The visit to the Bundestag must have been a special journey for Isaac Herzog, the President of the State of Israel. And that means something after the commemoration ceremony in Fürstenfeldbruck, in which he took part on Monday – together with Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, “my good friend”, as Herzog said, and the survivors of the 1972 assassination attempt by Palestinian terrorists at the Olympic Games in Munich murdered eleven Israeli athletes.
It was Herzog’s father Chaim who was the first head of the Jewish state to visit the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1987, as Bundestag President Bärbel Bas recalls. At that time, the Berlin Wall was still a few meters away, and Chaim Herzog spoke of an invisible wall of silence separating the German and Israeli peoples. Now, 35 years later, this wall has been overcome, says Bas, and Isaac Herzog steps up to the lectern here in the Bundestag, topped by the glass dome.
Herzog begins his address with the Jiskor prayer, with which Jews commemorate the deceased relatives – he dedicates it to the six million Jews who were murdered by Nazi Germany. But he also links it to the memory that anti-Semitism, violence and persecution against Jewish communities have a much longer history in Germany. The prayer commemorates the victims of the first Christian crusade a little less than 1,000 years ago, which, Herzog says, hit communities hard. Commemoration is an “indispensable part of our identity,” says Herzog.
A home and at the same time the site of the greatest atrocities in history
When he comes to Germany, he carries a “photo album of my people” with him, which contains “numerous pictures of this country”. On the one hand, Germany was a homeland for the Jews. Outstanding Jewish culture developed here, as did the most important rabbis of the Jewish people, intellectual greats such as Abraham Geiger, Albert Einstein, Kurt Weill and Else Lasker-Schüler.
At the same time, the greatest atrocities in history also happened in Germany, from the destruction of Jewish communities to the “deepest abyss of human coexistence, the Shoa”. This darkest chapter in German history is also connected to Herzog’s family history. Chaim Herzog was a British officer involved in the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It was the first place Chaim Herzog visited when he returned to Germany as President of the State of Israel. He will never forget how his father described the inhuman conditions there, “hell on earth,” as Herzog says, who wanted to visit the memorial with Federal President Steinmeier that afternoon.
“Only the dead have the right to forgive, the living have no right to forget,” Herzog continues. “The Jewish people do not forget.” That is “complex, hard and painful” for both sides and requires the obligation to commemorate the Shoah. In the present, that means not ignoring the hate-mongering voices and resolutely declaring war on anti-Semitism, an appeal that MEPs endorse with much applause. President of the Bundestag Bas had already made a similar statement during the welcome. It is unbearable that demonstrations against Israel are being incited, there should be no misunderstood tolerance. Anti-Semitism also exists in mainstream society and among some who “see themselves serving a good cause,” she warned.
Referring to the Palestinians, Herzog says Israel wants peaceful coexistence with all of its neighbors – pointing to the normalization of relations with a number of Arab states. But the “Palestinian neighbors” must stop terrorism against Israel, which led to the massacre in Munich in 1972 and is still ongoing today.
Herzog also makes a political deduction with regard to Iran: It is completely unacceptable that a member state of the United Nations is threatening another whose people have already been victims of the Shoah with annihilation. He called on the whole world to resolutely and decisively oppose the development of nuclear weapons by the Tehran regime. Anyone who denies the Shoah and Israel’s right to exist has no right to sign treaties, to concessions and financial resources – a reference to the nuclear agreement with Tehran, which the USA, France, Great Britain and Germany are currently in talks with Iran to reinstate try to put. Israel will defend itself with all means, says Herzog.
“World history knows no example of the extermination campaign that National Socialist Germany waged against the Jewish people” – these were the words Bas quoted. At the request of then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Israeli Foreign Minister Mosche Sharett refrained from stating them in 1952 when they signed the Luxembourg Agreement, the reparation treaty between what was then West Germany and Israel. Today Germany stands by its responsibility, said Bas. Today, Israel is “proud of its partnership with Germany,” Israel’s President replied in the Bundestag.