German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit Israel tomorrow, but not everyone involved in Israeli-German relations believes that she deserves a warm welcome. Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, claimed in an interview with Arutz Sheva that Merkel's efforts to combat the re-imposition of sanctions on Iran contradict her statements regarding the need to preserve Israel's security. "Despite all her statements about the Holocaust and Israel's security, she is actually leading efforts to circumvent the sanctions against Iran and is doing everything possible so that the Tehran regime will continue to conduct flourishing business with Germany," said Zuroff. "This is a trade volume of several billion shekels, and this, of course, fundamentally contradicts its declarations regarding the importance of Israel's security," he said. Zuroff believes this is a bleak extension of the chancellor's political career: "She is about to finish her job, her popularity is declining because of her decision to allow more than a million refugees from the Middle East to enter Germany, which has caused serious problems in her country. Now, her activity to prevent the sanctions against Iran also harms Israel's security and stands in contradiction to her declarations of support for us " "I have no doubt that she may be accepted here with dignity, but I am not surprised that our prime minister recently went to Lithuania and praised them despite all the crimes they committed during the Holocaust, so I'm not really surprised," Zuroff says.
