This time next year, Israel and Germany will be gearing up to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties — a spectacularly sensitive relationship between the nation whose leadership set about annihilating the Jews and the nation-state whose revival, tragically, came too late to save six million of them.
The conventional wisdom is that the Israel-Germany “special relationship” remains both firm and delicate, marked by Germany's extraordinary commitment to Israel's well-being, as a consequence of that eternally unpayable historical debt owed by the Germans to the Jews.
The reality, however, is that while Germany has proved willing to some extent to bolster Israel's defense militarily and diplomatically, much of its political and diplomatic leadership is as witheringly and ignorantly critical of Israel as the rest of the willfully blind European consensus. The only real difference is that German politicians and diplomats don't generally make public their ill-informed critiques and their facile conclusions. In deference to that special relationship, they don't put themselves openly at odds with the Jewish state.
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