On the other hand, the cultivation of economic ties today would be unthinkable without the process of political reconciliation initiated by former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in the late 1950s. In the wake of the shooting, Interior Minister Otto Schily doggedly told his countrymen to be ashamed that Israelis had been forced to use weapons in self-defence. On the basis of their current foreign policy, it would seem that Germany's post-war leaders are also groping for an exoneration to deliver the country from its Nazi past. Penitence is one thing. But Bonn's continuous silence in the face of Israeli human rights abuses begs the question how it is possible to atone for the crimes of history while ignoring today's atrocities.
Reticence has other implications too.
It is a maxim of fairness that we say this openly. Germany's Arab friends know this, although they do not agree with us. But I don't expect that either. What observers continue to expect, however, are bitter disputes within Fischer's ecological party. Although the Greens first raised eyebrows in the 1980s by calling for Germany's withdrawal from NATO, Fischer ironically became the country's first post-war minister to sanction an operation by German troops outside the nation's boundaries in Kosovo.