Description: By the late 1960s, West Germany and Israel were moving in almost opposite diplomatic directions in a political environment dominated by the Cold War. The Federal Republic launched ambitious policies to reconcile with its Iron Curtain neighbors, expand its influence in the Arab world, and promote West European interests vis-à-vis the United States. By contrast, Israel, unable to obtain peace with the Arabs after its 1967 military victory and threatened by Palestinian terrorism, became increasingly dependent upon the United States, estranged from the USSR and Western Europe, and isolated from the Third World. Nonetheless, the two countries remained connected by shared security concerns, personal bonds, and recurrent evocations of the German-Jewish past. Drawing upon newly-available sources covering the first decade of the countries' formal diplomatic ties, Carole Fink reveals the underlying issues that shaped these two countries' fraught relationship and sets their foreign and domestic policies in a global context.
Brief description: Carole Fink is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at the Ohio State University. She is the author of many books, including Cold War: An International History (2017), and Writing 20th Century International History: Explorations and Examples (2017). She was twice awarded the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association for Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge, 2004), and The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy 1921-1922 (1984).
Review Quotes: 'Carole Fink's new study is a model of how modern international history should be written. By integrating both domestic politics and the dynamics of the East-West conflict, this deeply researched book shows how Brandt's Ostpolitik, combined with his Nahostpolitik, greatly complicated relations between Jerusalem and Bonn.' V. R. Berghahn, author of American Big Business in Britain and Germany