European press review

A Swiss and a German newpaper express their concern about recent events in the Middle East, while other German-language papers examine local happenings on the 40th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall.

In France, in light of Saturday's bank raid which left three people dead and six others injured, several papers look at the rising crime figures.

Israel handed free rein

According to an editorial in Geneva's Le Temps, faced with the suicide bomb attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is attacking Palestinian Authority institutions in Jerusalem.

If this is part of a "planned, progressive and systematic destruction of the Palestinian movement", it says, "he will only meet very little international resistance".

The paper says that none of the major nations with influence in the region seem to want to commit themselves.

"In the short term, everything is happening as if Ariel Sharon should only expect verbal rebukes and political inaction from Washington," it adds.

"The European Union is equally paralysed," it says, adding that: "France and Germany are not in a position to follow the same policy regarding Israel, and Britain remains attached to American strategy in the region."

The UN is "worn out" after its operations in former Yugoslavia and the Arab countries "are all weakened, either by a lack of political legitimacy, or economic poverty, or both", it adds.

"Ariel Sharon has a clear path to charge into the wall," it concludes.

Fatal action

The Berlin paper Die Welt warns that the Israeli seizure of Orient House in Jerusalem from the Palestinians, following Thursday's suicide bomb attack, "could prove riskier than Israel expects".

The paper adds that as police were enforcing the seizure Jerusalem Mufti Shaykh Ikrimah Sabri was giving interviews to Arabic stations saying that "the only way for Palestinians to identify with the city now is through Temple Mount".

The paper writes that this could spell the beginning of a nightmare, concluding that it was a fatal move by Israeli Public Security Minister Uzi Landau to break Palestinian pride.

Wall in the mind

On the 40th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall, many of Germany's main dailies look back at the stand-off between West and East that led to its construction.

Frankfurter Rundschau says that by building the wall to stop the flood of people fleeing economic hardship, the East German leadership forfeited its "ideological basis" and "moral self-justification".

"Socialism, the theory on which the Socialist Unity Party based itself, is at its origin a theory of emancipation, that is, of freedom," the paper says. "The system destroyed freedom and therefore was not socialist," it adds.

Commenting on the divisions that still remain between Germans from the former East and West, the paper says: "It is more difficult to dismantle the wall in minds, than to physically remove the wall itself."

Bitter irony

Vienna's Die Presse considers it "absurd" that on the 40th anniversary of the wall, Berlin's Social Democrats, the SPD, are considering a coalition with the former communists, the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS.

"The governing mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, of the SPD, is not averse, after the elections this autumn, to entering a coalition with the PDS, ideologically and legally the successor of the former communist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic," the paper says.

It adds that the Greens, which together with the SPD form the current German ruling coalition, are also interested in taking part.

"The fact that the partners of the Greens", the paper laments, "those who were once persecuted by the GDR regime, could now join forces with their oppressors - that would truly be an irony of history" and a "particularly bitter one", it concludes.

Facing crime head on

Following the deaths of three people and the injuring of six others in a bank raid near the French capital on Saturday, Paris's Le Figaro looks on its front page at the rise in and "many faces" of crime in France.

"This tragedy has happened at a time when a lack of law and order has already established itself as a major issue in the forthcoming presidential election campaign," it says.

The paper adds that the most recent crime figures are "alarming," with reported crime up by nearly 10% over the first six months of the year.

Euro bank warning

The Paris-based financial newspaper La Tribune says that Saturday's and other recent hold-ups have set "bank alarm bells ringing".

It says that the most recent one confirms that hold-ups are increasing in France and that they are "increasingly violent".

The paper warns that the introduction of the euro next year, "due to the huge amount of money which will be stored ready for going into circulation, increases the risks".

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.