JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled a meeting with Germany’s visiting foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, after the diplomat refused to cancel a conference with a group highly critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories.
Netanyahu’s office announced the cancellation after the foreign minister declined to drop his session with Breaking the Silence, a nonprofit that collects the testimonies of former Israeli combatants with the aim of exposing “the reality of everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
In an interview with German television network ZDF, Gabriel said it was “totally normal” to meet with groups such as Breaking the Silence. And he added “it wouldn’t be a catastrophe” if he did not meet Netanyahu.
Gabriel arrived in Israel on Monday, the day Israelis mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and remember the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi regime and the millions of Jews murdered during World War II.
Gabriel took part in an official Remembrance Day ceremony, laying a wreath at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
He had been scheduled to meet Netanyahu on Tuesday until word of his meeting with Breaking the Silence reached the Israeli prime minister’s ears.
In June, Palestinians will mark 50 years of Israel’s military occupation, a situation that is viewed by much of the world as illegal.
Breaking the Silence is particularly reviled by Israel’s rightist political leaders, who claim the group’s actions aim to discredit the military and undermine the Israeli state.
In the past, the organization retold the soldiers’ stories to Israeli high school students and even to active soldiers. The goal, they said, was to raise a discussion in Israeli society of the army’s treatment of the Palestinian population. In recent years, however, there has been an attempt to muzzle the group.
In 2015, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, from the ultranationalist Jewish Home party, moved to ban the group from the education system. And, more recently, Israeli lawmakers have attempted to have them outlawed completely.
“It is unacceptable, particularly during Holocaust Remembrance Day, for a visiting diplomat to meet with a group that uses anonymous testimony to discredit the Israeli army,” a senior official in Netanyahu’s bureau, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to speak to the press, told The Washington Post.
There had been reports that the Israeli prime minister was also opposed to Gabriel’s meeting with another leftist, anti-occupation group, B’Tselem, but the official said that was seen as less of a problem. On Gabriel’s meeting with Breaking the Silence, the official said: “Israel’s prime minister would not go to Germany and meet with a group that was calling the German soldiers war criminals for their actions in Afghanistan.”