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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Focus Interview Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters A murder among friends
By Dominic ColdwellIt was all smiles when German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer visited Tel Aviv last week. "Reunited Germany is a friend that Israel can rely on," he said, delivering a series of Dolphin submarines, which can be loaded with nuclear warheads and reach Egypt's northern coastline. His colleague David Levy replied warmly that "Germany always supported us, even at times when no one else did. We are grateful for that." But things were once different.
Buffeted by memories of the Holocaust, German-Israeli relations have never been an exercise in plain-sailing. Recent reports that Israeli security deliberately shot Kurdish demonstrators who stormed the country's Consulate in Berlin last February have temporarily threatened to shipwreck trust in bilateral ties. Israel lambasted the German police for failing to prevent the take-over of its mission by Kurds protesting alleged Mossad involvement in the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. However, declassified evidence presented to a parliamentary board of enquiry in Berlin has disqualified Israeli claims that its officers acted in self-defence.
According to video footage, Kurdish activists fled the consulate after an agent gunned down twenty-nine year old Mustafa Kurt. An Israeli diplomat then opened fire on the retreating Kurds, leaving three more dead, including eighteen-year-old Kurdish girl Sema Alp, and a score wounded. Protected by their diplomatic immunity, both gunmen were then spirited out of the country. Miryam Shomrat, the Israeli Consul in Berlin, who spoke of "murder" in an initial response to the shooting, was swiftly assigned to a sinecure in Finland. In a violent harangue, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu then laid into the shortcomings of the German police, evoking the massacre of Israeli civilians at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
Far more surprising than the Israeli reaction, however, was the German response. In a deposition to local police, an Israeli diplomat testified that one shot had been fired outside the consulate as Kurds were scrambling to leave the compound. He thus debunked his government's claim that his colleague had acted in self-defence. Yet Berlin's General-Prosecutor Hansjürgen Karge chose to omit this fact from the not-so-kosher report he made to a judicial board of review in March. Thus, before the disclosure of evidence in May, the German public had no reason not to swallow the story of Israeli self-defence hook, line and sinker.
In spite of these revelations, however, the prosecution prematurely rested its case in June. Avi Primor, the Israeli ambassador in Bonn, had previously proposed that the gunmen testify before the German courts. The evidence disclosed in May would have required the prosecutors to charge the diplomats with homicide. But Primor knows as well as anybody else that laws of diplomatic immunity prevent the prosecution from filing charges against consulate personnel. Thus, when authorities in Berlin turned down Primor's gesture, the German press lamented the supercession of national law. In the words of journalist Christian Bommarius, the official response means "no less than that the prosecution shields the crime from investigation, and ostensibly forbids the judiciary to do what it is meant to do."
By ensuring that testimonies to the parliamentary board of enquiry are kept secret, Berlin's senator of the interior, Eckhart Werthebach, has meanwhile torpedoed ongoing attempts to shed further light on the incident. Wolfgang Wieland, who leads the enquiry, concluded that "we have a scenario of difficulties here, which has never existed before in such massive proportions." In the eyes of German magazine Der Spiegel, the "conspicuous reticence" of initial police investigations and the problems of the current enquiry are no accident, given that "interest in a political cover-up is mutual."
But apart from a face-saving way-out for Israel, what is in the basket for Germany? Not much, it seems. It is true that the Federal Republic has a vested interest in Israel. Last year, bilateral trade amounted to $3.2 billion, a 10.9 per cent increase over the previous year, as Germany became Israel's most important trading partner after the United States.
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. What the consulate shooting really reveals, say critics, is a strong current of "philosemitism" in Germany's foreign policy -- a refusal to accept that the victims of yore could one day become aggressors. 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. A spokesperson for Fischer also declared that there were no indications of a possible misdemeanour by the Israeli agents, a remark that Der Spiegel cynically dubbed "an acquittal among friends."
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. Although the treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1965 was not meant to prejudice Arab interests, in diplomatic practice, Israel continues to be on a considerably "more equal" footing than her neighbours. Last year, for instance, Germany's former Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel said that his country "felt a special responsibility to see that the Israeli people live free from fear and threats," a position that "Arab states had to understand." Although Kinkel criticised the construction of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, he also believes that "Germans ... should not voice [their opposition] too much nor too loudly." On the occasion of Israel's fiftieth anniversary, Kinkel dug deep into Zionist lore, praising Jewish settlers for their "tenacity" and for making the "Negev [Desert] bloom."
His successor Joschka Fischer has parroted these sentiments by wedding Germany's "original sin" to Mendelian genetics. Appropriate though criticism of Israel may be, Fischer believes that "it provokes the opposite reaction. [Germany's] special relationship to Israel stems from our responsibility... for the... Holocaust... [which] we inherit as a younger generation, [and which] will indefinitely remain the basis on which any relations are possible at all." Asked why he had departed from the more pro-Arab line of Wilhelm Brandt and Helmut Schmidt's Social-Democratic governments of the 1970s, Fischer replied that while he desired "very good relations" with Arab countries, these entailed "a mutual recognition of Germany's responsibility for Israel... 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. The Greens' accession to government as the junior partner of a national coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats has magnified the fault lines within the pacifist movement.
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. At the height of the Intifada and during the Gulf War, many Greens also donned Palestinian kafiyas to protest Zionist politics. It is these rank-and-file party members who find Fischer's deference to Tel Aviv especially revolting. Greens in Berlin were the first to call for an independent commission to investigate the consulate shooting. Thus, the government's efforts to contain a diplomatic crisis with Tel Aviv now ironically dovetails with the traditionally more pro-Israeli policies of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic Union.
At this point, Fischer is still awaiting the release of final reports by the parliamentary enquiry in October. The polls for Berlin's mayorship will then automatically end the board's mission. Two weeks ago, the enquiry adjourned for summer holidays after key witnesses suddenly claimed they were ill or on vacation. In any case, Fischer is not likely to register an official complaint in Tel Aviv once the enquiry closes. But since he feels so much "responsibility" for Israel's safety, perhaps it is high time that the foreign minister shoulder some responsibility for fudging investigations in the interest of "Jewish security." Anything else would make him an accomplice -- at least in legal jargon.
