***** New York Times 4 March 2001
Israel's Ties With Germany Elude U.S. Jews
By ROGER COHEN
TEL AVIV, Feb. 25 - Avi Primor, a former Israeli ambassador to Germany, travels regularly to the United States to tell American Jewish groups how good Israeli-German ties have become. "Their reaction," he said, "is often one of shock, pain and indignation. They want to preserve Germany in their minds as a negative nation."
>From the ashes of the Holocaust, a curious friendship has been born:
56 years after the fall of Hitler's Reich, and 36 years after the
establishment of diplomatic relations, Germany has become Israel's
most important ally outside the United States, providing critical
support in the military, intelligence, political and economic fields.
But this rapprochement - not widely advertised, but continually growing - has largely eluded the relationship between Germany and American Jews.
Indeed, as memory of the Holocaust looms large in American life, and wrangles persist over compensation for Jewish victims of the Nazis, the American Jewish view of Germany often seems mired in the Nazi past alone.
"American Jews have been always been a step or two behind Israel in understanding Germany's postwar evolution," said David A. Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee.
"American Jews have had the luxury of avoiding Germany, even boycotting its products - a luxury Israel could not afford."
The result is an odd disparity: in recent years, Germany has intensified its ties with Israel, quietly providing three submarines, as the difficulties between American Jews and Germany have multiplied and the feeling has spread among Germans that they are the objects of a "Holocaust industry."
"The recent negotiations on compensation for slave and forced laborers under the Nazis have left rancor in Germany," said Deidre Berger, who directs the office of the American Jewish Committee in Berlin. "Many German companies feel they are being blackmailed by American Jews. On the other side, there's a lot of enduring prejudice in the American Jewish community - the prejudice that Germany can never be trusted."
Of course, hostility to Germans exists in Israel, too, and commemoration of the Holocaust remains important. Kirsten Praefcke-Meron, a German woman married to an Israeli in Tel Aviv, recalls an Israeli child pointing to her daughter in school on a recent Holocaust Memorial Day and saying, "She's a Nazi."
Among American Jews, meanwhile, there are signs of growing interest in the contemporary democratic reality of Germany rather than its Nazi past. The move of the capital to Berlin has caused new curiosity; five major American Jewish groups are scheduled to visit this year - an unprecedented exchange.
Still, the responses to Germany of the Jewish state and of Jews in America remain a study in divergent paths and psychologies.
The former relationship has been driven by pragmatic involvement, shared postwar experiences and the effect of Israel's experience fighting wars since the Holocaust, which by no means defines Israeli identity.
The first Israeli passports, issued after the state's creation in 1948, declared themselves valid "for all states except Germany." But, long before diplomatic relations were established in 1965, the first rapprochement occurred with the 1952 accord on German reparations reached between David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli prime minister, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
The reparations would involve the payment of over $50 billion, to individual Israelis and to the state of Israel. Because some reparations were paid in kind - machinery, industrial investment, spare parts, ships, locomotives - they brought postwar Germans and Israelis together in a way that has scant equivalent with American Jews.
Israelis had to learn from Germans how to use the machinery and ships - and friendships were formed. Most Israelis gained the feeling that the financial consequences of the Holocaust were settled - hence their indifference, even irritation, at the recent American Jewish push for compensation from German industry.
By contrast, Germany's relationship with American Jews has often suffered from distance, bitterness and what sometimes looks to Germans like an American Jewish fixation on a traumatic past.
With the cold war over, the last generation of Holocaust survivors dying, and other sources of Jewish identity weakening, the Holocaust has become a crucial touchstone. American Jews used to identify with Israel as a plucky, isolated Jewish state, and with the plight of Soviet Jewry. But now Israel has become a regional power whose policies in the occupied territories are, for some at least, hard to defend, and the Soviet issue has disappeared.
Today, an investigation in Germany and Israel suggests, German support is central to Israel's security, even if it is kept quiet partly because of German concerns about the reactions of the Arab world and domestic public opinion.
Relations between the two countries' intelligence services are particularly intense, officials said. Germany provides Israel with extensive information on the Arab world, and Israel reciprocates with intelligence on Eastern Europe and Russia where, in the words of one informed Israeli, "we have people with a lot of understanding."
Germany, for example, is acting quietly to secure the release of three Israeli soldiers kidnapped last October by Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militant group based in Lebanon.
Germany is also Israel's second- most-important military partner, after the United States, working together on development of some weapons, providing technology and giving Israel two highly sophisticated submarines (while splitting the cost of a third) as a gesture after the Persian Gulf war.
Germany has become Israel's second-largest trading partner, after the United States, and sends more tourists to Israel than any country except America. As for politics, Germany "is now our mainstay and chief advocate in Europe," said Reuven Merhav, a former director-general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
In effect, European Middle East policy is largely determined by Germany's role in counterbalancing France's stance as the most forthright supporter in Europe of the Palestinian cause.
