Germany’s outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting Israel on a two-day farewell tour starting yesterday, after a 16-year term during which she cultivated warm relations with the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has said he and Merkel would discuss “regional threats and challenges, especially the Iranian nuclear issue,” and maintaining Israel’s “strength in all spheres.”
It is Merkel’s eighth and final visit to Israel as chancellor, as she prepares to retire from politics.
Merkel had initially planned to visit in August, but delayed her trip amid the chaotic exit of US and allied forces, including Germans, from Afghanistan. The 67-year-old trained physicist is to receive an honorary doctorate from Haifa’s Technion — Israel Institute of Technology.
Photo: AP
She will also visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and meet Israeli tech leaders, Bennett’s office said.
The veteran of German politics was the guest of the recently sworn-in Bennett, who ended Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12 straight years as prime minister.
Merkel congratulated Bennett on taking office in June, saying Germany and Israel were “connected by a unique friendship that we want to strengthen further.”
Merkel’s administration advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She also stressed Israel’s security as a crucial priority of German foreign policy.
Germany and Israel forged strong diplomatic ties in the decades after World War II, with Berlin committed to the preservation of the Jewish state in penance for the Holocaust.
In 2008, Merkel stood before the Israeli parliament to atone on behalf of the German people in a historic address.
Her administration backed Israel’s “right to defend itself” in May, as Israel bombed Gaza in response to rockets fired by militants from the blockaded enclave.
Advocates for the Palestinians have urged Germany to demand an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that began in 1967.
More than 600,000 Israeli settlers have moved into the West Bank and east Jerusalem, which Palestinians hope can become part of a future state.
Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza’s two million residents since the Islamist movement Hamas seized control in 2007.
Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, was critical of Merkel for regarding Israel’s 54-year occupation as “temporary.”
“Maintaining this fiction has allowed the Merkel government to avoid dealing with the reality of apartheid and persecution of millions of Palestinians,” he said in a statement. “The new German government should put human rights at the center of its Israel and Palestine policy.”
After Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union performed poorly in elections last month, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) appear poised to head a new coalition as party negotiations continue.
A rare point of difference between Germany and Israel is a 2015 deal that Berlin signed to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for greater supervision of its nuclear program.
Israel is opposed to efforts by Germany, the US and others to revive the deal after then-US president Donald Trump withdrew from it in 2018.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
Thailand has netted more than 1.3 million kilograms of highly destructive blackchin tilapia fish, the government said yesterday, as it battles to stamp out the invasive species. Shoals of blackchin tilapia, which can produce up to 500 young at a time, have been found in 19 provinces, damaging ecosystems in rivers, swamps and canals by preying on small fish, shrimp and snail larvae. As well as the ecological impact, the government is worried about the effect on the kingdom’s crucial fish-farming industry. Fishing authorities caught 1,332,000kg of blackchin tilapia from February to Wednesday last week, said Nattacha Boonchaiinsawat, vice president of a parliamentary
RSS