On his second trip to Israel, Cem Özdemir participated in the international conference organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Center for European Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC) on “60 Years of the Other Germany. An Appraisal 20 Years After the Fall of the Wall”. He spoke on “The New Germans. Experiences with my Belated Entry into German History”.
In Jerusalem Cem Özdemir visited Yad Vashem. He was guided through the exhibition and laid down a wreath in the hall of remembrance.
He had political talks with members of Knesset (Haim Oron, Nitzan Horowitz, Ophir Pines-Paz, Achmed Tibi, Haneen Zuabi), members of the Government (Danny Ayalon, Dan Meridor), in the Foreign Ministry (Rafael Barak) and with Shimon Peres, the President of the State of Israel.
He met with members of the academia Oded Eran, Shlomo Brom, Mark Heller, Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash) and Emily Landau from the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Galia Golan from the IDC, Dan Jacobson from Tel Aviv University and Fania Oz-Salzberger from Haifa University and with journalists Adar Primor and Akiva Eldar from Haaretz.
In the office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation he had talks with project partners from the foundation (Jafar Farah from Mossawa, Naor Yerushalmi from Life&Environment, Bardia Biromi-Kandaleft from Link to the Environment), with the head of the Green Movement, Eran Ben-Yemini and other activists of the party, with members of the new movement Efshar Acheret (Another Way). He spoke on “Green Strategies for the Upcoming Federal Elections in Germany in a Time of Multiple Crisis”, an event that was attended among others by two representatives from the Green party in Israel.
Cem Özdemir also met Daniel Seideman from Ir Amin, Hagit Ofran from Peace Now Settlement Watch and Mossi Raz from Radio All For Peace.
One of the main issues of the talks was of course the question of the settlement freeze. Cem Özdemir made clear that he supported it including the so-called natural growth. In several meetings it was mentioned that Palestinians and Arab States see the settlement issue as a key issue. Representatives of Israeli NGOs working on this issue see the position of the Obama administration as an opportunity to provide Israel with a new discourse. While the government officials played down the importance of the settlement issue other interlocutors assumed that eventually there would be a settlement freeze.
Cem Özdemir also addressed in the talks the issue of a potential role of international troops securing any kind of Israeli-Palestinian agreement. There were different responses from government officials ranging from openness to clear rejection. One NGO interlocutor suggested a new resolution of the UN Security Council along the lines of the Arab League Initiative and based on chapter VII of the UN-Charta that could replace resolution 242.
There was a shared concern between Cem Özdemir and many of his interlocutors that concerning Iran the challenge is to make the Iranian regime calculate that negotiations with the US-administration are preferable to the status quo.
In the talks Cem Özdemir was confronted also with the many internal challenges in Israel ranging from the economic crisis and the social problems through the education system to the tensions between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority.
In several meetings the need for a Green party in Israel was mentioned. Talking about the experiences of the German Green party, Cem Özdemir emphasized that the Greens in Germany were dealing with the whole range of issues but the central point of reference always was the environment. He advocated the idea of the Green New Deal, which addresses the financial as well as the climate crisis by promoting investments into “green structures”. He referred to the great success of the German Green in the recent European Elections (12,1%) and in municipal elections where they are now the largest group in the city council of Stuttgart and Mainz. In the upcoming federal elections they are aiming to become the third largest party. However, due to the Social-Democrats weakness, the chances are not ideal to build a coalition that includes the Greens.
After his visit in Israel Cem Özdemir went to a visit of the West bank as well as the Gaza strip. In the end he promised that he would not let as much time pass between his first trip in the 1990s and this visit, before he would come again.
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Cem Özdemir is the Chairman of the German Green Party and a former Member of the European Parliament.
He was born in 1965 in Bad Urach, Germany. He is an educator by profession and gained a degree in social pedagogy at the Evangelical Technical College in Reutlingen, Germany.
Mr. Özdemir joined the Green Party in 1981. In 1994 he was elected to the German Parliament and became its first-ever member of Turkish descent. He served two legislative terms, 1998 to 2002 as Speaker on Home Affairs for his Green Parliamentary Group.
In 2003 Mr. Özdemir was a "Transatlantic Fellow" at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington and in Brussels. In this time, he deepened his knowledge of the transatlantic relationship and drew special comparisons between the ways minority communities organize themselves politically in the United States and in Europe.
Mr. Özdemir was elected to the European Parliament in 2004 (The Greens/European Free Alliance). He was Co-speaker on Foreign Affairs for his political group, a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and a substitute member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. He was the European Parliament's rapporteur on Central Asia and second vice-chair of the Permanent ad-hoc Delegation for Relations with Iraq. He also served as Vice President of the European Parliament's "CIA Committee" (Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners), whose final report was adopted by the European Parliament in February 2007.
Mr. Özdemir is a charter member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). Besides foreign policy his areas of interest include relations between the EU and Turkey, migration and integration policy, as well as Islam in Germany and Europe.