The "Reichspogromnacht" debate on "Repeat Offender"

On his blog, "Repeat Offender", Gal Beckermann wrote a long and interesting commentary about the embarassing Bundestag debate, around the declaration denouncing Antisemitism (the article also appeared on NEXTBOOK — November 26, 2008):

"Early last month, the Christian Democrat representative proposed to add—to the standard elegiac language remembering the Holocaust—a clause that instantaneously upended the negotiations: “it must be recalled that Israel was never recognized by East Germany, that Jewish businesspeople were dispossessed by the East German government and had to flee, and that East Germany broke international law by delivering weapons to an anti-Israeli Syria in 1973.”

[...]

From at least 1967, the Communist world was officially anti-Zionist. East Germany, like its Soviet overlord, offered financial and propaganda support to belligerent Arab regimes. Cartoons in newspapers depicted Israeli soldiers as Nazis and the state sheltered PLO militants. The Zionist entity was an imperializing force, an oppressor whose existence should be mercilessly opposed.

[...]

While the Communist East maintained its anti-Zionist position, West Germany spent the post-war years rebuilding international goodwill through the hundreds of millions of dollars it threw at the Jewish state in the 1950s and ’60s."

(It should be noted, at this point, that the PLO and the Arab countries had good relationships with the West, which also sold them weapons - for example, despite Israeli protests, to Egypt in the early 1960s. The government back then was CDU ruled; and because money talks, Germany is doing business with Iran as we write this).