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Germany needs an Israel Lobby. That was the thrust of Alan Posener’s commentary on Deutschland Radio in late May. Posener, chief columnist for Germany’s largest circulating Sunday newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, attended the yearly AIPAC conference in Washington and posits U.S pro-Israel solidarity as a model for Germany, where “Israel’s Lobby’s consists of six million dead Jews.” There is a predisposition among a sizable number of Germans to memorialize the destruction of German (and European) Jewry while displaying an aversion to living Jews and the state of Israel. Posener views this German infatuation with dead Jews as “no substitute for six thousand living lobbyists in Germany – lobbyists who would remind us that solidarity with Israel is not part of how Germany deals with its past, but is an investment in Europe’s future. “If Beirut and Damascus, Cairo and Gaza, would one day look like Tel Aviv, Europe’s freedom would be assured.” Posener’s laudable goal is a tall order in a nation where 77 percent of the population harbors, according to a recent BBC poll, a pejorative view of Israel – the highest such level in Europe. And the German edition of Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, just out in bookstores here, will no doubt help push that figure higher. The dust jacket features an American flag with stars of David rather than the conventional five-pointed stars.
