Israel Matzav

Madame Zig Zag

Benny Weinthal reviews German Chancellor Angela Merkel's record on Israel and gives it a decidedly mixed review.

In fact, she is the only German chancellor to have gone on the rhetorical offensive during an Israeli war of self-defense and aligned her government with the Jewish state against radical Islamic terror.

Her predecessors, like the Social Democrat Willy Brandt, only made empty promises of support to Israel. Take the Yom Kippur War in 1973 for example. While Brandt said Germany had Israel’s back, he denied the US the right to use the Bremerhaven harbor to ship sorely needed military arms to Israel during its existential war with neighboring Arab countries.

Merkel, in contrast, delivered sophisticated Dolphin submarines to Israel and is slated to continue furnishing such military hardware to Israel in order to maintain Jerusalem’s critical deterrence capability against an increasingly jingoistic Iran, to name just one hostile country in the region.

However, Merkel’s flip-flops center largely around the issue of settlement construction, the upgrade of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s entity at the UN and an anti- Israel Bundestag measure.

Her administration endorsed a Lebanon-sponsored UN Security Council resolution in 2011 that condemned Israeli settlement construction as “illegal.”

Moreover, in 2010, she appeared to make no effort to convince her Christian Democratic Union party members in parliament, as well as her coalition partners from the Bavarian Christian Social Union and Free Democrats parties, to vote against a Bundestag resolution that slammed Israel for intercepting the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara ship, a confrontation that resulted in the deaths of nine alleged Turkish terrorists.

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Despite her government’s vote against an PLO upgrade at the UNESCO in Paris last year, she chose to abstain on Thursday at the UN.

From Israel’s perspective, Merkel’s stances on PLO statehood measures, which seek to bypass direct negotiations with Israel, along with her wobbly positions in UN international forums and when handling party deputies in the Bundestag that bash Israel, have represented a marked lack of consistency.

They are definitely not the worst in Europe, but Benny also leaves out the fact that Merkel has done little or nothing to stop German trade with Iran.

Definitely a mixed record. 

Labels: Angela Merkel, German-Iranian trade, Germany, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:38 PM