," which was written by Greta's mother together with other members of the family, describes Greta as an unhappy child. When Greta was in the fifth grade, the book notes, she cried constantly: in bed at night, on the way to school and in class. Teachers apparently called home on multiple occasions, and her father had to go pick her up from school. "Our daughter was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking," reads one passage in the book.

And she stopped eating. The family posted a sheet of paper on the wall where Greta's parents documented what their daughter ate and how long it took her. For a third of a banana one morning, 53 minutes.

Her parents tried to stay calm, but they were scared for their child. On one occasion, they lost their patience and yelled at her: "You have to eat now, otherwise you'll die!" Greta screamed for 40 minutes.

Greta wasn't just an unhappy child. She was apparently rather stubborn as well.

As the book notes, Thunberg was diagnosed with Asperger's, highly functioning autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Asperger’s syndrome is associated with deficits in social communication and interaction.

Greta’s mother has written that she was beaten up in the schoolyard, lured into an ambush and hid in the girl’s restroom. When her parents told her that she would make friends one day, she answered: "I don’t want to have a friend. Friends are children and all children are mean."

But then Greta found friends in the climate movement. But were they really friends? She almost immediately became the center of the movement; the former outsider became the defining force. This had an impact on her life at school. The global star also became a star back home.

The Globala gymnasiet high school, which Thunberg attended until this summer, is located in a 1930s building on a hill in Stockholm’s Södermalm neighborhood.

The school’s principal says it has a focus on human rights and sustainability. "A place for everyone who wants to understand, change and improve the world," the school’s website states. Vegetarian lunches are served in the cafeteria. Indeed, there probably couldn’t have been a more suitable school for Thunberg.

The principal says she isn’t allowed to talk about Thunberg. Outside the building, though, it is possible to meet with two of Thunberg’s former classmates, Lukas and Rosa, who are both 18 years old. They speak enthusiastically about Thunberg. She’s funny and down to earth, they say. "And inspiring," says Rosa. She says she regularly attended the climate strikes and that, like many young Swedes, she is proud of Thunberg. "Because she showed the world: A single teenager can change the world," says Rosa. Because she stands up for her convictions, regardless of who she has to face up to.

Rosa and Lukas talk about how, during the last school year, they held a model version of the climate conference in Egypt at school. In it, Greta played the role of one of the protestors, jokingly quoting from her own famous speech that she gave at the UN climate summit in 2019. "How dare you!"

A girl who used to be beaten up by her peers is now admired by them. Yet even though Thunberg may have actually managed to stay grounded, this unsual development must have had an impact on her life today.

Is she afraid of losing friends again? Does she long to continue to be recognized? Is that perhaps why she talks the way large swaths of the movement think, apart from the German branch? Is her own background getting in the way of her assessment of the political situation in the Middle East? From a distance, this is guesswork. And DER SPIEGEL has been unable to reach Greta Thunberg in recent days.

Many German climate activists interviewed recently say they either don't know Thunberg personally or haven't seen her in quite some time. But the explanations that local activists have developed for her recent political stances revolve around friendship and recognition – not to mention peer pressure.

The German activists say that Thunberg has spent much of her time in recent years in Sweden, mainly because of the pandemic. In Stockholm, but also in the digital realm, they say she has surrounded herself primarily with people who hold radical views of global injustices, colonialism and Israel, which they view as an imperial settler state.

If those accounts are true, it would be a classic story of political ideologization. The story of a 20-year-old woman whose life mixes friendship and politics and who yearns for the respect of her peers.

Or is that too simplistic? Thunberg, after all, is more than just a 20-year-old in search of meaning and like-minded people. She’s a global icon, respected and admired, a political leader who publicly reads the riot act to the world’s assembled governments and presumably has access to most of the people she might want to talk to.

Whatever the case, Thunberg is certainly not alone in her stance among those on the left.

Why Is It Always Israel?

The left’s hostility towards Israel has a long history. In what was then West Germany, it began with the Six-Day War in 1967. Before that, the left in the West had largely viewed the country sympathetically – not only because the kibbutz movement was genuinely left-wing and the Israeli state was socialist in many respects, but also due to Israel’s self-image as an anti-colonial state that maintained close ties with a number of young African nations.

But that ended with Israel’s victory in 1967. The Soviet Union provided support for the defeated Arab states, which is why many on the left began seeing Israel as an outpost of American power in the Arab world.

This view also spread in Germany. In East Germany, to be sure, but also in the West. The student movement and the New Left that emerged from it were largely in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Green Party éminence grise Joschka Fischer once said that the Six-Day War had been one of the key moments in his political education. During his time as German foreign minister, he even had to explain a photo showing him at a meeting of the PLO in Algiers in 1969, an event hostile to Israel.

But Fischer said the horror of Entebbe had made him rethink his approach in 1976. That year, an Air France jet was hijacked by a German-Palestinian commando group during a flight from Athens to Paris. One of the hijackers was even a passing acquaintance of Fischer's. After landing in Entebbe, Uganda, the terrorists released all the passengers – except for around 100 Jews. The Germans had helped identify them using their passports and surnames. Fischer said that the fact that Jews could once again be "selected" left him "stunned" and triggered his move away from his anti-Zionist stances. But not everyone shared his view.

In those years, there was a deeply rooted hostility towards Jews within the militant left. The left-wing terrorist group Tupamaros West-Berlin even tried to blow up a Jewish community center in 1969, but the bomb failed to detonate due to a technical defect. Dieter Kunzelmann, one of the scene’s best-known activists, even began speaking disparagingly of the Germans’ "Judenknacks," or "Jew complex." In the 1970s, left-wing terrorists underwent weapons training in Palestinian camps in Lebanon – just like the right-wing extremist group Wehrsport-Gruppe Hoffmann.

