Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Poll: Israeli Ill Will Toward Germany Is Dissipating

Is bad will towards Germany vanishing from Israeli society?

Once, it was common to hear people say they refuse to buy German goods. A new Hebrew University poll reveals that today only 6% of Israeli citizens today do so.

In fact, Israelis are pretty engaged with German culture. A third of respondents said they had watched a German movie of recent.

Among Jewish Israelis, pollsters found that some 61% are very satisfied with how Germany has dealt with Holocaust memorial and four in five think that Germany today is a “different Germany” to that which carried out the Holocaust. When the same pollsters asked that question on several occasions during the 1980s, the figure was always fifty-something percent.

In the new poll, when asked about German’s role in the Middle East, Jewish Israelis were very positive. Some 54% said they have confidence in Germany — 9% more than have confidence in France. Interestingly, only 27% of Israeli Arabs said they have confidence in Germany. This reflects a feeling among Arabs that Germany is pro-Israel. But it goes deeper.

It reflects the popular narrative that Arabs in Israel/Palestine are paying the price of German atrocities during the Holocaust, and that some Arabs see themselves as the indirect victims of the Holocaust. And of course in their view, Germany has moved to right its wrongs against Jews, but the idea that Arabs are also its victims has never come on to the German agenda.

Back to the results for Jewish Israelis, what does all this tell us? Is it an encouraging story of a nation that committed a historical wrong righting its society and dealing responsibly with commemoration so effective that relations are normalizing (four in five Jewish Israelis said Israel-Germany relations are today “normal)? Yes, but here is a less happy sub-plot.

The director of the poll Moshe Zimmerman, head of Hebrew University’s Richard Koebner Minerva Centre for German History, thinks that part of what is going on here is that Israelis see themselves as aligned with the Christian world, including Germany, and pitted against the Islamic world. In other words, dislike pointed in one direction is making way for dislike pointed in another.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Explore

Most Popular

In Case You Missed It

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.