The Special Relationship: Forty Years of Diplomatic Ties Between Germany and Israel
By Dr. Lily Gardner Feldman

Despite some Jewish voices of dissent (too monumental; too trivializing), the Israeli government reacted positively last week to the formal opening, sixty years after the end of World War II, of the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In addition to praising Germany as a partner in the world-wide fight against anti-Semitism, the spokesman of Israel's foreign ministry deemed the memorial "symbolic of the relationship between Israel and the new Germany." While not receiving the same international attention as the memorial, last week the German-Israeli partnership itself celebrated a remarkable achievement forged over the abyss of the Holocaust: the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic ties.

Forty Years Ago
The establishment of ties on May 12, 1965, was hardly auspicious, neither in origin nor in public response. After refusing Adenauer's offer of diplomatic relations during ratification of the 1952 Luxembourg Reparations Agreement between Germany and Israel, by the mid-1950s with increasing isolation in the Middle East, the Jewish state was willing to reconsider its policy of limited contact with the "country of the perpetrators." At this point, however, there was a new obstacle to diplomatic relations on the German side: the Hallstein Doctrine, according to which the Federal Republic recognized no nation that recognized the German Democratic Republic. When Egyptian President Nasser threatened to recognize East Germany if Adenauer recognized Israel, Germany reneged on its proposal, for implementation would have meant severing ties to the Arab world.

Germany's refusal to formalize ties did not preclude relations, and in an area of fundamental importance to Israel - military security - an intense, but highly secret supply network developed as compensation. Some Israelis, like Shimon Peres, then Minister of Defense, considered Germany's weapons aid more important than diplomatic ties, while others, like David Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister, felt international recognition was also paramount. In the fall of 1964, the press exposed West German arms supplies to Israel, the Arab world threatened recognition of the GDR, and Nasser invited Walter Ulbricht to Cairo. The German cabinet halted arms shipments to Israel, and in March 1965 the chancellor offered diplomatic relations to Israel, motivated by pressure from political and public opinion at home and from the United States, as well as by his moral conscience.

The selection of Rolf Pauls as first ambassador caused consternation in Israel because he had been a Wehrmacht officer (though not a member of the Nazi party), and the presentation of his credentials in August 1965 was accompanied by a hail of rocks and bottles from demonstrators. In accepting Pauls' credentials, the President of Israel, Zalman Shazar, reminded Germany's representative of the indelibility of the past: "The memory of these horrors and their victims is alive in the thoughts of our generation and will never be forgotten."

Four Decades Later
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon echoed Shazar's words four decades later, in February 2005, when welcoming President Horst Köhler to the Knesset as the first event in the celebration of forty years of diplomatic ties: "Even 60 years after the Holocaust, the pain over the terrible loss of millions of innocent Jews... has not faded. There cannot be and there is no pardon and forgiveness for what the Jewish people suffered at the hands of Germans." Sharon, however, prefaced those remarks with a reference to "friendly relations" and "fruitful cooperation" and continued with the language of trust and thanks, demonstrating just how far relations had come forty years after the formalization of ties.

Cooperation has spanned every area of public policy, politics and societal interaction: from science and technology to development aid to arms, from relations between political parties to ties between the Bundestag and Knesset, from youth exchange to twinning of towns and cities to commerce. In all of this activity over the course of four decades, both sides have been propelled by a moral need to create new and sturdy bridges across the chasm of the Holocaust, but also by pragmatic interests.

Israeli trust in Germany, often described as the second most important partner after the United States, has been won through decades of these cooperative efforts and also through the German government's support of Israel in times of crisis such as the Gulf War in 1991 and the height of the second intifada in spring 2002, even as German societal actors on both occasions were highly critical of Israel. Trust has also developed as a result of Germany's steadfast championship of Israel's interests in the EU, a "flagship" role in the words of Avi Primor, a beloved Israeli ambassador to the Federal Republic. Israel's belief in Germany has been expressed in the Jewish state entrusting German officials with negotiating the highly sensitive exchange of Hezbollah prisoners in Israel for the remains of Israeli soldiers in Lebanon.

The Challenges
The networks created over the past forty years are dense and resilient, but they are not unchallenged. Israel is concerned about anti-Semitism in Germany and growing anti-Israel sentiment both on the part of the public and in political parties. A recent University of Bielefeld poll revealed that some 80 percent of respondents were critical of Israel, and almost 70 percent of those polled compared Israeli policy toward Palestinians with Nazi behavior toward Jews. While isolated, the Möllemann (FDP) and Hohmann (CDU) affairs brought anti-Semitism to the political mainstream. The election of NPD members to the state parliament in Saxony and their efforts to appropriate the language of the Holocaust for German and not Jewish victims are particularly worrisome to Israelis. Yet, Israeli officials also acknowledge the German public outcry at contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism and laud the efforts of the German government to fight anti-Semitism, including its recent curtailment of the neo-Nazi right to assembly at memorials to the victims of the Third Reich.

The current German ambassador to Israel, Rudolf Dressler, has suggested that the German-Israeli relationship is not self-evident and must be nurtured. Avi Primor has identified three areas for further intensification: Israel's relationship with the EU; German investment in Israel, and cultural relations. Like Dressler, Primor believes the relationship between Germans and Israelis will never be normal. Israel's current ambassador to Germany has summed up this special quality that sets German-Israeli relations apart from other diplomatic dyads: "Our relations are unique, framed by the Shoah, which represented a rupture. Nonetheless, we have managed to forge close ties, not only between officials at the level of governments but also between civil societies in both countries... Our most important task now is to think about how relations should look in the next forty years."

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This essay appeared in the May 19, 2005 AICGS Advisor.