Berlin: German Chancellor Angela Merkel travels to Israel on Sunday for a visit of major historical significance more than 60 years after the end of World War II.

Merkel will be the first German chancellor to address the Knesset when she gives a speech at the Israeli parliament on Tuesday, an honour reserved normally for heads of state.

On Sunday she will visit Sde Boker, the kibbutz in the Negev Desert where Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion is buried and where in 1966 Ben Gurion met with Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first chancellor.

Merkel, Germany's first chancellor to be born after the war, will travel to Israel accompanied by the top members of her cabinet for a full inter-governmental conference.

Germany has previously only held such meetings with France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Poland, and Israel's cabinet will return the visit in 2009.

The visit also comes ahead of celebrations in May for the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel.

The German Federal Republic marks its own 60th birthday in 2009. This is "perhaps the most important visit ever by a German head of government," Israel's ambassador in Berlin Yoram Ben-Zeev said.

Joschka Fischer, the former left wing radical and later Germany's foreign minister, said once that in view of the Holocaust it was incredible that Germany and Israel had "any kind of relationship at all."

But more than 60 years since the eyes of the world were opened to the horrors at Auschwitz, Germany is Israel's most important political and trading partner in Europe behind the United States.

Source : PTI