Insinuating Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has no one to blame but himself, the German news magazine Der Spiegel is reporting a wariness in Berlin to “accommodate the Israeli prime minister.” A feature analysis of the German-Israeli relationship begins with a retelling of what the Germans call a deliberate twisting by the Netanyahu government of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s words to indicate her belief that the time was not right for two states — Israeli and Palestinian – when Merkel was, in fact, accusing Israel’s policy of construction in post-1967 areas for making a two-state solution unlikely. The article continues with the assessment that, “The Israeli prime minister has always been able to depend on Berlin ultimately standing together with Israel and not joining the country’s most vocal critics. But many, particularly in the Berlin Foreign Ministry, have begun wondering if Germany sent the wrong signals in the past.” Examples of “indications that the German government’s approach is changing” begin with Berlin’s refusal to support the Israeli position in opposition to language in the text of a European Union resolution at a Brussels conference that declared Israeli building “illegal.” The newspaper Haaretz quoted an unnamed Israeli source as dismissing the report, claiming that “ties between Israel and Germany are close and good, and they will continue to be,” and surmising that the Der Spiegel article is most likely “an internal German attempt to bash Merkel over her close relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
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