German Chancellor Angela Merkel says : Nuclear Iran would be disastrous
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"If Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons, it would have disastrous consequences," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday in a special address to the Knesset. "We have to prevent this."
In an emotional speech, delivered in German, Merkel said her country would always be committed to Israel's security, particularly in light of growing threats from Iran.
"Especially in this place, I emphasize: Every German government and every chancellor before me was committed to the special responsibility Germany has for Israel's security," she said.
"This historic responsibility is part of my country's fundamental policy. It means that for me, as a German chancellor, Israel's security is non-negotiable," she added.
Merkel also said Germany must speak out against racism and anti-Semitism.
The chancellor opened her speech with a Hebrew sentence, thanking the Knesset for giving her the "great honor" of addressing them in German. She immediately paid tribute to those killed by Nazi Germany during World War II.
"The mass murder of six million Jews, carried out in the name of Germany, has brought indescribable suffering to the Jewish people, Europe and the entire world," she said.
"The Shoah fills us Germans with shame. I bow before the victims. I bow before the survivors and before all those who helped them survive," she said, using the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Merkel grew up in former East Germany, the daughter of a pastor. In her speech, she referred to her former country's refusal to take responsibility for the Holocaust; until unification in 1990, that task was shouldered by West Germany alone.
She said Communist East Germany considered the Nazi past as a West German problem. "It took 40 years until the entire Germany ... acknowledged its responsibility for history and for the state of Israel," she said.
Merkel expressed support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also said Israel does not need unsolicited advice from outsiders. Merkel is not meeting Palestinian leaders during her current trip to Israel.
Currently, Germany is trying to help set up an industrial park in the northern West Bank, near the town of Jenin, that could create thousands of jobs. Merkel said she would follow the project very closely.
The address capped Merkel's three-day visit to Israel to mark the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding. Israel pulled out all the stops for Merkel, a staunch ally, raising the German flag over its parliament in a red carpet ceremony that drove home the two nations' growing alliance six decades after the Holocaust.
Lawmakers made special allowances for Merkel to address them, even though she's not a head of state. Several of the 120 parliamentarians skipped the ceremony, but the protest was overshadowed by the extraordinary warmth of the relationship.
About 1,000 guests listened to Merkel, including Holocaust survivors, Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders, former Israeli presidents and residents of towns targeted by rocket fire from Gaza.
Introducing Merkel, leaders repeatedly called on Germany never to forget the victims of the Holocaust, and appealed to her to do everything she could to stop Iran's nuclear program.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert praised Merkel's "strong and determined position against the horrific calls from the president of Iran to wipe Israel off the map and against Teheran's trickery and deceit," he said.
"The close bonds of friendship between Germany and Israel are not regular relations between two nations," Olmert said.
"They carry the heavy weight of historical memory to which we are obligated. But this is exactly why they [also] contain power, sensitivity and substance that are unparalleled between any two nations in the international arena."
Before Merkel addressed the plenum, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said although German society was fighting against the phenomena of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism, "the scars of the past are very deep and can't be treated in a single generation, if they can be treated at all."
Regarding MKs who expressed reservations about Merkel speaking in German, Netanyahu said that "it's possible to understand them, but there is no personal opposition to you or your state."
At a gathering in the Knesset earlier in the day, Merkel said her country would do its best to assist in returning the three abducted IDF soldiers, Gilad Schalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. The soldier's families were in attendance.
Several MKs, including Yisrael Katz (Likud), Limor Livnat (Likud), Arye Eldad (NU-NRP) and Shelly Yacimovich (Labor) have expressed displeasure with the decision to allow the speech.
The Knesset Committee approved the speech last week, despite the fact that Merkel is not considered a head of state and therefore does not officially qualify to address the plenum.
GIL MK Moshe Sharoni, a Holocaust survivor who was an inmate in a forced labor camp in Germany during the war, said Tuesday morning that he had no objection to hearing the language of his former oppressors spoken in the Knesset.
"It was not the language that destroyed us, but rather the people in command, who change everything," Sharoni told Army Radio. "When our president travels abroad he also speaks Hebrew. We cannot forbid them from speaking their language. I mean, the British also caused us trouble, would we forbid them to speak English?"
NU-NRP MK Arye Eldad was planning to protest the speech by reading poems by Uri Zvi Greenberg about the Holocaust on the Knesset podium Tuesday morning. Eldad, the son of Holocaust survivors, said on Monday that he dreaded the time when the sound of German no longer caused discomfort to anyone in the Knesset.
"The last words my family heard were in German, and those were the orders to shoot them," Eldad said. "My protest is against the State of Israel and the Knesset, who invited her to make an address inside [the Knesset] when protocol does not necessitate it."
Eldad said that he would be walking out conspicuously as soon as the speech began.
Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich, who is also the daughter of survivors, announced that she would not be in the Knesset during Merkel's address, saying that "although Merkel is a friend of Israel, the decision to allow a German speech in the Knesset, when this is not stipulated in the protocol, is callousness towards Holocaust survivors.
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Merkel Addresses Israeli Parliament Amid Controversy
Chancellor Merkel addressed the Israeli parliament on Tuesday amid controversy - some MPs boycotted the speech while Hamas slammed Merkel for being blind to what it called Israel's "Holocaust" against Palestinians.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's three-day solidarity visit to Israel to mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Jewish state following the Nazi holocaust climaxed with a historic speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament on Tuesday, March 17.
The 53-year-old became the first German head of government to address the Knesset, an honor normally reserved for heads of state.
Merkel told Israel's parliament that Germans are filled with shame over the Nazi Holocaust and that she bows before the victims. In an emotional speech, delivered in German and a smattering of Hebrew, Merkel said her country will always be committed to Israel's security, particularly in light of growing threats from Iran.
"To speak to you in this honourable assembly is a great honour for me," Merkel said in Hebrew. "I thank you all that I am allowed to speak to you in my mother tongue today," Merkel continued in German.
"The Shoah fills us Germans with shame," she said, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed. "I bow to the victims. I bow to all those who helped the survivors."
Mixed feelings about German in the Knesset
But Merkel's speech in German has ruffled some feathers in Israel, where memories of the Nazis' murder of six million Jews during World War II run deep.
Five legislators in the 120-member Knesset stayed away in
protest, saying they did not want to hear German spoken. Others, including at least one Holocaust survivor, criticized the plans as "populist."
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Shimon Peres welcomes Merkel with a kiss
"I know the last sounds heard by my grandparents and my uncles whom I have not known were those of the German language," said Arieh Eldad, an MP of the far-right National Union-National Religious Party.
Israel Radio reported Shelly Yachimovich, of the coalition Labor Party, as saying she would stay absent from the speech because it was "insensitive" toward Holocaust survivors to hold it in German, "the language of their torturers - SS officers, camp commanders and the Gestapo."
"It's very hard to hear the German language in the Knesset. We want to remind (people) that despite the fact that Germany today is indeed showing friendship toward Israel, we remember what had happened," said Yitzhak Levy, of the same party.
But a 73-year-old lawmaker, who is a Holocaust survivor herself, criticized the boycott as "nothing but populism."
"It doesn't bother me at all that Merkel chose to speak in German," said Romanian-born Sara Marom Shalev, of the coalition Pensioners' Party.
Labour Party lawmaker Ophir Pines, also the son of a Holocaust survivor, criticized the boycott as well as an "inappropriate provocation."
Cementing relations
The issue of German being spoken inside the Israeli parliament has sparked angry protests before in the Jewish state.
When Johannes Rau became the first German head of state to address the Knesset in 2000, he did so in German and several Israeli MPs stormed out in protest.
His successor Horst Koehler received a warmer reception five years later and included several sentences in Hebrew in his speech.
Israel and Germany established ties in 1965 after years of negotiations, including over reparations for Jewish property seized during the Holocaust. Israel has since come to regard Germany as its strongest ally in Europe.
And on Monday, the two countries further tightened their friendly but loaded relations by signing a bilateral agreement for tighter military, cultural, political and economic cooperation.
The agreement was signed at a symbolic, first ever joint cabinet session in Jerusalem, attended by 17 ministers of both sides, including Merkel and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Hamas slams Merkel visit
Merkel's last day of her visit was also marred by strong comments by radical Islamist movement Hamas which slammed Merkel for closing her eyes to what it labeled as Israel's "holocaust" against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Merkel's comments "reflect a moral degradation into which this chancellor has fallen by supporting without failure an entity that commits massacres against Palestinian children, women and the elderly," Hamas said.
The Islamists also said the chancellor "has closed her eyes to the holocaust that this entity has perpetrated in the Gaza Strip, focusing only on the Holocaust committed by the Nazis against Jews in her country, the extent of which is a subject of doubts and exaggerations." Hamas has pledged itself to Israel's destruction.
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: A Palestinian boy jumps over a pile of rubble after an Israeli strike
The comments referred to Israeli operations in the territory that began on February 27 in response to rocket fire and that killed more than 130 Palestinians, including several dozen children and other civilians, in the course of a little more than a week. Five Israelis were also killed.
Merkel, who was urged to be critical during her visit to Israel and raise questions about Israel's continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, sidestepped the settlement issue during talks with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday, saying only the question was complex.
When asked about almost daily rocket fire launched at southern Israel by Palestinian militants in Gaza, she said, "There are conditions that don't make talks any easier."
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