Israel slams ‘shameful’ former minister who endorses German far-right party

Rafi Eitan, a former Israeli minister and the legendary spy who captured Adolf Eichmann, caused surprise and shock in Israel when he publicly endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

In a video message posted Friday on the party’s Facebook page, Eitan praised the faction, saying: “Please understand that all of us in Israel appreciate your attitude toward Judaism.”

“In any case, I’m sure that if you work wisely strongly and most important realistically… I’m sure that instead of ‘Alternative for Germany,’ you might become an alternative for all of Europe,” he said.

He also urged AfD members to close their borders “as soon as possible to prevent Muslim immigration,” in a letter that accompanied the video.

Eitan, who commanded the 1960 intelligence operation that captured Nazi war criminal, Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, was also the chairman of the now defunct Gil Pensioners party and pensioner affairs minister from 2006 to 2009.

Eitan’s message drew immediate condemnation from Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff,  who “completely rejected” Eitan’s remarks.

“It is hard to believe how the person who captured Eichmann … is able to praise German right-wingers who so admire the Nazi past and wish on us that they become the alternative of Europe! Sad and shameful,” he said in a tweet.

Eitan started the video message with greetings to AfD co-leaders Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel as well as faction representative Beatrix von Storch. The latter has been accused of incitement after attacking the Cologne police for sending a New Year’s greeting in Arabic on Twitter.

“What the hell is going on with this country? Why is an official police site… tweeting in Arabic?” she tweeted. “Did you mean to placate the barbaric, Muslim, gang-raping hordes of men?”

Following his greetings to the anti-immigration lawmakers, Eitan went on to praise the AfD’s policies.

The former minister sent the video and letter after coming down with flu that prevented him from traveling to participate in an AfD gathering to discuss anti-Semitism at the German Bundestag.

The rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which came in third in Germany’s general elections in September with nearly 13 percent of the vote, has challenged Berlin’s culture of atonement over World War II and the slaughter of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

Speaking in September when the AfD became the first far-right faction to enter the Bundestag since the end of World War II, Issacharoff  expressed Israel’s “great concern.”

“The election result of the AfD causes us great concern,” Issacharoff told the Die Welt daily. “In the AfD, you have a party that is now the third-largest force in parliament and from whose ranks came a series of anti-Semitic remarks,” Issacharoff said.

For instance, Gauland recently said that Germans could be “proud” of their soldiers who fought in World War II, he noted. “This doesn’t jibe with the long way the Federal Republic of Germany has come since it assumed responsibility for the Holocaust and for the special relations with Israel.”

The AfD, derided by critics as anti-Semitic and racist, is the first openly anti-immigrant, far-right party to enter the Bundestag since World War II.

Many Jewish groups in Germany and abroad have repudiated the AfD as anti-Semitic, pointing to its anti-immigration and anti-Muslim platform, arguing that whoever targets Muslims and other minorities will sooner or later seek to harm the Jews’ religious freedoms.

MK Nachman Shai, an opposition lawmaker who chairs the Israel-Germany Parliamentary Friendship Group, said in September that Germany’s democratic elections must be respected, but at the same time called them “a great warning sign” for Israel and the Jewish people.

“The rise of the extreme right in Germany is indicative of dangerous moods that are growing stronger,” he said. “Xenophobia, racism, and extremism have conquered a significant portion of the German public and prove that the democratic stratum is fragile and vulnerable.”

At the same time, a wide-ranging September poll commissioned by a group promoting German-Israeli relations indicated that most AfD politicians care deeply about Israel. Nearly 90% of the 35 AfD members who were surveyed totally or somewhat support Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dictum that “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’etre.”

Raphael Ahren and agencies contributed to this report.