The annual human rights report of the German Foreign Ministry contains no reference to Israeli actions in the occupied territories, in contrast to the criticism of extrajudicial Israeli killings of Palestinians in the equivalent American report.
"Relations between Germany and Israel are special and must never normalize themselves in the sense that we have normal relations with Holland or the United States," said Rudolf Dressler, the German ambassador to Israel. "We feel co-responsible that the existence of Israel be guaranteed, and the political consequence is that, when in doubt, we side with Israel, because that is our unique duty."
Born in 1940, the son of a German who resisted Hitler, Mr. Dressler said he felt that he could legitimately ask himself what responsibility he bears for the Holocaust and for safeguarding the Jewish state, whose birth was linked in some ways to Hitler's onslaught on the Jews of Europe.
"Of course I ask, how could the Nazis do this and what do I have to do with what they did?" the ambassador said. "But they did it, and we have to live with it. There is no time limit for what the Germans did. And so we help Israel."
Bernhard Steubing is 21, a volunteer who has shunned military service to work for Aktion Sühnezeichen - literally Action Sign of Atonement - a group that has brought hundreds of young Germans to Israel since the 1950's. He helps handicapped people and Holocaust survivors.
"I felt it was important to do something because of the past, and while Holocaust survivors are still alive," he said. "I feel close to Israelis, although sometimes it is strange to find myself in this very nationalistic country, having refused to go to the German Army because I am against nationalism."
Germany and Israel are indeed an odd couple in this sense - the most postnational of European states allied with one of the most nationalistic. But their closeness has grown steadily past what once seemed the impenetrable wall of Hitler's annihilation of European Jewry.
In Germany, the immediate postwar years were marked by an attempt to bury the past, to find the elusive closure on the Holocaust for which many Germans still quest today.
In Israel, the initial reaction was also evasive because the Holocaust provoked a sense of humiliation on which the country preferred to turn its back. "We were raised as the better, proud Jews who could fight back, unlike our brothers who went like sheep to the slaughter," Mr. Primor said. "We thought, wrongly, that the victims humiliated us. They were insulted as the `Sabonim' - the Jews gassed and turned into soap by the Nazis."
Over decades, Germany came to terms with its Nazi past and Israel adopted the view that Hitler's victims were lured and coerced to their fate.
"The coming-together was a long and painful process," said Mr. Merhav, the retired senior diplomat who is himself the son of German immigrants to Israel. "But postwar Germany won over the body politic of Israel through a constant policy of friendship. American Jews, of course, were never exposed to this sort of practical friendship, and I suspect their anger at Germany is also anger at themselves, for they were very late to realize what was going on in Europe."
One Israeli, Gabriel Bach - a Jew born in Berlin in 1927, chased out of Germany in 1938, and later the chief prosecutor at the trial of Adolf Eichmann - finds that painful memory and appreciation of the new Germany still confront each other.
In Berlin recently, he was strolling in a central park when his wife pointed out the geraniums in each and every window of the nearby apartments. "And I looked up and what I saw was the ocean of swastikas that had adorned those same windows in the 1930's," Mr. Bach said. "There were swastikas on every balcony. She spoke of flowers and I saw that."
The past is still haunting - but, for Mr. Bach, it is the past. Eichmann's trial was a moment of epiphany, he said, when the man who planned to destroy the Jews stood at attention before the symbols of the Jewish state in an Israeli courtroom.
Israelis' national pride, and struggles, seem to have led them - like Mr. Bach - to view Germany with less prejudice, and more self-confidence, and more pragmatic engagement than many American Jews.
"I can't feel any resentment toward Germans not born at the time of Hitler," Mr. Bach said.
Reinhard Wiemer, a German diplomat married to an Israeli and now stationed in Tel Aviv, has also served in the United States. In Washington, he said, they lived in a largely Jewish neighborhood. "People would ask my wife: how could you marry a German?" he recalled. "That does not happen here."
He sees several reasons for the difference between Israeli attitudes and what he called the suspicion and prejudice of American Jews toward Germany, including an Israeli identity that is less tied to the Holocaust than that of American Jews, the broad Israeli knowledge that Germany has helped the country a lot, and the stereotyping of Germans in American movies and television.
The situation is improving, he believes, but slowly, and the recent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Germany naturally encourages those who wish to freeze their image of Germany in the past.
Mr. Wiemer enjoys Israel, but finds that being a German diplomat is often subject to the self-restraint that has helped build a remarkable alliance. "I think Israel should give back the occupied territories," Mr. Wiemer said. "I do not hide this, I tell my friends, and they do not object. But in public, as a German, you have to shut up." *****
Yoshie