The Hebrew University of Jerusalem presented German President Joachim Gauck with an Honorary PhD today (Sunday), in honor of his public service and commitment to democracy.
President Gauck then gave a speech, in which he discussed Germany's troubled history with Israel: "GDR citizens were as a rule not allowed to travel to non-socialist countries, which of course included Israel. Moreover, in the official GDR propaganda Israel was portrayed as the spearhead of imperialistic interests in the Middle East, as an aggressor whose goal was to destroy the Palestinians. East Berlin allied itself with Arab states against Israel, which was not seldom compared to Nazi Germany, of all things, in a perfidious distortion of the truth. The GDR allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization, not Israel, to open a representation, supplied them with weapons and trained their fighters."
He added: "Only the members of the first and only freely elected parliament of the GDR, to which I belonged, were able to unanimously adopt a declaration on Israel a few days after the constitutive session, which stated: ‘We ask the people in Israel for forgiveness for the hypocrisy and hostility of the official GDR policies towards the State of Israel and for the persecution and abuse of Jewish citizens in our country that also occurred after 1945.'"