BERLIN – Shortly before leaving Berlin, Shimon Stein, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, summed up his seven-year term as “interesting, challenging, productive, and frustrating.”
It was frustrating, he said, mainly because “though we invested much effort in an attempt to explain the situation in Israel and why we react the way we do to the Germans, we scored an unimpressive success, to say the least.”
Stein is not optimistic at all. “I watched with great concern how the German’s public view of Israel eroded,” he said. “If public opinion polls are any indication of prevailing moods, I cannot forget the survey that the EU held in 2003, where Germany stood out as a country that feels Israel and the United States are the biggest threat to world peace. That poll pointed at a symptom of a general attitude that has taken root over the past few years in Germany. I am not saying that it is not legitimate to criticize Israel, but I have a problem with the tone of that criticism. In recent years, a question concerning the legitimacy of Israel clearly surfaced.”
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