Merkel's trips to Israel at start and end of tenure not a coincidence - analysis

• Author: HERB KEINON
• Published date: 11 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

And it is not by accident that visits to Israel will serve as bookends to her term in office: Both trips gave tangible expression to the importance she attributes to Berlin's ties with Jerusalem.

Merkel's first visit as Germany's leader came in January 2006, almost 16 years ago, four months after her Christian Democratic Union squeaked out a victory and just two months after she was sworn in as chancellor.

Israel was Merkel's first destination outside of Europe and the US. She went ahead with the planned meeting, even though then-prime minister Ariel Sharon was felled by a second stroke and was being replaced by an acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert. It was Olmert's first meeting with a world leader in his new role.

"I have come here on my first visit, a get-acquainted visit, because I wanted to emphasize how important the State of Israel is to me," Merkel said at the time.

That is one side of the bookends.

The other side is her current visit, one that followed her retirement from politics and a new election in Germany and is a farewell trip made in her capacity as a lame-duck chancellor. The trip itself sends the same message as did her first one: German-Israeli relations are special.

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid – the son of a Holocaust survivor, late justice minister Tommy Lapid – concurred with that message. Not only are the relations special, they are a herald of good, he said.

"If after the most horrible event in the history of mankind we can sit here together – allies, friends, real partners – then there is hope for humankind. There is the possibility that good can conquer evil," Lapid said to Merkel at a special cabinet meeting she attended.

"I am the grandson of someone who was killed in the gas chambers of the Mauthausen concentration camp and the son of a Holocaust survivor from Budapest, a child of 13 who sat in a cellar and did not understand why the nation of Goethe and Beethoven wanted to kill him," he said. "I carry with me their memories."

"But my children will remember this moment" he continued. "Their father was present when the German chancellor was hosted at a cabinet meeting of the State of Israel... a nation that turned the past, as horrible as it might have been, into the impetus for building and for creating, and which is proud to host you because of who you are and what you represent."

Lapid, who has lambasted Poland for not owning up to its Holocaust past, said that from Merkel's first day in office she did not base German...