Within these circles, Israel was seen as a spearhead of American imperialism. The debate about the 1991 Gulf War also fell along these lines on the left side of the political spectrum. Despite fears that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could attack Israel with missiles carrying chemical weapons, many on the left refused to declare their solidarity with the country.

Today, there is a large number of non-Jewish leftists in Germany who declare their solidarity with Israel. This likely has something to do with German history. The fact that the Holocaust can’t be explained by theories of imperialism – that it was the result of outright anti-Semitism – is an experience that distinguishes many German leftists from others within the same political spectrum in other countries.

And yet, in the last issue of DER SPIEGEL, Meron Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, asked: "Germany, where is your empathy?"

Many young climate activists, particularly in other countries, are building on the Israel-critical traditions of the left. They argue that Israel kills indiscriminately or is even committing genocide, and that the Hamas attack now provides the country with a pretext for even more violence against Palestinians. That message can be read on posters and in social network posts during the protests.

In Sweden, Thunberg’s home country, but also in Finland and Denmark, many climate activists view the conflict through that lens, although with different consequences than in Germany.

Twenty-two-year-old Ida Korhonen of Finland helped organize what was likely Europe’s northernmost climate blockade last January in Lapland. She spoke with DER SPIEGEL at the time about trees and nature conservation. The forestry student is now back in Helsinki and has other interests.

"Actually, we shouldn’t be talking about ourselves anymore, but only about Palestine," she says. By "us," she means the climate movement. "War against people is also always war against nature," she says. "There can be no justice without an end to the genocide against the Palestinians."

Korhonen is active in several environmental and climate groups. She has no official role with Fridays for Future, but she was one of the main speakers at the last climate strike in September. She readily admits that her interest in the Middle East conflict is less than eight weeks old. And yet she already seems to have a clear picture in her mind. "I get my information from social networks, from Amnesty and from Palestinian journalists on the scene," she says.

Climate activist Frederik Sandby from Copenhagen also doesn’t hide whose side he's on. He sees the Palestinians as victims of a historical injustice. So far, though, he has avoided speaking publicly about the war in Gaza. Sandby is the spokesman for Klimabevægelsen, an organization that has taken over the legacy of Fridays for Future in Denmark and is now professionally engaged in climate protection.

"Many see that climate change has been fuelled by global exploitation and inequality," he says, describing the polarization of the climate movement. "They see that people in the (Global) South have been oppressed and are now suffering the most. That’s why they think that the two belong together, that you can’t save the world if you’re already looking the other way in Gaza. Hence the focus."

But Sandby also views it as being a dead-end road. "I don’t see what it will do for us. We oppose violence against innocent people and mourn with both sides."

Sandby says he has "the greatest respect" for Greta Thunberg and is still grateful to her. But he also doesn’t want to just look on as such an important matter sinks into an emotional maelstrom. "I am absolutely certain that this is exactly what is threatening us. This conflict could be very damaging."

The fact that the conflict has long since spread to other groups was recently demonstrated by the example of "Pink Room," Sweden’s largest Facebook group for women and people who do not clearly identify with a single gender. The group has over 184,000 members, and the founder has been the recipient of awards in the past for her tone, which is characterized by "respect, humanity and community spirit." Since the beginning of the war, though, a different one has prevailed. You can find posts like: "Almost all Swedish media are owned by Zionists." Or: "Only Israel can do such a thing and wait until it takes over control of the world."

It seems like an obsession. Why is it always Israel?

Anti-Semitism researcher Christer Mattsson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has spent years studying how groups became radicalized and how the Middle East conflict is taught in Swedish schools. His findings are striking: "Twenty-five to 30 percent of all school classes in Sweden today visit the Auschwitz memorial. But fewer and fewer people actually understand what happened back then."

For many, he says, the lesson of the Holocaust is that we must stand up against racism and violence. Anti-Semitism is only perceived as an historical problem in this context, and in the eyes of young activists, Muslims and minorities are quickly seen as the new victims – or the Israelis as well. "They say Zionism, but it’s against Jews. We are currently seeing anti-Semitism as we have never seen it before," says Mattsson. He and his colleagues describe it as structural anti-Semitism, because although it is not consciously expressed, it is still nonetheless clearly anti-Jewish at its core.

Many young people get their information about the war from platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, he says, along with canned left-wing post-colonial theories. Many of the comments made on the platforms are emotionally charged, and the desire for clarity is often greater than that for understanding. Teachers and parents are themselves often overwhelmed.

Mattsson tells the story of a 10-year-old girl whose Muslim classmate refused to sing happy birthday to her in front of the whole school because the girl’s parents were from Israel. "Everyone was silent. She eventually denied having an Israeli passport."

Social networks have increasingly become an important source of information, especially for young people. Every fifth person in the world between the ages of 18 and 24 gets news from the video platform TikTok, a trend that is growing.

Even if TikTok likes to claim that it is primarily a platform for entertainment, the war in Gaza has been extremely present there for weeks now. Some 11 billion videos with the hashtag #freepalestine have been viewed in the past month, even if not all of these videos are about the events on the ground.

Social media stars who have built up a large number of followers have become news providers for some people. In the past several weeks, influencers who had previously been rather apolitical on the platform have suddenly started speaking out about the war in the Middle East.

A German lifestyle influencer with more than 2 million followers who otherwise uses channels with over 2.5 million subscribers to talk about her everyday life in Dubai, has suddenly begun explaining – under headings like "A Short Political Lesson" – why German media supposedly are not allowed to report the truth about Gaza. On the day of the attack, she uploaded a fatuous video with her husband in which they mimic machine gun sounds while displaying a Palestinian flag.