"The good fortune of history has given us a gift, in that after the crimes against humanity committed in the Holocaust, it was possible to reset and re-establish relations between Germany and Israel, to the extent we did. It would be a mistake to base relations only on Holocaust remembrance," the retiring leader said yesterday. Of Germany, at a special cabinet meeting held in honor of her retirement visit to Israel.
Merkel did feel a historical commitment to the Jewish people due to the Holocaust.
Her personal approach led her to take a relatively sympathetic stance toward Israel in the European space, as well as assist Israel in discounted defense procurement.
Merkel's personal commitment to the memory of the Holocaust, and to the German policy that should be derived as a result, is not self-evident.
In broad strata of young generations in Germany, right and left alike, the declared consensus on special treatment for Israel because of the Holocaust no longer exists.
Many there want to put the past behind, and this erosion of historical memory has been intensifying for years.
But the doubly serious problem is that even in Israel, the demand for special German treatment of the Jewish state is being eroded to the core.
In this respect it can be said of Merkel, and not at all with satisfaction, that her wish has been fulfilled for many years above and beyond all that is reasonable and logical.
The State of Israel, with its institutions and discourse designers, normalized relations with Germany too soon and too excessively.
A foreign person who is exposed to the Israeli discourse will find, for example, that the Poles - see the value of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid's statements - are much more infamous for their part in the murder of the Jews than the Germans.
In an incomprehensible way, in the world of Israeli imagery, Germany is a pleasant country that is fun to travel and visit, while Poland is a land of extermination camps.
Our leaders, Lapid or Israel Katz, do not dare to slap the Germans a tenth of what they say about the Poles.
Moreover, even through the money that Berlin pours into BDS organizations, one can often hear the claim of distortions that the Jews are the new Nazis.
Not to mention the indifference of the Holocaust - not once courtesy of German research institutes - that makes it another genocide.
The message is that "by chance" Germans are the ones who murdered Jews, but very easily things could have been the other way around.
What emerges from this horrific creative reversal is that the Germans are not to blame for the most horrific atrocity that has ever happened on the globe, but that it is a coincidence.
Sometimes they are murderers and we are murdered, and sometimes the opposite. Even in relation to the Holocaust, the facts do not change at all. Both Lapid and Bennett went out of their way yesterday to praise Merkel for her Holocaust remembrance activities. They did not dare say that alongside this policy, it was expected that because of Germany's historic debt to the Jewish people, Merkel, for example, would stand firmly to the right of Israel in the struggle against Iran. Not to be misunderstood, even previous Israeli leaders did not have the courage to voice, even with a hint, such a position. Too quickly, and too easily, we got sick of the Germans, put the past behind us, let relationships with them get into an almost random routine, as if things never were.
"The Holocaust is always in the background," every Israeli diplomat who has served in Germany tells me. But when it comes to the practical level, it is already difficult to find people like the chairman of Yad Vashem, Danny Dayan, who do not buy German products. Moreover, and absurdly, the Israeli government decided many years ago that its heads would symbolically travel in German cars. Does this humiliation make sense? Relations between Germany and Israel, unfortunately, are not based on the memory of the Holocaust.
Had we remembered as we should remember, we would not have maintained ties with Germany to this day, and we would have done our best to continue to condemn it among the nations.
We would light six million candles every day in Merhavia in memory of the parents and sons, granddaughters and grandmothers, uncles and nieces she murdered, tortured, burned and buried alive.
The blood of our brothers' blood cries out from all over Europe.
The Germans - it was not just Hitler and his followers, but the whole nation - were forever defiled by the cursed continent.
On the memory of this hell we must base our relations with Germany.
Maybe in six million years there will be a place other than sanity or normalcy.
Ariel Kahana