A campaign by a group of Swiss army officers to raise 750,000 Francs to build a soldiers’ home in Israel has created a turor here since it was announced last week in the privately published but government subsidized military periodical, Schweitzer Soldat.
A prominent figure in the campaign is Martin Raeber, a rightwing politician and reserve army officer who is in the public relations business. The leftist Zurich weekly, Die Weltwoche, accused Raeber of having been “bought” by Israel. The weekly claimed that his PR firm handles the accounts of El Al and other Israeli companies. Miriam Shomrat, Charge d’Affaires at the Israel Embassy in Bern, declared the charges were absolutely unfounded and claimed they were manufactured by the Arab lobby.
In addition to the army officers, the project in Israel is supported by several prominent Jews in Zurich. The Defense Ministry, which subsidizes Schweitzer Soldat, and the Foreign Ministry are both opposed to the fund-raising drive as contrary to Swiss neutrality. But they cannot stop the project because it is in private hands.
The Geneva newspaper, La Suisse, observed that obviously the officers involved in the campaign are anti-Arab and disapprove of the Foreign Ministry’s approaches to the Arab countries, but they tend to forget that they harm Swiss neutrality and that Switzerland gets her oil from the Arabs.
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