Arab students and their left-wing German supporters prevented Israel’s Ambassador Asher Ben Natan from addressing a crowd of 2,000 at Hamburg University yesterday. It was the second time this week that demonstrators carrying banners supporting Arab guerrillas and denouncing Israel disrupted an address by Mr. Ben Natan.
He was shouted down Monday at Frankfurt University where he spoke to an audience of 1,500 on the occasion of the beginning of Peace in the Middle East Week in Germany. On both occasions he was denounced, along with West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, as a “Nazi” and “Fascist.” The Israeli Ambassador’s appearances were arranged by the Organization of Jewish Students in Germany in Frankfurt and the German-Israeli Students Union in Hamburg. The demonstrations against him were instigated by the radical German Socialist Student Federation (SDS), a group that backs Arab students who support El Fatah terrorist activities against Israel.
Messages of regret for the Frankfurt disturbance poured into the Israeli Embassy here from students and prominent Germans. The writer Guenter Grass cabled his regrets.
(Washington Post correspondent Dan Morgan reported from Bonn today that the Frankfurt demonstration may be used by Government authorities as an excuse to clamp down on the radical student movement and “drop all pretenses of leniency in dealing with campus unrest.” He said the conservative Christian Democratic Union of Chancellor Kiesinger would try to “capitalize” on the incident in the election campaign. Mr. Morgan quoted a party official as saying that the incident would be helpful to the conservative cause by showing that the left has as many bad traits as the extreme right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD) which is sometimes called neo-Nazi.
Mr. Morgan reported that the pro-Israel mass circulation press of publisher Axel Springer expressed “outrage” over the Frankfurt incident. The newspaper Bild Zeitung demanded an end to the “terror” before “radicalinskis” wipe out the good name the country has earned over the last 25 years.)
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.
