Israel’s Peres Pays Visit to Berlin Wall
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, touring the city where Adolf Hitler plotted the extermination of millions of Jews, today visited the site where the Nazi dictator’s would-be assassins were executed.
At the 29-mile-long Berlin Wall that since 1961 has slashed the city into a Communist eastern sector and a western part, Peres said: “Walls come, walls go, but the human spirit remains.”
“We should always look to the roots (of problems) and not to the walls,” he told a crowd of dignitaries in the ornate Schoeneberg City Hall.
Protected by tanks, helicopters and 4,000 police officers, Peres became only the second Israeli prime minister to visit the divided city, after Yitzhak Rabin’s visit in 1975.
A West Berlin police source, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said a threat against Peres’ life had been telephoned to a news agency Tuesday night. Official spokesmen refused to confirm or deny that report.
Peres said Israel’s reprisal bombing this morning of Palestinian guerrilla bases outside a refugee camp in Lebanon was “part of our ongoing fight against terrorist concentrations.”
“I understand the bombing worked out well and achieved its aim,” Peres told reporters. The raid on the edge of the south Lebanon port city of Sidon killed one man and injured six people.
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