No Forgiving Bitburg Visit, Rabin Says

Israeli leaders opened weeklong ceremonies Monday commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany with their strongest criticism yet of President Reagan’s visit to a West German military cemetery.

“The historic mistake of President Reagan was in equating murderers with their victims,” Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said while dedicating a monument to World War II Jewish partisans and underground fighters. “For this he will not be forgiven either by enlightened humanity or by the Jewish people.”

Prime Minister Shimon Peres said it was because Reagan is a “true friend” of Jews and Israel that “we feel deep pain at the grievous error of his visit to Bitburg” on Sunday.

49 Nazi SS Graves

The military cemetery at Bitburg contains the graves of 49 Nazi SS combat soldiers among 1,887 war dead. The SS (elite force) was also responsible for guarding and administering the concentration camps where millions of Jews, Gypsies and other people died during World War II.

On Sunday, Reagan also visited the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in West Germany where more than 50,000 died.

“We are not proposing to answer hatred with hatred,” Peres told a special session of the Israeli Parliament. “But even death cannot obscure the difference between those who were buried as murderers and those who were buried as murder victims.

“Gravestones haven’t the power to obliterate the abyss that yawns between those who lead (others) to murder and those who were led.”

‘Saddest Days’

Speaking to reporters by telephone from his Jerusalem home, former Prime Minister Menachem Begin said the Reagan visit marked “one of the saddest days in the history of the Jewish people.”

The Peres-led Israeli government found itself in an awkward position as the controversy over Reagan’s Bitburg stop flared in the United States and elsewhere.

Under other circumstances, the Jewish state might have been expected to lead the outcry against the visit. But Israel relies heavily on American military and economic aid and, as well, feels it has a particularly sympathetic ally in Reagan. So, Israeli leaders muted their criticism of the White House.

In turn, they were criticized by many here on both the political right and left for their unusually mild reaction.

‘Stand up to Gentiles’

“They (the current leaders) unfortunately don’t know how to stand up to the Gentiles,” former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon of the Peres-led Labor alignment told a trade union rally Sunday night.

“And I want to tell you that if Begin were prime minister today, Israel would not have stuttered,” Sharon added. “He would have spoken to the Americans on this subject clearly and with determination.”

Sharon, a leader of the rightist Likud bloc, is minister of trade and industry in Israel’s delicately balanced coalition government.

Yossi Sarid, a leftist opposition member of Parliament, said at a rally here to protest Reagan’s Bitburg visit that the government was “overcome by silence” about the Reagan trip because of $1.5 billion in emergency aid that Israel hopes to receive from the United States soon.

Western Wall Ceremony

Israeli President Chaim Herzog formally opened the commemoration of Nazi Germany’s defeat Monday night with a festive ceremony at the Western (or Wailing) Wall, Judaism’s most revered site.