Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-22-Speech-3-227"
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"en.20031022.9.3-227"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start by thanking Mr Menéndez del Valle for the good cooperation on this report. This is an issue that could even split the House, for if everyone’s motion were to be included, diametrically opposing positions would be established. We will continue to present these positions in our articles and speeches and so forth, but, in this situation, where peace and dignity in the Middle East are essential, it is important for this House to make a contribution with a report that does justice to the great value of peace and dignity.
In my view, the Middle East conflict is a conflict of missed opportunities, starting in 1947/48 after the United Nations’ partition plan, continuing with the non-creation of a Palestinian state under Jordanian occupation in 1967, and carrying on with what could have been achieved under President Clinton just before 2000, namely the project which the then Prime Minister Barak was attempting to initiate with his Palestinian partners and which subsequently failed. I therefore believe that the objective – the entire process’s ultimate destination – is clear to everyone: there will be a Palestinian state, the Israelis will have to withdraw from the occupied territories, and the two nations will have to live together in peace, just as the Germans and the French also had to learn to do after centuries of warfare.
The question is: How many victims must there be before that happens? That is why I see the present situation as an outcome of the Intifada which began in 2000, when suddenly, people no longer relied on the talks which had been promised by both sides in Oslo and to which the European Union has now contributed billions of euros in support. Instead, they thought that recourse to violence would enable them to move closer to the objective I have outlined.
Then, too, society changes in a process that you have described. Israeli society is more right-wing today than it was a few years ago. Many people who were active in the peace movement, who held illegal meetings with Arafat in the 1980s and 1990s and were threatened with criminal proceedings, now tell us that they do not want to talk to him any more, that they no longer trust him, because every week a bomb explodes in an Israeli city. I imagine that our societies would change too if suicide bombings occurred in Rome, Madrid, Brussels or Berlin on a daily basis. I expect that our societies, too, would become right-wing and reactionary in such a scenario.
So we must ask ourselves what is the way out of this situation. The Road Map, involving collaboration between the Quartet – the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia – is absolutely the right approach. Everyone must see that we cannot be divided on this issue, and that we intend to continue our support for this process. In this respect, I believe we are a step further forward, in that we have become more demanding, with the Council, too, now saying that the political wing of Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and in that we are speaking out clearly, also about the security fence and the way in which it alters territories. Yes, we have now become more demanding. I hope that we can involve the region as a whole, and that Syria and Iran and indeed everyone who has funded terrorism for so many years will now recognise that they must work for peace if they want to be the European Union’s partners. This report, in my view, makes important suggestions that help contribute to this process."@en1
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