Foreign Minister Abba Eban described his forthcoming official visit to Poland — the first by an Israeli Foreign Minister to an East European bloc country — as “only the first link in a chain.”
Speaking at a luncheon of the Israel Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Foreign Minister noted that Israel has diplomatic relations with all East European countries, trade relations with most, and cultural ties with many. He said the Israel Government’s program in this area of foreign relations was to strengthen and enlarge those relations, and he suggested that a mutual basis for Israeli understandings with those countries could be found in the sufferings all sustained in the Nazi holocaust.
Mr. Eban declared that the concepts of the cold war and the Iron Curtain were being increasingly replaced by such terms as “peaceful co-existence.” He said that it was “apparent now that the world will not be forever divided into two blocs,” adding that Europe was seen as a unit by many historians and sociologists.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.