Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-19-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20070619.4.2-016"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Gaza Strip is not a new Palestinian state; far from it, it is a prison, a prison in which people – Palestinians, the Palestinian people, and women, children and old people in particular – are obliged to live in barracks, shut away from the world.
The latest outbreak of violence, with the Hamas militias seizing power in the Gaza Strip, was of course made possible by wrongdoing on the part of European policymakers, American policymakers, Israeli policymakers and Fatah too. For it was Israeli politicians who refused the Palestinian Government its tax revenues and built a wall to keep the Palestinian people in their place; the Americans allowed that to happen and showed themselves incapable of forcing all the warring factions to sit down at a table together; and, finally, it was the Europeans, including us in this House, who were unable to give support to a democratically elected government, some of the elements in which we found uncongenial or disagreeable – and hence found ourselves denying support to the moderates and failing to encourage the growth, within Hamas and elsewhere, of those forces who could have been amenable to reason. It is they who are to blame for this state of affairs.
We know that, now Hamas has seized power, it is one of the four radical elements in the Middle East, together with Iran, Syria and Hizbollah. We also know that radical Islamism of the kind preached by Hamas is very dangerous, that the elements associated with it are the forces behind global Islamist terrorism, and – of course – that we Europeans must defend ourselves against it.
On the other hand, though, we have to stand up for the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, which means that they should elect as their government the people they want rather than the ones we want, because we are not in a position to pick and choose them. It follows, then, that we must not repeat our former mistakes; we have to talk to, and support, those Palestinian forces that enjoy majority popular support.
Important though the security of Israel is to Europe, the future prospects for the Palestinian people are no less so, and if we manage to give them hope for the future, we stand a chance of establishing peace in the Middle East in the longer term."@en1
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